Free A Well-deserved Murder (Trevor Joseph Detective series) by Katherine John

Collins – added an order for you because he said you’d most likely forget.’
    ‘He did, did he?’ Trevor took the top sandwich and opened it. ‘Ham and salad, thank you. Any more information come in?’
    ‘Not yet, sir. But we’ve sent the family’s fingerprints to forensics.’
    ‘I’ve gone through the statements Sarah inputted. Have the teams who are interviewing the neighbours discovered anything new?’
    ‘Not much, sir. No one has reported seeing or hearing anything above the usual noises.’
    Trevor took a bite from his sandwich. ‘What are the usual noises?’
    ‘A farmer who owns the land behind the Howells, and lives on the hillside above it, said he heard Mrs Howells using her electric saw around midday. He looked down and saw her felling trees on his land. He said he intended to have a word with her about it.’
    ‘A grateful word for managing his woodland?’
    ‘More like an angry “stay your side of the fence” word according to the officer who interviewed him. Apparently Kacy Howells was always walking on his land and couldn’t leave it alone. He is convinced that she was under the misapprehension that if he did nothing with the land, she could cultivate and eventually claim it. From what the interviewing officer told me when he came in, Kacy Howells appeared to be obsessed with her neighbours’ lives and frequently stole their property.’
    ‘As Alan told us.’ Peter joined them; sandwich in one hand, coffee in the other.
    ‘You raised Alan yet?’ Trevor asked.
    ‘He’s on his way. Apparently the Queen didn’t invite him to lunch, just the opening so he missed out on the five course, taxpayer-funded, champagne-fuelled binge.’
    ‘Ask Sarah to make sure an interview room is empty, would you please?’ Trevor ordered Chris.
    ‘Yes, sir.’ Knowing he’d been dismissed, Chris left.
    Peter dropped his coffee and sandwich on Trevor’s desk, sat in the visitor’s chair and propped his feet on Trevor’s waste-bin.
    ‘You listened in to the second half of the questioning.’ Trevor said to Peter. It wasn’t a question.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Any thoughts?’
    ‘A few. Starting with their marriage. For all George’s insistence, there’s no way it was normal. Forget the murder for a moment. Why did he marry her? Short of loneliness I can’t come up with a single reason why a bloke like him who was enjoying the bachelor life would saddle himself with an unstable mouse of a woman.’
    ‘Patrick came up with some information that might shed light on the unstable.’ Trevor told Peter about the call he’d received from the pathologist.
    ‘No – I still refuse to feel sorry for her. Even the community police officer who retrieved Alan’s gate and post and suggested Alan put up CCTV warned him to watch his property and take care of himself because she was aggressive.’
    ‘If she was incubating Alzheimer’s …’
    ‘If!’
    ‘Possibly George Howells wanted children.’ Trevor finished his sandwich and reached for his coffee.
    ‘In which case George should have picked a woman the right side of forty. They were lucky but a lot of women her age have trouble conceiving. And if it was just kids he wanted, he could have adopted, fostered or bought himself a nice little subservient Thai bride.’
    ‘Perhaps he’d heard that marriages to brides bought on the internet last only until the brides get UK citizenship along with half the groom’s assets in the divorce courts.’
    ‘Sir,’ Chris Brookes knocked again. ‘Forensic results have come in that we thought you’d want to see right away.’
    Trevor took the print-out from Chris. ‘Thanks, if anything else of interest arrives you’ll bring it in?’
    ‘Of course, sir.’
    Trevor opened the file and read the first page.
    ‘Talk?’ Peter demanded impatiently.
    ‘These are initial results from fingerprinting. Remember I said there were four sets of prints on the axe?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘One set belonged to Kacy