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pushing my way through the opening, which was less than a foot wide.
    ‘Hey!’ said Officer Jessica. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
    ‘For a look,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
    ‘It might be a crime scene. You’ll contaminate it.’
    ‘And what if the man isn’t actually dead? You’re standing back when you might be saving his life. Who said anything about a crime? Maybe he just had a heart attack.’
    ‘You won’t say that when you’ve seen him,’ croaked David, the birdwatcher.
    ‘I order you to stay this side of the gate,’ said Jessica, sounding more like the military than the police.
    I paused, but already I could see what David meant. A fully clothed man was lying on his side only three or four yards away, with his face towards us. The top of his head was thick with blood, which had made a pool like a ghastly halo around him. His lack of protective hair made the wound somehow more terrible. At least two things indicated that he was unarguably dead: firstly, his wide-open staring eyes, and secondly. the clotting of the blood on the wound. His heart could not be beating – if it had been, the blood would still be flowing.
    But these details occurred to me slightly later than the most startling and major observation. I knew this man. I had seen him only a few hours previously.
    It was Mr Maynard, council officer, responsible for Parks and Recreation.

Chapter Five
    If I hadn’t been so annoyed with Jessica’s heavy-handedness, I might have told her immediately who the victim was. Instead, I backed away from the gate, hands melodramatically raised as if she were a Wild West sheriff pointing a pistol at me. Perhaps this piece of foolish play-acting brought about the subsequent avalanche of trouble that landed on my head. At any rate, I couldn’t help feeling that quite a bit of it served me right.
    As it was, PC Jessica Osborne went to the gate herself and took a good long look at the corpse. I quickly understood that I had underestimated her powers of observation. ‘Isn’t that the man you were with this morning?’ she said slowly. ‘I remember that jacket.’
    Which was more than I did. His clothes had made no impression on me whatsoever. ‘I’m afraid it is, yes,’ I said. ‘Mr Maynard.’
    ‘What? Who? What do you mean?’ demanded Thea, who had been hovering on the grass verge with her dog. ‘It can’t be someone you know, surely?’ She stared from me to her daughter and back again.
    ‘The man from the council who was making a fuss about the grave,’ I explained. ‘Who summoned me here in the first place.’
    ‘And who you might well want dead,’ said Detective Paul, with reliably bad timing.
    ‘Good God,’ I huffed scornfully at him. ‘You think I killed him?’
    The resounding silence on all sides made my internal organs quiver. Every single person – and the dog – looked at me.
    ‘Of course not,’ said Thea. ‘You couldn’t possibly have done. That’s obvious.’
    ‘Is it?’ said Jessica slowly. ‘He was gone for half an hour, right here. He’s just told us he came past this exact spot. He looked flustered when he came back. When I met him this morning, it looked to me as if he’d been in an angry argument with this man. Hadn’t you?’ she challenged me.
    I could not have said anything even if I’d wanted to. I was sandbagged, stunned. I even wondered whether she might be right – had I gone mad for a few minutes and bashed the annoying Mr Maynard on the head? Enough of Jessica’s accusations were true for me to feel there might be something in the idea that this was my work. I had indeed been on this precise spot, approximately two hours earlier.
    Thea was scrutinising me with an uncomfortably probing stare. ‘He’d have been more flustered,’ she said. ‘He’d never have acted so normally over lunch.’
    ‘How do you know?’ Jessica demanded.
    ‘So – prove it,’ Thea challenged. ‘Where’s the murder weapon, for a start?’
    Jessica beckoned