 | By: Catherine Aird Binding: Paperback Publisher: Corgi ISBN: 0552127949 ISBN-13: 9780552127943 Released: 16 Oct 1987 RRP: Average Rating:  |
The Battle of Britain, of course, didn't just involve the bombing of London; even thirty years later, Lamb Lane in Berebury is still a bomb site. (The council & the owners have been fighting for years about the building plans.) Now that everyone has their act together, the bomb rubble is being cleared - & the excavator hits just the wrong (or right) place: the skeleton of a pregnant woman was buried on the site, dating back to the war. Even before the autopsy, Dr. Dabbe doesn't buy the theory that a bomb would have laid her out so neatly with no visible crush injuries, so Sloan is stuck with an investigation that the superintendent would be just as happy to write off as 'historical' rather than 'possible murder', but there are suggestive points: the absence of any identification - or wedding ring - on the body, for one. Other missing pieces include a hue-and-cry for a missing person (there wasn't any) & the required notification of the local archeologists about the construction (the notice never arrived - if it was ever sent). And when the archaeologists had arrived in spite of everything, someone had moved their pegs out of the danger zone.
Inspector Sloan, beginning his digging while the contractors are banned from continuing theirs, turns up various interesting tidbits: the memories of the older members of the Berebury force & the firefighting & rescue teams of the time, as well as the receptionist of the doctor's office across from the site (the old doctor himself died a few months ago). The Waite brothers, sons of the old couple who used to live in the bombed house, both left after the war, but only Harold inherited it, & promptly sold the site; Leslie, a black sheep, was disinherited. Why? And why did the self-made buyer want it but let it get bogged down in planning fights for so many years - or did someone else engineer the delay? And how & why did the clearance plans finallly get approved?
Apart from interesting sidelights on living through bombing, not once but over & over again, we have Miss Tyrell, breaking in the new Dr. Latimer as the late Dr. Tarde's successor, & William Latimer's own attempts to find his feet in Callleshire's medical community as a first-generation doctor.
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