For a few seconds, both men watched his trembling fingers, and Vincent felt dread kick off inside his stomach.

‘All right, Dad,’ he managed to say through a throat tight with alarm. ‘Don’t you think it’s about time you told me just what’s the matter with you?’

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Extract

Keep reading for an excerpt from A Fatal Affair …

Prologue

Tuesday 1st May, 1962

No one in the city of dreaming spires on that chilly May Day morning would have been thinking about death. Why would they, when the birds were singing, and everyone was congregating around Magdalen Tower, counting down the moments until it was 6 a.m.; that magical moment when the city began its celebrations in earnest?

Certainly, the excited young choristers clustered at the very top of the college building had no reason to ponder on tragedy. Rather, their minds were firmly fixed on their soon-to-be-given rendition of that lovely piece, ‘Te Deum Patrem colimus’, the singing of which had been customary from Magdalen Tower on May Day since 1509.

Even the influx of foreign visitors to the city on that special morning were far more interested in watching, with bemusement and disbelief, the quaint and colourful antics of the morris dancers that thronged the city streets, with their jingling bells and clacking sticks, than in contemplating murder.

After all, who in that beautiful and ancient city could believe on such a wonderfully auspicious and bright spring day that anything dark and fatal could be happening anywhere? Weren’t the daffodils and tulips, the forsythia bushes and polyanthus, blooming in multi-coloured glory in all the gardens, proclaiming that life itself was good? Little children, perhaps bored with Latin hymns, were laughing and playing and singing their own, far more down-to-earth, songs, every bit as traditional to May Day, and carried on the breeze – ‘Now is the Month of Maying’ competing with ‘Oh the Little Busy Bee’ for dominance.

Tourists took photographs. The choristers, flushed with triumph, eventually left the tower. The people in the streets, flushed with having witnessed proper ‘English culture’ sought out any cafés that might be open so early in the morning in search of that other British stalwart, a hot cup of tea.

And less than seven miles away, in a small country village that had for centuries celebrated May Day almost as assiduously as its nearest city, a plump, middle-aged woman made her bustling way through the quiet lanes and barely stirring cottages, towards the village green.

Margaret Bellham had lived in Middle Fenton for all her life, first attending the village school there, and then marrying a lad who’d grown up four doors from her down the lane, and moving into a tied cottage on one of the farm estates.