Falteringly, her brain buzzing like a hive of disturbed bees, she stumbled forward, but as her feet stepped onto the soft green grass of the green, she felt the strength leaching out of her, and she sank awkwardly onto her knees.

She felt her mouth open, but was incapable of making a sound.

Instead, she just stared at that year’s May Queen.

Nobody had been surprised when Iris Carmody had been chosen. Traditionally, all the village men (in a closed ballot) elected a village girl between the age of sixteen to twenty to be Queen of the May. And Iris, with her long pale fair hair, big blue eyes, heart-shaped face and hourglass figure had been breaking the hearts of local boys since she’d hit puberty. And probably even before then! Now, at the age of seventeen, she had swept all other challengers before her.

As May Queen, she was to rule the village for the day, for tradition had it that the May Queen’s every wish had to be met. Of course, in the past, this had led to some jolly japes, with one May Queen famously ordering that all the pigs must be ‘painted’ green, and all lads must have daisy-chains for belts!

Margaret, for one, had had severe misgivings about giving Iris Carmody, the little minx, so much scope to make mischief, and she didn’t believe that she was alone in that. There had been more than one wise matron who had taken her aside and muttered darkly about the village’s choice this year.

But looking at Iris now, dressed in a long white gown embroidered with a swathe of tiny colourful flowers and her long, waist-length hair topped by a crown of violets, bluebells, primroses and narcissus, even Margaret had to admit that she epitomised youthful beauty and the spring.

Even the colourful ribbons, hanging from the crown of the maypole, and which were now wrapped tightly around and around her body, holding her fast to the stone edifice, looked pretty.

But underneath the swathe of beautiful fair hair that was framing her profile, Margaret Bellham could see a string of darkly smudged bruises around Iris’s neck, and even more horrifically, the congested, contorted face and lolling blue tongue that made the dead girl look like a grotesque parody of what a May Queen should be.

Finally, the monstrousness of what she was seeing freed Margaret Bellham from her paralysis, and she began to scream, before wailing pitifully.

Chapter 1

It was a week and four days after the murder of Iris Carmody, and DI Harry Jennings was beginning to feel the strain. His officers had been working on the case non-stop, with the press breathing down their necks every inch of the way. He wasn’t particularly surprised by this, as a beautiful girl dressed as a May Queen and found strangled and bound to a village maypole was many a newspaper editor’s dream.