Inspector Winwood Mysteries Series

A body is found in the English market town of Rutherford on a patch of waste land between a housing estate and the bypass. Detective Inspector Steve Winwood has one piece of good news in that the body is identified as Bill Gibson, a freelance artist from a town about twenty miles distant. There are no clues as to how or why Gibson was dumped there. The waste land soon becomes the centre of conflict between property developers and those that want the town to remain as it is. Winwood’s investigations are linked with those of local reporter Tony Meehan. Corruption in the local Council is at the centre of enquiries which are complicated with the suspicious death of a taxi driver who is linked with Gibson. The Green Man pub becomes the battleground as the Underground slowly reveal themselves as the only group that can stop the town centre being demolished to make way for a new shopping complex.

The body of a suspect in a murder enquiry is uncovered during work to the town fountain. He was Ray Radford, killed thirty years previous and thought to have killed his partner John Kennedy. A manhunt at the time involving DCI Winwood who had only recently been appointed as a detective failed to find Radford or identify any suspects. The case had led to accusations of corruption in both the police force and local Council. Now that a body had been uncovered the case has to be re-opened and the question answered: if Radford killed Kennedy who killed Radford? The town’s workforce had lived in fear of Radford and even thirty years later few want to discuss the past. Winwood has to interview people still alive who remember the case despite the hurt it causes. Winwood fears that his career and that of his superiors could be ended by the failures of the past and his inability to solve then now. The investigation is aided by the fact that there is no public identification of Radford as the body in the fountain. The press are more interested in the discovery of a bag of bones in a utility trench which are identified as being those of a soldier in the English Civil War. Winwood draws on the help of Christine Grey, Leader of the Council and Brian Stirling, Sergeant Emma Porter’s partner. They are able to access Council records and local tradespeople willing to talk. The trail leads to a suspect by means of advances in modern forensics to establish soil samples that marry up Radford and the Civil War soldier. This is a much abridged edition of the first version published in April 2016.

The rules of cricket are almost incomprehensible to most of the non cricket playing world. Which is how DI Steve Winwood felt when bodies started turning up at the Rutherford Cricket Club. The schoolteacher had a stump driven into his heart, the model was killed by a silver bullet and the banker swallowed poisoned garlic. But it was the fourth murder that made no sense. In some way all of them were connected to the Cricket Club. Everyone had a different theory from vampire slaying, Happy Families card games and even the letter ‘c’ but Winwood believed in none of these. He continued to dig into the personal histories of those involved including the computer software developer, the aloof bank clerk and the very dull Museum curator. He knew they were all linked in some way but until he worked that one out all the murders remained a mystery with no obvious suspect in the frame. The final solution was quite bizarre. Underneath the quintessential calm and ordered world of club cricket all sorts of pent up emotions were let loose. Readers may still find cricket is played in a different universe but the terms used in a normal game are explained as the story progresses.

When the Rutherford Member of Parliament is found in a sexually comprimising situation he is forced to resign sparking a by-election. An advert in the local newspaper is decoded by Government sources to be notice of an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister who is due to visit Rutherford during the election campaign. Detective Inspector Steve Winwood is told to remain at his desk to filter all intelligence reports whilst his sergeant Archie Tibble is seconded to Inspector Ruth Coleman on serveillance duties. Before they assume their new roles Les Wade a reclusive rock star is found dead in his home shot in the head in the style of an execution. Winwood can find no motive, suspect or reason for the killing. Archie and Ruth keep a close watch on the social and political events in town and try not to let their professional relationship become a sexual one. Winwood is allowed more time to investigate the Wade killing before the Area Murder team take over and slowly uncovers Wade’s past. He befriends a dying man in the Fleetwood Arms Hotel and with the latter’s guidance uncovers a Government’s involvement in a cover-up of a murder over 30 years previously, how it led to the killing of Les Wade and a thirty year old secret romance. Caution: explicit sexual content from the beginning.

What could possibly go wrong at the Rutherford Arts Festival? Plenty apparently. Three deaths, a hit and run, blackmail and a drugged hip flask are just the start. Things start to go wrong when Eddie Searchfield is found dead beneath a painting of a naked woman playing the cello.The Festival is organised by a Council electrician whose experience is limited to playing lead guitar in a back room of a pub group and covered for the national media by a novice journalist whose brief stage career ended abruptly when funding was cut. The worlds worst orchestra, a blank canvas and an installation comprised of Council rubbish are the tip of a very large iceberg which DCI Winwood calls ‘one hundred and one of the world’s greatest artistic disasters’. Whilst artistic chaos reigns around him he has a series of unexplained accidents to investigate that he is sure are connected. He is trying to understand why Government funding is being poured into Rutherford to support an hitherto lack of any obvious local talent. He finds that a background of unrequited love and the English way of life are the solution to all of his problems. This is not for the lovers of John Constable but more for those who find enlightenment in the Turner Prize.

Ben Davies a director of Rutherford Corinthian Football Club is found in the ground floor supporters bar with his throat cut. The other ten directors had already gathered for an Emergency General Meeting in the first floor boardroom. Detective Chief Inspector Steve Winwood discovers that the founder of Rutherford Corinthian Football Club was considered insane. He had established a Trust to pay for the running costs of the Club and wrote the rule book by which the club was to be operated. Some rules were quite bizarre although true to the Corinthinian ideal such as the goalkeeper standing aside for penalty kicks. As he digs deeper into the rules of the club suspicion falls on the directors who are likely to make a substantial financial killing if the Fotball Club and the ground is sold. Peter Redbourne Managing Director of Redbourne Brewery who sponsors the Club is never far from suspicion either. Ben Davies past is shrouded in secrecy but as Winwood uncovers his ties to Rutherford and the financial world in which he works and from tha the reason for his killing A conspiracy amongst the directors slowly unwinds until the solution to Davies’ murder is found amidst the very eccentric and unique way that the Trust was set up. This can be read as a sequel to Murder at the Fleetwood but the book begins with a very brief recap of the events at the Murder Mystery Weekend, the previous book in the series.

There were two unexpected mourners at Councillor Bob Ball’s funeral; his Russian wife and daughter. Even more surprising because no one knew that Bob Ball was married. Whilst the guests gathered afterwards for drinks at the Council offices someone beat the Council Archivist to death in his office in the second basement. No one knew much about Gordon Nicholson, his work or his life so there was not much for Detective Inspector Steve Winwood to work with. He and his Sergeant Archie Tibble and acting Detective Constable Emma Porter set about interviewing all the guests. Enquiries uncovered political in-fighting between Town and District Councils over the town’s market and the disagreement over the details of the Royal Charter which established Rutherford market in the reign of Edward III in 1375. No one knew where this document was stored apart from the recently murdered Nicholson. Redbourne Brewery was negotiating with Beano Supermarkets over a lease for their new store which involved moving the market but Harry Ridgewell, Redbourne’s Financial Director was then killed in similar circumstances to Nicholson and his body found in the Rutter River. There was nothing to connect the two victims until the Town Clerk found that the new painting she had bought for her office was in fact a landscape that had been painted over a more important work. Winwood finally discovers what Nicholson was doing in the second basement but not before chasing a shaggy dog or rather an uncredited statue on which Ridgewell hit his head in the river. What then is the involvement of a pub quiz team comprising of University Professors? When Bob Ball’s wife and daughter leave their hotel to take his body back home they are followed around town by a mysterious male Russian. Only then do the bits of the puzzle finally came together like the individual figures nesting in a Russian Doll.

The Murder Mystery Weekend at the Fleetwood Arms Hotel is thrown into chaos when one of the guests is murdered. The first thing DI Steve Winwood discovers is that many of the guests are members of the Rutherford Operatic And Dramatic Society (ROADS) and they all have solid alibis for the time of death; they were asleep. The deceased Martin Protheroe had switched rooms with Brian Stirling a member of ROADS. The Amdram group used this and similar events to indulge in swinging weekends. DC Emma Porter goes undercover and auditions for the chorus in ROADS’ upcoming production of South Pacific. She attends the Fleetwood Arms Hotel’s Treasure Island themed weekend as the guest of Brian Stirling and finds herself sat on the same table where another actor suffers a fatal anaphylactic shock. Winwood continues to dig deeper into the lives and loves of ROADS and the secret life of Martin Protheroe. In a classic Agatha Christie style dénouement he gathers all the cast back at the Fleetwood Arms Hotel to uncover the culprit behind both murders.

Two hired men came from the north, their victory to try; and they did make a solemn vow, John Barleycorn should die. Men In Black are real. They are not the hip agents of Hollywood films. No one knows who they work for; many believe they are agents of a national government; others that they are an alien police force walking amongst us on earth. Whoever they are, they are never far away from DCI Winwood. Detective Chief Inspector Steve Winwood is asked to come out of retirement by MI5 to find one of their agents who has gone missing from the small English market town of Rutherford. He has no photo or even a name to help locate the agent. Trusting his instinct, he follows up a report of a car crash where the vehicle and driver have been incinerated beyond identification. Circumstantial evidence points to the driver being Roger Chapman, the Overseas Marketing Executive for Redbourne Brewery. One further clue is that his photograph in the company’s brochure matches the description given by the Fleetwood Arms Hotel night porter from where he was arrested by the local police. When searching Chapman’s home address Winwood has his first contact with one of the mysterious Men In Black. The man with no name or identification appears to be responsible to no one; he says little other that make demands of Winwood which completely unsettles the worldly-wise senior detective. Emma Porter once Winwood’s sergeant and now an Inspector in the Fraud Squad returns to Rutherford and seeks out Winwood to investigate claims of a property scam reported by a Chinese businessman. Winwood is convinced that Chapman was being chased by both the Government and the Chinese over the embarrassment that would be caused if the fraud was exposed. At every turn he is met by obfuscation and blind alleys orchestrated by the secret service. Winwood is handed confidential documents confirming her own contact with one of the Men In Black by Dr Rose Collins. A transcript of a taped interview records Roger Chapman’s experiences under regression hypnosis in which he claims he had been abducted by aliens and returned to earth. There are few people Winwood can trust apart from Emma; only the newspaper editor, the antiquarian bookseller, and the local vicar. When he pulls all the evidence together Winwood finally discovers who and what the local Underground represent and the terrible secret that they and the secret service are hiding. Some incidents in this book were researched from real accounts but names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. Parts of this book featured in a previous edition which has since been deleted.

When Brian Bennett, Group Commissioning Editor of the Rutherford Echo invites DCI Steve Winwood as his ‘plus one’ to the VIP opening of the Shed Community Theatre Steve fears the worst. He is not wrong. But it is Brian who finds a dead body in the gents toilet apparently having slipped or been deliberately pushed, and cracked his skull on the urinal. The body is identified by two of his university colleagues Professor Daish-Cook and Professor Rufus Cornwallis as Lucien Wadsworth, an English lecturer at Rutherford University, commonly known as Mungo Jerry. From then on Steve finds himself drawn deeper into an imaginary ‘what-if’ literary mystery and the world of theatre with which he has a deep mistrust. Wadsworth had discovered a seventeenth century manuscript about a year earlier now believed to be a lost work of the sixteenth century dramatist Christopher Marlowe who was believed to have been killed about thirty years earlier than the manuscript is dated. What if the manuscript is genuine, what if it really is the work of Marlowe and did he really escape England and prosecution in 1593? What if he really had written this undiscovered work on the life and persecution of the astronomer Galileo Galilei whilst in exile and how did it get to England? These questions surround Steve’s investigations that take in the Redbourne Brewery, the Rutherford International Newspaper Group, their PR company and the University – all of which are more concerned with The Shed rather than a four hundred year old manuscript that has surfaced in a small, English market town. On the other hand they are all aware of its existence. Things get muddled when it is revealed that Wadsworth has worked in several universities under different names and given other untraceable academics as references for jobs. His real identity remains a mystery. What concerns Steve is how the manuscript came to be found in a modern university. His investigations are inconclusive as to whether Wadsworth’s death was accidental or murder and if the latter, why? Steve needs the help of his own personal network such as the vicar and the local antiquarian bookshop owner and certainly his Sergeant Miles Davis to understand the secrets behind the wall of silence being put up by all those involved in The Shed project. Daish-Cook and Cornwallis admit that both Wadsworth and themselves have been the targets of low level on-line threats to destroy or dismiss the now named Marlowe Papers. It takes some inspired detective work by Davis to point the finger at a hitherto unknown participant in this literary puzzle.

Alan Price, local Councillor, local businessman and Chairman of the Football Club is found dead in a hotel room from a heart attack brought on by a truth drug slipped into his drink. The female suspect with whom he had lunch and then disappeared is later discovered to be a MI5 agent, codenamed Kaos. Detective Sergeant Miles Davis is assigned to Detective Chief Inspector Winwood’s but does not share his love of strong coffee and strong local ale, but Davis has a knowledge of the financial world upon which Winwood has to rely on more and more. The two detectives interview everyone in the town of Fordhamton who had a connection with Price. No one liked him although few had any real motive to want him dead and only one had reason to mourn his passing. Then a CIA agent is found dead in his car parked outside Price’s factory with a full can of petrol in the boot. It appears that he intended to burn both the factory and the stock. Winwood narrows suspects down to what he calls the Famous Five – ex-wife, best friend, lover, factory manager and the Bank Manager. He believes that there is a conspiracy against Price but no strong evidence that it actually exists. It is Davis’ knowledge of the financial markets that leads to understanding why Price’s export order was of so much interest to the English and American secret services. That and Winwood’s mistrust of all things theatrical which uncovers the connection between Kaos, the Famous Five and the real motive for the secret services to be so active in a small part of the English countryside.

On his first day back after his holiday Detective Chief Inspector Steve Winwood gets the report of a dead body found on the bridge over the Rutter river. In the early hours of the next morning a body is thrown against the front doors of the Fleetwood Arms Hotel stabbed through the heart in the same way as the first victim. Things go from bad to worse as a third body is found crushed between the riverbank and a moored up houseboat. The only connection is that all three have been similarly killed with a long, sharp blade which leads his newly appointed Chief Superintendent Diane Bliss to ask if there is a serial killer at loose. Steve is unable to confirm this one way or another but he is sure that he is not going to enjoy a new working relationship with his senior officer who starts by asking him to smarten himself up. The new Chief Constable is not so interested in dead bodies in Rutherford as to a fraud that has caught up senior police officers and minor politicians. Despite Steve’s protestations that this is a case for the Fraud Squad he is assigned the case and only given some bare clues as to the nature of the fraud which are three names; Peru, Alberto Pereira and Pactolus. The best clue he has is a memory stick from the second victim’s possessions which he hands to Detective Sergeant Miles Davis, more at home with spreadsheets than himself. A search of the last victim’s home brings forward a key to solving the riddle set by the Chief Constable. Steve’s mind is elsewhere. He is thinking about retirement. For the second time. The world has changed since he joined the force. His instinct tells him that the three dead bodies and the fraud case are connected. It is fortunate that he has no expertise in spreadsheets but Davis has, so between old fashioned policing and modern technology they solve both the riddle and the identity of the murderer.