It has been a warm summer in Cranford, a small town in the north east of England, where DI Peter Porteous has transferred in the hope of a quieter life. But as the water level in the lake drops, a weighted body is discovered. It has been there a while, years, but the post-mortem and missing person records eventually identify the victim (for it is murder) as Michael Grey, a young man who disappeared shortly after completing his A levels in 1972.
But Michael Grey is a bit of a mystery. He arrived in Cranford only a couple of years before his demise and was fostered by a local elderly couple, now deceased. There are school records to be had, there is an old teacher who remembers him, and a few of the school cohort can be traced living locally. A little further afield, living in a coastal town, is his then girlfriend, Hannah Meek. She is recently separated, living with her teenage daughter, and works as a librarian at the local prison. That makes for a stressful life at home and work, so Porteous’s questioning just adds another level of aggravation.
The story unfolds as Porteous investigates in his quiet unfussy way, and Hannah gently unravels. Tension ramps up towards the end as disparate side stories cleverly coalesce to provide a satisfactory ending to a devious plot.
And the plot is the
main thing; the characters never quite grip the imagination, which is possibly
why Peter Porteous never made it to the serial book status of other Cleeves
stalwarts like Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez. But it is still a diverting
enough early (2001) work by one of the leading detective fiction writers
around.
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