Plot

Vera's investigation into the murder of an ex-Met officer turns out to be far more complicated than initially imagined.

A man is stabbed to death outside a pub, his identity initially unknown though his unregistered car contains six thousand pounds in the boot. He was John Warnock, a former policeman recently returned home from London and working at Finches, a local brewery owned by Sam Harper, boyfriend of John's sister Maggie, on whose farm John was staying. John was something of a ladies' man and married old flame Lisa Strachan was planning to elope with him. Her husband Ross, a violent man who had previously been arrested by John, is charged with assaulting him but was stealing lead from a church roof at the time of the murder and has an alibi. Vera learns that John had been hired to spy on Finches on behalf of a national firm anxious for a take-over but had been fired when no adverse evidence could be found and this was not the source of the six grand. It becomes apparent that John was blackmailing somebody, who eventually killed him but Vera finds that she has more than one suspect to choose from.—don @ minifie-1

DCI Stanhope and DS Ashcroft investigate the murder of a man who was found stabbed to death in an alley just outside a pub. There's nothing on him to identify just who he is but his keys lead them to his car where they find a bag full of phones and £6000 in cash. He is eventually identified as John Warnock, a former policeman in the Met, who was invalided out of the police service the previous year. He and his sister Maggie co-own a horse farm they inherited from their mother but he worked at the local brewery run by Maggie's fiancé Sam Hooper. The police discover several possible leads: Warnock's former girlfriend is now married to a brute of man; the inheritance of the farm was not quite as clear cut as they had been left to believe; and the dead man may have had ulterior motives in working at the brewery. In the end, the solution lies in events from long ago.—garykmcd