Ulverscroft
3 total works
Professor Helen Vaughan, one of the foremost scientists in the field of DNA research and still only in her middle thirties, is found slumped over her desk in her office at the City Hospital, having been bludgeoned to death by a severe blow to the side of her head.Acerbic and both feared and disliked by her colleagues, she had a colourful private life featuring sado-masochistic games as the police were soon to discover. Investigation into that, her difficult and traumatic upbringing and hospital tensions all lead to the understanding of the deadly obsession that led to her death and the person responsible for it.
Janet Creswell, whilst struggling to come to terms with her husband's sudden death, received a letter, followed by a visit from a man named Richard Medley. A former university professor, he had been a pupil at Brantwood, a boys' preparatory school in Sussex, where, for one term in 1944, she had been matron. Their meeting brings back many memories to her, but also raises some doubts. Was the headmaster, Edward Blackstone, with his maltreatment of his daughter and the boys, merely an eccentric, or was he deeply disturbed, mad, or even being poisoned? And had his death by drowning in the swimming pool been an accident, or had he been murdered? What starts as simple curiosity, becomes near obsession as Janet meets several of those involved in the school at that time, both pupils and staff and finally discovers the truth about all those distant and disturbing events.
This work tells about a schoolgirl's highly suspicious death. Unhappy at home and with her parents desperately worried by her moods and withdrawn behaviour and fearing that she might be taking drugs, sixteen year old Sophie Hammond is sent as a boarder to a coeducational private school. A talented swimmer, she appears to be settling in well with the help of the young woman who is both her coach and house mother. Found dead in her room at Sandford College with both the door and window secured, it is at first assumed that the girl has either taken her own life or died from an accidental overdose of the drugs and alcohol which are found in her room. Rawlings, the forensic pathologist, however, is convinced that she has been suffocated. Before the answers to the tragedy are found, there are two further deaths and the lives of all those involved, including the investigating police officers, are turned upside down.