DC Johns Meets His Match

This short story relates an incident that has unexected and long-term consequences for Detective Constable Peter Johns. When newly-qualified nurse, Susan Parry, is found dead in her bed in the nurses’ home, her colleagues call the police to investigate and DC Johns finds himself involved in a murder enquiry for the first time in his career. It is not just his career, however, which is dramatically affected by the events that follow. As he gets to know the other inmates of the home, he finds himself becoming personally involved in the life of one nurse in particular, and this helps to bring home to him the reality of racial prejudice in nineteen-seventies Oxford. Faced with both an apparently intractable murder mystery and the derision and antipathy of some of his colleagues, Peter feels increasingly embattled. Who could have wanted Nurse Parry dead? How did the murderer escape from a locked room? And who will Peter take with him to the Police Ball?