The Allotments

There was a body in Clem Sapsford's compost. Not his doing. He'd like that noted. Clem has had Plot 7 on the Tithe Drove allotments for forty-one years. He takes his heap's temperature every morning at seven and writes it down in pencil. He can tell which end of the site a man has been kneeling at by the colour of the dirt in his turn-ups. He grows the heaviest marrow in the Fens, and he has not spoken to the man on the plot opposite for eleven years. So when Neville Crouch, Treasurer and Plot Inspector, turns up in the hottest of his three bays, Clem knows three things the police do not. The heap was disturbed on the Thursday night, not the Friday. The silt on Neville's trousers came from the other end of the site. And whoever hung Clem's fork back up hung it the wrong way round. Nobody wants to hear it. Not the detective who calls his heap book "pencil, Mr Sapsford". Not the committee, who suspend him under Rule 14 and bar him from the Show. And not the town, which is relieved to have charged the young Lithuanian who slept in his sister's shed. The only person who will listen is the sister, who grades potatoes on the same line Clem stood at for thirty-six years, and who knows more about soil than anyone on the committee. Black soil. Flat sky. A committee to die for. A completely standalone novel of murder, marrows and parish-pump politics, from the author of The Warden and The Lollipop Lady.