Send in the Clown

From a distance, it looks like a bundle of old clothes washed up at the tide's edge, but thirty years in the Met tells Howard otherwise. It's a body. And a body says trouble. When Howard Johnstone retires from the CID, he returns for a holiday in his home town on the North Yorkshire coast. He stays, enticed by a beautiful face from his past. Gwen Melsome, the Fair Miss Frigidaire. July 1962: Saltby Grammar's production of Twelfth Night. Howard as Feste the clown. Gwen, the cool lady Olivia. Type casting. A passionate but interrupted backstage embrace. After thirty years, Gwen is back, running her father's old bookshop, and Howard falls in lust all over again. With wishful thinking, Howard takes on a part-time driving job for one of Saltby's great and good, surgeon Alex Saunders. But when he finds a body on the beach, Howard curses his luck. He's been an idiot to return, and an even bigger idiot to stay. Nothing but trouble ahead.