Blood on the Happy Highway

In a copse near a busy Suffolk road, a body has been found neatly parcelled in plastic. And headless. Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill and his team have been working on the case for two months without a single lead. Sharing Quantrill's office, and replacing cocky young Martin Tait, is a new detective sergeant, who has shoulder-length dark hair and a good deal of cool competence. Hilary Lloyd makes Quantrill feel uncomfortable. Not that he has anything against women detectives, of course . . . but how can he share with her the easy camaraderie that team-working should involve? This new constraint at work combines with the apparently insoluble murder to make Quantrill unusually gloomy. But a thoroughly nasty little incident cheers him slightly: someone has left a decapitated cat and a warning sprayed in blood-red paint on the doorstep of a local house. Might headless cat and headless corpse be linked? Hilary Lloyd, interviewing the owner...