Harm’s Way

When the Berebury Footpaths Society created their locally infamous motto, "Every walk a challenge," they couldn't have known just how apt it would be. Avid hikers Wendy Lamport and Gordon Briggs suffer from a good walk spoiled when, while reclaiming a public footpath from the greedy barbed-wire fences of encroaching farmers, a crow drops a severed human finger at their feet. And where there's a finger, thinks Detective C. D. Sloan, a body can't be far behind. It would seem that there are a handful of bodies to whom the finger might belong. There is a suspiciously long list of people gone missing from Great Rooden's farming country: the tippling son of a local pillar of society, a financier who may have angered the wrong man, and even an old tramp or two who may have thieved one too many apples.