The Crowland Project

By Outset Publishing

Moscow Gunn comes across a horrific sight in Coe Meadow near the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. He consults friends and contacts to help him solve the mystery. The government also seems interested. What is the truth behind this terrible crime?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outset Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781872889023

Outset Publishing

Outset Publishing is delighted to bring you the work of emerging author, David E P Dennis. David served as an RAF officer, was a member of a mountain rescue team, became a government inspector, chaired a national charity which conducted brain research and is now a director of a country park. He writes, paints and is a wildlife and landscape photographer. Find out more about David at: www.searoadarts.com

Book preview

THE CROWLAND PROJECT

A novella by

David E P Dennis

This book is dedicated to my lovely wife and children - and their children.

Published by Outset Publishing Ltd

www.outsetpublishing.co.uk

© David E P Dennis 2015

All rights reserved

About the author

David E P Dennis served as an RAF officer, was a member of a mountain rescue team, became a government inspector, chaired a national charity which conducted brain research and is now a director of a country park. He writes, paints and is a wildlife and landscape photographer.

Also available as a printed book from CreateSpace, an Amazon.com company

Published in December 2015 by Outset Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER ONE

On a sultry August evening, postgraduate student Moscow Gunn ambled through Coe Fen in Cambridge to meet his girlfriend Amelia at Hodson’s Folly. Amelia Townsend worked at the nearby Fitzwilliam Museum, a short after-work walk away and soon they would be together again. They’d known each other for a year now and had been intimate after a few months, in a fumbling and exploratory way, laughing and blushing.

Moscow felt privileged to know someone so lovely and she told him she would certainly marry him as the child in her womb was now several months old. The Coe Fen meadow had its usual complement of cows grazing or sitting and lowing by the River Cam. There was a thunderstorm in the offing, making the air muggy and tense. Moscow reached the Folly.

There was a man on the tow path wearing a black bomber jacket and blue faded jeans. He was bending down with one hand on the body of a woman. Amelia was dead, sprawled on her right side with her face away from him, her dark hair matted and bloody. Her body seemed wet, half-clothed, part of her left breast had been torn away and one of her legs had been forced up into her pelvis. She had been disembowelled.

The man stood up, shook his head and cried out. ‘Jesus, it’s too late mate, she’s gone. She was well dead when I got here.’

Moscow felt a stinging sensation in the back of his hand, was poleaxed with shock and fell down near her body. From his prone position he looked at her, hoping for signs of life, feeling that at any moment he would die too.

Moscow’s hands were bloody from touching the grass at the edge of the tow path but he could not bring himself to touch her. Her beauty had been shattered. He struggled to breathe and fell forward, hitting his head on the edge of the Folly. A short time later a dog-walker found him unconscious and called the police and an ambulance. The man who had been at the scene first, ran away.

Police kept a vigil by Moscow’s bedside since he was an obvious suspect, but doctors said that as he had a skull fracture they would keep him sedated. By the time he was able to sit up, the nursing staff told him the funeral was over. There had been a post-mortem. Her parents had flown back to their villa in Portugal. A police detective came to interview and then reassure him as he rested in a hospital bed that he had not done this crime. Reports had come in that a similar incident had occurred at Flag Fen near Peterborough. There, the body of a man had been torn almost to shreds. The man’s arm had been torn off at the shoulder and one of his legs had been forced up into his body cavity, so they said.

Detective Inspector Colin Edgeland, in charge of the Cambridge case, told the press that the Flag Fen incident did seem to be connected but there was no ‘smoking gun’ forensic proof as yet that the same assailant, who or whatever that was, must have had been at both scenes.

When he left hospital, Moscow went back to his university lodgings, only to be told that the police had searched them. DI Edgeland revealed that as soon as they heard the sad news, Amelia’s parents had phoned from Portugal pleading with officers to investigate in case Moscow really had killed Amelia and their prospective grandchild.

Moscow went to see the police and they told him that Amelia’s death was being