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This was my first novel, published Macmillan, London/St Martin’s Press, NY 1983. Hardback, paperback, large print and Soundings Audio Book (unabridged).

The news rocked the town. A woman’s body found in a boathouse. And the woman’s last known companion Missing Presumed Fled. To the people of Stansfield it’s an open and shut case.

But Detective Inspector Lloyd – teamed up once more with Sergeant Judy Hill – isn’t so quick to jump to conclusions. To begin with he’s certain of only two things. First, that nothing can stop the reawakening of his tender feelings towards his colleague.

And second: in a murder enquiry you don’t rule anybody out…

What made you choose to write a whodunit?
I didn’t. I’d always read whodunits – my mother was very fond of them – but it had simply never crossed my mind to write one. I was trying to write a ‘straight’ novel, and wrote a sentence which I realised would be a wonderful clue in a whodunit. (I can’t tell you what it was, in case you want to read the book, because it would give the game away.) So, a whodunit it became. I’m nothing if not pragmatic.

Did you conceive Lloyd and Hill as series characters?
No. I had no intention in the world of writing a series; I made them a little too old. If you’ve read the novels, you’ve probably noticed that time is rather kinder to the people of Stansfield than it is to the rest of us. In twenty years, I, and I expect you, have aged twenty years – Lloyd and Hill have aged just ten. But they have miraculously joined us in the twenty-first century, nonetheless – fiction isn’t bound by the same natural laws as the real world.

You’re Scottish. Why is Lloyd Welsh?
I wanted him to be a Celt, but I felt that if my protagonist were to be Scottish, it might pigeon-hole me. The troubles were at their height in Ireland, so I was wary of making him Irish, lest I felt obliged to give him an opinion about it all. So, Welsh it was. I decided that his family had come to live in England, as mine had, when he was a child.

How much thought did you give to Lloyd and Hill’s physical characteristics?
To be perfectly honest, no conscious thought at all. When Donald Mitchell opened the door to Lloyd in the first chapter, I found myself writing ‘His first thought…was that DI Lloyd was small for a policeman’. Later, Lloyd ran his hand over his hair and felt his bald patch – what can I say? He just did. Maybe even he didn’t know he was going bald until then. And Judy arrived the same way. Brown hair, I decided, and brown eyes; she was new to the rank of detective sergeant, and she had just arrived in Stansfield. And that’s about as much decision as went into it.

The odd thing is that though I have a clear picture in my mind of the incidental characters in my novels, the series’ leads – by which I mean Lloyd, Judy, Tom, and, these days, Gary – are very hazy. Their personalities are what I know – their physical appearance is very much secondary.

Did you plan the love-interest?
No, not at all. When Judy appeared on the page, I just felt that there was a history there, between her and Lloyd. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t know where it would lead. I still don’t – I have never planned anything that’s happened with Lloyd and Judy, not even her pregnancy. I found myself making her wistful about her childhood, feeling a bit queasy and a little inclined to tears and thought ‘Oh, hell – she’s pregnant!’