Absolute Poison Extract A Rafferty and Llewellyn Crime Novel

'There'll be another one along in a minute' - wasn't that what they said? Inspector

Joseph Rafferty gazed at the very dead old lady in the bed and mused that usually

it was in respect of buses, not bodies.

But this week the bodies were bunched like the rush-hour double-deckers on

Elmhurst's congested steets. The first suicide had been of a World War Two veteran

whose suicide note had derided the notion that this was a land fit for heroes to live in.

This old lady was the second suicide. And it was still only Wednesday morning.

Rafferty, chock-full of Irish superstition, felt he could be forgiven for becoming

equally chock-full of the conviction that they wouldn't get through the rest of the week
without a third. As he remarked to Sergeant Llewellyn, in his experience, bad things always
came in threes. It was a depressing thought.

Almost as depressing as the February weather, which, like the previous autumn, was

as grey and dank as a dirty floorcloth. Even the jolly holly bush, with its urgent

tap-tappings at the window, seemed to have had enough and to want to come inside

for a warm. Hardly surprising the suicide rate was up...