Purple Death

Introduction

IntroductionThe London Borough of Richmond-on-Thames sits sedately at the south-eastern fringes of the boundaries of Greater London. Hampton Court Palace, Kew Gardens and Twickenham, the home of English Rugby are all to be found within its borders, as is the National Physical Laboratory. There are over one hundred parks within its borders, and the River Thames flows sedately through twenty one miles of the borough which has royal connections that date back some nine hundred years.

It is into this tranquil and unlikely setting that a killer with terrifying motives begins a spree of murders that soon lead the police to a connection with a decades old case. Unfortunately for Detective Inspector Sean Connor and his assistant Sergeant Lucy Clay, all roads seem to lead to nowhere in this baffling investigation as they begin to realise that the man behind the murders is a master of the art of misdirection who appears to assume a new identity with almost every passing day. Witnesses are thin on the ground, clues non-existent, and every potential suspect soon turns out to be yet another victim of the invidious killer. Connor is faced with question after question as to the killer's motives and yet the answers are never going to be easy to find.

Who is the unknown but deadly female accomplice of the murderer whom the police soon dub The Chocolate Woman? Who is directing her in the prosecution of these apparently pointless and motiveless crimes? Why does the driver die at the controls as an express train arrives at Birmingham station, and how does his murder on the opposite side of the country connect with the horrendous series of killings taking place in quiet, leafy Richmond-on-Thames? What, if anything connects the victims to a thirty two year old unsolved murder investigation?

Each and every time that Connor and his team feel they are about to discover a new lead, they find they have been led into yet another `blind alley' by the merciless yet fiendishly clever mastermind behind the murders. Time is running out for those still on the killers `murder list' and the detectives must work fast to prevent the serial killer from completing his gruesome task as they begin their investigation into the catalogue of murders that would soon come to be known collectively as `The Purple Death'.

Author's note: Although the towns and cities named in this fiction and the borough of Richmond-on-Thames are genuine, any and all references to local place names, streets and individuals are purely the inventions of the author's mind and bear no connection to any place or person in real life. Any similarity to real places or persons is thus a pure coincidence and is entirely unintentional.