The Day of the Donkey Derby

The day of the Donkey Derby dawned bright and clear: a perfect June day. When the telephone rang at seven o'clock in the morning, Dr Tom Lavenham, GP in a quiet market town, had no idea that it was to be a day he would remember all his life.

The telephone call was from his son, announcing the imminent arrival, alone, of the young woman who was to be the Lavenhams' daughter-in-law. Such a situation can often be taxing to parents, but this one was doubly so, for not only had the Lavenhams never met Juniper, who was a pædiatrician doing a course in London, but she happened to be Chinese. As he made plans to meet her off the two-fifteen train and his wife's mind turned to a suitable variety of fatted calf (did the Chinese have dietary taboos?), Tom Lavenham had no idea that he would shortly be confronted with the body of a beautiful girl, mysteriously dead in the home of a tricycle-riding eccentric; that he would be kept prisoner at the wrong end of a loaded gun from eight-thirty a.m. to half past eleven at night; that a house known locally as Dedend would very nearly become one; and certainly no idea of the circumstances in which he would first encounter his future daughter-in-law.