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Barbara didn’t know she’d opened the wrong parcel, though. Without looking inside the mug, she glared at him and upended the mug’s contents.

‘Cheating fucking bastard,’ she said.

Craig didn’t protest his innocence. He couldn’t. He was unable to tear his eyes away from the things that had fallen on the floor. They were no engagement ring.

He recoiled and gasped in revulsion.

A familiar and unwelcome warmth began spreading from his groin.

And then the screaming started.

Chapter 2

Boxing Day

Someone else who hated Christmas was Detective Sergeant Washington Poe.

As a committed grouch he was against all forms of enforced joviality and, up until today, he’d managed to shun all festivities, organised or ot

herwise. He usually worked through the enforced Christmas break, spent it alone or found a pub full of like-minded misanthropes and drank until it was over.

But not this year. This year he’d been well and truly ‘Bradshawed’.

Because, instead of being in the pub or hunkered down in his two-hundred-year-old shepherd’s croft, with beer in the fridge and leftover roast potatoes in the oven, he was in a penthouse flat in a village on the outskirts of Cambridge.

His friend and colleague Matilda ‘Tilly’ Bradshaw had dragged him to a baby shower.

Initially, he’d point blank refused.

She’d looked upset, but that was OK, she’d have got over it. She might be his best friend but a baby shower at a rich person’s house was his special kind of hell.

She’d stamped her foot.

He’d ignored her.

But then she’d used her most deadly weapon against him, one he was powerless against: incessant logic.

He’d told her that baby showers were for women.

She’d shouted at him in front of the whole office. Everyone in the Serious Crime Analysis Section, the National Crime Agency unit charged with investigating emerging serial killers and apparently motiveless murders, stopped to listen.

And giggle.

‘Washington Poe, you might have a penis but that doesn’t mean you get to use the social privileges of the patriarchal society to get out of doing things you don’t like.’

Poe had been about to ask her what the hell she was talking about when he’d heard someone snigger, ‘What does she mean, “might have a penis”?’

He’d tried saying he couldn’t leave Edgar, his springer spaniel, on his own for that long.

She’d replied that Edgar could stay with Victoria Hume, his neighbour. ‘You know, like he does all the time.’

He tried the truth – that he didn’t want to go.

‘Well, gee golly, mister,’ she’d countered, ‘since when did Washington Poe always get what he wants? Our line manager, DI Stephanie Flynn, is having a baby and her sister has been kind enough to host a baby shower – we’re her friends, we’re invited, we’re going, it’s as simple as that.’

So Poe was at a baby shower, sulking in a corner. Up until then he’d avoided catching anyone’s eye. He planned to do that until he’d been there long enough to leave. His glass of Champagne had gone warm forty minutes ago but it gave him something to do with his hands.

Jessica Flynn, the boss’s elder sister, lived on the top floor of a renovated brick factory. It was an open-plan, loft-style apartment, more suited to Manhattan than semi-rural Cambridgeshire. There were at least fifty women there. Poe was the only man, a fact he was reminded of every time someone gave him a weird look.