by Helen Gidley
Teen and up · Complete · 17,014 words · 5 chapters
Warnings: Major character death, Graphic violence
Tags: mystery, whodunit, fair-play mystery, amateur sleuth, village mystery, british mystery, bell ringing, devon, dartmoor, female detective, small town secrets
Gill Vosper hangs church bells for a living, and she can tell who's ringing by the way they pull. So on summer Saturdays the Devon ringers sit her in a pensioner's back bedroom with a fault sheet and a schooner of sherry, out of sight of the tower, and let her judge.
This year the competition is at Upcott Petrock, the Dartmoor village where she learned to ring at eleven and was thrown out at sixteen by Derek Coaker, tower captain since 1982. His team wins. At ten past five the whole village hears him ring his goodnight on the tenor, as he always does when everyone's gone home.
An hour later he's dead at the foot of the clock-chamber ladder.
The police say he fell. Gill knows that ladder, and she knows that bell, and there's a note in the margin of her own fault sheet that she can't stop reading.
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