The Murder of Miss Perfect by Mark Eklid
Detective Chief Inspector Jim Pendlebury almost died at the end of his last big case.
Three years later, he is struggling to cope with forced retirement and the frustration of failing to convict the teacher accused of killing an 18-year-old student after seducing her.
Now, he must try one more time to search for the vital piece of missing evidence the Police failed to find during the initial investigation .
Whatever the cost, this time he will make sure justice is served for the cruel murder of the beautiful young woman the media dubbed Miss Perfect.
About the author
Long before Mark first became a published author, writing was his living.
His background is as a newspaper journalist, starting out with the South Yorkshire Times in 1984 and then on to the Derby Telegraph, until leaving full-time work in March 2020.
Most of Mark’s time at the Telegraph was as their cricket writer, a role that brought national recognition in the 2012 and 2013 England and Wales Cricket Board awards. He contributed for 12 years to the famed Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack and had many articles published in national magazines, annuals and newspapers.
Writing as a profession meant writing for pleasure had to be put on the back burner but when his work role changed, Mark returned to one of the many half-formed novels in his computer files and, this time, saw it through to publication.
The Murder of Miss Perfect is his first novel for SpellBound, but Mark has previously self-published Sunbeam (November 2019), Family Business (June 2020) and Catalyst (February 2021). The earlier three are to be re-published through SpellBound soon.
All four are fast-moving, plot-twisting thrillers set in the city of his birth, Sheffield.
Mark lives in Derby with his partner, Sue. They have two adult sons and have been adopted by a cat.
As part of the blog tour it is my pleasure to be able to share an extract of the book with you!
Like being given CPR by a consultant anaesthetist who just happened to be passing by the court the moment he collapsed. Like officially dying three times in the ambulance on the way to hospital while the paramedics fought desperately to restart his heart. Like being stabilised by a crash team in A&E at the Northern General Hospital while the theatre was prepared for an emergency operation. Like nine hours in surgery having a quadruple bypass. That sort of thing.
He was so lucky to be alive – and thankful for that – but as he began the long recovery process he began to realise his career in the police was over.
So the coming of June the twenty-first would forever be a reminder of the day he had to give up the job he loved. The job that was so much a part of everything he was. That was still hard to deal with.
On top of that, Pendlebury had still not been able to bury the bitter regret of that final day in the job and the final case he took to trial.
The Miss Perfect Murder.
Abie Moran was eighteen, the same age as Pendlebury’s youngest daughter, Natalie, at the time. That was part of the reason why the case felt so personal to him.
Abie was a sixth form student at one of the new Academies in one of Sheffield’s more respectable areas. She had just taken her final A Level exams and was expected to earn the highest grades before going on to study at one of the top universities. She wanted to become a doctor.
With her long blonde hair, slim build and soft, fresh, innocent features, she was a beautiful young woman well-liked by all her fellow students. Friends gravitated to her because she was completely unaffected. It was impossible not to like Abie.
Her biggest flaw – her fatal flaw – was that she had developed a secret infatuation for one of her maths tutors.
David Bales was thirty-six, no more than average height and build and had features that some might have considered handsome. He certainly did. He was also well aware of his ability to charm the hind legs off a donkey. It made him a constant target for teenage crushes and, it has to be said, he loved the attention, though there had never been any allegation of serious misconduct made against him.
That was, until Abie Moran started to make her interest known.
Bales could not resist her and she allowed herself to be lured by him. On July the eighteenth, 2017, a couple of days before the official end of term, she went to his home, which was a short walk from the school. It appears she went there to deliver a small present, a show of gratitude for his guidance as a tutor. There is no evidence to suggest her visit was down to collusion on his part.
Bales invited her in and Abie, in her naivety, accepted the offer.
He then tried to get her drunk by giving her beer and she was coerced into having sex with him. There was no evidence of rape or of her being restrained but who knows what manner of threats or misdirection were used to get her to agree to his debauched advances?
After the act, the scale of his impropriety must have dawned on Bales. He realised the only way he could guarantee Abie’s future silence, to save himself from the inevitable consequences after she reported his appalling behaviour to the appropriate authorities, was to kill her.
Abie was murdered by strangulation, using a ligature. It was believed he used his own necktie because fibres of blue silk were recovered from beneath Abie’s fingernails where she had clawed at the restraint to try to release the pressure on her throat. Several witnesses reported seeing Bales wearing a woven silk tie in pale blue with a repeating pattern of six small white dots earlier that day. The tie was not recovered during a thorough search of the house and grounds. Its whereabouts are still unknown.
After he killed her, his preparations for the disposal of the body were twice disturbed.
