And a Bottle of Rum

Stretched across the road was the body of a policeman.

On the way home one evening in the Romney Marsh, Bookseller Theodore Terhune and friend Julia are caught in heavy coastal fog.  A passing lorry provides some guidance on the narrow country roads, but the night ends with intentional mishap and a dead body.  It becomes clear that the constable’s death was not accidental, but what possessed Tom Kitchen to try to stop a lorry singlehandedly at 1am?  His widow is frightened; local farms vandalized; his home ransacked.  Suspicion centres around the Load of Hay, an ancient Dickensian pub full of unsavoury characters, and Terhune finds the clues may lay in the history of 18^th century smuggling in the Romney Marsh.