Beyond Another Curtain — Tony Nash

SEQUEL TO ‘BLOCKBUSTER'
Jane, DI John Hunter's wife, was abducted and killed during the Blockbuster affair and at last John and Jane's father, Sir Henry Bliss, Minister for Internal Affairs in the present Government, go to recover her body from the well down which the criminal Harry Haggar had insisted she had been thrown after being killed.
Thirteen bodies are recovered, but not Jane's. John is even more devastated. He continues with investigations, but life is merely going through the motions; he is dead inside, and though Annie Green, his old love, offers TLC, he cannot accept any kind of involvement.
He believes that the assassination of the Russian President during a state visit to Britain has nothing whatsoever to do with him, but the Prime Minister, remembering his service to the country, insists that Special Branch incorporate Hunter into the investigation.
While carrying out checks for the SB he is shot in the chest. After signing himself out of hospital against the doctor's wishes he discovers that a Russian agent was one of the two people involved in the assassination, which takes the heat off the British Government, but there the trail goes cold.
A series of unusual homespun murders begins, where the victims are emasculated before they are killed and John is faced with an investigation where there are dozens of possible perpetrators, since the murdered men were part of a paedophile ring involving a large and unknown quantity of teenaged girls. Every brother, father, mother and sister is a possible killer.
After three such murders, which John has linked to an old rape case involving all three men, he believes that the killings will stop, but four weeks later he receives a call from *DCI Tony Dyce of the Norfolk Constabulary. Another similar murder has taken place on a houseboat on the Broads.
John finds out that the Norfolk victim was charged along with the other three for a rape in 2001, a case he had ignored until then because of the long time lapse.
After much prevarication, Sir Henry Bliss gives John a small piece of information that leads him to the fifth man involved in the 2001 rape case. That information leads him on to other explosive discoveries, one of which turns his life upside down: the serial killer he has been hunting and the assassin of the Russian President is none other than his own wife, Jane…
*See ‘Murder on Tiptoes' et al.