Murder Call

A fiftieth birthday party of Gerard Gault turns out to be more than anyone bargained for when he is discovered dead amongst his cactus collection the next morning. A simple heart attack? That's what the death certificate says but an anonymous caller is making it clear that some doubt surrounds that diagnosis ... the caller believes Gerard Gault was murdered.

A shop assistant opens up for the day in "O'Leary's Dry Cleaners" and lets in the first day's customer. But there is more hanging on the rack than the coats and evening wear today - namely one very dead dry cleaning owner/operator, Irene O'Leary. It looks that it's a simple case of robbery ending in murder, but as the details unfold, it appears that there is much more to this case.

When Faith Pecci is found bludgeoned to death and hanging upside down in the living room of her house, it's the local gang who are immediately blamed. The victim's sister Rose however believes her sister's ex-husband is the killer Tessa and Steve are searching for. Who did kill Faith Pecci? Was it a gang or the ex-husband? Or is the killer far more devious than either of these?

Tessa and Steve respond to a murder call only to find no body, no crime scene and they, they suppose, no murder; until they discover that the eye witness is their boss, Inspector Malcolm Thorne. Thorne is convinced he witnessed a man being pushed off the roof of a building, but he is perplexed as the rest of them when no evidence of a crime can be found.

The body of Eva Blanfield is found in a local dump. When they inform her husband, he claims she had been the victim of a kidnapping. The ransom note threatened to kill her if he contacted the police. He is distraught as he has paid the money, but his wife is dead. Meanwhile, another kidnapping victim Penny Whittaker was released once the ransom was paid. Why release one victim and not the other?

El Mar, seafood restaurant. Nothing special about it, except that tonight, a well-known food writer Roberta McKinnon is dining here. And except that tonight, Roberta McKinnon dies. There is no obvious signs of foul play. It's just that the critic's companion has cried "murder", on the strength of a threatening note she received that morning. Trouble is, the note was just one of many.

A sneak preview of a new exhibition at the "Maritime Historical & Conservation Museum" ends with a bizarre twist when the curator is found dead in one of the boat's. Tessa and Steve investigate the death of Ezekial Hartman and soon realise that his public face as a knowledgeable, hides a private life littered with sexual indiscretions and money troubles.

Professor Richard Worthington is panicked when his assistant, Carl Tatum, is locked inside a vault. Worthington's secretary, the keeper of the combination to the vault, is summoned immediately, but only minutes later she is found kneeling beside the dead body of Worthington - who has been fatally wounded by a single blow from a screwdriver.

In the back streets of the city the first rays of sunlight are fighting their way into the gloom, where a charred and twisted body is testimony to a fatal Friday night. It's Melissa Hindwood. Tessa and Steve break the news to her parents. As far as they are concerned their daughter should have been at their exclusive tennis club. The detectives soon discover Melissa led another life.

When the detectives attend the extravagant costume hire shop "Dresses to Die For", they find the shop's young security guard/delivery boy, Reuben O'Rouke, dead. Bizarrely, he has been propped inside an elaborate costume. Is it a misadventure, a crime of passion, or a none-too-subtle message to the costume shop's proprietors to withdraw from the upcoming Frock of the Year contest?

Two bodies joined together in death, skewered to the wall by a spear from a speargun. James Holland and Pauline Hook, business partners in life. Or was there something more than just business that bound these two together? Very fishy indeed.

Jerome Soeteman leaps from the roof of his apartment building, the 1812 Overture playing loudly as he does so. He is found hanging in a harness outside the window of his apartment. Dead. Is it suicide? Accident? Or murder? To complete the mystery, Soeteman was shot through the head and the murder weapon was an antique Russian military pistol.

The Klein String Quartet is a hotbed of passions and hatreds. When it's founder and first violinist, Hugo Klein is found macabrely murdered, the other three members come under Steve and Tessa's spotlight, betraying their own animosities towards Hugo and each other. There appears to be no shortage of motive amongst this small group of intense and volatile personalities.

When a referee of a women's fame of soccer is murdered in full view of a hundred people, our Detectives are puzzled when they have no eye-witnesses. The only witness turns out to be the video footage shot by Dee. After examinations of the video, Tessa realises it's not necessarily what is happening in the foreground, but the lies being played out in the grainy background.

When Cyril Crease, an elderly worker at Bilby Leather Factory is found dead, mangled beyond all recognition, inside a paddle drum at his workplace, it is initially thought to be an unfortunate accident. But when his skull plate is found dented, and when a hammer is found that matches that dent, then murder is very firmly placed on the agenda.

The body of a young woman is delivered to the morgue. Tootsie arrives shortly afterwards to discover the body is missing and her new morgue clerk, Ziggy Felden, has been murdered. A foreign set of prints in Ziggy's office is their only lead until the missing body of the girl turns up in the boot of Tootsie's car. Who stole then returned the body of the girl and why?

Brian Hart is on a train met by a woman he obviously knows. An argument follows. She leaves as his wife calls him on the mobile phone. Moments later Brian Hart is killed when a letter bomb concealed in a card explodes. Was Brian Hart having an affair? Had his wife found out about? Nothing is what it seems as Steve and Tessa begin to uncover the web of intrigue surrounding this horrific death.

A customer brings his dead rat to a taxidermy store to have it stuffed but it's unlikely it'll be a successful venture given that something is bleeding on it while it sits on the counter. That "something" is a severed head, mounted on a backboard and hung about the store's counter. Tessa and Steve find that nothing is as it seems in trying to solve the murder.

Sebastian Tombs is celebrating the sale of the film rights of his latest horror novel. Sebastian "lives" his genre, from the decor in his apartment, to his belief in the beneficial effects of black humour. His guests are forced to listen, in darkness, to taped readings of the latest chapter of his work. After such a reading, the lights come up, and Sebastian is lying dead, a knife in his back.

A small funeral cortege moves along the avenue of crypts in a cemetery. A woman is to be interred, but an unpleasant surprise awaits us when the crypt is opened. It is already occupied by a stinking corpse. Nobody seems to know how the body came to be here, and a week has elapsed since the murder, giving the killer plenty of time to cover his or her tracks.

Fifteen years ago, Malcolm Thorne joined the Homicide Squad and the first major case he was assigned to involved three murders. The victims were slashed almost beyond recognition and their tongues were cut out. The murderer was never caught. Now another body has been found. The wounds are similar, so the removal of the tongue. Thorne experiences a strong sense of déjà vu.

Lindsay Frampton, a fairground king and games arcade millionaire, liked his simple pleasures. Friday night was pizza night - a pizza best enjoyed in his bubbling spa. But this Friday night Supreme with extra pineapple goes cold. The millionaire is found face up in the spa, a fat wad of one hundred dollar notes jammed in his mouth as a grim last message from his murderer.

When a young mime artist collapses and dies while busking, it's thought to be the result of a drug overdose. However, during the autopsy, Tootsie discovers that man was poisoned by lantana berries mixed into a salad. The Detectives' only lead is an address which leads to a warehouse, where Tessa and Steve find that all four inhabitants hold grudges of varying degrees towards the deceased.

Beautiful model, Samantha Reading, is lured to a secret garden, where she expects to meet her lover, only to find death waiting for her. Tessa and Steve investigate the gruesome murder. The victim has been mauled to death by two vicious dogs. They trace the woman's car to her agent Jack Turkington and discover that the dogs were stolen months ago from the victim's best friend, Andrea Thatcher.

A young blind man is found dead in a swimming pool and one of his eyes has been removed and placed on a pile of clothes - exactly mimicking a case that was solved 6 years earlier, a case Tootsie recently described in one of her lectures to the Forensic Society. Horrified Tootsie realises this is the third time her lectures have been used as a blueprint for murder.