No18
A highly thought-of and distinguished senior officer, Charlie Hillian, has just retired and is writing a book about his biggest cases. During the night after he received an OBE, Hillian is killed in a struggle in his rural Oxfordshire home. The notes for one chapter of his forthcoming book are missing, the only case in the book which Hillian and his then DS, Patrick Dawson, never solved. That case involved the murder of an eight-year-old girl, Mary Lapsley, and it appears that someone wants that chapter to be unpublished. The Lapsley case is very personnel for Morse who has never solved it.