Listen With Others

What a great title for the current state of play! And cryptically it’s MALONEY = LONE in MAY. But who is or was Maloney?

The story, if I understand it correctly, should unfold as follows:
(a) Mary Maloney takes the (frozen) lamb from out of the FREEZER on the lhs side of the grid.
(b) hubbie Patrick Maloney initially stands at the far side of the room / grid… where the town-based instruction (‘DOWNPATRICK’) tells ‘us’ to kill him with the LAMB by applying it to his head.
(c) PATRICK falls to the carpet, lying at 39a on the Kidderminster, dead.
(d) Now all Mary needs to do is get rid of the evidence. So she cooks the lamb. And then … two policemen arrive at the top of the grid.
(e) So she cuts up the lamb and serves it to them. By the end those pieces of LAMB – L, A, M & B are safely inside the POLICEMEN across the top of the grid.

A delightful little tale from that classic Roald Dahl collection of stories, with some neat twists if I remember rightly – I must get myself a copy and re-read it. It’s rare to come across such clever short stories: if I had to pick another where the plots make you smile when the story equivalent to the solver’s PDM appears – then it has to be Alexei Sayle’s “Barcelona Plates”. Dust that old copy off and give it a re-read, if you have a spare moment 🙂

Finally, back to the puzzle: all those real words / names throughout – a really excellent piece of construction. Thank you Dysart!

Cheers,

Tim / Encota

PS Thanks, amongst others, to Charybdis, Samuel & Aragon for getting me some publicity for an anagram! I am still feeling slightly taken aback by the attention, to be honest. It all started a day or two back here …