The papers hinted that behind the deaths of Thomas Barr, M.P., and his secretary, Sheila Daly, lay scandal and depravity. But Detective Coffin believed the causes lay buried deep among the secret emotions and shadowy pasts of the quick - and the dead - of his own district.

Certainly the estrangement of the M.P. from his beautiful wife, Camilla, was involved. So was the suicide of the dead secretary's husband. And the seething anger of Martin Kelly, an ex-cop with a grudge. But touching the crime more strangely still was the hundred-year-old mass murder of the Steinberg family... and the sinister trace of soil which had come from atop their grave.