Seven men and a woman were in the first-class coach of a train from London to Brighton. They had travelled together each evening for months. That night one of them, Alexis Mortensen, editor of a scurrilous newspaper, died from strychnine poisoning. Strychnine acts inside fifteen minutes, but Mortensen had had nothing which could have contained the poison for an hour before his death. An unbelievably grotesque story from the past was to be uncovered before the case was solved.