Kate Kinsella's friend and landlord, funeral director Hubert Humberstone, persuades Kate to help him out by preparing a body for the chapel of rest. For an ex-nurse this isn't much of a problem - until, that is, Kate finds bruises on the body which indicate the elderly woman, Ivy Waites, may have been raped. When another elderly woman, Alvera Trees, confides in Hubert that she was raped in her own home whilst her husband (now deceased) was in hospital, it heralds a spiral of events that hurls the normally quiet town of Longborough into mayhem and madness. As the truth emerges and the past explains the present, Kate realizes she must reconsider her own future. But is David Todman really the answer?