November 1978. Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied, rubbish piles in the streets - and in West London `mad Annie´ dies in a rain-oaked gutter.

Her passing would have gone unmourned but for the young woman who finds her and who believes - apparently against reason - that she was murdered. For something passed between Annie and Mrs. Ranelagh at the moment of death.

But why is Mrs. Ranelagh so convinced it was murder when by her own account Annie died without speaking? And why does she spend the next twenty years painstakingly trying to uncover the truth...?