A disgraced college
lecturer is found murdered with £5,000 in his pocket on a disused
railway line near his home. Since being dismissed from his job for
sexual misconduct four years previously, he has been living a
poverty-stricken and hermit-like existence in this isolated spot.
The
suspects range from several individuals at the college where he used to
teach to a woman who knew the victim back in the early '70s at Essex
University, then a hotbed of political activism. When Banks receives a
warning to step away from the case, he realises there is much more to
the mystery than meets the eye - for there are plenty more skeletons to
come out of the closet . . .