It was the skeleton of a woman

and the woman had been dead for nearly a year...

This much the police knew, but that was all. Until everyone in the village began to think back, to try to remember what they could about a mysterious redheaded woman who had appeared and then suddenly disappeared in their midst a year ago.

Then someone, a ten-year-old boy who was crippled, did remember something.

He spoke, and his careless words smashed to pieces the precarious sanity of a killer-leaving nakedly exposed a long-hidden hatred, black and bitter and blindly murderous.