The Missing Wife and the Stone Fen Siamese

Driving home from a ceramics evening class Clarice Beech reflects on the absence of one of her students Colin Compton-Smythe. Later Emily Colin's daughter telephones to say her father has died during routine surgery. Distraught Emily opens up to Clarice about his wretched childhood and the day five-year-old Colin returned home to discover his mother gone. Colin never believed she would have left without him and had been trying to find out more about her disappearance. Clarice soon becomes drawn into the fractious world of the Compton-Smythe family: Colin's argumentative father Ralph and his equally combative partner Tessa their daughter Dawn being stalked by an ex-lover and most unsettling of all Ernestine Ralph's emotionally unpredictable sister. And then there's Johnson Ralph's menacing manservant. Clarice discovers the nearer she gets to the truth the greater somebody is intent that the mystery of the missing wife should never be resolved.