'You could say it began with a phone call. After all, that's the way most cases begin . . .'
A phone call late on a hot Dublin evening. An anxious mother, enquiring about her daughter. If she'd just said she wasn't coming home. If she'd rung. If she'd just let me know . . .
Then, a week later, the full dreadful story beginning to unfold. The policeman, McLoughlin, watching as the green cover is pulled back from the mortuary slab. The young woman's battered, mutilated body exposed. And for Margaret, the dull, aching realisation that this is not - can never be allowed to be - the end.
Margaret is a psychiatrist, recently returned to Dublin after many years abroad. To a city where she once loved and shone. She came back to nurse her dying mother and now her daughter Mary is dead.
What else but to begin at the beginning? Where the clockwork started in motion, where the road to tragedy began? To see the world in a grain of sand - for sorrow and for one last hope of her own and her daughter's salvation . . .
