For seventeen years, the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude's Ferry has lain abandoned, requisitioned by the Government for military training. In its thousand-year-old history, it had been famous for one thing, never having recorded a single crime. But when local reporter Philip Dryden joins the Territorial Army on exercise in the empty village, its spotless history is literally blow n apart. For the Territorial Army's shells reveal a hidden cellar beneath the old pub. And inside the cellar hangs a skeleton, a noose around its neck . . .