One summer evening in 1942, Flossie Rubrick, goes to her husband's wool shed to rehearse a patriotic speech - and disappears. Three weeks later she turns up at an auction, packed inside one of her own bales of wool and very, very dead.

It was a horrible death - lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die. Far from home on a wartime quest for German agents, Chief Inspector Alleyn knew that any number of people could have killed him.