June the 4th, 1973, was much like any other summer's day in Peterborough, and Ralph Mellish, a file clerk at an insurance company, was on his way to work as usual when --- Nothing happened!

Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Ralph Mellish looked down. But one glance confirmed his suspicions. Behind a bush, on the side of the road, there was *no* severed arm. *No* dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties. No head in a bag. Nothing. Not a sausage.

For Ralph Mellish, this was *not* to be the start of any trail of events which would not, in no time at all, involve him in neither a tangled knot of suspicion, nor any web of lies, which would, had he been not involved, surely have led him to no other place, than the central criminal court of the Old Bailey.