Newly married Gwenda Reed buys a house on the English coast and begins recognising rooms and features she believes she has never seen. A sudden memory of a woman lying strangled at the foot of the stairs persuades her that the house belonged to her childhood and that the scene may have been real.
Miss Marple helps Gwenda and her husband reconstruct the disappearance of Gwenda’s stepmother years earlier. The case depends on childhood memory, altered property and the stories adults used to conceal trauma, creating an interwar mystery in which the physical survival of a house allows a supposedly forgotten crime to return.