Long married and now grandparents, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford pay a visit to Tommy's difficult elderly aunt at Sunny Ridge, a quiet nursing home. While waiting, Tuppence falls into conversation with a gentle, slightly muddled fellow resident who suddenly asks an unsettling question about a poor child behind the fireplace, then drifts away. The remark lodges itself in Tuppence's mind. Weeks later, when the Beresfords return to settle the aunt's affairs, they learn the old woman has been quietly removed by relatives and cannot be traced. Left with little more than instinct and an old oil painting of a house beside a canal, Tuppence becomes convinced she has seen that house somewhere before, and that something is badly wrong. She sets out alone, retracing journeys and following a thin chain of clues to a remote, watchful village where polite faces hide long-buried local history. As Tuppence pursues the missing woman, Tommy works his own contacts, and the two threads of inquiry circle a series of old, unexplained tragedies that the district would rather forget. The novel pairs the comfortable rhythms of an ageing detective couple with a creeping unease, building dread out of small talk, half-remembered places, and the gap between what people say and what they refuse to. It moves from the muted corridors of a care home into rural lanes and church records, asking how much of the past can really be left undisturbed.