This stage play traps a small group of people inside a remote English guesthouse as a blizzard cuts every road and severs the telephone lines. Mollie and Giles Ralston, newlyweds who have opened Monkswell Manor to paying visitors for the first time, welcome an oddly assorted set of guests: a restless young man, a censorious older woman, a brisk retired major, a self-contained traveller, and an uninvited foreigner whose car has slid into a drift. Word arrives by radio of a murder in London, and soon a young police sergeant struggles through the snow on skis to warn the household that the killer may already be among them. As the detective questions each person, it becomes clear that the crime is tied to a buried tragedy and to the nursery rhyme that gives the menace its shape. Every guest carries something concealed, and the isolation that should offer shelter instead tightens around them. Suspicion shifts from face to face while the snow keeps falling and the danger draws closer. Built as a tight single-set thriller, the play turns on careful misdirection, sharp interrogation, and the slow exposure of pasts that several characters would rather forget. Audiences have long honoured a request to leave the theatre without disclosing how it all resolves, a tradition that has accompanied the work since its opening. The result is a compact, methodical puzzle that rewards close attention to every word spoken on stage.