Alistair Dingley is a man with an easy charm and a large ego. He is filled with a ruthless determination to succeed in whatever he does and is used to getting his way. At the moment he is in the process of buying a beautiful wooded property from which he is determined to make, in his words, "an absolute killing". As he barks orders into his cellphone to the men he has hired to bulldoze the ground of its trees and shrubs so that he can build on it, he is overheard by hundreds of listeners no human would ever suspect of being able to do so.
Some individuals involved with the magnificent old garden do make an "absolute killing", and it is one so bizarre that anyone learning of its true nature would struggle to comprehend it. If a man, woman, boy or girl did, by unlikely chance, learn of who was killed and how it was done, would they sit right there and try and puzzle it out, or run screaming and screaming, all the while wondering if what had executed such a torturous death was coming after them? Perhaps they would run first and then turn their brain into a knot trying to understand what had really gone down in a place that always looked so perfectly natural and tranquil; one that had been like that for a long, long time.
