pWilliam Wilkins is a history teacher at a minor public school in Gloucestershire. Life in this quiet educational backwater is easygoing and uneventful ideally suited to Williamamprsquos unadventurous nature.p pWilliam is the only child of Theo Wilkins a wellrespected art dealer and expert in eighteenthcentury Italian painting residing in nearby Cheltenham along with Williamamprsquos much younger and beautiful mother. Theo was the proprietor of a successful art business with galleries in Cheltenham and London which he sold out to a Mayfair dealer. Over his years in business Theo also succeeded in accumulating a very valuable private art collection of his own.p pWilliam enjoys his career as a teacher and one day might expect to inherit from his wealthy parents a substantial fortune. His future seems as secure and predictable as any young man could wish. In fact he is more than contented with his lot and has no desire for challenges adventures or excitements which would interfere with his comfortable way of life. He has no inkling though that things are about to take a very different course. His quiet agreeable existence is suddenly overturned by a series of tragic and disastrous events affecting every aspect of his life and future expectations and undermining all the cosy assumptions upon which he has always relied events which descend upon him one by one without warning emout of a pale blue sky.emp