A child is lost, a village searching through the night, a body found, an itinerant hawker seen in the vicinity but is he all that he appears to be? These are the ingredients of a murder story that really took place in the Derbyshire village of Brimington in August of 1881. The newspaper reporters of the day covered the story in the greatest detail - the arrest, the inquest, the funeral, the magistrates' hearings, the frenzy of the locals who wanted to take the law into their own hands, the incarceration of the alleged murderer, the trial before a High Court judge and the verdict. Follow the events and the characters involved day by day until the eventual outcome unfolds in November of 1881.