Robert Louis Stevenson's strange and sinister tale of the gentle Dr Jekyll and the sadistic Mr Hyde is filled with oddities suggesting a dark reality behind a classic fiction. That dark reality is laid bare in the casebook of Inspector Swain.

The 'parliamentary murder' of 1884 leads the inspector and his portly sergeant, Lumley, from plush drawing-room to madhouse cell in search of the link between a coward in the red-coated ranks at Isandhlwana, a killer in Cheyne Walk and the satanic persona of Edward Hyde.