The Sleeping Beauties

Gordon White has a problem: there is a hole in his memory and four murders he may be connected to. Fleeing to a remote seaside town, the retired civil servant does not know whether he is hiding from danger or from the police. When news breaks of an arrest, fragments of the missing hours begin to surface.

Pushed by a Catholic priest to write down everything he can recall, and drawn into an uneasy relationship with Josie, aunt of one of the victims, Gordon starts piecing together the truth. Notes left by a former colleague point him back to Manchester’s long-abandoned underground railway, where two of the killings took place, and where Gordon now realises he had been.

Twenty years later, living in a care home, Gordon is given an identity tracking chip that maps every step of a person’s life. It finally reveals part of what happened during those lost hours, but not everything. Some answers remain buried, and some memories refuse to return.