The people first saw the snow as a welcome representative of a white Christmas; the children and the adults alike played in it, starting snowball fights and gleefully building snowmen. But they had no idea of the nightmare that lay ahead of them. No concept of what it would be like when roads would be blocked for weeks on end, when trains couldn’t run, when winter fuel became scarce, and food in the shops dwindled alarmingly.

Nor could they have anticipated the wearying, will-sapping tedium of constant freezing temperatures, day in, night out, until only and finally on the sixth day of March of the brand-new year of 1963, did the country finally record its first frost-free day.

Of course, by then, there had been death, and plenty of it – the elderly, the unwary, the unlucky, the ill.

But not all of the deaths were natural or accidental, or could be blamed solely on the pitiless winter …

Chapter 1

WPC Trudy Loveday felt her right foot sliding out from under her in a way that was becoming only too familiar, and instinctively reached out to grab at a railing beside her. It belonged to a small front garden currently blanketed in white, like everything else as far as the eye could see, and obligingly kept her upright. Luckily she was wearing warm woollen gloves, otherwise her bare skin might have stuck to the metal, it was that cold.

All around her, the city of Oxford lay shivering and miserable. Much like one young, lone WPC, who was resolutely walking her beat.

Trudy looked around and sighed, her breath, as ever, appearing in front of her in a small puff of vapour. They were in those ‘dead’ days between Christmas and the New Year of 1963, when all thoughts of Father Christmas seemed like weeks ago instead of mere days, and the time to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ seemed as if it would never arrive.

Most of the shops around her were closed, some because the proprietors weren’t convinced that any customers would be foolish enough to venture outside when the roads and pavements were so slick with ice and the dark days so uninviting. Others belonged to owners who lived out of town rather than over the shop, and were themselves snowed solidly into surrounding villages, unable to come in and oversee their business premises. No buses ran, and most trains were either hours late, cancelled, stuck on frozen points, or halted by last night’s snowfall, which a nasty wind had driven into drifts that covered open spots on the railway tracks.