Out of a Pale Blue Sky

William Wilkins is a history teacher at a minor public school in Gloucestershire. Life in this quiet educational backwater is easy-going and uneventful, ideally suited to William’s unadventurous nature.

William is the only child of Theo Wilkins, a well-respected art dealer and expert in eighteenth-century Italian painting residing in nearby Cheltenham, along with William’s 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.

William 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, out of a pale blue sky.