Lockton Leather is no ordinary patient. Physically and mentally scarred, he looks back from extreme old age to a remote past as a Thimblerigger among the criminal underworld of Victorian Liverpool. It was a life fraught with hardship and danger; one which returns to threaten everything he holds dear. But how can this be, when he is telling his story in 1999? Drawn ever deeper into Lockton's life history, Dr Sam Stockwell, the psychologist assigned to work with him, finds it increasingly hard to extricate reality from fiction, till he finally begins to suspect that the old man may actually be telling the truth...