When DCI Neil Paget is ordered, under protest, to deal with a missing person report filed by the chief constable's niece, he expects a storm in a teacup. But when he and DS Tregalles investigate, it emerges that the missing person, Mark Newman, is an aspiring journalist, who seems to have been on the trail of a hot story - at least, that's how it appeared to witnesses who overheard him having a secretive tete-a-tete with one Mickey Doyle in the local pub. But Mickey's disappeared too - to Ireland, according to his elderly neighbour, who saw him and another man being bundled into a car late at night. Mickey's caravan has been ransacked, and someone's removed every scrap of potential evidence from Mark's room.Meanwhile, Paget is struggling to keep his mind on the job, given the erratic behaviour and unexplained absences of his new live-in lover, Grace Lowett. Bodies start to pile up but just when the investigation seems to be on the right course, the National Criminal Intelligence Service orders Paget to call off his surveillance of a local farm. Trouble is, Paget already has a man in there...