Joe's daughter is a witness to the death of a pensioner, seemingly stabbed, on a rush hour train she and her father were travelling on. Her seemingly quiet life turns out to be anything but as Vera's investigation begins to unravel a tangled web of lies and deceit. An old friend of Vera's father appears to hold the key to the entire mystery, which involves unraveling a murder committed thirty years previously, a rape which resulted in a child whose identity has been shrouded in mystery, and an affair which nobody suspected would ever be likely to have taken place. Vera realises that the answer may lie in events which have started to repeat themselves.

Teenagers Sassi and Louis Barnes discover Shane Thurgood, dead from a single gunshot wound on the moors of the Northumberland countryside. An abandoned truck is found burnt out a mile away, containing the remains of a deer. DS Joe Ashworth is convinced this is a poacher's war gone wrong but for DCI Vera Stanhope, the truth is never that straightforward.