Clive Benton, who was put in the witness protection program after helping bring down an international paedophile network, is found dead in a sewer. Detective Chief Inspector, Bob Carter must across the English Channel to search out the killer. What Carter is unaware of, is that Benton has a secret past involving smuggling drugs and illegal immigrants into the country.
For a demolition crew digging up the concrete floor of a cellar was part of a normal working day. Finding skeletal remains of seven people beneath it was not.
In possession of her dead sister's ashes after, she was supposedly cremated some years earlier, the woman finds out that her sister is one of the seven. Two brothers who ran the funeral home, at the time, come under suspicion. One of the brothers is in a nursing home dying of cancer. The clue to finding the second brother lies buried the cellar.
Anti-Islamic hate leads to a firebombing of a Mosque. Acting on a tip, police smash their way into a house only to find out that they had been set up.
From the moment they arrived on the demolition site, Callahan the foreman started quoting health and safety regulations. He insisted that before venturing into the building, the two officers from Kingsport CID, Detective Chief Inspector Bob Carter and Sergeant Marcia Kirby don hard hats and yellow vests. As Callahan led them cautiously through the empty rooms to the cellar, they understood why? Nothing in the interior of the old, two-storey English building looked safe.
The ceilings hung limply in the dust-laden air and fragments of lath and plaster littered the creaking floorboards. Mildew covered wallpaper still clung desperately to some of the walls. In the ceiling space, like great sheets of hair from an ancient hag, grey cobwebs hung, dirty and heavy with dust.
The pair descended the steps into the damp, musty-smelling cellar. Being a possible crime scene, Carter told Callahan to stay at the top. Apart from a few beams of sunlight leaking through holes in the floorboards above them, one arch light, powered by the generator outside, was their only source of light. Carter looked around. On the partly broken concrete floor lay the pneumatic drill dropped by the operator after retreating from his grisly find.
With only its empty eye sockets exposed above the soil, Carter bent down, scraped away some of the black earth, and examined the top half of a skull. 'And just who are you, my friend?' he said, addressing it. 'How did you get here?'
After a close examination, Carter straightened up and once again looked slowly around the cellar. As he did so, he called to Kirby, 'Better give forensics a call. Tell Tim to bring his bucket and spade. He's got a bit of digging to do!'
