Journalist Philip Dryden is shocked to be informed by the police that his father has just been killed in a car accident, his body incinerated in a fireball of burning petrol. It's impossible - because Dryden's father drowned during the fenland floods of 1977, 35 years before. At the same time, two unrelated cases are demanding his professional attention. A body has been found hanging from an irrigation gantry in the middle of a lettuce field, the corpse riddled with bullets. The police fear they are dealing with a gang revenge killing. And a couple have come forward protesting that the local council is refusing to the return the body of their baby daughter, initially given a pauper's grave in the local cemetery. As Dryden gradually pieces the clues together, he realizes that he has stumbled on a dark secret which seems to link the three cases and stretches back many years into his own childhood. He discovers there were many things he didn't know about his late father, and that it is his fate which holds the key to the mystery.