For seventeen years, the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude's Ferry has lain abandoned, requisitioned by the Government for military training. In its thousand-year-old history, it had been famous for one thing — never having recorded a single crime. But when local reporter Philip Dryden joins the Territorial Army on exercise in the empty village, its spotless history is literally blown apart. For the TA's shells reveal a hidden cellar beneath the old pub. And inside the cellar hangs a skeleton, a noose around its neck... Two days later, a man is pulled from the reeds in the river near Ely — he has no idea who he is or how he got there. But, he knows the words 'Jude's Ferry' are important, and he knows he is afraid...

In the past: a man crawls desperately through a claustrophobic escape tunnel beneath a POW camp in the Cambridgeshire Fens. Above, a shadow passes across the moon, while ahead only death awaits him. In the present: Philip Dryden is reporting on an archaeological dig at the old POW camp, when a body is uncovered. But there is something odd: the man appears to have been shot in the head, and the position indicates that he was trying to get into the camp, not escape it. It's a puzzle which excites Dryden far more than the archaeologists or the police. That is, until a second, more recent, body is discovered...