When a young actor is murdered during a student Shakespeare production, Lewis and Hathaway sift through the motives of several suspects - from a jealous thespian to an Oxford dropout to a playgoer only too anxious to use his ticket stub as an alibi. As the duo tracks down the truth, they unearth a dark secret that hits Lewis eerily close to home.
What looks like a simple drugs drop at a building site turns into a murder case when CID find a body buried in concrete. There are many that think the site owner, Michael Lafferty, is crooked - an eager young PC who thinks he's paying off his superior officers, plus several of the Polish workers that he exploits. All the while, Alex is waiting, convinced that she's recovering in the hospital and will wake up soon.