When Iain Bower is found murdered in his Edinbugh flat, DI Meldrum's problem is that the businessman had only recently retired to the city and seems to have had few acquaintances and no enemies. Until, that is, an unknown man appears at his funeral, pisses into the open grave, and escapes. Meldrum's subsequent investigations take him to Brussels and Italy, but the key to the truth lies with the Naylor Home, a boys' reformatory school, where Meldrum discovers a history of abuse stretching back more than thirty years.