Silence and secrets ... and a ceramic rat Detective Sergeant Washington Poe is in court, fighting eviction from his beloved croft, when he is summoned to a backstreet brothel in Carlisle where a man has been beaten to death with a baseball bat. Poe is confused - he hunts serial killers and this appears to be murder-by-pimp - but his attendance was requested personally, by the kind of people who prefer to remain in the shadows. As Poe and programmer Tilly Bradshaw delve deeper into the case, they are faced with seemingly unanswerable questions: despite being heavily vetted for a high-profile job, why does nothing