Twenty-one years after his wife and daughter were murdered in the bombing of a plane over Scotland, Alan Tealing, a university lecturer, still doubts the official version of events surrounding that terrible night. Obsessed by the details of what he has come to call The Case, he is sure that the man convicted of the atrocity was not responsible, and that he himself has thus been deprived not only of justice but also of any chance of escape from his enduring grief. When an American intelligence officer, apparently terminally ill and determined to settle his own accounts before death, arrives on his doorstep with information about a key witness in the trial, Alan decides to act. He travels to Australia to confront the witness, whose evidence he has always disbelieved. Will this encounter end only in more distress and disappointment? Or might it lead to the truth for which Alan has waited so long?