Leaving a pub, a drunken Jim Carver is approached by Alec Facer, a former DI who he met while in CID. Facer offers him a job at Marlowe's, a prestigious private investigation firm, and Carver jumps at the chance. With the job all but his, Facer asks Carver to look up the location of a woman he suspects of embezzling, which turns out to be in a women's refuge. To Carver's horror, Facer turns out to be an alcoholic wife-beater who has just used him to find his estranged wife, and as he and DC Lennox race to the women's shelter, CAD radios through a report of an assault there.