October 1678. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, respected London wood monger and Court Justice, sets out from his house, early one foggy morning, in his second-best coat. Then he vanishes. Six days later, his body is discovered in a ditch near Primrose Hill. He has been severely beaten, strangled and stabbed through the chest - killed three times, in fact. There's no doubt somebody wanted him dead. The cash in his pockets however is still there. And, in spite of the wet weather and muddy roads, his clothes are dry and his shoes are spotlessly clean.

People are quick to connect his killing with the role Godfrey has played in exposing a Catholic plot to kill the King. His name is, after all, an anagram of 'dy'd by Rome's reveng'd fury'. Parliament, whipped into a frenzy by the conspirator Titus Oates, demands a suitable perpetrator is found. But it soon becomes clear that Godfrey had not merely offended the Catholics. And he had, some weeks before, predicted his own death with uncanny accuracy.

Magistrate John Grey is summoned from his Essex village to investigate an increasingly inexplicable crime and to prevent some innocent men from being hanged as a regrettable political necessity.