Trina Lavery returns home to Stoke after 20 years, to look after her ill mother. She learns that Bernard Cleve is also living in Stoke. Bernard was accused of killing Trinas best friend many years ago but was never convicted. Another girl is killed and Bernard is again a suspect. Trina thinks he is innocent but places herself in danger in trying to prove it.
Unexpected events occur when Pat, a glamorous British-born star of American soaps, returns home to plug her auto-biography on television and meets, for the first time since they were teenagers, Margaret her plain and frumpy younger sister. The meeting is painful for both women highlighting the vast differences in their lives and resurrecting painful memories of their unhappy childhood with an uncaring, errant mother. The tabloid press smell a juicy story and a race ensues to trace the whereabouts of the long lost parent.
Simon Willerton's suicide in 1990 brought to six the number of young prisoners who hanged themselves in British prisons in just over six months. It prompted a public debate over conditions in remand prisons and Armley in particular, where overcrowding had reached such a level that prison officers refused to admit any new inmates. Simon faced a burglary charge over the theft of a hot-water bottle from an unoccupied flat. Less a hardened criminal than an immature, gawky teenager who never fitted in, Simon's tragic death inspired writer Vincent O'Connell and director Corin Campbell-Hill to tell his story.
A wounded member of a rebel terrorist organisation is tended by an English nurse. She is imprisoned, interrogated, then released to face another form of interrogation.