"We used to be an idealistic bunch of terrorists," replied Ashe. "But look at us now. Property deals, expense accounts, mistresses, and chauffeur-driven cars. How did we become so vulgar?"

Armagh, Northern Ireland.
She knows about border country, she dreams about her native borderland with its wolves and buried landmines, but is brought back to the present: the decrepit farmhouse, the man hitching up his trousers, the dripping rain.

Businessman Jack Fowler drives through the narrow lanes to the rural brothel. Drunk, regretful, all he wants is to talk to someone and from the women at the brothel, he picks Lena. Back again a week later, this time there is sex. Lena seems battered, in need of help. And Jack wants to help her. He promises to return in three days with a plan and gives her the phone number of an old friend. The possibility of escape fires Lena. Her anger focuses on Mikolajek, the trafficker who tricked her into travelling here from Croatia.
On the evening of Jack's planned return, one of the other girls agrees to help Lena who gives the girl a rag doll containing the contact number and a list of Mikolajek's trafficked women. However it is Sergei, not Jack, who arrives and orders Lena into his car. Driving fast, Sergei's car is blocked by a jack-knifed lorry and a car in a ditch - Jack's car. He reverses up the icy lane but loses control and crashes into a tree. Lena comes to amongst shattered glass and the reek of fuel. Crawling out and looking back, she sees a groggy Sergei lean out of the car and light a cigarette. In that moment the car becomes a fireball. Lena takes off through the snow, bare feet skinned by the cold, running through the forest until she reaches the black borderland river.
In his father's rural cottage, Inspector Celcius Daly takes a colleague's phone call. There has been a violent death - a pimp in a burned-out car at a borderland brothel. Daly heads to the scene where he spots a woman's footprints in the snow surrounding the burnt car and corpse. The prints lead into the trees, stopping at the river. None on the opposite bank, nor any in the surrounding undergrowth. The corpse's identity is confirmed but the fire service suggests a petrol bomb was involved. The police find a group of women hiding in a lorry container in the farmyard, all from Croatia, Albania and Serbia, and they identify the escaped woman as Lena Novak. She said she would find her "knight in shining armour" and return to help them.

When Daly is called out to a luxury mansion carved out of the moorland, it is for another death, that of Jack Fowler. He had once served time for IRA arms smuggling but in recent years had become a property developer and chairman of a local community organisation, the Gortin Regeneration Partnership. That morning he admitted to his wife that he was facing bankruptcy and embezzlement charges. She drove their children to school and returned, full of forgiveness and determination to sort things out, only to find her husband's drowned body floating in the family swimming pool. She knows that he was having an affair with the Croatian woman whose photo lies at the poolside and a police search of the house reveals more: an envelope containing Fowler's passport and two tickets for Malaga, one for him and one for a Lena Novak. Daly has found Lena's "knight in shining armour"...