Struggling to make ends meet, private detective Joseph Tremaine Ellington sees a way to make some easy cash when approached by Ida Stephens, the administrator of a local orphanage. She offers him GBP500 to locate a disgraced Jamaican GP, Dr Ronald Fowler.
1967, Bristol. Life is tough for JT Ellington, ex-cop and reluctant private eye. He's still trading in favours, helping those scared of the police or trying to stay one step ahead of the law.
Bristol in the early 1960s: Joseph Tremaine Ellington is a Barbadian expoliceman who, like many of his generation in the West Indies, has come to the UK to make a new life in the mother country. But the land of opportunity is not all it is cut out to be. It is not just the weather that is cold: so is the welcome.