The team is called in to identify the corpse of a woman whose face was surgically removed after death. Janet Mander, a Home Office anthropologist, cannot link it to similar murders but, after Nikki has reconstructed the face, Holly, a medical student on work experience with Harry,recognizes the woman as Fran Price, an investigative journalist. Pargeter, her agent, is evasive and Supt. Barker, the investigating police officer, does not help as he is obsessed with the idea that Leonid Polyak, a Russian criminal Fran helped to put behind bars, has ordered a hit on her from his prison cell. Whilst Leo gets closer to Janet, Harry is concerned when he sees Barker entering Holly's flat and later she is found murdered in her bed.

Everyone is affected by Holly Farr's murder. The pathologists find that she was tortured and beaten but died from having her throat slit. The police believe that her death is related to that of Fran Price and the recent leaks of forensic evidence to the press may have led the killer to her. Supt. Barker decides to put armed policeman to guard each of the three pathologists but Harry Cunningham, who saw Barker go into Holly's house, is suspicious of his true motives. When a prominent Russian, Oleg Kolik, seeks asylum in the UK saying he is the true target of the Russian assassins, Harry thinks that Fran Price may have been targeting him in her new book. When Leonid Polyak is murdered while being transferred between prisons, he decides it's time to put his job on the line in the pursuit of justice.

The team assists DI Paul Renick following the assumed suicide of Jamal Al Sham and discover that he was murdered and was a people smuggler, blamed by Varkey Khoury, head of a family of Syrian refugees, for killing his wife. Varkey's 15 year old daughter Akka approaches Nikki for news of her mother, leading to Nikki sheltering her whilst the police haul in another young woman Tamara as a likely killer. At the refuge camp in Calais apparent altruist Yusuf Hamed assists 12 year old Sosa to come to England whilst Kalil Aziz, an associate of Sham, is also murdered and the police and pathologists make a grim discovery in an English forest.

The pathologists join the police in removing the corpses of the refugees who suffocated in the locked van and find a possible clue in phone messages sent by the dying victims. Whilst a customs officer due for retirement is suspected of allowing the people smuggling the team establish that the culprit took money from the relatives of the migrants he then left to die, Akka's mother among them. Yusuf rescues another batch of refugees from a second locked van, escaping with Sosa before the police arrive but the real clue surfaces via a Syrian charity to which the killer donated the victims' monies.