The Ways of Death // Murder at Abbey Head — Roy Lewis

Winter storms and a landslide have uncovered an ancient sea cave on the Northumbrian coast and, escaping the tensions of his difficult relationship with his director and her beautiful assistant, archaeologist Arnold Landon takes time out to probe its secrets. Very soon however he finds himself embroiled in events of a more topical nature when he inadvertently gets caught up in the violence directed against asylum seekers dispersed to a nearby village.

A growing local neo-fascist movement against the recent immigrants triggers a chain of orchestrated political riots which can only end in tragedy, and Arnold happens to be in the right place at the wrong time. He becomes personally involved in the search for a student who disappeared while seeking to clear the name of a village man - someone who was rumoured to have been a guard at a concentration camp during the Second World War.

In some strange way the echoes of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz by the long dead prison guard seem to reverberate through the sea cave, and Arnold comes to realize that there is a link between the cave and the mysterious cleft on the headland known as Hades Gate. It is there at the windswept edge of the gate to the underworld, that Arnold solves an ancient riddle and is finally confronted with the truth about the brutal past whose terrible legacy is the murderous present.