"Five of us had run away that fateful night just over a month before. Only three of us would be going home. And nothing, nothing would ever be the same again."

Glasgow, 1965. Headstrong teenager Jack Mackay cannot allow for even the possibility of a life of predictability and routine. The seventeen-year-old has just one destination on his mind—London—and successfully convinces his four friends, and fellow bandmates, to join him in abandoning their homes to pursue a goal of musical stardom.

Glasgow, 2015. Jack Mackay dares not look back on a life of failure and mediocrity. The heavy-hearted sixty-seven-year-old is still haunted by what might have been. His recollections of the terrible events that befell him and his friends some fifty years earlier, and how he did not act when it mattered most is a memory he has tried to escape his entire adult life.

London, 2015. A man lies dead in a one-room flat. His killer looks on, remorseless. What started with five teenagers following a dream five decades before has been transformed over the intervening decades into a waking nightmare that might just consume them all.