It's the start of the 21st century. And a single bullet will change two lives. Raymond is a shy young man. He wishes he'd gone to Uni. But his father wants him in the family business. And his father is a gangster and a killer. Barry wants to be a poet. But he's also - in his own words - a user of the mental health services. And his two best friends are the late John Lennon and the even later Erwin Rommel, Hitler's one-time military boss. In a Yorkshire bus station a shot rings out. It's the shot that brings Raymond and Barry together - and sets off a sequence of violent events that ends in terrible murder and even more terrible poetry.