[1] It was the twenty sixth novel of her long-running series featuring Chief Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard.

On a November night in Regent's Park a man witnesses another being coshed over the head, illuminated only by the match he was lighting for his cigarette.

The body is identified by his identity card as John Ward, but further investigations reveal he is really an Irishman named Timothy O'Farrel who had stolen the identity of another man killed in an air raid in Camberwell some months earlier.

Enquiries at the theatrical boarding house in Notting Hill where he had been living reveal the dead man was a charming, but good-for-nothing scrounger given to blackmail and black market activities.

To further complicate matters, the house is struck and partly destroyed by an incendiary device during a German raid.