The disappearance of Dr. Larry Pettifer from his teaching position at Bath University should not have concerned a great many people, especially a retired Treasury boffin like Tim Cranmer.

Pettifer was a British Secret Intelligence Service operative during the Cold War and Cranmer was his handler for twenty years.

Panicked by his encounter with the Bath Police, Cranmer contacts his former employers and is summoned to London where he learns that, not only has Larry disappeared, he has absconded with some £37 million milked from the Russian Government with the help of a former Soviet spy.

To solve this mystery, Cranmer begins calling on old contacts from Oxford to the arms trade to find out what his former agent and his purloined mistress have been up to in their disappearance.

He also visits his secret archive of Office files, stashed away in the abandoned church of St. James the Less, bequeathed to him by the same Uncle Bob who left him Honeybrook.