During 1960, Rupert Highsmith, lover of Ena’s associate Artie Mallory, receives anonymous letters and compromising photographs taken twenty four years earlier in Berlin. While researching the parentage of a young woman claiming to be the daughter of Ena’s friend, Priscilla Galbraith, Highsmith is almost killed in a hit and run. The investigation takes Ena to Shetland where she learns that the would-be assassin of Highsmith (and PM Stanley Baldwin in 1936) is dead.
Who wants to kill Rupert Highsmith, and more importantly, why? Who took the compromising photographs in 1936? And is the girl who says she’s Priscilla’s daughter the child that was stolen nineteen years ago?