When Christopher Barrington was twelve, he came to live at Belting, stately home of his great-aunt, Lady Wainwright. It was a frightening house to a nervous boy, who was there only because his parents were dead. Lady Wainwright had disapproved of Christopher's mother marrying his father (a film director), but she took the boy in, partly because her two adored sons, Hugh and David, had been lost in the war. She had two surviving sons, to be sure, Christopher's Uncle Miles and Uncle Stephen, but they weren't the sons she had loved.

Christopher grew up as a poor relation and as an audience. Then, when he was almost a man grown, and his great-aunt was dying, word came that David had apparently not died in the war - he had survived, but he had never let anyone at Belting know.

Was it really David who was returning to solace his dying mother in her last hours? Or was it an impostor come to claim the inheritance, to rob Miles and Stephen - and even Christopher -

the old lady's fortune?

And why, when the man turned up who was or was not David (it was so hard to be sure), was Thorne, the elderly family retainer, shot to death?

Christopher, deeply enmeshed in the family puzzle, tries to find out the truth, and runs into some strange situations and stranger people.