 While English professor Loretta Lawson is attending a conference in Paris, she stays the night in the flat of a friend s acquaintance. She discovers a sleeping man in one of the bedrooms, and the next morning finds the man gone, but the bed soaked with blood. Returning to Cambridge, she begins to suspect her friend s acquaintance, and others on the staff of the college, are involved with the missing (murdered?) man, and decides to investigate for herself.