An 8-year-old girl is missing, and the last person to have seen her is Billy Conrad, a gentle young man with Down's syndrome, but who appears is hiding something.

An odd group of animal rights advocates attempting to sabotage a foxhunt includes a working-class teenager, who is murdered. Then another person associated with the anti-hunt protesters is murdered. His investigations take Frost to tea with a local squire, but Supt Mullett is apprehensive lest he upset the gentry.

Frost's Saturday afternoon is disrupted by the discovery of a man's body floating in the river, and it turns out that he is not who he claimed to be. Events become more intriguing when the star player of a local soccer team collapses during a press conference, following an incident on the pitch in which he received head injuries.

There is an armed robbery at a local family-run glassworks, in which an employee is shot dead. The owner, who is one of the witnesses, is then threatened, and goes into hiding. The family has a tangled web of personal relationships, which Frost has to understand, in order to find who is doing the threatening. Meanwhile, Shirley Fisher's mother dies, and he fails to attend the funeral. DS Lawson lets business and personal relationships mix, with serious consequences.