Lord Greenwood is most perturbed when his son Bill Chance strikes up a relationship with the actress Millicent Vane. When the troubled peer commissions Philip Tolefree to provide him with proof that Miss Vane is a woman with a scandalous past, Tolefree worries that this savours too much of the sordid intrigue of the divorce court. But when a hunch leads Tolefree and his associate Farrar to pay a late night visit to the rich playboy Howard Killick, the case takes an altogether more interesting turn - when they discover the body of a murdered man in a flat on the floor below...