Kate is hired by Mr Moony, a jeweller, who has been robbed. The thief stole the pawned items he had in his safe and he is worried about his clients. Kate agrees to go and see those clients.
One of the clients is Mrs Devries, and she goes to Harrogate, where the woman lives, as she is also attending an amateur play directed by her friend Meriel Jamieson. When she arrives, she tries to find Mrs Devries, but she discovers that the woman does not live at the address that Mr Moony gave her. For some reason the woman gave a fake address.
The day of the play Kate is sitting next to Burrington Wheatley, a theatre impresario, and Meriel hopes that she can impress the man. Nex to her there is also a man, Lawrence Milner, who is too vocal and talks about the leading girl, Lucy, in terms that Kate does not like, so she and Mr Wheatley move to the back.
Kate waits for Meriel after the play, and they leave the theatre together. As it is raining, they stop at a shop door, and they find a dead man. It is Mr Milner, who has been stabbed. Meriel goes to call the police, and Kate stays with the dead man, and she finds a cuff link nearby. The police arrive, and the two women are taken to the station for questioning. The detective who talks to Kate is Inspector Charles, who also investigated the case in which Kate was involved in the first book. Kate explains that she and the cast celebrated the last performance at the bar. She noticed that Mr Milner was insistent on walking Lucy home, but the girl refused, and she left with her friends, Dylan, Alison and Rodney, Mr Milner's son. Actually, Lucy asked Kate to tell her grandfather, who is Meriel's landlord, that she was going to spend the night at Alison's. Later when Kate went to retrieve her bag, she opened the wrong address and found Mr Milner and Mrs Geerts, another actress, in a compromising situation. Then she and Meriel left and that is when they found the dead man.
When Meriel and Kate leave and arrive home, Lucy's grandftather, Captain Wolfendale, is there, and Kate introduces herself and tells him about Lucy staying at Alison. The next day the man wants to talk to Kate as she knows through his granddaughter that Kate is not only a photographer but a private investigator. The man wants a private consultation, and he shows her a note, saying that Lucy has been kidnapped and he needs to pay a thousand pounds for her release. The captain and Kate think that maybe it is a prank, and the first thing Kate needs to do is to find out if Lucy is at Alison's. She goes there and Alison's mother is alone, and she tells her that Alison is at Lucy's. So each girl told their respective elders a lie. We know that Lucy has faked her own abduction because she wants to study to be an actress, and her grandfather has refused to give her her inheritance from her parents. So with the help of Dylan, a friend who is an estate agent, she stays at a derelict tower and asks Dylan to post the ransom letter.
Apart from this, the book also goes back in time when Captain Wolfendale was fighting the Boer War, and Mr Milner was a corporal there as well. We discover that the Boers attacked, and it was Captain Wolfendale's sergeant (Sergeant Lampton) who managed to put them to safety, but it was the captain who received a medal for bravery, and he never spoke well about his sergeant.
I imagine that the reason why the corporal was killed has its origin in the war. Could Sergeant Lampton be lurking in Harrogate? But then why was Mr Mirlner killed and not the captain?
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