London: March 1966.Despite not being fully fit Detective Chief Inspector Neil Goddard is called back early from sick leave to find the killer of a man found viciously beaten around the head by an unusual weapon in the grounds of Oddhams House where an important conference on Rhodesia and its Unilateral Declaration of Independence is scheduled to begin in a few weeks.In order to guarantee the safety of the delegates and to ensure that there is no link with the dead man he is tasked with solving the case as a matter of urgency before the press get to hear of it, especially as attached to the body was a metal plate marked with the number 2.Fearing that there is at least one more body to be found he has to employ all of his investigative skills honed over many years but in a matter of days is confronted by a further three murders in the same vein with the dead men holding metal plates 1,3 and 4.There are no clues left at either crime scene which offers any hope of getting an early arrest but enquiries then lead him to believe that all of the victims were loosely connected to a 1953 house fire, listed as an arson attack on the wrong property, in which four people, including two young children, were killed.The only person who might be able to shed some light on things is an ex-detective who is suffering from Alzheimer's who had gathered documents about who he thought were six people linked to the blaze but the file has gone missing from police safekeeping.To complicate matters it soon becomes obvious that there are two people responsible for the murders and that as they are using the file to trace their targets Goddard has to race to discover the whereabouts of the last two individuals but fearful of never getting a breakthrough is astonished when it comes from an unlikely source.
