In the late summer of 1940 Madame Claudette Lamartine set out from her home in Nazi-occupied France to find her missing husband in England. For her in particular this perilous journey is more than especially fraught with personal dangers and difficulty. More than thirty years later, following the first of two British snap elections in 1974, ex-newspaperman turned government press chief, John Colebrook, has been told his face no longer fits in Whitehall. Sent home to cool his heels while his future is decided, he is secretly approached by Sally Hegarty, a rising young civil servant, who enlists him to investigate the wartime activities of a prominent industrialist. His searches begin to reveal a connection with Madame Lamartine's journey and a murky wartime conspiracy in Lisbon, whose instigators may still be active in public life. Colebrook begins to suspect he too is under surveillance and starts to have doubts about Sally's real motives for involving him. But he is torn by his feelings for her.