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.