It is late at night when the poet Cadogan stumbles on the dead body of an old lady in an Oxford toyshop.

The following morning the toyshop has vanished and in its place is a grocery store. Nobody, not even the police, seems surprised.

How fortunate that Cadogan is a friend of Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford and that most tenacious and perceptive of amateur sleuths. Fen is delighted to investigate a crime that seems not to exist. With a little inspiration and a few hunches, Fen discovers that the toyshop, the corpse and the motive are all very real indeed.