A murder mystery thought to have been solved comes back with a bang when an unidentified corpse of a man is found at the Dover Beach with severe head injuries.

Chief Inspector Pointer has a problem. More specifically, he has a body. The body, the apparent victim of robbery with violence, was discovered on the beach at Dover dressed in old clothes. Pointer is led away on various false trails, but when those are dismissed, he is still left with the question of the identity of the dead man and how he came to be lying in a beach shelter with his head bashed in. Pointer's dogged investigation leads him to the sunny fields of the south of France and entanglements with another, more sensational, murder case that had long been thought solved.