While walking home from work early one June morning along Fleet Street, just before 3 a.m., newspaper editor Frank Spargo notices a police officer whom he knows standing at the entrance to Middle Temple Lane just off Fleet Street. Knowing that he's a newsman, the officer invites Spargo to accompany him to observe the body of a dead man—lying on the pavement at the entryway of one of the small apartment buildings on the lane—who has, apparently, been murdered. Although the dead man had seemingly been stripped of all of his valuables and papers, one small grey paper—with the name "Ronald Breton, Barrister, King's Bench Walk, Temple, London" scrawled in pencil on it—had slipped into a hole of the dead man's waistcoat and was found by the police. Knowing Ronald Breton, Spargo's curiosity about the murder is piqued, and he decides then and there to commit himself to fully investigating the mysterious crime in hopes of discovering the truth.