Chief Superintendent Wycliffe is not looking forward to Christmas. With his wife away in Kenya he rashly accepts an invitation from Penzance lawyer Ernest Bishop to spend a few days at the Bishops' cliff-top home. When Wycliffe arrives the weather is bleak, the house remote, and the welcome from the family no more than polite.<BR>Then a young girl goes missing after playing the part of the Virgin in the local nativity play. The girl was withdrawn, difficult and unpopular in the neigbourhood, and even her parents seen strangely unsurprised by their daughter's disappearance.<BR>It is left to Wycliffe to initiate a search - but what begins as a missing person case soon turns into a major criminal investigation.