Neil Waverley comes home from work to discover a note from his wife. It wasn't a shopping list, she'd left with her lover to live in New York. Neil is heartbroken. Until he meets Paula, she is a new member of the amateur dramatic society and is a woman with a keen eye to opportunity, because Neil is the manager of a bank with a rather large safe. She formulates a foolproof plan to separate the bank from the best part of a million pounds, Neil isn't sold on the idea until the bank decides to make 20,000 staff redundant. Simultaneously Chief Inspector Marley is obsessing about one Fred Wilson, an itinerant burglar. When these two worlds collide chaos ensues but Paula is a woman with plan and won't be stopped... An intriguingly clever plot about how a bank manager could get away with a million pounds whereby no one would ever suspect him of being the thief.