Based on the real-life experiences of Mende Nazer, the story unfolds as twelve-year-old Malia, daughter of champion wrestler Bah, is abducted from her Sudanese village in the Nubar Mountains by pro-government Arab militia and sold into slavery to a woman in Khartoum, who beats her for touching her daughter. After six years she is sent to London, where her name is changed, but her miserable life of servitude continues. Her passport is taken and she is told that her father will die if she goes to the authorities. Fortunately she meets a sympathetic person who seems to offer her the hope of escape and reunion with Bah ,back in Sudan. For all the film's optimism an end title states that there are around 5,000 'slave' workers currently in Britain.

Lewis attends a book launch for a fantasy novel penned by prodigious young research fellow Dorian Crane, with whose adoptive mother, Ginny, Robbie's boss Jean is trying to match-make him. Later that night a Czech hotel worker Marina is found murdered. Professor Deering, the uncle of Dorian's fiancee and muse, Alice, confesses to having seen Marina on a foreign website and paid for her to come to Oxford, finding her work. However, as a supposed gay man, he is keen to hush up his sex life with her. Robbie believes that Marina was killed in mistake for Alice and then Dorian is also murdered, in order to preserve a secret well beyond Robbie's imagination.