Two teenagers, wanting to secretly view a collection of World War II relics, enter the home of an eccentric historian and find him murdered. In the quiet Swedish town of Tanumshede, who was bothered by an old man who dedicated his life to exposing Nazi criminals? This question interests the police, but even more so the writer Erica Falk, because it was from the late historian that she tried to find out how among the things she inherited there was an award of the Third Reich - the Iron Cross - and why her mother kept a child’s shirt stained with blood all her life. The mother's former friend, now a mentally ill old woman, cannot help Erica, she only mutters something about old bones that should lie quietly... But within two months, sudden death takes away other witnesses of the mother's youth.