A large number of jewelers in different central Swedish cities are exposed to burglary. The method elicits the police when the jewels were stolen without any door to the shops being broken up. When an elderly jeweler is murdered in his shop, the local police first conclude that it is another crime of the same offender, when another jeweler in the city got burglary the day before. But Sverre Sterner soon begins to suspect that completely different motives are behind the murder. The wires lead backwards in time around a putative drowning accident.