The outskirts of the city were shaken by a series of strange events. Pojarsky heard someone else’s footsteps in the room of his neighbor Tatyana Brusnikina and tried to catch the thief, who slipped away. Later, the body of a fire inspector’s inspector, who had previously visited Brusnikina, fell onto the embankment. Then they discovered Tatyana’s twelve-year-old daughter, whom they had considered dead during the war. Police captain Nikolay Sorokin believes none of this is a coincidence and decides to conduct an investigation together with Pojarsky’s friends. The novel’s atmosphere describes the era of postwar youth, when freedom and danger went side by side.