Towards the end of the 80s, an American woman named Muriel arrives in Spain to work on her doctoral thesis on Jesús Galíndez, a Basque politician exiled in the USA after the Spanish Civil War who disappeared in strange circumstances in 1956. Muriel contacts an elderly writer who sets her on the trail of the last people to have seen Galíndez alive. This is the outset of an investigation soon to adopt a political rather than an academic angle, given that the people responsible for Galíndez' death do everything they can to try and stop Muriel from putting two and two together and reporting her findings.