I open the first filing cabinet. Accounts and other useless information. I keep looking, careful to drag open each drawer as gently and noiselessly as I can. It’s difficult for me to judge if I’m doing this quietly so I have to work by touch. Vibration. The slowest and smoothest of movements. I think about Dad’s mantra: Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Archives covering the ’70s. Then I find the ’80s and we get colour print. Then the ’90s. I pull drawers and open folders until I get to 1994. Cream-coloured folders like the rest. But then a red-plastic file with a rubber band around it.

I slump to the floor, my back to the desk.

Ragnar’s own notes about the circumstances of his daughter’s death.

Interviews with local residents. I can see shorthand extracts from chats with Eva Edlund and Margareta Eriksson. There are sketches and lists of cars owned by local people; the lists have cars and trucks checked off systematically. Registration plates and addresses. Lists of names with codes next to them. Notes cross-referenced with vehicles found up at Snake River Salvage, west of Gavrik. Then a short list of cars unaccounted for. Four names, all men.

The list is headed with the words ‘Possible Murderous Drivers’.

Three names I don’t recognise.

And one name I do.

Arne Persson.

37

I stare at Ragnar’s handwriting. The ink has sunk into the paper from force, or perhaps he left the pen in place too long thinking about his dead daughter.

Ragnar believed Arne Persson killed his child.

The only light on the paper shines through the open footwell of the desk. Visberg streetlight illuminating the handwritten name of a mutilated man.

My breathing quickens.

The dust in the room catches in my throat and I have to stifle a cough. No noise, Tuva. No lights on, no noise, no movement visible to anyone in the square.

When did Ragnar work out who killed his daughter? Now, after all these years? Or is this an old note? The paper looks new. No yellowing or ink fade. But then it’s been stored inside a file, not hung on the walls like his old front pages. Did Ragnar Falk shoot and behead Arne Persson to avenge his daughter’s death?

I kneel and photograph the note but it looks black on my screen, so I open the filing cabinet and place the paper inside. I glance out at the street. Nobody. Apple-tree branches thrashing around, losing the last of their rotting fruit. I switch on my flash and take a photo. The cabinet does a good job of swallowing most of the light. I close the drawer as silently as I can.

Have to leave everything exactly as I found it. If Falk is a killer, I don’t need him getting suspicious. I move the chair I nudged and I make sure my bootprints aren’t clear in the dust.

The ceiling creaks.