She sets it all up on my kitchen table. Plastic cartons of steaming, perfect rice-cooker rice. Cardboard boxes of spring rolls, so crispy the thin batter has bubbled in the fryer and the bubbles have been frozen in time, ready to crunch and burst inside my mouth. Prawn crackers in a greasy bag. Both kinds: white and spicy. Her curry and my noodles. We sit down and she says, ‘Fucking Halloween. Brings out the worst in teenagers. Did in me, anyway.’ I start chopsticking hot noodles into my mouth. They’re glossy and fresh, flecked with red chili and leaves of bright coriander. The spice is a balm. I’m heated up from every angle.

‘A man was kidnapped in Visberg tonight,’ I say with my mouth full. ‘Just off the town square.’

Tammy swigs from the alcohol-free beer she makes a point of drinking when she’s with me to make me feel more normal. She says it’s so she can drive but I know she does it for me, because the fridge in her flat is stocked with them whenever I go over there. She’s not driving then, is she.

‘I heard,’ she says. ‘Worked at the self-storage place?’

I nod. ‘Owner’s son.’

‘Police will find him.’

I wrinkle up my face like, maybe they will but maybe they won’t.

‘They found me, didn’t they,’ she says, and suddenly I feel like a Grade-A idiot for not connecting this to her abduction over Midsommar.

‘Fingers crossed,’ I say.

My phone vibrates on the table.

‘If Noora’s coming over,’ says Tam, looking at the phone. ‘Then I’ll go. It’s no problem.’

‘She’s asked to move in,’ I say.

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Terrified,’ I say.

The message is from Sebastian.

It says police have taken in a suspect for questioning.

It says they’re talking to Ragnar Falk.

42

I’m at the police station before 8am. Four other journalists stand outside, two of them recording pieces to camera. An outside-broadcast van with a dish on its roof. One woman from Svenska Dagbladet waiting outside my office, probably trying to talk to Lena.

Thord lets me into reception and locks the door behind me.

‘Here we go again,’ he says.

‘What do you mean?’

He pushes the vertical strip-blinds apart with the biro he keeps behind his ear and says, ‘This media circus. No offence.’

‘None taken.’

‘We can’t talk in the main office. We’ve got company from Linköping, Karlstad and Torsby. Full house. Let’s talk in there.’

We walk through to the press-conference room. There are cycling-proficiency-advice posters on the wall and a range of unstamped, unsigned certificates spread out on a table.

‘Bicycle bullcrap,’ says Thord. ‘Most of the kids round here have a motocross bike or an EPA tractor. But we gotta tick those boxes.’

He makes a tick action with his index finger.

‘Any news on Emil Eriksson?’