Four hours, Sandra thought to herself. It was something she was sure she had heard in these situations. If the child wasn’t found within four hours, the chances of doing so before it was too late minimised drastically.

It had been almost four days.

There were no cars on the street outside Hallin’s house that might contain surveillance officers. Sandra preferred not to think that the policeman had lied straight to her face, but perhaps that was the way they dealt with unstable family members. Or perhaps they were busy curtain-twitching somewhere nearby, so well concealed that not even Sandra—who knew what she was looking for—could manage to spot them.

Then she remembered that what he had actually said was that they’d had eyes on Hallin for forty-eight hours without spotting anything suspicious. That didn’t necessarily mean that they would incur the expense of another forty-eight hours of man-marking. They had probably done their jobs, but now the Hallin-trail had gone cold, and inquiries had been directed elsewhere.

Sandra felt winded, and she sat down on the kerb. She knew that it was Hallin who had staged the disappearance, but her theories didn’t have enough credibility for the police to put everything else to one side. She knew that, and it was in a way understandable that they weren’t listening too much to single points of view, but were instead justifying their methods on the basis of their experience. And if you thought about it, it might even be the right approach in this case, given that if Hallin hadn’t behaved suspiciously then Erik was either dead or something else, entirely different from what Sandra imagined, had befallen him. The top priority was finding him, and Hallin didn’t seem to have any plans to lead them to the right place.

That was what was going through Sandra’s head as she sat there despairing, watching raindrops splatter onto the asphalt, creating trickles of water that combined to form torrenting streams gushing down the street. She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up, thinking that it might be a police officer who had caught sight of her and was going to ask her to leave.

To Sandra’s surprise, it was Hallin’s wife, standing there in her dressing gown beneath an open umbrella.

“You shouldn’t be sitting out here in the rain,” she said. “Come inside and warm up over a cup of coffee.”

“No,” Sandra said in horror, standing up. “That’s out of the question.”

She had obviously seemed to be angling for it, sitting here in the pouring rain looking vulnerable. It wasn’t even six o’clock yet—she’d not given a thought to the fact that someone might spot her from inside the house.

“I insist,” the woman said with a smile, although at their last meeting she had not been particularly accommodating.