He looks tired, Karen thinks, studying the dark circles under his eyes. No wonder: three young children, a creaking marriage, and being chewed out yesterday probably didn’t make for a good night’s sleep.

*

She, for her part, had woken up in the middle of the night, suddenly wide awake with eight little words ringing in her head. After a few futile attempts to ignore them and go back to sleep, she had given up. Deathly tired, she had staggered down to the kitchen and dug the printouts from New Builds Ltd out of her bag, to make sure she hadn’t misremembered.

She hadn’t.

Now he’s back on that balcony, smoking again, was what Loa Marklund had written in her last email.

Karen had put the papers back, downed a glass of milk standing up, and gone back to bed. She’d been able to fall asleep after that and had slept like a log until morning.

*

Now, she puts one foot up on the chair next to hers and taps her finger on the printout.

‘You might say it, but surely you wouldn’t write it unless that’s what you meant?’

Karl Björken glances at the paper without a trace of interest. He has already read it several times.

‘She might not have known he was in a wheelchair,’ he says. ‘Might have assumed he was standing up. Aren’t the balconies up there enclosed, you know, so you can’t see into each other’s?’

‘Oh, come on, Charlie-boy, they lived next door to each other for six years. Don’t you think they would have run into each other at least once? He must have taken out a bin bag at some point or whatever. They have chutes in the stairwell, you know.’

For a moment, something seems to stir in him, a tiny spark that is instantly extinguished and turned into resignation.

‘It’s not enough,’ he says. ‘We’ll never get Smeed’s, Haugen’s, or any prosecutor’s permission to swab a guy in a wheelchair. Not after that debacle with Martin Talliksen. And definitely not without more proof than a nine-month-old email about balcony smoking.’

‘Yeah, I get that.’

‘I can’t even take this to the group. I’m in enough trouble as it is.’

Karl Björken pushes his reading glasses up to his forehead and presses his hands against his face, rubs his skin as though to muster strength, and then finishes by massaging his eyes with the tips of his fingers. Then he sits there with his face in his hands, a shield against what he knows is coming.

Karen says nothing. Knows what he’s thinking and why. That in this situation, breathing so much as one word about arresting a guy in a wheelchair would probably get Karl Björken replaced as lead investigator.

But still . . .