But no one looks more uncomfortable than Karl Björken. And for good reason.

*

He and Karen Eiken Hornby had already been seated side by side in the interview room when the handcuffed suspect was dragged in and pushed into a chair by two uniformed officers who were beaming with pride as though they’d brought a still-steaming carcase back to the starving people waiting by the campfire.

It had taken Karen Eiken Hornby and Karl Björken less than a minute to realise their mistake.

This wasn’t big game. Physically speaking, Martin Talliksen may have reached the age of twenty-two, as the ID they’d found in his wallet at the time of his arrest claimed. But mentally, he is likely somewhere around ten. They had suspected as much the moment he walked through the door, his eyes scared and confused. Had become convinced when Martin Talliksen answered the question they hadn’t had time to ask yet, in a nasal voice choked with tears. It had been painfully clear even before they’d interpreted his almost consonant-less speech and realised what he was saying:

‘I yus wanned to pe de puppy.’

And once the truth dawned on them, they had exchanged a look of pure horror.

I just wanted to pet the puppy.

*

Then all hell broke loose. Karl Björken’s voice had echoed down the hallway.

‘You didn’t notice the fact that he has a mental disability? That he’s a child? Are you fucking challenged yourselves?’

‘How should I know? Isaksson and Lange brought him in,’ Johannes Berglund had replied in a defensive tone that didn’t match his dejected body language.

‘And what the hell were you doing? Watching Netflix?’

‘It was bedlam here last night. We’d just nicked a whole gaggle of little delinquents from a gang fight up in Gaarda, and the damn reporting platform was on the blink again, so it wasn’t exactly easy to keep track of everything.’

‘You’re the fucking station sergeant. It’s your responsibility to keep track of everything. Everything.’

Since then, guilt and defensiveness have rippled both up and down the ranks.

‘We should have known. I did tell you there was something wrong with the bloke,’ Lange had said to Isaksson when they climbed back into their patrol car, shaken and pale after their conversation with Berglund.

‘How the fuck were we supposed to know he was a retard?’ Isaksson had bit back. ‘You can’t tell from looking at him and he refused to say a word.’

It was going to be a long shift for the two police constables.

*