Perhaps because she refused, from some obscure paranoid motive connected with James and Claudia, to tell the receptionist she was Håkan Almquist’s daughter and had consistently refused to do so the night before, he would tell her nothing beyond the fact that Mr. Almquist was not in the hotel at that moment. She asked if he had caught his flight and was told they were in no position to tell her. Liv looked thoughtful. She nodded her head once or twice, then said to me, “You must go there and find what is happening.” She seemed to realize that this was rude even by her standards and flushed a deep mottled red. “Please you will go, please. You know that I cannot, I cannot go in the street.”

It was Silver who went to the hotel. He spoke to the manager. No one knew if Håkan Almquist had returned to the hotel in the night. The night receptionist had no memory of seeing him but this man was not behind his desk for every minute of every hour.

“He’s got to go out for a pee sometimes, hasn’t he?” the manager said.

The key to room 12 was missing from its hook, but Mr. Almquist was one of those who carried his room key about with him instead of handing it in. They had made the key fobs as heavy as they reasonably could, the manager said bitterly, but that never deterred these people. He had never been able to understand what was so fascinating about a key with a great lump of metal hanging from it that you had to carry it about with you wherever you went. Silver went home and told Liv she ought to phone the police. Or he’d do it if she liked. This brought on a storm of raving and tears and in the end he had to promise to do nothing.

None of us, that is Wim, Silver, and I, knew what Håkan Almquist was really like. All we had to go on was visits from a man who mostly spoke in an incomprehensible foreign language and the testimony of his daughter who described him as dull, staid, and respectable, and his London behavior as exceptional. But Liv was an unreliable person and perhaps all this was exaggerated or outright untruths. So Silver and I concluded when we discussed it in private in our bedroom. Far from being the well-conducted clean-living mining engineer we had been led to believe he was, he might be exactly the kind of man who would defraud his daughter of a large sum of money and, once it was in his possession, abscond, leaving his hotel bill unpaid. But perhaps what we really wanted was to be rid of it all, not have this added complication in our lives, so that we could concentrate on the occupants of 4E.