Mariana Hermansson’s office was two doors down from the vending machine and four doors away from his own. And there, on an elegant and translucent straight-backed chair, which she must have brought in herself because there was no way the force would have sprung for something that nice, there sat the plastic folder. And inside it, on the top of the stack, was a black-and-white picture from the medical examiner—a close-up of the hole in Pejović’s temple.

“Got it. And the rest?”

“Sven has one. He might have taken it home with him, he sometimes does, but last I looked it was on his desk behind his phone.”

Sven Sundkvist had the office right next to Grens. And behind the phone, just as Hermansson guessed, there lay a folder labeled “Hit man? Arms dealers?” in Sven’s spindly handwriting.

“Got that too. Was there anything else?”

“Yes. In the cadets’ office. Lucas and Amelia. You met them this morning. I asked them to look into our victims’ pasts. They really are so good, both of them, much better at finding their way through all the various registries and websites than you and Sven and me.”

“I didn’t know they had their own office.”

“Well, they didn’t. So I arranged one. The space we used to have as an archive, near the copier. It’s been empty since we centralized our records in the basement. They helped me clean it out and track down a couple of desks. It turned out pretty nice, I think. But don’t say anything to the union, please—because the office lacks any windows or good ventilation.”

A big closet. That’s how Grens would have described it.

And two narrow desks that had nothing on them other than two more plastic folders, not yet labeled, but still full of papers. He thought again about how these two young cadets were only just starting out, and the fact that they were content to sit in a tiny closet without much oxygen, felt like a symbol of the long journey they had ahead of them. Someone leaves, someone arrives. I’m out, they’re in. He wondered which one would eventually have his office.

The Stockholm night was still alive while he headed back home, unconcerned by the approach of day. Ewert Grens wove between late-night revelers still out on the streets, singing and shrieking with their arms around each other, streaming in and out of bars.

When he opened the front door and stepped into his apartment, Piet Hoffmann was no longer in the kitchen. Grens found him in the library reading a book.