The weather had been cooler then. Late autumn. He’d been wearing a different gray jacket, and she, after just a few steps, leaned her head against his shoulder, closed her eyes, and let days and nights of waiting for the dead to answer dissolve into sleep. A young police officer who’d been called to the crime scene followed him—this limping man with a child in his arms—in a patrol car, pulled up close, rolled down the side window, and asked Grens to stop, open the door to the back seat, and get in. Grens had mumbled something and kept walking. Oden Street, Sankt Eriks Street, Fleming Street. The child’s head rested heavier on his shoulder, her eyes still closed. So trusting, he’d thought, the kind of trust he could never feel, maybe that’s how it felt.

Today he took the same path, walking toward the entrance to the Kronoberg Police Station, where a security guard in the glass cage nodded to the detective who always stayed late, long past when evening had turned to night, and the glow of most of the computer screens had been extinguished. The detective who usually slept in his office under a thin blanket on a brown corduroy sofa rather than going to the apartment where loneliness lived. Grens grabbed a cup of black coffee from the machine in the hall, squeezed in between the new copier and an old-fashioned fax. Then just seven steps to his office. He started the music just like always, his own mix tape. Siw Malmkvist began to sing for him again: “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.” He sat down at his desk, twisting and turning his leg and upper body and still not finding a comfortable position, lay down on the sofa and kept spinning round and round.

Maybe it was the heat chafing at him again.

Maybe it was an empty box four centimeters long and four centimeters wide.

He rose quickly and left his office.

The dust was even more visible than usual in the hallway, and he pressed out another plastic mug of coffee, black, headed for the elevator and passed by her office, the woman who demanded answers, who saw straight through him.

“Ewert?”

He didn’t stop.

“I don’t have time right now.”

Mariana hurried into the hall, shouting after him while he pushed the elevator button.

“Neither do I.”

She walked closer.

“But I want to know.”

“You will. Later. Both you and Sven.”

“A burglary? And nothing was stolen? And yet I can see on your face that . . .”

“Mariana Hermansson?”

“Yes?”

“Later.”

He turned around, the elevator had just arrived.

“Four murders, Ewert?”

She wasn’t giving up. The door opened, and he stepped in.

“And now the same apartment? Same investigator? And after he visits the scene he seems visibly . . . yes, visibly, there’s no better word—upset?”

They stared at each other.

“Ewert? Talk to me.”