He stood in the elevator and she stood outside.

“I thought I’d only made one mistake. But clearly I made another.”

“Mistake?”

“I let the man who killed them go—I’ve always been convinced of that. But turns out I also missed a hole in the floor.”

“Now you’ve lost me completely.”

“And I don’t like it, Hermansson—I don’t like loose ends.”

“What are you saying?”

“That right now this only concerns me.”

•   •   •

Three floors down. Cooler. Darker. Just as dusty. Grens stepped out of the elevator and headed toward a gray door that was wider than all the others. The archive. Shelves and boxes and folders. And inside of them somewhere were his four decades among the criminals of Stockholm, investigations of perpetrators and victims, who transform each other’s lives forever. There was one shelf he used to avoid—turned his eyes away when he passed by it, made sure to look anywhere but there. An investigation concerning the woman who had been his whole world and who disappeared into herself after her head was crushed under the wheels of the police van he’d been driving. Nowadays he did look, sometimes even stopped there. Just as he dared to visit her grave now, the white cross with her name engraved on it; he even grabbed a watering can hanging from a nearby rusty faucet and watered a tall flowering bush he’d planted because he liked the name—love’s ear. She lay in that grave just as she lay in those brown archival boxes. Anni Grens written on a label on the cardboard. He ran his fingers gently over the black ink, wrote her name in the air. Then he kept going, deeper into the archives, past other shelves and other Annis.

All the way to the back and the glass wall that stood there.

He waited in front of a small hatch, which was raised just a centimeter by a man of his own age, staring at him through small round glasses.

“I need to see a record from the witness protection program.”

It was a file that only a few had the authority to see, which he had to apply for, get a receipt, and be registered in order to handle. The records were kept in a room with all the other sensitive documents stored on behalf of SÄPO, Interpol, and the witness protection program.

“Ewert Grens? It’s been a while.”

The archivist didn’t seem particularly happy to see him. They didn’t like each other. Never had.

“The witness protection registry, like I said. An old investigation that was never closed. I’d like to check it out.”

Grens fished a used envelope out of a trash can, grabbed the pen hanging from the counter on a string, jotted down the archive number on the back, and pushed it in through the gap.

“Hmm.”

“Is there a problem?”