“Erik Wilson.”

“What about him?”

“He’s hiding something.”

“Everyone is hiding something.”

“Not everyone is hiding something that’s connected to a break-in at the police station.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone call. Grens could hear Mariana Hermansson breathing, could hear the forensic technicians shuffling around in the stairwell, and a medical examiner quietly recording his observations into a tape recorder.

“Are you there, Hermansson?”

“What are you saying? Do you think our boss broke into his own workplace?”

“I’m saying that I think he’s responsible for the disappearance of highly classified documents. Documents that directly endanger people’s lives.”

“What documents? What people?”

“I can’t tell you any more than that.”

“But you can call me claiming that the head of our department has committed a crime that would result in immediate dismissal if it were true! You know Wilson, Ewert—he’s not guilty of some break-in. It’s as unlikely as you or me.”

“Maybe he didn’t do it personally. But he’s protecting someone. I think Erik Wilson is being manipulated.”

“Manipulated?”

“He seems to have begun a fairly new . . . well, relationship. Even admitted it. You’ve probably noticed it, too. A relationship that happens to coincide with the disappearance of highly classified documents from his office. Nobody got in there without his help, either conscious or unconscious, on that I think we can agree. But he doesn’t want to tell me who. No matter how hard I press the matter. I want to know, Hermansson. I want you to ferret out who it could be, start by concentrating on the police station. Put together a list of possible colleagues. Who’s newly divorced. Who’s single. Who might be unhappy enough in their present relationship to consider cheating.”

Silence again. He thought he heard the forensic technicians discussing the best way to dust for prints far off in the background somewhere. But maybe that was just his imagination, a lifetime spent at crime scenes just like that one made it easy to call to mind something he knew by heart.

“Ewert, I will not spy on my colleagues. And let me make one thing very clear to you—you will never again ask me to play some double-dealing game with the people I work with! I don’t care if you’re my superior officer or not. Is that clear?”

Grens usually liked when Mariana Hermansson stood up to him. She was one of the few who dared to do so. But as he stood there with the phone pressed to his ear, something didn’t sit right. There was some note in her voice. He knew her. He knew how she worked. And to refuse to take on a superior who might be hiding the truth, who might even have switched sides, that wasn’t at all like her.

He was about to say as much. When she cut him off.