“Yes. A man who thought it would be easier to do what he needed to do with that psycho off the streets.”

“The man I met in your kitchen?”

“Could be, yes.”

The ride down in the elevator from the Kronoberg jail became uncomfortable in the way such elevator rides can be, when every look and word feels like too much. But this was more than that—Ewert Grens had openly accused one of his closest colleagues of selling them out, betraying them, for a second time. They stepped out of the first elevator on their way to the next, and now they had to pass through five doors that required access cards. Just before the third, Grens couldn’t take it anymore.

“I . . . well, I apologize.”

She swiped her card, opened the door, and they walked on.

“I . . . never should have accused you. But this whole fucking story, someone breaking into Wilson’s safe, and you not wanting to help me and look into him . . . It feels better now, Hermansson. You arrested Zaravic. I no longer doubt you.”

She stopped abruptly.

“No, Ewert. You should never have accused me. And you will never do it again. Because I will apply for a transfer. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She looked at him, through him. As only she could.

“Yes, Hermansson. I understand.”

The fourth door, the fifth door, and finally the last elevator, now on their way to the homicide unit. But just as they were about to reach their floor, Grens pushed the red stop button, then a button that made them head back down.

“One more thing.”

He might as well. Now that the ice was broken. She was the only one who talked to him about these things, who again and again demanded answers, and who could look straight at him and say you don’t know how to separate intimacy from integrity, just like the people we investigate, and that, Ewert, makes you terrified and still he wouldn’t cut her out of his life. That’s why she was the one he could talk to about a problem with no solution.

“I used to have a colleague I liked quite a bit. Looked up to. A mentor, you might say. But when he was about to retire . . . He changed. He couldn’t handle that big black hole. The emptiness. There was nothing because he had nothing else. One night, with just a couple of weeks left at the police station, he called a squad car, asked them to come to his home. Then he shot himself. A bullet in the mouth. He knew the right way to do it to leave the least amount of trouble for everyone involved.”

The elevator stopped again. Now it was Mariana Hermansson who pressed the button in the opposite direction.

“Shot himself?”

“Yes.”

“Because he couldn’t stand it?”