She was beautiful, Zofia hadn’t noticed at first glance, but she turned to the side in the closet and her profile emerged. Her face was finely drawn, her hair dark and shiny, and her eyes seemed intelligent, full of experience even though she was so young.

“Sorry, I just wanted to know if your kids were okay. My name is Amelia, and I’m doing my training period for six months with a detective superintendent named Ewert Grens, and being supervised by another police officer named Mariana Hermansson. Answer me now—this bottom part, does it lift as well? Are you sure about that?”

“I just saw it. My son pulled it up from the top right corner.”

The policewoman whose name was Amelia found what she was looking for. She pulled on the knob and the hatch went straight up. She stared down into a hole and caught a glimpse of three children.

“Hello . . . everything is okay up here. There’s no danger anymore. I’m a police officer, and I’m helping your mom. Do you know how I can get down to you? Is there any other way besides through the hole?”

A boy who looked to be about nine, ten years old answered.

“I’m Hugo. You can go out into the stairwell and down to the basement and all the way until you reach a metal door with two wheels that you have to spin. We’re in there. I’m here and my little brother Rasmus and my little sister Luiza. And now I want to know . . . is Mom okay?”

“I’m fine, honey!”

Zofia had heard his question, and it felt so good to shout out an answer, as if she were following her own voice all the way to her three wonderful children.

“Good. Then I’ll come down to you while your mom waits up here.”

Amelia winked at Hugo as she left the closet, and Hugo winked back. She went out into the stairwell as he told her to, but didn’t go directly to the basement. She had another errand first, which involved two cars.

In her own car—still unlocked, she’d only had seconds—a folder lay on the passenger seat. She grabbed it and headed over to a black BMW parked across the street. The car of the masked men. She opened it with the key she took from Zaravic’s jacket, while Zofia Hoffmann was still lying there unaware of what happened. Now she placed the folder on the passenger seat of his car. As she headed back toward the building and the basement where the children were, she wondered how long it would take before Ewert Grens, Mariana Hermansson, and Sven Sundkvist arrived in one of their police cars with sirens blaring and lights flashing. And which version of events she would give them—because the truth was the only story that couldn’t be told.

PART
8

Chapter 50