Already during the introductory tour Mariana Hermansson showed us, her two cadets, the archive, those shelves in the dark rooms of the police station’s basement where the files from every criminal investigation were kept, she even gave us the task of looking up a couple of old cases and rewarded us afterward with the code—here you go, you’ll have to go down there sometimes, just part of the job. Here were the traces I was looking for. Those who had been erased in reality, but who lingered on in stacks of paper in brown cardboard boxes. Early the next morning I made my first visit. Alone in that absurd collection of assaults and crime victims, I found at the top of a shelf at the end of one of the halls, the preliminary investigation.

REPORT REGARDING DALA STREET 74.

One page. In order to access the full case files—with complete crime scene investigation and list of suspects—reference was made to the restricted archive. But at that point a single page was enough. I got the address, the floor, and I could go to the apartment. I broke the lock just the way I’d learned to and stepped into a hallway that transported me back in time. The furniture was different and the smell, but the rooms were the ones I remembered so well. Perhaps I should have wept, broken down. But I didn’t. I was there for a reason. And those bastards would never force me into a cupboard again.

Somehow I just knew about that little square hole in the floor of Julia’s room. It seemed so obvious. Dad must have let us see it. Maybe he guessed that one day one of his children might have to finish what he started, what someone tried to take away from him.

And there it was, in the hole in the floor, a USB drive. The information that would lead to a stash of weapons worth one billion kronor—coordinates of its exact position, detailed descriptions of how to get there, pictures from inside the rock room with pallet after pallet of heavy machine guns that no one had ever seen before.

Getting into the restricted archive was more difficult.