It felt easier now. When they were talking police work.

“So tell me. I’m curious! For real.”

But the young cadet was just as reticent.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a better explanation. I knew Zaravic’s past from your briefing, and I knew Hoffmann must have been in the same world, and I knew his family was being threatened . . . it just added up. I was there. In the right place. And I got lucky.”

“You didn’t get lucky, Amelia. You were clever. Cleverer than any young officer I’ve ever encountered. You had presence of mind. You were able to shoot under pressure. You weren’t just in the right place, you made the right decisions under immense stress—not many people can do that.”

Then they sat there again, wrestling with the silence, an old police officer on his way out and a young one on her way in. But just as the silence was becoming too awkward, Rasmus came running in with his red backpack and loudly proclaimed that they were ready to go now. Grens made sure that Mariana Hermansson and Sven Sundkvist had an overview and all the resources they needed, then left the apartment with two dead men in the bedroom and headed for his car, followed by a big brother, a little brother, and their little sister in her mother’s arms. Twenty minutes later, when they parked in front of his turn-of-the-century building on Svea Road, the whole family was now asleep. After several days of constant worry, they’d finally relaxed. The detective superintendent considered letting them rest, didn’t really have the heart to interrupt their deep breaths and loud snores, but finally he cautiously woke them up one by one. And just as they stepped out of the elevator and into his enormous apartment, the boys seemed to regain their energy and started running from room to room to room, and then said they were super-super-hungry and checkered pancakes—the kind they’d made together that first evening Grens had been their babysitter—were exactly what they needed in order to go to sleep. That’s why for the first time ever there was a search of Grens’s apartment for the ingredients to make pancake batter that would then be cooked in a waffle iron and not in the frying pan so as to get the right pattern. And maybe that’s also why all the children fell asleep so deeply in various sofas—a feeling of security, even in the shape of checkered pancakes, makes it easier to rest.

“So . . . this is where Piet hid out? This was where he went?”