Ewert Grens was pacing anxiously around his office as he so often did when he wanted to make progress but had no idea how or where. Around and around in a tight circle so as not to crash into the closet or the bookshelf. Until it became too cramped, until he crashed into himself, so he headed out to the corridor and the coffee machine and a plastic mug of lukewarm black coffee. From there it wasn’t far to Sven’s office, where he opened the window just as wide as his own, then on to Hermansson’s office and her window. The air started to move. What an amazing invention a cross draft was. Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson were the only colleagues he could stand, and who could stand him. But they were at home now, asleep in their own beds. He hoped they could keep living the kind of lives where they didn’t need an old worn-out corduroy sofa to be brave enough to close their eyes and face sleep unguarded.

The witness protection program folder was lying on Hermansson’s desk, because she’d been working on the analysis of the blank paper. Ewert Grens couldn’t stop himself from opening it, even though it only made him quiver with rage. It should have told him the story of one little girl’s future, of what happened to her, who she became, and where she ended up.

Unwritten pages whose contents were hidden outside those windows somewhere.

He knew that when the trial was over, when an individual was no longer of interest to the police, they were also no longer the responsibility of the witness protection program. These people, who would always have to live with having once been threatened, were now flushed out into another reality, and had to be traced via the records of their new town’s tax agency, which had given them their new identity. After the trial, after the investigation was abandoned, a person who had been threatened would just have to make it on their own. But this girl had only been five years old. She wouldn’t have been able to fend for herself. She would have been placed into a foster home, into a new life, maybe eventually she would have been adopted and grown up as someone else’s child.

Grens had his own special access to the Swedish Tax Agency. The kind of back door criminals often bought or threatened their way into. His own arrangement was different—he and his contact exchanged their services. Information from the police records was traded for information in the tax records. Not quite legal, but it wasn’t always possible to find lawbreakers by following the letter of the law.