Grens wandered around the silent and empty hallways of his department for another half hour, still waiting for a phone call that never came. When his restlessness became too urgent and destructive, and he began crashing into himself again, he took care of it as he often did nowadays, driving up to the Northern Cemetery to sit for a while on a simple park bench in front of plot number 603, a spot he avoided visiting for many years. The white cross looked a little crooked, and the brass plate with her name on it had some green schmutz stuck to it. He used the weight of his body to stand the cross upright again, and cleaned the plaque with water fetched from a tap in a corner next to the rakes and watering cans. He dried the brass off with his sleeve. Anni Grens. That’s what stood on the plaque. She’d held his hand tight for just a short time, which ended before their journey together barely even began. It had taken him thirty years to scrape together the courage and longing to meet anyone else. Laura. The autopsy technician whose eyes seemed so present and whose mouth held the warmest smile he’d ever seen. She had made him feel calm despite the fact that they met in the coldest place there is—a morgue. He never understood how someone who spent their time carving up dead people could seem so full of life. He’d sat here on this park bench, debating with Anni if maybe it might be time to meet someone like Laura—and a half year later decided to go back to spending his days on his own. He didn’t miss his meetings with Laura, he was the one who ended it, but it had been nice to have a woman’s help in breaking out of this prison of his own making.

He was walking back through the enormous cemetery, about half-way to his car, when the phone rang. A blocked number at five in the morning, not many people were awake yet.

“Yes?”

“Couldn’t find much. But I got something that might point you in the right direction.”

His contact at the Swedish Tax Agency. They never said each other’s names out loud, nor made any other personal references, either. They both behaved as if they were being listened to, because they had so much to lose if they really were.

“It took me a while because so much from that time has yet to be digitized. But the fact that you were able to give me the month and the year helped quite a bit. And it appears, from the handwritten notes I found, that she was prepped for a new name and a new social security number.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“But, unfortunately, I couldn’t find which name, or which social security number.”