“A woman, a little younger, she sounded younger, asked me questions, which I answered. I don’t understand—I’ve had a burglary before, not here but at my summerhouse, and the police didn’t do a damn thing even though the whole place was emptied out, and I called you many times. And now . . . you contact me twice when not a thing has been taken?”

“Detective Mariana Hermansson spoke to you on the phone. But I wanted to take a look for myself.”

Those eyes, watching him.

“Well, in that case, I’d like to see your badge.”

The inner pocket of his jacket, black leather case.

ID card, metal badge. And just to be sure, he gave her his business card, with his title and telephone number and an email address he barely knew himself.

“It says you’re a detective superintendent?”

“Yes.”

“Now I’m even more confused. A detective superintendent? Following up on a break-in . . .”

She shrugged her shoulders, stepped back, waved him inside with one of her tan arms.

“. . . that wasn’t even a burglary, just some damage, and all my belongings, though scattered about, were all still here?”

That memory again.

Demanding space, pushing everything away.

In the hallway an antique chest of drawers and large mirror with a gold frame were replaced in his mind by a chair and a man with a newspaper in his lap and two bullet holes in his head.

The living room with its pine dining table turned into a TV playing cartoons at full blast. And the empty, gleaming kitchen became one that was sticky with food, where a little girl climbed into her dead mother’s lap.

Ewert Grens looked at the woman who’d hesitantly let him in, trying to concentrate on her mouth when she answered his questions—lips that turned into red candles on a birthday cake still sitting on a kitchen table, untouched. She told him what he already knew, what Hermansson had written down in her report. Someone broke in on a weekday sometime between eight thirty and eleven. Exterior door with clear scratches made with a hard metal tool, and the contents of the wardrobes and cabinets and drawers thrown onto the floor. But the jewelry box, a wallet with a good amount of cash in it, new computers, and expensive art hanging on the walls all remained untouched—even the thin layer of dust on the frames showed no fingerprints.

Everything was left intact.

Except for a small patch on the floor. She led him into one of the children’s bedrooms. Or what had once been one of the children’s rooms, long ago.

“We use it as a guest room. When we moved in, it was clear it had belonged to a young person. That was . . . well, sixteen and a half years ago. We’d planned to use it as a child’s room someday too. But . . . well.”