She looked toward the side room. Bror emerged, his arm around Arno’s shoulder. The boy saw me and stopped. With empty eyes he looked at Bror. Bror bent down, whispered something. Arno nodded, walked slowly past me toward the front door.

“Nice to see you, Cal,” said Mari as she passed. “This is an extraordinary place. The man has something . . .” She took her son’s hand, and together they stood for a moment on the front step. Then they were gone.

I turned toward Bror. “That was unexpected,” I said.

“Sadly the boy is yet to speak. I do what I can to provide counsel.” That same reassuring gentleness. That same disarming smile. I tried to imagine Bror twenty years earlier, in the days before he became a priest, smoking cigarillos and talking earnestly about politics. I could not.

“Now,” he said. “Follow.” He waited until I drew level, then turned down the hallway. “I understand Police Chief Tvist is taking an interest in your case? Did he cite ‘exceptional operational circumstances’?”

I laughed. “Why?”

Bror was not smiling as he turned to me. “You must be careful of this man. He may not be the ally he appears to be. Coffee?”

“Coffee would be good,” I said.

The kitchen was a huge vaulted room, wood-beamed and white-painted, with glass doors that gave on to a vegetable garden. On the facing wall a single oil painting showed a young girl kneeling in a dark stone vault, gazing upon the tomb of a knight.

I stood listening. You could almost feel the house breathe, feel the timbers as they expanded and contracted.

From a cupboard above his head Bror took a stiff-sided paper bag. A single fruit fly zigzagged up into the air. It hovered above him like a mote of dust trapped in the sunlight. He caught my gaze, looked up, smiled. “Ineradicable little buggers. They come in on the coriander plants. Then they make the kitchen their own.” A twinkle in his eye, as if he were challenging me to challenge him.

My phone rang.

“Your wife, perhaps?”

I looked down at the screen. “Excuse me a moment.”

“Of course.”

I walked out into the hall.

“Cal. You disappeared. With Franklin. I got a little worried.”

“Franklin’s here, with me, sleeping peacefully.” I walked to the front door, stood on the porch, watching the doves in their pear tree. “I was about to call you. I’m having lunch.”

“Kind of a late lunch.”

“Coffee, really.”

“You’re in town? The car’s gone.”

I could feel the next lie coming. Yes, Elsa, I’m in town.

I stopped. I looked about me, at the gravel drive and the courtyard and the birds circling a tractor in the field below.

“I’m not in town. I’m at Bror’s farmhouse.”

“With Franklin.” The longest of pauses.

“You told me I could meet him.”

“I did.”

“Can I be honest with you?”