“Otherwise perhaps you could leave the table for other guests?” she said.

“I’m leaving now,” Jana said, getting up.

The server immediately began clearing the table. Jana buttoned her jacket, pulled on her gloves and wound her black Louis Vuitton scarf twice around her neck. Then she walked straight out into the cold, standing for a moment with her eyes toward the sky.

Snowflakes whirled outside picture windows, around lit shop signs and along the sidewalks.

The streetlights glowed like frosty lanterns. People were everywhere. Three women stood talking with each other, laughing loudly and opening their shopping bags to compare their recent purchases.

Jana’s long, dark hair rustled in the wind and was swept in front of her face.

Her hands were clenched.

Robin Stenberg was dead.

Murdered!

Why?

It must be sheer coincidence that Robin was murdered after having happened upon her and Danilo at the entrance to Knäppingsborg. But why? Who could feel more threatened by what Robin had seen than she?

Danilo?

She tried to force herself to stop, but her thoughts remained with him and the fact that she had been at the scene of the crime the very night it had occurred. Her heart was pounding loudly when she finally began walking.

* * *

Henrik Levin pushed up his sleeves before sitting down next to Mia Bolander in the kitchen on the fifth floor of a Ljura neighborhood apartment building. He looked at Sussie Anander, who stood leaning on the stove with her fingers wrapped around a cigarette. She looked like a woman on a downward spiral, but maybe he was just looking at a grieving mother.

He knew he’d soon be asked the most difficult question, the one that no parent ever wanted to have to ask: Why did someone take my child from me?

After the usual formalities, Henrik explained that they hoped she would be able to help shed a little light on this horrible situation. She remained silent. The only sound was the squeak of a chair, the weak hum of the fan over the stove and a sigh. Henrik was also silent, waiting for Sussie’s first words.

She slowly exhaled the smoke, wiped her nose with the back of her hand and tapped the ash from her cigarette into a glass jar.

“Did he have socks on?” she asked quietly.

Her chin was angular and her eyebrows drawn on. She was wearing black jeans, a brown T-shirt and silver rings on all of the fingers of her left hand except her thumb.

“Why do you ask?” Henrik said.

“The floor in his apartment was cold, you know, so I had told him he should always wear socks. And I don’t remember, was he?”

Although Sussie spoke in a calm voice, he noticed a constant tremor in her head. She tightened the gold-colored lid on the glass jar.

“Yes,” Henrik replied.

“Good.”