‘No, listen! I didn’t do anything! The only thing I did was stand there and—’

‘Exactly, Theodor. You were there. How you got there, whether anyone forced you or not, doesn’t matter right now. The only thing that matters is that you were there.’

Theodor stared at him, but it wasn’t anxiety or worry Fabian could see in his eyes, nor was it distress or nerves. No, his eyes shone with pure, unadulterated terror. Which was exactly what Fabian felt, too. At what lay ahead and what was going to happen to his son.

‘If you want to put this behind you, the only way is to give a statement telling the police exactly what happened.’

Theodor’s face turned even whiter.

‘I will go with you and make sure you have a good lawyer. But it’s going to be up to you to—’

The warning signs had been there. The fear in his eyes, his breathing and his deathly pale face. He should have known. Even so, Theodor’s vomit seemed to come out of nowhere.

31

Even though it was still early and the sun had only just peeked over the treetops, Lilja was sweating like she’d hit menopause. And that was after taking off both her windcheater and her fleece; apart from the jeans that clung to her legs, she now wore nothing but an old T-shirt, which was also sopping wet.

She turned off the trail and sat down on a tree stump about thirty feet into the woods, pulled one of her water bottles out of her backpack and downed it, despite the water being lukewarm and tasting faintly of plastic.

Looking at her phone, she noticed that the marked area on the map had changed again. Having been cheese-puff shaped just over an hour ago, it was now more evocative of a balloon someone had sat on.

Molander, who was running the triangulation from the station, had explained that the shape depended on the number and types of masts the phone in question was connected to at any given moment. And whether the antennas were omnidirectional or unidirectional; and if the latter, what angle they covered.

Either way, the area was much too large, covering about a square mile. Which didn’t sound overly large in itself, but the inaccessible terrain of Söderåsen, coupled with the fact that she and Klippan had only been able to commandeer two uniformed officers on account of the football games that weekend, made the task considerably harder than finding a needle in a haystack.