Four of the photography club’s members had offered their services. They’d hung up the developed films to dry, then cut them into strips of four and placed them in a holder in the enlarger, where the negatives filtered the light of the incandescent bulb, projecting their images on to the emulsion side of the photopaper for a few short seconds.

It was only once the exposed photopaper was placed in a tray of developer that Fabian could finally see the pictures as they took shape, seemingly out of thin air.

Since Einar Stenson had been a professional sports photographer, there were a lot of sports pictures, showing everything from handball to curling, but there were also beautiful nature shots with mirror-like lakes, billowing fields of grain and trees emerging from morning mist. There was also a handful of truly gorgeous portraits of Einar’s wife, Flora Stenson, and a picture series of a couple of magpies building a nest. What Fabian wasn’t finding, however, was anything that might explain why Molander would have taken Einar’s life.

After the first few hundred pictures, everyone’s enthusiasm started to wane. Fabian was less affected than his four volunteers, who had naturally been hoping to discover something juicy to gossip about around the dinner table.

One had already bowed out and the remaining three were so despondent they didn’t react when Fabian lingered over the developing tray.

At first, the fields that were slowly darkening looked like hundreds of dots growing into larger patches. Little lakes of darkness that eventually came together in the shape of a car. A grey sedan with its driver’s door open and with someone… Or wait… Fabian watched the developing process for a few more seconds to get more details.

Yes, someone had just opened the driver’s door to climb in behind the wheel. Someone with glasses, dressed in what looked like a checked shirt under a sports jacket.

The man’s face was turned away from the camera, but Fabian recognized both the driveway and the house. He still remembered taking Sonja and the children there for the first time two years ago for a team barbecue, thrown in the middle of a complex murder investigation.

Of course it was Ingvar Molander. He wasn’t even surprised.

By now, he could also see that the car was a grey Saab 9-3 with registration number HOT 378. In other words, the same model and colour as the one in the pictures Hugo Elvin had found. He felt justified in assuming this was the same car that an as-yet-unidentified woman had been climbing into in those pictures.

Einar Stenson had apparently been tailing Molander, and on this particular night he had followed him to his rendezvous with the unknown woman. Had Molander had an affair? Was that what all this was about? Had Einar discovered that Molander was cheating on his daughter Gertrud?