The big 3 told him that March was the last month before a new MOT and tax payment was due, and the two smaller numbers – 07 – in the top right corner next to the three crowns revealed that the last year it was valid for was 2007. Which in turn meant Einar Stenson had taken the pictures sometime during the summer of 2006, just over nine months before he died.

The rest of the pictures were from a completely different location and showed Molander waiting in the car, which was parked in front of a backdrop of green leaves. The twilight was more or less unchanged from the previous pictures, which suggested no more than twenty minutes or so had passed. On the other hand, you can get pretty far in a car in twenty minutes.

But thanks to the signs on the black signpost in the top right corner of the picture, Fabian was able to identify the location, even though he couldn’t recall when he’d last been there.

The signs pointed to, among other things, The Springs and The Water Pavilion, names that could only refer to Helsingborg’s three-hundred-year-old spring, to be found in Ramlösa Brunn Park, which happened to be just a few minutes’ drive from Molander’s home on Lindhultsgatan.

The smiling woman in the summer dress who was walking towards the car and climbing into the passenger seat was harder to identify. He’d had the feeling he’d seen her before when he first saw the picture at the Celluloid photography club, and now that he was able to study her more closely, he felt exactly the same.

If Molander had had an affair, it should, statistically speaking, have been with a colleague. But after going through the staff register of the police department, he concluded that she didn’t work for the police in Helsingborg, Malmö or any of the smaller municipalities. Nor for the regional detention facility nor the Prosecution Authority. Nor was she one of the many assistants he had gone through over the years.

When the work angle failed, Fabian had turned to more outlandish ideas, such as searching for pictures of the staff at the hairdresser out in Väla Mall where he knew Molander usually went for his haircuts. But she had been nowhere to be found, and after spending more than two hours on the search, the whole project began to seem futile, so he sat down in his armchair to rest his eyes and think about how to proceed.

He was convinced he’d seen her not too long ago. If not for that, he might have been able to let it go and start working on some other lead. As it was, he was completely blocked and felt compelled to keep banging his head against the same wall. Not even the fact that Sonja and Matilda were coming home any minute…

How daft could he be not to have thought of that?