‘Hey… It’s going to be okay.’ She sat down next to him and was just about to put her arm around him when she realized what he was looking at. Suddenly, everything made sense. His violent reaction, which she’d found a bit over the top after getting back. The silence, which was so unlike him. His insistence that she see it for herself. Even why he was sitting on the roof became clear.

Down on the ground, she had interpreted the mayhem in their garden as exactly that, mayhem. The work of a couple of knuckleheads who had skidded around at random, trying to wreak as much havoc as they could as quickly as they could.

She couldn’t have been more wrong.

Whoever it was who had roared around their garden, they’d known exactly what they were doing. Where to let their tyres dig extra deep into the mud; where they were supposed to destroy the lawn utterly and where they should leave a few patches. It was only now, looking down from above, that she could see what they had really done.

The entire expanse, from the stepping stones by the front door to the juniper bushes lining the street, was now filled with the biggest swastika she’d ever seen.

48

Someone had told him once that the buildings lined up in a row in the North Harbour were inspired by old ships. Fabian, for his part, thought they looked more like square grey lumps built out of Lego. At least from the outside.

After finding the entrance code among his notes, he discovered that the inside better reflected the poshness of the address. As Klippan and the others had intimated, it suggested Molly Wessman had, despite her relative youth, risen through the company ranks unusually quickly and may have stepped on a few toes on her way up.

But an embittered co-worker breaking in to her home in the middle of the night and hacking her phone to snap a background picture of her sleeping before lethally poisoning her two days later, it seemed too unlikely. The strange tattoo was a much more promising clue.

Granted, that downward arrow could have been nothing more than a vulgar sexual invitation. But that didn’t explain the horizontal line or the two-digit number. Nor why the tattoo had been concealed underneath her pubic hair.

When he reached the third floor, he pulled out the keys Molander had given him, unlocked the door to her flat and entered.

Molander…

Over the past few hours, he’d done his best not to think about his colleague so he could give Molly Wessman his undivided attention. But the question of how he should handle the situation now that Gertrud knew the case had been reopened gnawed at him; when he stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him, it was as though comprehension finally broke through his last barrier of denial.