Here, too, the floor was covered in plastic, a habit of Molander’s when they were done with a room but not the rest of the property. The point of the plastic was that you could go in without contaminating anything. Fabian wanted nothing more than to get out of there. But to see the cable Molander was talking about, he had to step inside completely and turn around.

The light from the spotlights in the ceiling blinded him and forced him to shield his eyes with one hand. It was warm, too, several degrees warmer than the rest of the flat. Especially down by the floor. Was the underfloor heating turned up to the max? If so, why? He was utterly confused and felt his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth while sweat soaked his already damp clothes.

What he really needed was to sit down and drink a big glass of cold water. But he couldn’t afford to let his guard down. Never mind that the heat was making him nauseous. What he had to do was stay focused, keep trying to understand what Molander had planned for him and wait for the right moment.

And he did understand, as soon as he saw the cable. The way it came out of the wall as expected and continued along the ceiling through a small box before disappearing out through another hole further in. Suddenly, everything made sense. All the talk about his call on Sunday and his own incoherent thoughts about a handyman with an extra set of keys, the cable and the protective plastic on the floor, the turned-up heat and those buckets he now noticed had the same warning triangles as the ones in the stairwell.

‘Now do you see?’ Molander said behind him.

And he did see. He saw that his colleague had used that bloody cable to lure him into the bathroom so he could push him into the bath.

Hydrofluoric acid. Wasn’t that so highly corrosive you couldn’t store it in glass jars, only in plastic buckets? So corrosive it could dissolve a human body into a bloody, viscous slime so you only had to remember to pick out the bones before flushing the rest down the toilet?

He stuck his hand inside his jacket and closed his fingers around the butt of his gun. He didn’t know if he had enough evidence. But it didn’t matter. He couldn’t wait any longer. If he didn’t act now, Molander would be coming at him with some kind of syringe or chemically soaked piece of cloth.

‘Isn’t it odd?’ Molander stepped into the bathroom with him.

‘I think that’s putting it mildly,’ Fabian said as he started to pull his gun from its holster.