‘All right, I confess.’ Fabian put his wineglass down. ‘I was just about to kiss your beautiful mother, so your timing actually couldn’t have been much worse. But since you’re here now, there’s potatoes to rinse and carrots and beetroot to peel. Have at it. I was going to make a salad.’

Theodor and Matilda nodded and went over to the fridge.

‘Great, then I’ll lay the table.’ Sonja got out plates and cutlery, and within minutes, everyone was working away.

‘Hey, are we doing something for the summer holiday?’

It was Matilda who had broached the subject, and when Fabian met Sonja’s eyes, he could tell she was as dumbfounded as he was. They’d been in shut-down mode; neither one of them had had the energy to reflect on the fact that they were now in the middle of the summer holidays.

‘I suppose we’ve given it some thought,’ he said.

‘We have?’

‘Apparently not,’ Theodor said, mixing chunks of beetroot in with the other root vegetables in an ovenproof dish.

‘Esmaralda’s parents have a boat. We should get one. It seems super cosy.’

‘Boat?’ For the first time in several days, Fabian thought about the two boat keys that had had him convinced Hugo Elvin owned a boat.

He wasn’t so sure now. He had not only contacted the North Harbour in Helsingborg, which was the most logical marina for someone at Elvin’s address, he’d also checked with all the other marinas along the coast, both north and south of Helsingborg, without finding anything under Elvin’s or Molander’s names.

‘My family had a boat when I was a child,’ Sonja said. ‘Do you know how much work it is? We did nothing all autumn and spring but scrape and sand until we had frostbite on our hands.’

‘But wasn’t that, like, an old wooden thing?’ Theodor said. ‘We could buy a plastic boat.’

‘Old wooden thing. Bite your tongue. That’s my whole childhood you’re insulting.’

On the other hand, there was nothing to say that Elvin, or Molander for that matter, had necessarily kept a boat under their own name. They might just as easily have borrowed it from someone else, which was why he’d spent a large part of that Thursday looking around the North Harbour.

‘And just so you know, a fibreglass boat is a lot of work, too,’ Sonja continued.

He’d found, among other things, three old Pettersson boats, any one of which could have belonged to Elvin. Sadly, neither of the keys were a fit. In them or any of the other boats he’d tested.

‘You have to paint them and wax them and what not.’ Sonja shook her head and put out napkins and cutlery.