She was about to object, but it was too late. Klippan was already thirty feet ahead of her, walking towards the man standing by the entrance, who was so well-built it looked over the top even from a distance. Instead, she decided to do as she was told and slowed down to avoid drawing attention.

‘Good evening. So, what’s going on here?’ Klippan said to the bouncer.

‘And who are you?’

Klippan showed him his police ID. ‘Sverker Holm from the Helsingborg Police.’

The bouncer chuckled and shook his head. ‘Then you’ve got the wrong address. This is a private event.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I said that if I were you, I’d crawl back down whatever hole I came from as fast as I could.’

Klippan turned round to look for Lilja but couldn’t see her anywhere in the dark.

Meanwhile, the bouncer greeted another group and let them in, unaware that one of the two women didn’t belong.

17

The garden behind Fabian’s semi-detached house was really much too small to be called a garden. It was more of an outdoor area with a patio, a small patch of lawn, a few shrubs and a storage shed. And even though it was late, the whole scene was illuminated by a pale light. It was almost midsummer, and at this time of year the night was never truly dark.

On the other side of the double curtains covering the grimy basement window, Fabian pulled on a pair of powdered latex gloves and took out the framed black-and-white photograph of a young Hugo Elvin wearing a dress, helping his mother hang laundry. Then he carefully put the photograph down on the desk in the light of the desk lamp, picked up his squirrel-hair brush and applied a powder consisting of equal parts soot and potato starch.

The visit to Elvin’s flat with Stubbs that afternoon had given him reasons to be both more and less suspicious of Molander. It was unquestionably far-fetched to think he had staged an entire gender identity crisis. Not to mention the nearly impossible method that would have been required to make the hanging itself look self-inflicted. And yet not even Stubbs had been able to ignore all the things that pointed to something being amiss.

Like he had suspected, the powder refused to stick to the frame, the glass or the backing. So there were no fingerprints. That in itself was odd. The glass was one thing, but the frame and the backing? Why wipe those clean of prints unless you had something to hide?

He turned the frame over, bent up the four little metal points and lifted out the backing. The photograph had no marks and no stamps on the back; it was pure white, which made it hard to say whether the paper was new or not.