She’d devoted a significant proportion of her life to music. She had an unusually good ear, and could reproduce virtually any piece on her violin. She had made good use of this skill in her professional life too. She could hear when someone was lying or withholding part of the truth; something jarred. Exactly the same feeling came over her when she started looking into Ross’s dead daughter.

This isn’t right.

She found phone numbers for both his current wife and his ex, as well as the two sons he’d had with his second wife.

This isn’t right.

She tried to shake off the conviction that she was heading in the wrong direction, mainly because she couldn’t work out where it had come from. Ross was the only person who tied up the whole package, the only unifying link between the victims. She felt sick when she thought about what Alex had told her Ross had said about the scars on Alex’s hands.

A low blow, to say the least.

It wasn’t our fault that Lilian Sebastiansson died. And it certainly wasn’t Henry Lindgren’s either.

At the same time she felt a bizarre gratitude for Ross’s comment, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to link him to Lindgren’s murder. They still needed forensic evidence, of course, and so far they’d found nothing. Nothing. She’d never known a situation like it: a perpetrator who left the scene so clean, yet so striking. She kept on coming back to the same thought. The forensic evidence was negligible. No prosecutor would take Ross to court on the flimsy grounds they had so far.

She looked at her watch; she really wanted to go home.

She had dug and dug, but there was no trace of Ross’s alleged daughter. The next move was to contact his family, but that would have to wait. They mustn’t reveal that there was any kind of ongoing investigation into Ross, not under any circumstances.

So how could they move forward?

There had to be someone they could call, someone who would talk.

Fredrika went back to the notes Alex had made after his meeting with Tina Antonsson. She’d mentioned a security firm, Solid Security, said that Noah’s brother Dan had asked them to deal with threats from a difficult client. Alex had wondered if it was the same firm Noah had used, the one Peder had talked about. With a sense of relief she decided to contact the security firm rather than one of Ross’s relatives in the hunt for a non-existent daughter. Well, for the time being at least. They had taken action against Ross because of what Tina had told them, and her only connection was with Noah’s brother and sister-in-law.

Which meant Tina was both their weakest and their strongest card.

Fredrika wasn’t happy with that.