But that probably wasn’t the case. It seemed more likely that the perpetrator was Torbjörn Ross.

So why couldn’t she let go of these horrific suspicions? The answer was easy: she still had no evidence that the writer had nothing to do with the murders.

I need to talk to Spencer, she thought. I have to confront him.

Her sorrow was as overwhelming as her anger. How could he have simply let the years go by? How could he have omitted to tell her what he’d done?

Because I wouldn’t have forgiven him.

Fredrika opened up her laptop, which she’d brought home from work. She wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight, not if she was sharing a bed with Spencer, so she might as well do something useful. With a bit of luck she might doze off on the sofa, then she could blame work if Spencer wanted to know why she hadn’t come back to bed.

Because I don’t feel safe next to you.

She opened up her notes from the meeting with Solid Security. Alex had passed on the misleading information given by Peder Rydh, and it chafed like an ill-fitting shoe. Why had he said that Noah Johansson had sought help from Solid Security, when in fact it was Dan? Why had he suggested that Noah was unreliable? And why the hell had he been fired?

She refused to waste any more energy on Peder. She decided to focus on Noah and his missing brother. That was the hardest piece of the puzzle to understand. According to the initial assessment made by the police, Dan and his family were living in Australia, but according to Noah, they’d been kidnapped. Fredrika didn’t know what the investigating officer’s thought process had been, but she saw no reason to doubt Noah’s genuine concern.

So where did you hide an entire family?

And why not assume they were dead?

That was a challenging but important question: why start from the premise that the family were alive?

Maybe because a police officer had allegedly spoken to Dan on one occasion. However, he didn’t know Dan, didn’t know what he sounded like. It could have been anybody on the other end of the line.

Fredrika changed her position on the sofa. If Dan and his family had been abducted but not killed, where were they?

Ross wasn’t the kind to turn his cellar into a dungeon, besides which it would take a very long time to carry out such a project, making major alterations and soundproofing the room or rooms. According to Berlin, Ross had said that his daughter had died back in the autumn. And Dan had disappeared in May.

Forget it.

So: did it have to be so complicated? Had the person who’d taken the family really invested oceans of time in a complex building project, or did the ideal location already exist?