Disappointed, she flips even faster through the notebook until something stops her. She thinks she might have seen something, some note, some numbers. She goes back until she finds the page again. Holds the book at another angle trying to get more light on its pages. There are a few words dashed down. Just a few lines.

‘Palais de Justice. In front of the elevator,’ she reads. ‘24/11, 16:00’. Then a name. ‘Karl’. Then no more.

24 November? That’s in two days, Tuesday.

Klara recalls Gabi’s phone call yesterday at the hostel. Tuesday in Brussels, she said. Terrorism crackdown, the police said.

She puts the notebook back in Gabriella’s bag and takes out her phone. First, she needs to figure out where they’ve taken Gabriella.

She looks up the number for the city jail, and a young woman answers almost immediately. She can only confirm what Klara vaguely remembers from studying criminal law in Uppsala.

‘The police have seventy-two hours to decide if they want to detain your friend,’ the girl says. ‘The detention will be decided by one of the Stockholm district courts, and all you can do is wait for a detention order to be established. You’ll have to contact the district court this week. That’s all the advice I can give you for now.’

Klara hangs up and leans back. Seventy-two hours. Three days. Gabriella is unreachable until Wednesday unless they release her early.

*

It takes less than fifteen minutes to drive to Bastugatan on Södermalm and find a parking spot. She grabs Gabriella’s bag and locks the car, then walks shivering through the early evening light towards her friend’s apartment.

The weather has shifted quickly and heavy clouds are rolling in above the rooftops. She can already see tiny, fleeting raindrops shining in the streetlights. She’s not quite sure what she’s going to do in the apartment, but it feels like the natural place to start.

She unlocks the front door with one of the keys on Gabriella’s keychain and turns the light on in the stairs. The apartment is on the third floor, with French doors that open onto a stunning view of Stockholm. Gabriella bought the small one-bedroom when she became a partner at the firm, and the price made Klara almost faint. But Gabriella just shrugged.

‘I don’t have anything else to spend my money on right now,’ Gabrielle told her.