‘I’m not really in a position to say; I didn’t know him very well. From what I’ve heard, he had marital problems, so that might be why he drank too much last night,’ Björn replies in an attempt to take the sting out of his words.

‘And of course he’d recently lost his grandfather in a tragic accident,’ Laura adds.

As though suddenly struck by a thought, Laura Groth fixes Karen with a level stare.

‘Or . . . it was an accident, wasn’t it?’

Karen considers being evasive but dismisses the notion. The truth is going to come out any day now anyway.

‘I’m afraid it wasn’t,’ she says. ‘It looks as though Fredrik Stuub was murdered as well.’

Silence engulfs the parlour. Laura is still staring at Karen but Björn’s eyes suddenly dart toward the tall windows, as though he has spotted something. Karen quickly turns around, but all she can see is the room reflected in the black glass.

‘Can either of you think of any reason someone would want to kill Fredrik and Gabriel?’ she asks.

Her words seem to rouse Björn Groth from his torpor.

‘Us?’ he says in a tone of outrage. ‘What could we possibly know about something like that?’

‘Well, you’ve known Gabriel for years. Maybe you knew his grandfather, too?’

‘No,’ Laura replies, her voice steady. ‘We were not acquainted. We had obviously heard of him, but that’s all.’

‘That’s all,’ her husband agrees, somewhat less steadily. ‘This has absolutely nothing to do with us.’

Chapter 38

38

Just like last time, Karen finds Jens Groth behind the cluttered desk in his office at the back of the distillery’s warehouse. His wife Sandra is, as Laura Groth informed her, in bed with a high fever. The locum provincial doctor has strongly discouraged but not explicitly forbidden Karen from talking to her, not so much out of concern for Sandra as the risk of contagion.

‘Some of the other guests are likely to start experiencing symptoms in the next twenty-four hours,’ he’d told her, adding, ‘Keep your distance and wash your hands,’ before snapping his black doctor’s bag shut and departing.

Now, Karen studies the tumbler on Jens Groth’s desk and ponders whether sampling is part of his job description or a sign that he needed something to calm his nerves. And, for a moment, she wonders whether it’s the alcohol or a nascent flu infection that’s making Jens’ eyes look slightly glassy in the light of the desk lamp.