They are sitting in a restaurant near the ferry port. Karen went down to meet Karl and now they’re the only guests at something that is probably best described as a dive. Simple wooden tables and aluminium café chairs and, on the walls, the compulsory fishing nets and ‘oil paintings’ of ships on stormy seas. Here, the faith, hope and love symbol looks carved from a big chunk of driftwood, ominously suspended above the door to the kitchen.

Karl Björken shrugs.

‘He might have called or gone to find Stuub in person instead of emailing him back. That actually seems more likely, if it’s true the old geezer had information that could threaten the expansion.’

‘It’s possible; we’ll have to ask him, I guess. OK, so what did Brodal learn from the autopsy?’

‘You really want to hear about that now, while we wait for our food?’

‘Sure, go ahead.’

‘All right, but don’t get your hopes up,’ Karl says and takes a sip of his beer. ‘Gabriel Stuub had his throat slit with a serrated knife. Probably a double-edged hunting knife, according to Kneought. The kind with deeper notches on one side and shallower ones on the other. Damn effective whichever way you turn it, so to speak.’

‘Right, one of those,’ Karen says sarcastically. ‘Either way, it’s probably at the bottom of the North Sea now.’

‘Be that as it may, the killer stabbed Gabriel in the side of his neck and then sliced clean through the larynx from the inside out.’

‘Delightful. What else?’

‘Well, you know what our beloved Brodal is like, always full of caveats, but he was fairly certain Gabriel was sitting on the ground with his back to the tree where he was found when the killer attacked him from behind. That would apparently explain the marks on his trousers and the mild frostbite on his buttocks.’

‘A swift execution, in other words.’

‘The knife entered from the left, so in all likeliness we’re dealing with a right-handed killer.’

‘How unusual. Anything else?’

Karl shakes his head.

‘Not as far as the murder is concerned, but there were a number of half-healed bruises on the body, indicating Gabriel had been on the receiving end of a couple of hard punches to the face twenty-four to forty-eight hours before his death. The bloodwork also revealed traces of cocaine and liver values even Kneought Brodal considered unusually poor for a man his age.’

‘We know he liked to drink, but he looked remarkably fit. Steroids?’

‘Exactly what Brodal said, but we’re going to have to wait for the lab results on that one. Well, I suppose that was the gist of it. We’ll see what Sören comes up with.’

‘I’m working on the assumption that he found piles and piles of DNA that explicitly and unequivocally identifies our killer. And his mobile was still neatly tucked into his pocket, too, I presume?’