Karen looks around the living room and feels exhaustion hit her like a cudgel at the sight. Drawers have been pulled out and overturned, piles of books and newspapers knocked over, pictures pushed askew. The floor is littered with things that probably used to be filed away in boxes: receipts, paid bills, photographs. The kitchen and bedroom are more of the same – everything not nailed down has been pulled out and thrown about, as though a bulldozer had been let loose in Fredrik Stuub’s home. Sören Larsen might be right, she muses. There’s something exaggerated, almost theatrical about the mess.

The technicians are done; fingerprints, hairs and shoe prints have been collected from the house and its immediate surroundings. Before they parted ways in Ravenby, Larsen gave Karen the key to the new lock and the all-clear to enter.

‘We’ve done what we can, now it’s your turn to see if you can find something exciting. Knock yourself out!’ he’d said.

Cheers, she thinks sourly and prods a pile of circulars with the tip of her shoe. I’ll have to have a couple of constables come and collect and catalogue this crap. And I need reinforcements from the bloody CID. Thorstein Byle is sweet and helpful, but so damn polite and deferential. I need someone who’ll stand up to me and have an opinion of their own.

She knows she’s being unfair. Without Thorstein Byle’s local knowledge, they would be nowhere right now, even if every single detective at the CID came up to help with the case. Byle has been nothing but helpful and has even opened his home to her. To atone for her mean thoughts, she turns to her colleague with a smile.

‘Right, I guess there’s no point putting this off. Ready to have at it?’

Byle nods, but stays where he is, looking around indecisively.

‘We’re just going to do a quick overview to see if anything jumps out at us; we’ll map everything out more methodically later,’ she says.

‘In all honesty, it’s probably safe to assume nothing we find in this mess is of any interest,’ Byle says. ‘If it was, it wouldn’t still be here.’

‘True. But there might be something that indirectly reveals something interesting about Stuub’s life. Larsen had the feeling this break-in was staged. What do you think?’

Byle sits down on a brown sofa, leans forward and glumly picks up a stack of papers.

‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘Hard to say.’

Of course, Karen thinks.

*

With no idea what they’re looking for, they start searching the house. Papers, bills, letters. They silently pick up, read, skim, put aside.

‘Do you think they checked the concealment?’ Byle says after a while.

Karen looks up from a pile of bills, uncomprehending.

‘The concealment?’