"What won't ever happen again?" Yngvesson swung around in his chair to face Winter. "It won't happen again? Never again?"

"What she's done. He's punishing her for what she's done."

"For what she's done… to him?"

Winter thought. He would listen to the tape again in a moment; he was thinking and preparing himself.

"Yes. Either directly or… indirectly."

"Indirectly? For what she's done to others?"

Winter suddenly felt depressed, infinitely depressed. He wanted to sink down into the ocean and never rise up again. The sun could rise, but not him.

"I don't know, Yngvesson. It's going around and around. I need to sit down while it spins." He sat on the other chair. "What did we say? Indirect? She's done something he's punishing her for."

"Hmm."

"For God's sake, Yngvesson, 1 don't know what to say about this. We'll have to see later if anything I do say is relevant."

"But this isn't… personal, is it? Not in that way? He didn't know her, did he?"

"He knew her, or didn't know her. I don't know."

"It does make a difference, doesn't it?"

Sara Helander and Halders were sitting in his car, about seventy-five meters from the house that Samic and the woman had disappeared into.

The house was built of wood, as tall as an apartment building, Halders thought. Four or five stories, and no doubt a huge basement stretching under the whole thing.

It was one of four similar houses in a row. They blocked out the sun, but only to a degree. Some rays were shining directly into their faces. Sara Helander was squinting with one hand over her eyes. Halders was wearing sunglasses.

"Maybe we should have parked behind the house," she said.

"No."

"No, you're right. This side is where the traffic is."

There wasn't much traffic, but a few cars passed at regular intervals, on the way to the ferries and the new apartment buildings that were only a few meters from the water's edge.

There was a car parked in the driveway. The garage was out of sync with the house. Seemed to have been built in a different century. Maybe even two centuries between them. Halders kept his eyes on the house, on all the windows that were almost invisible against the light.

It was darker now. Sara Helander had brought something to eat and drink. No sun in their eyes now. Nobody had entered or left the house. Halders was biting into a sandwich that might have been egg and mayonnaise, or ham and cucumber, he couldn't taste anything. He checked his watch. Almost midnight.

Two cars drove by slowly, but continued past the house. Then they came back from the other direction, despite the fact that it was a one-way street.

"Down," said Halders, and they both ducked out of sight. The headlights on the first of the cars were shining directly at them. They heard voices, but no words. Car doors were opened and closed carefully. The engines were still running. Then the cars set off again, their lights just a few centimeters over the two police officers' heads.

"Exciting, eh?" Halders muttered.

"Somebody went in."

They waited, then cautiously sat up again. Everything was as before, except that there was now a light on in a ground-floor window.

"Were there lights in many of the rooms when you were here last night?" Halders asked.

"No."

"More than this?"

"Yes."

"Hmm."

"Do you think it was Samic who just went in?"

"Doesn't he come by boat and on foot?"

She didn't answer. They sat quiet for some minutes.

It was getting darker all the time. It was a little darker now than it had been at the same time last night. Just as warm, but darker. The darkness for a new season was moving in. "Do not step gently into the good night," thought Halders.

"Here comes another car," Helander said.

It was approaching from behind them.

"Keep sitting up," said Halders. He ducked down just a little bit.

The car stopped outside the house. The door opened. A woman emerged from the car.

"Is that her?" asked Halders, speaking mainly to himself.

"No."

The woman seemed young. She went into the house. No more lights were turned on. The car left.

They waited. Halders drank some coffee, which steamed shyly as he poured it out from his Thermos.

"Somebody's coming," Helander said. "On foot."

Somebody emerged from the shadows below them, from the river. He climbed up the steps to the street. The steps were almost directly opposite the house. It was a man, and he looked around before crossing the empty street that was now lit up by the moon and the stars and the streetlights, or was it the sky? He was wearing a light-colored suit and his hair was the same color as the streetlights. He wasn't a young man. He turned right and seemed to be looking straight at them, as they sat hidden in the darkness of their car.

"He can't see us," said Halders. "Sit still." He'd placed a piece of paper over the steaming cups.

The man turned toward the house and went in.

"Kurt Bielke," said Halders softly.

It was quiet again in the street. The man had disappeared into the remarkable house. Helander had never seen Kurt Bielke before.

Night was starting to turn into day. She could see the lights from the night's last ferry from Denmark on its way to the dock on the other side of the river.

Halders got out of the car.

"What are you going to do?" she whispered.

"Take a look at this place."

"Isn't that a little risky?"

"We'll soon find out."

"Should I call for backup?"

"Good God, no. I'm only going to take a little look."

"Don't do anything silly, Fredrik. I'll check on you every twenty minutes." The mobile phone would vibrate in Halders's pocket, but there would be no sound.

"I'll call you," said Halders. "But if you do call and I can't answer, I'll turn it off to signal that everything's OK."

"Twenty minutes."

He didn't reply, but left without a word. She never saw him cross the street, but shortly afterward thought she might have seen a shadowy figure in the garden behind the house.

Halders stood under one of three trees ten meters from the house. There were lights in two of the windows, but he couldn't see anybody. There was no sound coming from inside.

Now what?

There was no door leading down to the basement. That would have been too easy.

The two windows on the left were dark. He moved swiftly over the lawn. Both windows were the old-fashioned sash type and appeared to be closed, but the left-hand one didn't close quite flush. Halders guessed there would be a latch that he couldn't see, and he took a thin chopstick, which he'd taken from Ming's that same afternoon, from his inside pocket. He inserted it into the narrow crack, located the latch, and unfastened it. It wasn't easy, as the window was almost two meters from the ground.

He opened the window and put the chopstick back in his pocket.

He looked around. There was a cistern at the gable end a few meters to the left. He went up to it to test how heavy it was, and found it was fairly light, as there had been no more than one or two short thundery showers for ages. It wasn't difficult to carry it to the window.

He climbed onto it and peered in: furniture outlined in the murky darkness, a door looking grayish-white at the back of the room. Nothing animate in there.

Halders clambered through the window, and looked back, but saw nobody racing up with a machine gun. Nobody came barging in through the door.