“But it might have made him a little careless.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was just wondering if he slipped up at that point.”

“Actually, he did.”

“How?”

“They found a loose metal sleeve from one leg of the tripod.”

Winter felt like he’d been locked inside a walk-in freezer. The roots of his hair tingled and his fingers turned to rubber. “The Lord is with us after all,” he said.

“So you believe in a merciful God?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe he’s looking down on us right now.”

“That metal sleeve. It’s not just something that happened to be in the room?”

“You’re selling some of the world’s best forensic specialists short.”

“Sorry.”

“There’s a streak of defiance in this,” Macdonald said. “It makes me wonder if it really was sloppiness.”

“That’s occurred to me too.”

“The defiance?”

“Yes, and that it could be a message of some kind, or a greeting.”

“Or a cry for help. But we’ll have to leave that up to the forensic psychologist.”

“Not help. It’s something else, more intimate. I can’t find the word for it.”

“Just as long as you can say it to yourself-the Swedish word, I mean.”

“I can’t find it in any language.”

The north wind had risen and Bergenhem felt the boat rock from side to side for the first time. The porthole was whistling like a flute. “The porthole is drafty,” he said.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Marianne said. “I’m used to it.”

“I can fix it.”

“I’d probably be nervous without it.”

“When you’re Angel…”

“What?”

“When you’re working.”

“Yes?”

“When somebody follows you into the other room.”

“What are you getting at?”

“What do you do there behind the bar, or wherever it is?”

“What do you want from me?”

“I just want to know what goes on back there.”

“If I fuck them?”

“No, I was just wondering if they say any-”

“You want to know whether I’m an honest-to-goodness hooker.”

“No!”

“You think I’m a hooker.”

“No way.”

“I’m not a hooker. I’ve never done it for money, not what you’re talking about.”

There was only one thought in Bergenhem’s head-that he had become someone else. His fists were clenched, and they didn’t belong to him.

“Hello? Anybody home?” Marianne edged toward him.

“Stay right where you are.”

“What?”

“Don’t come any closer.”

“So you think I’m a hooker after all.”

“That’s not it.”

“What are you talking about then?”

He drank some more wine. They were on their second bottle. He was off duty tonight, but Martina thought he was working. I wish you could stay home, she had said. It feels like my water is about to break any minute.”

“I dance for those poor bastards,” Marianne said. “All I do is dance.”

Bergenhem had lost interest in his question. He closed his eyes and saw a child on a table. He and Martina were watching through a screen. Angel danced for them and smiled at something she was holding in her hand.

The hull surged, as if a gale had lashed the boat, lifted it up and hurled it back into the river. Suddenly he felt sick to his stomach. His hands throbbed, the blood storming through his fingers. They weren’t his hands. His head was somebody else’s.

“Like when I was little,” Marianne continued. “Did I ever tell you how much fun I had?”

She had told him about the child she had once been, and that was one of the reasons he stayed. He thought about the privileged and the underprivileged. There was no justice anywhere, and it wasn’t going to get any better. All the signals that flashed on the road to the future were red as could be, with the same glare as at the strip joints, a light that led the human race on its pilgrimage to perdition.

“I was the star of my parents’ dinner parties,” she said.

Bergenhem lunged off the bed, dashed up to the deck, leaned over the gunwale and vomited. Tears filled his eyes and all he saw was a black hole. He felt a hand on his back. Marianne said something he didn’t catch.

“Don’t lean any farther or you’ll fall over.”

He breathed more easily now and he could see again. Below him the river ran dark between the boat and the stone of the wharf. The boat bumped up against the stone. Down there-that wasn’t any way out.

She wiped his forehead with a damp towel. He was drenched from the rain, his shirt clinging to his body as if he had fallen into the water. She steadied him as they walked back below deck. His feet slipped back and forth on the boards.

Winter poured hot water from the coffeepot. It was eight in the morning and birds he didn’t know the names of had already warbled themselves hoarse in the courtyard below his open window.

Just a few more hours and he would be sitting in a television studio with Macdonald and a bunch of reporters. The producers of Crimewatch had called a second time and Macdonald had accepted without hesitation.

Winter and thirteen other investigators had met the night before in one of the big offices on Parchmore Road. A bottle of whisky was on the table. Everybody said what they had been thinking. Macdonald tried to draw out the best in each of them.

Could they distill what had been said and communicate it to the public? Winter wasn’t nervous, and he hoped and prayed they would get calls after the program.

“Now’s the time to go for it,” Macdonald had said to Winter. “We’ve just got to keep our fingers crossed that someone out there in the anonymous public has seen something.”

“I agree.”

“Television is a paradoxical medium.”

“The anonymous public.”

Winter spread butter and orange marmalade on two slices of toast. Earlier in the morning, he had walked down Hogarth Road to a newspaper stand on Earl’s Court Road and bought the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and the Daily Telegraph.

His cell phone rang.

“I know you’re an hour behind us,” Ringmar said, “but I assumed you’d be up anyway.”

“It’s broad daylight here.”

“We just got another letter from our burglar friend.”

It took a few seconds for Winter to follow the chain of thought backward: burglar, apartment, bloody clothes-far-fetched, so goddam far-fetched.

“Erik?”

“I’m still here.” Winter washed down his toast with a mouthful of tea.

“He was insistent, as if he wanted to make up for his procrastination and set the record straight.”

“And?”

“So we took a closer look at the guy who rents the apartment. Halders and Djanali had a little extra time when-”

“For God’s sake, Bertil, skip the chronology and tell me what happened.”

“We called him in for questioning.”

“And?”

“He didn’t respond right away, but finally we heard from him.”

“Bertil!”

“Okay, okay, I’m coming to it. Listen carefully now. We couldn’t get hold of him in Gothenburg at first because he was in London.”

“What?”

“I told you to listen carefully. He was in London.”

“How the hell can you know something like that?”

A chilliness began to creep through Winter’s body. His scalp was prickly. Sweeping the newspapers off the table, he took three steps over to the counter and picked up his notepad. He sat down again, pen in hand.

“That wasn’t so hard to figure out,” Ringmar said. “He’s a flight attendant, often on the Gothenburg-London route.”

“Good Lord.”

“And that’s not all. He has an apartment in London. He lives there and has an overnight apartment in Gothenburg, or the other way around.”

“Is he British?”

“Swedish through and through. Not to mention his name-Carl Vikingsson.”

“Vikingsson?”

“Yes. And the name of the aircraft he usually works on is Viking something.”