“Now it’s perfect,” she repeated. “All that’s missing is the schnapps, but we’re not allowed to have any of that, are we?”

“You are not allowed to have any of that,” he said. “I could indulge, but I’ll display my sympathy for your situation. For tonight, at least.”

“It’s quite usual for men to show their sympathy for their women in a situation like this.”

“Really?”

“Some of them even put on weight.”

“You can count me out on that score.”

Morelius felt stiff. He’d felt stiff before setting out for work, and it hadn’t gone away as a result of the routine workout before the upcoming night shift.

Afterward he sat on the bench in front of his locker, massaging his neck and looking at the pictures of naked women taped to the inside of Bartram’s locker door. They were fairly innocent pictures, cut out of some 1960s men’s magazine. Not the kind of thing that got printed nowadays. Bartram lived in the past. He sometimes claimed the pictures were of his wife, but he didn’t have a wife.

They were now in the last week of the six-week rotation. That meant an extra night shift this Friday followed by two more over the weekend. It was the last Friday of the month, payday He knew that people were already out celebrating the fact that their pockets were full. It was just eight o‘clock and the station was closed.

“A touch of a stiff neck, is it?” Bartram asked, who was fiddling with his pistol, checking the mechanism with an ease born of long experience. His SIG-Sauer still had the original wooden butt. Bartram sometimes went on about losing the Walther, which he considered a better weapon for the job, but not today. He was calm and serious, ready for the coming night and the coming weekend.

“It’s just a bit stiff,” Morelius said.

“Watch out for drafts.”

“I will.”

“You’d better stay indoors tonight.”

“Why?”

“Drafts. There’s a nasty wind blowing through Gothenburg tonight.”

“Bullshit. It’ll be a routine shift.”

“It’s payday today, Simon.”

Morelius and Bartram were walking down the Avenue. Some preferred to walk it alone, and Morelius had been one of those; but the last six months had been different. Being on his own no longer felt like liberation as far as he was concerned. He’d been well and truly scared on several occasions. Had seen things that terrified him.

On one occasion he’d come face-to-face with death in the Gnistäng Tunnel when a young couple drove straight into the wall. He’d been in the following car and seen everything. Like in a film. Real, but somehow unreal. The Mazda in front of him had swerved left and crashed into the wall with a noise of shattering glass and twisting metal. He wasn’t even on duty he’d just been driving around for fun, as he sometimes did when he was off duty. He’d managed to pull off an emergency stop, then leaped from his car and raced over to the wreck where the girl was hanging with… with… He’d gotten violently sick, right in front of her, like your ordinary… and then he’d tried to phone, but even as he was punching in the number he could hear sirens as his colleagues and an ambulance converged on the scene.

He thought about that now, as they passed the park for the second time. Beautiful people glittered on the other side of the windows, in bars, in restaurants. Women. Bartram turned to admire the sights to the left.

“Watch out for that stiff neck.”

“Ha, ha.”

“Maybe it would be worth it.”

“The trick is to compensate by looking in the other direction as well.”

Morelius looked in the other direction, over the Avenue. A gang of kids was approaching from Götaplatsen. One of twenty or so that were tempted to gather in the center of town on a Friday night. The Avenue became an odd mixture of middle-aged elegance, desperate thirty-year-old crises, and desperate fifteen-year-old crises.

Those who were most drunk tried to make contact, to provoke. The gang pushed their smallest member to the front, waited, then attacked. Bartram looked to his right now too.

“I recognize her.”

“Eh?”

“That blonde girl over there, in the gang. Nearest to us. She’s the vicar’s daughter.”

“Yes. Maria Östergaard.”

“She recovered pretty quickly.”

“That was a week ago. And I said at the time that it wasn’t all that serious.”

“But she’s out on the town, even so. What does our vicar have to say about that?”

“Why not ask her? Here she comes.”

It was true. Hanne Ostergaard was hurrying toward them, practically running, crossing over the Avenue from the theater, and the two police officers watched her march up to the gang of youths. She grabbed hold of her fair-haired daughter.

“Come home with me this minute!”

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

“I asked you to stay at home tonight.”

“You always want me to stay at home.” She tried to pull her arm away. “Let go of me!” She looked at her friends.

“I just want you to come home with me,” Hanne said. She had let go of her daughter’s sleeve. “I’m worried stiff by all this. What if it happens again?”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” the girl said. “I haven’t even had a beer.” She breathed in her mother’s face. “Can you smell beer? Well, can you?”

Hanne had started crying. “Please, Maria, I just want you to come home with me now. I get so… so terribly worried.”

“There’s nothing to be worried about, Mom. I’m with my friends. I’ll be home by one, as I said.”

Hanne looked at the girl, at the group of teenagers, then over the street at the two police officers. She made a move as if she were about to run over to them, ask them to arrest the girl and take her home to the house in Orgryte.

Please don’t come over here, Morelius thought. Though if it gets much worse we’ll have to go and sort it out. He heard a shout. “NO!” He watched the girl turn on her heel and start running down the Avenue. The gang hesitated. One youth suddenly started running after her. It looked like the kid who’d been lurking in the background at the ER. The group moved off, seeming to be pulled along the wide pavement, away from the woman who was left standing there on her own.

“Do you often think about what it’ll be like, being a father?”

The question took him by surprise. It was like interrogating a suspect. Taken by surprise. No time to think.

“Of course.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“How on earth could I fib about that? It’ll be the most important event of my life, along with my own birth.” He looked at her. Hair combed back. A slight swelling of the stomach. “That, and when I met you.”

“Good answer. But I think you’re already starting to worry about all the bad things that could happen.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Angela. I’m an optimist, as you know.”

She burst out laughing.

‘About this, anyway,“ he said.

“I think you’re already starting to think what it will be like when… when our child is a teenager roaming around the Avenue with a gang.”

“Come off it.”

“I’m right, though, aren’t I? That’s what’ll happen.”

“There won’t be any Avenue by then.”

“No parade street in Gothenburg anymore? Is that the optimist talking?”

Winter’s mobile rang on the bedside table. It was 12:03 A.M. The few people who had his mobile number rang on police business, apart from Angela, but she was lying in bed beside him, still soft and red, with three small beads of sweat on her forehead.

His mother was the only other person it could be. It’s either murder or Mother, Winter thought, without smiling. He scrambled over to the other side of the bed and answered.

“Erik! Thank God you answered.” His mother was out of breath, as if she’d just run up two or three hills in Nueva Andalucia. Winter could hear crackling over the line from the Costa del Sol.