‘Unfortunately I cannot talk about what Elsa confided in me.

‘No, that is included in the vow of confidentiality.’

His heart was pounding. For a moment he thought he saw Elsa sitting in the chair in front of him. Elsa with the erect posture, the short white hair and the thin figure. He had tried to fatten her up with pasta and pastry, but nothing seemed to stick to her. She gave him a kindly look.

‘I’m terribly sorry, but I simply can’t. You’ll have to find another way to . . .’

Elsa nodded urgently to him from her place in the chair, and he tried to understand what she meant. Did she want him to speak? But that didn’t help; he still couldn’t. She continued to watch him, and then he had an idea. Softly he said, ‘I can’t reveal what Elsa told me. But I can tell you things that were generally known. Elsa was from your part of the country. She was from Uddevalla.’

From her place facing him Elsa smiled. Then she was gone. He knew that she hadn’t been real, that she was only a figment of his imagination. But it had still been lovely to see her.

When he hung up he felt at peace. He hadn’t betrayed God, nor had he betrayed Elsa. Now the rest was up to the police.

Erica could see that something had happened as soon as Patrik walked in the front door. There was a lightness to his step, and he seemed more relaxed than he had in a long time.

‘Did things go well today?’ she asked cautiously, carrying Maja as she went to meet him. Beaming with happiness, Maja held out her arms to her pappa, and he swept her up in his embrace.

‘Things went fantastic,’ he said, taking a few dance steps with his daughter. She laughed so hard that she almost choked. Pappa was hysterically funny. She had obviously already decided that.

‘Tell me more,’ said Erica, heading for the kitchen to finish cooking dinner. Patrik and Maja followed her. Anna, Emma and Adrian were watching the Bolibompa show and gave Patrik a distracted wave when he came in. On the TV Björne was demanding all their attention.

‘We found the connection,’ he said, setting Maja on the floor. She sat there a while, torn between Pappa on one side and Björne on the other, but decided at last to take the furrier of the two and crawled over to the TV.

‘Always rejected, always number two,’ Patrik sighed as he watched Maja go.

‘Mmm, but for me you’re always number one,’ said Erica and gave him a big hug before she went back to cooking. Patrik sat down to watch.

Erica cleared her throat and looked pointedly at the vegetables lying on the worktop.

Patrik promptly jumped up from his chair and started chopping cucumbers for the salad. ‘If you say “hop”, I ask “how high”,’ he said with a laugh, taking a step to one side to avoid the kick she playfully aimed at his shin.

‘You just wait, after Saturday I’ll be wielding the whip with renewed vigour,’ said Erica, trying to look stern. She was happy he was even thinking about the wedding.

‘I think you’re doing a pretty good job of it already,’ he said, bending over to kiss her.

‘Lay off out there,’ Anna shouted from the living room. ‘I can hear you smooching. There are children present.’ She laughed.

‘Mmm, maybe we’ll have to save this till later,’ said Erica with a wink at Patrik. ‘Now tell me more about what happened.’

Patrik gave her a brief rundown of what they’d found out, and the smile vanished from Erica’s face. There was so much tragedy, so much death mixed up in the case, and despite the fact that the investigation had now taken a big step forward she understood that things were going to be difficult in future as well.

‘So the victim in Nyköping had also killed someone in an accident?’

‘Yes,’ Patrik said, cutting tomato wedges. ‘Although not in Nyköping, but in Uddevalla.’

‘Who was it she killed?’ said Erica, stirring her pork filet stew.

‘We don’t know the details yet. That accident was much longer ago than the others, so it will take a while to find out more. But I talked with our colleagues in Uddevalla today, and they’re sending over all the material as soon as they dig it up. Some poor soul will have to crawl around among dusty boxes for a while.’

‘So somebody is murdering drunk drivers who killed someone. And the first accident occurred thirty-five years ago, while the last one was . . . when was the last one?’

‘Seventeen years ago. Rasmus Olsson.’

‘And the locations are spread all over Sweden,’ said Erica pensively as she kept stirring. ‘From Lund all the way up here. When did the first murder take place?’

‘Ten years ago,’ Patrik answered obediently, watching his future wife. Erica was used to handling facts and analysing them, and he welcomed help from her sharp mind.

‘So the killer moves over a large geographical area, has a great time spread for his deeds, and the only thing the victims have in common is that they were killed because of a fatal accident they caused by driving drunk.’

‘Yep, that’s about it,’ said Patrik with a sigh. It sounded utterly hopeless when Erica summed up the situation. He poured the veggies into a big bowl, mixed them up, and placed the salad on the kitchen table.

‘Don’t forget that we’re most likely missing one victim,’ he said quietly as he sat down. ‘In all likelihood it’s victim number two that we haven’t found yet. But I’m sure there is another victim. Somebody we missed.’

‘Isn’t it possible to get more out of those book pages?’ Erica asked, setting the steaming pot of stew on a trivet on the table.

‘It doesn’t seem so. What I’m pinning my best hopes on now is that we can develop something that will take us further once we get all the details about Elsa Forsell’s accident. She was the first victim, and something tells me she’s the most important one.’

‘Mmm, you may be right,’ said Erica and then called Anna and the children for dinner. They could talk more later.

Two days had passed since they had worked out what the serial killer’s victims had in common. The initial euphoria had subsided, and discouragement had taken its place. They still didn’t understand why the geographic territory was so large. Did the murderer travel about in his hunt for victims, or had he actually lived in all these towns? There were just too many questions. They had pored over all the available material on the accidents involving the murder victims, but nowhere did they find anything to connect them. Patrik was leaning more and more towards the idea that there was no personal connection among the victims, but that the killer was a person filled with hate who randomly chose his victims based on their actions. In that case it seemed that the murderer took no notice of the fact that several of his victims had shown real remorse after the events. Elsa had struggled with guilt and sought redemption in religion; Marit had never touched alcohol again; the same was true of Rasmus, but he couldn’t drink anyway for physiological reasons because of the injuries he had suffered in the car crash. Börje was the exception. He had continued to drink, continued to drive drunk, and didn’t seem to have worried about the girl whose death he had caused.

But it was impossible to draw any conclusions when one victim was missing. When the phone rang at nine o’clock on Wednesday morning, Patrik had no idea that the call would give him the last piece of the puzzle.

‘Patrik Hedström,’ he answered, placing his hand over the receiver so that the person calling wouldn’t hear that he was yawning. Consequently he didn’t catch the name of the caller.

‘Excuse me, what was your name?’

‘My name is Vilgot Runberg, and I’m superintendent of the Ortboda police station.’

‘Ortboda?’ said Patrik, feverishly searching his geographic memory.

‘Outside Eskilstuna,’ Superintendent Runberg said impatiently. ‘But it’s a small station, only three of us work here.’ He coughed, turned away from the receiver, but then went on, ‘The thing is, I just came back from a two-week holiday in Thailand.’