He made a move to lift Erica’s feet, but she got up quickly and brushed herself off.

‘No, Patrik, I refuse to go along with that. I’ve already got enough bruises for one day. And I’m not getting in that bathtub where Alex was found, that’s one thing for damn sure!’

He reluctantly accepted her protests and they left the bathroom and went back to the living room.

‘After the killer got Alex into the tub it was a simple matter to run the water and then slit her wrists with a razor blade from a bag in the medicine cabinet. Then all the killer had to do was clean up after himself. Rinse out the glasses and wipe off the fingerprints from one of them. Meanwhile Alex slowly bled to death in the bathroom. Terribly, terribly cold-hearted.’

‘And the furnace? Was it already off when she arrived in Fjällbacka?’

‘Yes, it seems so. Which was lucky for us. It would have been much harder to gather any evidence from the body if it had been in room temperature for a whole week. For example, it would probably have been impossible to distinguish Anders’s fingerprints.’

Erica shuddered. The thought of taking fingerprints off a corpse was a little too macabre for her taste.

Together they searched the rest of the house. Erica took time to go through Alex and Henrik’s bedroom more thoroughly, since her previous visit had been so rudely interrupted. But she found nothing else. The feeling that something was missing lingered, and it irritated her that she couldn’t think of what it was. She decided to tell Patrik; he was just as frustrated as she was. To her satisfaction she also saw that he looked quite uneasy when she told him about the intruder and how she had been forced to hide in the wardrobe.

Patrik heaved a sigh and sat down on the edge of the big four-poster bed, trying to help her figure out what it was she was searching for in her memory.

‘Was it something small or something big?’

‘I don’t know, Patrik, probably something small, otherwise I would have noticed it, don’t you think? If the four-poster bed was gone, for instance, I would probably have noticed it.’ She smiled and sat down next to him.

‘But where in the room was it? By the door? Over by the bed? On the bureau?’

Patrik fingered a little scrap of leather he found on Alex’s nightstand. It looked like some sort of club insignia, with an inscription burned into the leather in a childish hand: ‘T.T.M. 1976.’ When he turned it over he saw some indistinct spots of what looked like old dried blood. He wondered where it had come from.

‘I don’t know what it was, Patrik. If I did I wouldn’t be sitting here tearing out my hair.’

She glanced at him in profile. He had wonderfully long, dark eyelashes. His beard stubble was perfect. Just long enough to be felt as light sandpaper against the skin, but short enough not to scratch uncomfortably. She wondered how it would feel against her skin.

‘What is it? Have I got something on my face?’

Patrik wiped his mouth nervously. She quickly looked away, embarrassed that he had caught her out staring at him.

‘It’s nothing. A little crumb of chocolate. It’s gone now.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Well, what do you say-we’re not going to get any farther now, do you think?’ Erica said at last.

‘No, probably not. But listen, ring me as soon as you think of what’s missing. If it’s important enough for someone to come here to find, it must be important to the investigation as well.’

They locked up carefully, and Erica placed the key back under the mat.

‘Would you like a ride back?’

‘No thanks, Patrik. I’ll enjoy the walk.’

‘See you tomorrow night then.’ Patrik shifted from one foot to the other, feeling like an awkward fifteen-year-old.

‘Okay, I’ll see you at eight. Come hungry,’ Erica said.

‘I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything. Right now it doesn’t feel like I’ll ever be hungry again.’ Patrik laughed as he patted his stomach and nodded at Dagmar Petren’s house across the street.

Erica smiled and waved as he drove off in his Volvo. She could already feel anticipation churning inside of her, mixed with insecurity, anxiety and outright fear.

She started for home but hadn’t gone more than a few yards before she stopped short. An idea had come out of nowhere, and it had to be tested before she could let it go. With determined steps she went back to the house, took the key from under the mat, and entered the house again, after first carefully kicking the snow off her shoes.

What should a woman do who was waiting for a man who never showed up for a romantic dinner? She should ring him, of course! Erica said a prayer that Alex had a modern telephone and hadn’t fallen for the trendiness of a ’50s Cobra phone or still had some old Bakelite model. She was in luck. A brand-new Doro hung on the wall in the kitchen. With trembling fingers she pushed the button for the last number called and crossed her fingers that nobody had used the phone since Alex’s death.

The phone rang and rang. After seven rings she was about to hang up, but then the voicemail switched on. She listened to the message but hung up before the beep. Her face pale. Erica slowly replaced the receiver. She could almost hear the clatter in her head as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Suddenly she knew precisely what it was that was missing from the bedroom upstairs.

Mellberg was seething with rage. He strode through the station in a fury. If they could have, the employees at Tanumshede police station would have taken cover under their desks. But grown-ups didn’t do that, so they had to suffer through a whole day of fiery oaths, reprimands and general abuse. And Annika had to bear the brunt of it. Even though she’d developed a tough hide during the months since Mellberg had become boss, for the first time in a long time she felt on the verge of tears. By four o’clock she’d had enough. She left work and stopped at Konsum to buy a large tub of ice cream. Then she went home, turned on Glamour TV and let the tears run down into the chocolate ice cream. It was just one of those days.

It drove Mellberg crazy that he’d been forced to release Anders Nilsson from gaol. He felt in every bone of his body that Anders was Alex Wijkner’s killer, and if he’d only had more time alone with him he would have wrung the truth out of him. Instead he’d been forced to release Anders because of a fucking witness who said she saw him come home just before Separate Worlds started on TV. That placed him at home in his flat by seven o’clock, and Alex had talked with Birgit at a quarter past. Bloody hell.

Then there was that young cop, Patrik Hedström. Kept spouting a bunch of wild ideas that it was somebody other than Anders Nilsson who murdered the woman. No, if there was anything he’d learned in all his years in the police, it was that everything was most often exactly what it appeared to be. No hidden motives, no complicated plots. Just riff-raff that made life unsafe for honest citizens. Find the riff-raff and you find the perpetrator, that was his motto.

He hit the number of Patrik’s mobile.

‘Where the hell are you?’ No pleasantries needed here. ‘Are you sitting around gathering navel lint somewhere, or what? Down here at the station we’re working. Overtime. I don’t know if that’s a phenomenon you’re familiar with. If not, I can fix it so you no longer have to worry about that either. Not here, at any rate.’

He felt a bit better in the pit of his stomach when he’d had a chance to put some pressure on that young whippersnapper. You had to keep them on a short leash, or those young cocks would get too full of themselves.

‘I want you to drive down and talk to a witness who places Anders Nilsson at home at seven o’clock. Press her, twist her arm a little and see what you can find out…yes, NOW, damn it.’