'They know where I was going. They'll be here if I'm not back within an hour.'

Karlsson gestures with his head, and the Slavs let go of Waldemar.

'Get up,' he says.

Then Waldemar is standing facing him, the Slavs in a circle around them.

An arm flies out and Waldemar ducks instinctively, but the blow hits him on the cheek. Then another, to his left eye.

'What the fuck are you doing, beating up a cop?' Waldemar shouts.

'Listen,' Karlsson says. 'I've got enough shit on you to get you put away. I can dig out a dozen men you've beaten up in the course of your duties.'

Two quick punches.

A burning pain and Waldemar spits, realises he has to get out of there, have a cigarette.

'Fuck off now, pig,' Karlsson says, and behind him Waldemar hears the door rattle, and thinks, fucking hell, how long before I can retire?

Malin and Zeke have picked up the car from outside Hamlet, and now they're waiting outside a room in leryd Care Home while the nurses change ke Petersson's incontinence pad.

Zeke didn't ask about the car and Malin was glad he didn't, the last thing she wants is a stern lecture.

From inside the room they hear groaning, but no whining, no cross words. The walls of the corridor are painted white, stencilled with pink flowers. A clock with a white face and black hands sticks out from the wall. It says 2.20, and Malin can feel the pizza she's just eaten at the Conya pizzeria churning in her stomach. But the fat has soothed her hangover and she can't feel any grimier than she already does. Must go to the gym, she thinks. Sweat all the crap out.

Thank God Zeke hasn't mentioned what she told him yesterday, about leaving Janne again.

The smell here.

Ammonia and disinfectant, cheap perfume and excrement, and the odour that slowly dying old people give off.

A man in a wheelchair is staring out at the rain through a window at the end of the corridor. It stopped a while ago, but not for long. How much can it actually rain?

Then the door opens. A young blonde nurse shows them in. In the bed, its top end propped up, sits a thin man with a chiselled face, and Malin thinks that he looks like his son, his dead son, and what would have happened if Tove died, if she had died in the flat in Finspng more than a year ago?

Everything would be over.

But in the man's watery, grey, alcoholic's eyes there is no grief, just loneliness. He has one hand clenched into a stroke-victim's claw, his right hand, so maybe he can still talk, but what if he's mute, what if he has trouble distinguishing dreams from reality? What do they do with the conversation then?

One of his eyes, on his lame side, seems blind, fixed in its socket, a broken, rigid camera, only capable of filming black.

'Come in,' ke Petersson says as the other nurse leaves the room. One corner of his mouth droops when he talks, but it doesn't seem to affect his speech.

'You can sit over there.'

By the wall is a worn green sofa. Brown curtains cover the window, shutting out the season.

It's uncomfortable, and Malin looks at the framed photographs on the table beside ke Petersson, the woman, young and beautiful, then older with eyes weary from life.

'Eva. Taken by rheumatism. She died of an allergic reaction to the cortisone when she was forty-five. She took all that she had in the house, must have hoped her allergy to the medicine had gone.'

Jerry.

Your mum. So she died. How old would you have been then? Ten? Fifteen?

'That's when I stopped drinking,' ke Petersson says, and it's as if he wants to tell them his whole life story, relieved that somebody finally might want to hear it. 'I pulled myself together. Stopped working for the parks, got some training in computers. Got a job doing data-entry.'

'Sorry for your loss,' Zeke says.

'We would have preferred to wait,' Malin says. 'But . . .'

'He was my son,' ke Petersson says. 'But we didn't have much contact over the last twenty-five years.'

'You had a falling-out?' Malin asks.

'No, not even that. He just didn't want anything to do with me. I never understood why. After all, I stopped drinking when he was sixteen.'

Did you hurt him? Malin wonders. Was that why?

'Maybe I wasn't the best father in the world. But I never hit the lad. Nothing like that. I think he just wanted to get away from everything I stood for. I think he felt that way even when he was a child. He was better than me, to put it bluntly.'

'What was he like as a child?' Malin asks.

'Impossible to handle. Did crazy things, got into fights, but he was good at school. We lived in a rented flat in Berga, but he went to the nestad School with all the doctors' kids. And he was better than them.'

'What was he like towards you? And you to him?'

The words literally pour from ke Petersson.

'I worked a lot when he was a kid. A hell of a lot. That was when things were going well in the aviation industry.'

The old man twists in the bed, reaching for a glass from the bedside table and drinking the transparent liquid through a straw.

'Do you know if he had any enemies?'

Zeke's voice is soft, hopeful.

'I knew no more about his life than I read in the papers.'

'Do you know why he bought Skogs? Why he wanted to move back here?'

'No. I called him, but he hung up every time he heard it was me.'

'Anything that might have happened when you were still in touch?'

The old man seems to consider this, his pupils contracting, then he says: 'No. Of course he was an unusual person, the sort people used to notice, but nothing special ever happened. I really didn't know much about his life even back then. When he was at high school. Before he moved to Lund. He never used to tell me anything.'

'You're sure of that?' Malin asks. 'Try to remember.'

The old man closes his eyes and sits in silence.

'Could he have been homosexual?'

ke Petersson remains calm when he replies: 'I can't imagine that he was. I seem to remember him liking girls. When he was at high school there were several girls who used to phone the flat in the evenings.'

'What was Jerry like in high school, generally?'

'I don't know. He'd pretty much turned his back on us by then.'

'So Jerry moved to Lund?'

'Yes. But by then he'd broken off all contact.'

'What about before that?'

But ke Petersson doesn't answer her question, and says instead: 'I did my grieving for Jerry a long time ago. I knew he'd never come back to me, so I got all the sadness out of the way in advance, and now he's gone all I've got is confirmation of what I already felt. Strange, isn't it? My son is dead, murdered, and all I can do is revisit feelings I've already had.'

Malin can feel that her marinated brain isn't keeping her thoughts in order, and they wander off to Tenerife, to Mum and Dad on the balcony in the sun, the balcony she's only seen in pictures.

And pictures, black and white, emerge from her memory, she's very young and wandering around the room asking for her mum, but Mum isn't there, and she doesn't come home either, and she asks Dad where Mum's gone, but Dad doesn't answer, or does he?

Strange, Malin thinks. I always remember Mum as being there, yet somehow not. Maybe she wasn't even there?

Tove.

I'm not there. And she feels acutely sick, but manages to control the gag reflex.

Then she forces herself back to the present, and stares at the wall of the room. A shelf full of books. Literary fiction, by famous difficult authors: the sort Tove devours and that she can't stand.

'I started reading late in life,' ke Petersson says. 'When I needed something to believe in.'

Dad!

Dad, Dad, Dad!

What would I need you for? To raise my hand against?

You know why Mum took the cortisone, the pain in her body ended up as pain in her soul.

You dragged yourself up from that green sofa for your own sake, not mine, and what did you get up for? Sitting and programming the simplest sort of code, the only thing your pickled brain could handle.

I see you there in bed, your cramping stroke-paralysed half-body is like a physical embodiment of the muteness that always characterised your side of the family, those taciturn, useless men.

You tried to contact me, Dad. But I wouldn't take your calls. What would we have said to each other?

Would we have spent Christmases in Berga eating cheap sausages? Meatballs, Jansson's Temptation, pickled herring ad nauseam?

You stopped trying to contact me.

Certain doors have to be closed for others to open. That's just the way it is. But at the same time: is there anything more exciting than a locked door?

I had been hoping you'd get in touch when I moved back to the city. When I bought the castle. I could have had you driven out there, I could have shown you my home.

Someone else could have come too.

There's something tragic about you now, as you tell the nurse to angle the blinds so you can look out at the rain. You speak to her nicely, with a meekness you've learned to express perfectly.

You look out into the room.

One eye blind after the stroke.

You blink.

As if you can see something you could never see before.

Is it me you can see, Dad?

25.

The phone in her hand shaking. The living room of the flat dark, as if darkness could subdue her nerves.

I'm scared, nervous about calling my own daughter. I've spent two days being scared to talk to her. Is that really true?

The third ring cuts off. Crackling. Fragments of a voice.

'Tove? Is that you?'

'Mum!'

'I can hardly hear you, the line's really bad for some reason.'

'I can hear you.'

'Hang on, I'll go over to the living-room window, you know reception's a bit better there.'

'OK, Mum, go to the window.'

'There, can you hear me any better now?'

'I can hear you better now.'