His wife's name. His son's.

His former wife's name.

Any love is better than loneliness, he thinks.

Lovisa Segerberg is lying awake in her room at the Hotel du Nord. The walls are so thin that she can feel the damp and cold outside trying to find their way into the room, and she hears a goods train rumbling through the station just a couple of hundred metres away.

Gloomy. But not dark enough to sleep.

The linoleum floor, a thin mattress from Ikea, nothing but a shower in the shabby bathroom. But I don't need anything else, Lovisa thinks. She spoke to Patrik at eleven o'clock. He was still awake, up working, and he asked about the case she was working on, but she couldn't be bothered to explain, just told him she missed him, and that she didn't know how long she'd be staying in Linkoping.

Kiss, kiss.

Goodnight, darling, and she can feel him in the room in the same way that she felt him during their first night together. Warm and present and real. They're getting married next summer. Will have a wonderful life together. Not mess it all up like all the other poor bastards seem to. Like Malin Fors seems to have done, according to the talk at the station. She stank of alcohol today, stale drink, but no one seemed to care, or at least no one said or did anything if they did. But what do I know about what goes on behind the scenes?

What a gang, Lovisa thinks. Waldemar. The idiot. Sexist. But not really dangerous. And Sven Sjoman. The commanding officer every policeman dreams of having.

She looks up at the ceiling. Thinks: Patrik, where's your body now, where is whatever it is you are when we're not together?

Zeke has got up on his own.

It's still dark outside the windows of his detached house, and in the garden the trees and bushes resemble burned-out, prehistoric skeletons.

He sips his coffee.

Thinks about Malin.

This past year has taken its toll on her.

He thinks that he's going to have to keep an eye on her, that he probably can't do much more than that. Give her chewing-gum so the others don't notice the smell. Stop her from driving. He can see her alone in her flat with a bottle of tequila.

Maybe I ought to talk to Sven, Zeke thinks, he's thought about doing that before, but Malin would regard any conversation like that as a serious betrayal. She'd think he had gone behind her back if she ever found out about it, and maybe the trust between them would be gone for good.

But she's drinking way too damn much.

Her demons are snapping at her heels.

Your heels are bleeding, Malin, Zeke thinks, noting that it's started to rain again.

It's a long time since he gave up smoking. But this morning he really feels like having a cigarette.

He closes his eyes, Karin Johannison's body, her soft hard warm body is there. What the hell are we playing at really? And in the bedroom Gunilla lies sleeping. I love her, Zeke thinks. So much. Yet I'm still capable of lying to her face.

I have to go to the toilet and throw up afterwards. But I can do it. And I do.

Waldemar Ekenberg is standing on his terrace in the garden smoking.

The rain is pattering on the corrugated plastic roof, and dawn is slowly breaking over Mjolby, and the sky looks almost the same colour as the bruise on his cheek.

He told his wife what had happened. As usual when he talked about the rough side of the job she didn't get worried, just said: 'You never learn.'

In his thoughts he curses all the paperwork. He's still shocked at the amount of paper and documents one single person can produce in the course of a short lifetime. And he's just as fed up with the amounts of money all that paper-shuffling can produce.

Smoke thick in his lungs.

Where's the justice in a paper-shuffler like Petersson living in a castle, when ordinary, decent workers end up practically on the street when factories and workshops close down? Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in Swedish industry. What happens to the blues' false promises of solidarity then?

What's going to happen to them, the workers?

The less intelligent.

He stubs his cigarette out in the coffee tin half-filled of sand.

Thinks: What about me, what would I be doing if I wasn't a cop? Maybe I'd be a security guard at some supermarket, accused of using excessive force on a difficult customer.

'Walle! Walle!'

His old woman shouting indoors. Best see what she wants. Without her, I'd be nothing but my own stupid self.

Johan Jakobsson is lying stretched out in bed, his children on either side of him, having got home from their grandparents early yesterday evening.

His wife asleep alongside.

A blessed harvest, he thinks, listening to his wife's breathing. That's what his family is. He thinks of her, and the way they apologised to each other, the way they always do.

They're best friends, through thick and thin.

What's a good friend worth? he thinks.

As much as a family? As much as a father?

No. But almost.

30.

Monday, 27 October Early morning.

The world grey-blue like a newborn infant outside the windows of the open-plan office.

Sven Sjoman looks out over the empty chairs and desks, breathes in the smell of paper and lingering sweat. The light from the fluorescent tubes overhead merges with the grey light from outside. Sven thinks about how many detectives he has seen come and go through the course of his career. Malin is one of the best, possibly the best of them all. She understands about listening to the silent voices of an investigation, weaving together the choir of hunches and words into a clear truth.

But it's taking its toll on her.

The conversation with her husband, or ex-husband, yesterday. Janne. A decent fellow. He called again, worrying about her.

I'm worried as well, Sven thinks. But now I've finally had an idea about what I can do without her realising that I'm trying to help her. If she suspected, she'd be furious. Maybe refuse to go. But at least Janne thought it was an excellent idea.

Everything seems to affect Malin badly right now. Everything's on the surface, and gets scorched by the slightest touch.

Johan, Zeke, Borje, Waldemar.

Borje at home with his wife, the next attack of her MS will in all likelihood mean death.

It's taking its toll on Borje. But Borje doesn't seem to be affected by everything the way that Malin is. He seems to have an ability to take pleasure in what he has with his wife, in what he has had.

Waldemar. He's going to go mad in that room full of paper. But I can probably use his questionable talents. I'm not in favour of the way he conducts police business, his brutality, but not so stupid that I can't see the value of it at times. That's why I didn't veto his transfer from Mjolby. God knows where he got those latest bruises, but he doesn't complain, and if you work the way that Waldemar does, you have to take the knocks.

Petersson. Who knows what might be lurking under his unturned stones? Give people a whiff of money and they're capable of almost anything.

Sven pulls in his stomach, sighs, thinks about his brother, self-employed, when he was about to start another business, and how he guaranteed the loan himself and had to sell his house in Karlstad to repay the bank when the business went bankrupt.

Several years later his brother got rich when he sold his next company. Sven asked for his money back, and they were standing on the terrace of his brother's house, and his brother replied, with a blank look on his face: 'That was business, Sven. You took a gamble and you lost. Let's not get apples and pears mixed up now.'

Sven stayed to dinner, that evening.

But he hasn't spoken to his brother since then.

He opens the Correspondent on his desk. The speculation in the paper points in the same direction as their own. The Fgelsjos, Goldman. Business.

Money, fraternity.

Who could have got so angry, or upset, or disappointed with Jerry Petersson that he ended up in the castle moat, beaten to death and stabbed, among the walled-in prisoners-of-war?

The others look as tired as me, Malin thinks as she looks around at the detectives who have gathered for the first meeting of the week in the preliminary investigation into the murder of Jerry Petersson.

The time is 8.30.

Johan Jakobsson has dark rings under his eyes. Waldemar Ekenberg is ragged from smoking, Lovisa Segerberg looks as if she slept badly in her hotel; they probably have lousy beds in the Hotel du Nord down by the station. Sven Sjoman is the only one who looks alert. Karim Akbar is sitting listlessly at the end of the table, but his shiny grey wool suit is as well pressed as usual, and the pinkish-red tie has been chosen with care.

Silence has descended on the room. The sort of silence that can occur in a room full of detectives searching their minds for a sense of where to go next, waiting for something that is hidden to reveal itself before their eyes.

They've been through the Fgelsjos' lies about their finances, that Fredrik Fgelsjo had lost money on bad investments and had to sell up. And that they had come into an inheritance and tried to buy the estate back, but that Petersson had turned down the offer, in spite of it being a good deal. That Axel Fgelsjo had refused to let Malin and Zeke in, but that Katarina had spoken to them, and that Fredrik had spoken openly and admitted that he had gone out to see Petersson the evening before the murder, but claimed that nothing had happened apart from him confronting Petersson and demanding to be allowed to buy the castle back.

'If he was there the previous evening, he can't have killed Petersson then, Karin's reports says he died in the early hours of the morning and that the blow to the head killed him outright,' Sven said. 'From what we know about Petersson's last twenty-four hours, he doesn't seem to have met anyone apart from Fredrik Fgelsjo. He only made one call on his mobile, and that turned out to be to his cleaner. A Filipino woman with a solid alibi, and who hadn't been there for a week.'

'If Fredrik did kill him,' Malin said, 'then he must have gone back the next morning. But his wife has given him an alibi. But we've got no way of knowing, that could just be a married couple's alibi.'

'And the Filipino cleaner?' Waldemar asked. 'Could she have any crazy relatives?'

'Aronsson's spoken to her,' Sven said. 'She's clean as a whistle. Anyway, if that were the case, surely he'd have been robbed?'

Then they went through the rest of the case, but there wasn't much new to report.

'We've checked Petersson's emails,' Johan said. 'And we received the log of telephone calls from Telia late yesterday. Both his mobile and landline. But we haven't found anything unusual there, apart from the two calls from a phone-box out at Ikea.'

'Is that so unusual?' Karim asked.

'No, but they're the only calls where we don't know who made them, and of course pretty much everyone has a mobile these days.'

'Which phone-box was it?'

'One out in the car park,' Johan replied.

'Is it covered by any of the security cameras?'

'I'm afraid not, I checked. There's no camera there. And the calls were made several months ago, so there's next to no chance of finding any witnesses.'

Karim breaks the silence that has followed the run-through: 'Any tip-offs from the public?'

'It's been remarkably quiet,' Sven says. 'I thought we'd get loads of calls about the things Petersson got up to, but maybe he was just the sort who left satisfied customers and people behind.'

'Do people like that actually exist?' Zeke asks.

'No,' Waldemar says.

'And we haven't found the murder weapon,' Sven says.

'Where do we go from here?' Karim asks.

'Well, the team in Hades will keep digging, trying to find out why the company Jochen Goldman and Petersson ran between them wasn't more profitable,' Sven says. 'Malin and Zeke can try to talk to Axel Fgelsjo. Bring him in for questioning if he makes a fuss. After all, it isn't that incredible that someone in that family killed Petersson so they could buy back the castle from his estate.'

'Do you think they could have paid someone to do it?' Malin asks.

'Unlikely,' Sven says. 'But that did occur to me, even if there's no evidence to suggest it.'

Malin nods.

'Petersson's father stands to inherit everything,' she goes on. 'Unless some unknown child or a wife pops up abroad.'

'People have been killed for less,' Waldemar says, and in his voice Malin can hear a longing, but she can't grab hold of the feeling lurking at the back of Waldemar's wishes.

Just as well, she thinks, looking at his bruise, which has turned orange and yellow around the edges, like an autumn leaf.

Sven picks up the phone on the third ring.

Number unknown on the display, yet the call has come straight through to his phone, bypassing reception.

The open-plan office is noisy now. The morning calm has gone, and the place stinks of coffee.

Police officers in uniform and plain clothes hurrying back and forth, talking into headsets, looking busy, stressed.