Whining.

Stop whining. No birthright gives anyone a lifetime's right to anything.

To this day, the article annoys him, and he regrets giving in to his vanity, his desire to send a message to the area that he was back. To recreate something that never existed: that was what he imagined he was doing.

How much damage have the Fgelsjo family done to people around here, though? How many peasants and tenant farmers and wage-slaves have had to endure their bailiff's whip? How many people have been trampled underfoot by the Fgelsjos' assumption that they're better than everyone else?

Petersson hasn't taken on any employees, instead he contracts people whenever anything needs doing, and he's careful to make sure he pays them well and treats them decently.

And the story of the moat around the castle. That it was built in the early nineteenth century, long after anyone in this country had any need of a moat. That one of the counts got it into his head that he wanted a moat, and commandeered a load of Russian prisoners-of-war from von Platen's work on the Gota Canal and worked them until they dropped, a lot of them dying of exhaustion. It was said that they interred the bodies in the walls of the moat when they lined it with stone, that they shut those Russian souls in for all eternity for the sake of a meaningless moat.

But sometimes it feels a bit isolated at the castle. And for the first time in his life he has felt that he could do with a friend. The security of having another living creature around him, someone who would take his side no matter what happened, who would sound the alarm if there was any danger approaching. And a dog was useful for hunting.

Is that something up ahead on the road? Howie? Back so soon. Impossible. Completely impossible.

A stag?

A deer.

No.

The rain is pouring down now, but inside the oil-smelling warmth of the Range Rover the world seems very agreeable.

Then the castle appears out of the fog, its three storeys of grey stone seeming to force their way out of the earth, the leaning walls straining towards the grey sky, as if they thought they should be in charge up there. And the light from the swaying green lanterns he has had installed along the moat. He loves the brightness they give.

Is that someone standing on the castle steps?

The tenant farmers he's going hunting with aren't due until later on, and they've never been on time yet.

He accelerates.

He feels with his hand beside him for the dog, but the warm fur isn't there.

Of course.

Petersson wants to get there quickly, wants to hear the gravel of the drive crunch under the Range Rover's tyres. Yes, there is someone on the steps.

The outline of a figure. Hazy through the fog. Unless it's an animal?

The castle ghosts?

The vengeful spirits of the Russian soldiers?

Count Erik paying him a visit with his cloak and scythe?

He's ten metres away from the black shape now.

Who is it? A woman? You?

Can it really be that person again? Certainly persistent, if it is.

He stops the car.

Blows the horn.

The black figure on the steps moves silently towards him.

6.

Grey.

The morning light is grey, but it still manages to cut right into Malin's eyes. The light is gentle, like a blunt knife found at the back of a kitchen drawer of a deceased and distant relative. She looks up, out through the living-room window. The clouds are clustered tightly in different layers in front of the sun, and she can feel how her skin is swollen over swollen flesh, and she tries to look around, but keeps having to close her eyes, to give her reluctant brain a rest and muffle its angry throbbing with darkness.

Her body is in a heap on the parquet floor, the radiator by her head warmer now than yesterday evening, and she can hear the water gurgling through the pipes.

An almost empty bottle of tequila beside her, the lid half screwed on, and she looks out at the flat.

Grey.

The whole of my world is grey, Malin thinks. More nuances of grey than my brain can comprehend, from the dark, leaden grey under the sofa to the almost dirty white of the walls.

And who's that looking in through the window, whose face is that peering through the fog? The contours of her guilty conscience. Nausea. How the hell can I behave like this? A hand raised in anger.

I stink. I want to turn my face inside out so I don't have to look at myself in the mirror.

How the hell am I going to get up from here?

I want to call them, Janne and Tove, but what would I say?

That I love them?

That it's raining?

That I regret what I did?

'Zacharias! Zacharias!'

His wife Gunilla is calling from down in the kitchen with her sharp telephone-ring voice. What does she want now?

'Martin scored two goals last night,' she calls.

Other women have a different voice.

Zacharias 'Zeke' Martinsson, detective inspector with the Linkoping Police, twists his body out of bed. Gets up, feeling that the damp in the room has made his body unnaturally stiff. Not much light is creeping past the edges of the black blind, so he knows the weather outside must still be atrocious, a perfect day for staying indoors, fix a few things that need doing around the house.

Martin.

He got an NHL contract in the end. After his success at the World Championships in Moscow they were throwing money at his agent, and six months ago he moved out to Vancouver.

Rich.

And famous.

'If you want any money, Dad, for a holiday or a new summerhouse, or to come out and visit, just say. Linus is growing fast, you must want to see him?'

Twelve thousand kronor.

That's how much the cheapest flights to Vancouver cost.

Each.

A hefty chunk of a detective's salary.

He's eight months old now, the boy, my grandchild. I want to see him. But getting Martin to pay for the tickets?

Never.

All those millions that the lad's earning just for entertaining a few exhausted uneducated souls. Sometimes it disgusts Zeke, just as ice hockey's affected macho bullshit always has, the way the players and coaches and fans all think they're so tough. But what do they know about real roughness, real danger, and the demands that makes of you? Have any of those prima donnas in their oversized padded shorts got what it takes if things really kick off? Sundin? Forsberg? Not a chance.

'Zeke, they're showing the goals on 4. Hurry up.'

Gunilla has done the whole ice hockey thing. All the ferrying around. Cheering him on, while he couldn't get past his dislike of the game and would rather sing with the Da Capo choir instead.

He pulls on his underpants, feeling them stretch over his thighs and balls. Standing in the darkness of the room he rubs his hand over his shaved head. The two days of stubble is sharp against his hand, but not enough for him to need to shave.

Goal.

My son.

And then Zeke smiles, against his will, the lad's coping with those prima donnas pretty well. But rush downstairs?

Never.

She's not sleeping by my side. This bed is an ocean of lost opportunities.

Police Chief Karim Akbar would like to be able to put his arm around his wife, but she isn't there, he's been rejected in favour of someone else. But maybe it's better this way? For the past few years he hasn't dared approach her, scared of getting burned by her refusal.

She was always tired.

Tired after working double shifts as a social worker, when half her colleagues had emigrated to Norway to work for twice as much money for two thirds of their old hours.

There's something I'm not seeing, Karim had often thought. But what? He had turned the feeling into an abstract problem instead of grabbing it and trying to work out what it meant or what the consequences might be. He had reflected upon how two people can spend their whole lives living side by side without ever understanding each other, and that the feeling of emptiness that both destroys you and surrounds you in that sort of relationship must be similar to what his father felt when he arrived in Sweden as an engineer, but failed to find either a job or a place in society. His father had ended up hanging from a noose made with a nylon tie in a flat in Nacksta up in Sundsvall.

Sometimes Karim has been struck by the idea that she wanted to get out. That she wanted a divorce. But if that was the case, then why didn't she say so? He was a sufficiently enlightened man not to claim any right of ownership.

But he hadn't managed to pursue the thought through to its conclusion, hadn't summoned up the energy to ask her.

And then she left. Took their nine-year-old son and moved in with another bastard social worker in Malmo.

She dared. But he knows she was scared, maybe still is.

But there's no need.

I'd never be like my compatriots, the brother and father we caught a month or so ago. They make me sick.

Divorce.

A better word for loneliness and confusion. He's tried to take refuge in work, in his new book, looking at issues of integration from an entirely new perspective, but it's slow-going. Instead he has tried to come up with activities to keep their son amused when he visits.

An every-third-weekend dad. She wanted sole custody and he gave in. It wouldn't have suited his rota at work to be a single parent every other week. And it was geographically impossible.

Bajran is with her and the other man this weekend.

In September they spent his birthday in Stockholm, and his son went with him to Gotrich where he got some new suits, and he even let Bajran choose a couple of ties.

The suits are made of fine, soft wool. Cashmere. An extravagance that an upstart police chief like him can indulge himself with. That and a Mercedes.

He pulls the covers tighter around him, hearing the rain clatter on the windowsill and thinking how much he wants to move to a flat in the city, closer to everything. Lambohov is too reminiscent of Nacksta and Sundsvall.

But of course things could be worse. And Karim sees Borje Svard's face before him, the detective's bold twisted moustache. He's on sick leave at the moment: Anna, his wife, has MS and needs round-the-clock care, help with her breathing, the illness has hit the nerves controlling the muscles around her lungs.

'She might have six months,' Borje said when he applied for leave so he could be her carer.

'Take all the time you need to look after your wife,' Karim replied. 'There'll always be a job for you here.'

And Malin Fors. Something's going to crack there, Karim thinks. But can I do anything about it? She drinks too much, but, God knows, we need her in the department.

Sven Sjoman, superintendent and head of the investigative unit of Linkoping Police's Violent Crime Division, likes to think that he's coaxing the innermost secrets out of wood: its beauty, and the functional, attractive shape that lives within it.

It's an absurdly romantic notion, of course, but if having woodwork as a hobby isn't romantic, it can still be full of love.

The lathe rumbles. The sawdust sprays up onto his blue T-shirt with the logo of the Berg Lumberyard.

Sven's workshop, in a soundproof room in the basement of his house in Valla, smells of fresh wood-shavings, of varnish and polish, of sweat.

The hour he spends down here each morning is the best but also the loneliest hour of the day.

He's never liked loneliness.

Prefers the company of other people.