The doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it,” she shouted, getting to her feet.

Patrik was standing outside. He had blood all over his face, a dried-up rivulet under one eye.

“Patrik!” screamed Maria, from behind her mother.

“A man!?” Halders said. “Louise Valker told you about a man?” Why have you kept this to yourself? he thought. It could have cost lives!

“Once…” she said, then fell silent.

“Go on.”

Winter could feel the tension in his body, could see it in Halders. Per Elfvegren seemed to be paralyzed. His wife appeared to be calmer now. She’d been working her way toward this.

“She… she said they’d met a man a few times. That’s all, really…”

Halders stared at her. The penny dropped.

“It never occurred to me that it could have anything to do with…”

“Tell me exactly what she said.”

“I’ve already told you…”

“In what connection did it crop up?”

“I can’t really remember.” She looked at her husband. “But it was when we were alone.”

“What did she say?”

“That they’d been visited… a few times… by a man.”

“And?”

“I had the impression that he was… exciting.”

“How did they meet?”

“I don’t know…”

“Through an ad?”

“Yes, perhaps she did say that.” She seemed to be thinking. “Something about them having been lucky… yes, that they’d been lucky with their advertisements.”

“Had that man answered an ad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Had the man placed an ad?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Did you know him?”

“Certainly not.”

“Did Louise Valker say what he looked like?”

“No.”

“Nothing… personal about him?”

“Not a thing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No.”

“His clothes?”

“No. Nothing about that.”

“She just mentioned him, and that was all?”

“Yes…”

Winter heard a slight hesitation. Halders had heard it as well, waited.

49

Winter phoned Möllerström. The registrar answered after the first ring.

“Could you please get me the latest issue of Aktuell Rapport, Janne.”

“You mean the men’s magazine?”

“That’s what I said.”

Winter hung up and turned to the list of forty extras who were wearing police uniforms in the film based on the adventures of a detective chief inspector in Gothenburg. Why not an inspector’s? Halders wanted to know. You’ll be in it as well, Ringmar assured him. We’ll all be in it.

“Should we do that, then?” asked Ringmar, who was sitting opposite Winter. “Have you spoken to Sture?”

“He says we should go ahead if we think it’s worth the effort.”

“Forty people,” Ringmar said. “That means ten to fifteen officers tied up for perhaps a week. How long will we need per extra? An hour and a half? An hour? We’ll have to track them down, check their addresses, arrange a meeting, interrogate them.”

“And compare,” Winter said.

“That’s your job.”

“I can get ten officers,” Winter said. He lit a Corps. It was still reasonably light outside. The snow was still there. He looked Ringmar in the eye.

‘Are we heading in the right direction here… the police trail? The uniform trail?“

“I’m damned if I know, Erik.”

“Say what you think.”

Ringmar screwed up his eyes, rubbed his forehead, and produced a noise like sandpaper on rough timber. His features became more marked in the twilight, his wrinkles seemed deeper when the sun was reflected into the room from the buildings on the other side of the river. There wasn’t going to be any leave for Ringmar this February either. Perhaps when the grandchildren came. But the best time for skiing was already past.

“There has been talk of police officers-or police uniforms-a bit too often for us to simply ignore it,” he said in the end.

“I agree.”

“What Börjesson had to say about the record shop was most interesting.”

“I agree.”

“We’ve checked places where there are uniforms, but nobody has reported any missing.”

“No.”

“None at all.”

“No.”

“That only leaves the filmmakers.”

“I agree.”

“Perhaps it’s an omen.”

“A good omen?”

“Are there any good ones? I once saw a film called Omen. It wasn’t exactly teeming with benevolence.”

“There were several,” Winter said. “Parts one and two, et cetera.”

Ringmar rubbed his forehead again.

“I think we ought to get going on that.”

“Will you take charge, please?”

Ringmar agreed, took the list, and went to his own office in order to start organizing the work. A messenger arrived with an internal mail envelope and the secretary raised her eyes heavenward. The girl on the front cover was scantily dressed. A big headline in red and yellow explained the best way to get sex at work. Winter turned the pages until he came to the personal column with the subheading “Make It Quick.” There were a lot of ads. Several pictures of naked genitalia and faces with thick black censor lines over the eyes. Why not the other way around? he wondered.

At the end was a coupon for the text of an advertisement. The Valkers must have filled in one of these and posted it, he thought. Maybe the Elfvegrens as well. And the Martells.

Maybe somebody else.

What did you have to do?

He read on until he came to information about answers. Telephone replies, postal replies. They hadn’t asked the Elfvegrens about which type of ad it was. Or ads. Replies. That was careless and showed lack of knowledge and perhaps it was also creditable. Not even Halders had asked.

They had lists of all their telephone calls, so they could check.

They hadn’t found any filled-in ad coupons at the Valkers’ nor at the Martells‘. No ad texts, no replies.

Winter phoned the editorial office of Aktuell Rapport. A woman answered and he explained who he was.

“The coupons with the text for the ads are kept for three months,” she said.

“Does that mean that you have the addresses of all the people who’ve advertised over the last three months?” Winter asked.

“Yes. Generally speaking.”

“Generally speaking? What does that mean?”

“Sometimes we don’t manage to keep up with the shredding. There are so many of them…”

Shredding, he thought. That damn shredding. There should be a law against shredding. In order to assist police investigations into serious crimes.

“How long could they be saved in those circumstances, then?”

“Six months, perhaps. But that would be exceptional.”

“How?”

“What do you mean?”

“How are the addresses saved?”

“We keep the coupons people send in. We also have a computer record that we erase when the paper is shredded.”

‘Are they mainly home addresses?“

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have anonymous box numbers that a lot of people use?”

“No, we don’t allow that. When we did, the ads turned out to be… not serious enough.”

Winter didn’t dig any further into that.

“Can you see who replies?”

“No. The respondent puts the reply into an envelope, seals it, and writes the contact number of the advertisement on it. Then he or she puts that envelope in another envelope and sends it to us at return postage rates that include a handling charge. We then pass the replies on to the advertiser.”

“And the respondent has three months in which to react?”

“Yes.”

Winter thought that over. With a bit of luck the Valkers’ ad coupon might be in the records at the editorial office, or their home address confirming that they’d put in an advertisement. He would phone his colleagues in Stockholm, which was where the magazine’s editorial office was based.

They might also find a coupon from the Martells. Or the Elfvegrens. The Martells. He thought about the Martells again. They had been murdered less than three months ago.

If the Martells had advertised, they wouldn’t have received their replies yet. There could be replies being kept by the editorial staff. He recalled Erika Elfvegren’s story about “a man.”