Margit was staring at the house as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. Thomas, who had known what to expect, grinned at her.

The house was bright green.

In the middle of the idyllic archipelago, where virtually every single house was painted Falu red, someone had decided to paint the whole place bright green. Apart from the white eaves and steps, every last piece of timber was nauseatingly green. Without the eaves and steps you could easily have imagined you were standing in front of a giant marzipan cake. Only the rose was missing.

Margit looked at Thomas, who merely gave a resigned shake of his head.

“To each his own. It’s looked like this for a long time.”

“But why on earth would anyone even think of doing that? In a place like this,” Margit said in disbelief.

“Perhaps they thought it looked nice. Or else they’re color blind.”

“Don’t you have to get permission to do something like this? Surely it must be against building regulations?”

Thomas shrugged. “I expect the council tried, but they can’t be bothered to follow up. People get away with quite a lot out here. You can’t imagine how many houses have gone up without anybody paying much attention to building regulations.”

Margit reached out and touched the wall, as if she weren’t sure if the color were real or if it might come off on her hand. “Good grief. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A “Welcome” sign was hanging on the front door; fortunately it was painted in more traditional colors—blue and white. One of the windows was ajar, but no one answered when they knocked. They walked around the back of the house and saw that the doors leading to the patio were closed. There were no signs of life.

An enormous wooden deck ran along the back wall. It was dominated by a huge teak table and an unusually large gas barbecue on wheels. A short distance away several striped sun loungers were arranged, while through the wide panorama window they could see a dining table and chairs and a plasma TV on the wall. Bang & Olufsen speakers stood in each corner.

“You could certainly relax and recuperate here on a summer evening,” Margit said.

She looked at the hot tub, from which a white plastic pipe ran into the sea. Presumably seawater was used to fill it. A wooden tray with three glasses and a bottle of whisky was floating on the surface. Evidently the owner wasn’t worried about strangers wandering in and drinking his booze.

The expression on Margit’s face was a mixture of fascination and horror as she contemplated the comfortable lifestyle. “I wonder how you come to afford something like this. It doesn’t look particularly cheap. Either the owner must have won the lottery, or he must have his own business at the very least. What do you think?”

“I think he runs his own business. I imagine quite a lot of this stuff has been billed to the company,” Thomas said. “Of course they’ll go down as essential materials rather than a hot tub for his place in the country.”

Margit gave a wry smile.

“Of course it depends on your conscience,” Thomas said with a wink. “But I can’t imagine someone’s normal income paid for all this.”

Margit looked around. There wasn’t a soul in sight. “What now?” she asked. “There’s no one home, and it could be a while before the Fahléns turn up.”

“If they’re out at sea they’ll probably be back before too long; if they were going to stay away overnight, they’d have taken the Bayliner. They probably left in a smaller boat.” He pointed to some ropes lying on the jetty that appeared to belong to another boat. “One you can use to lay nets,” he said, mostly to himself.

“Do you want to wait?”

“We can come back later. I don’t really want to call and warn them in advance. It’s better to turn up unannounced with questions like this.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s get something to eat, then we can see Nora. I don’t see the point of giving up now that we’re here.”

He set off toward the gate, then turned and smiled at Margit.

“And you’ll get to meet my godson, too.”

CHAPTER 50

“Thomas!” Simon came barreling through the gate and hurled himself into Thomas’s arms. “Did you bring me a present?” He looked expectantly at Thomas, his eyes bright.

“Simon, you don’t ask people for presents!” Nora gave him a reproachful look. “It’s good to see Thomas with or without a present.”

Thomas introduced Margit, and they gratefully accepted the offer of a cold beer—preferably low alcohol, as they were still on duty.

They sat in the garden, enjoying the scent of the roses drifting across from Signe’s garden next door. The swallows were flying high, a sure sign of good weather.

“How’s the investigation going?” Henrik asked as he poured their drinks.

Nora placed a bowl of potato chips on the table; Simon immediately grabbed a handful before she could stop him. Then he beamed, showing the gap in his bottom teeth. It was impossible not to smile back.

Thomas turned to Margit, who grimaced.

“It depends on how you look at things,” Thomas said. “We know what killed Kicki Berggren, but we don’t know how or why.”

“So what killed her?” Henrik asked.

“Rat poison.” It sounded more dramatic than Thomas had intended, and the effect was immediate. Both Nora and Henrik stared at him in surprise.

“I didn’t think you could kill a person with rat poison,” Henrik said.

“You can kill most people with virtually every kind of poison, if they ingest enough of it,” Thomas said.

Henrik frowned. “If I remember correctly from med school, there are a number of notorious cases where people have tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison, or warfarin, but they haven’t been very successful. They’ve just caused themselves a great deal of pain. You have to take enormous quantities in order for it to be fatal.”

“You’re right,” said Thomas. “According to forensics the rat poison alone wouldn’t have been enough, but she suffered a blow to the head, which caused a fatal hemorrhage.”

“That explains it,” Henrik said. “If there was a bleed and the clotting mechanism was impaired by the warfarin, then it would have been nearly impossible to save her. It wouldn’t have taken many hours for her to die in that case.” He took a few chips and went on. “Did she have any other symptoms to indicate that her blood wasn’t clotting?”

“She’d also suffered a blow to the temple that apparently looked much worse than it should have.”

Henrik nodded. “That fits with the effects one would expect. When the blood isn’t clotting, any bleeding becomes much worse than usual, and it can look pretty serious.”

Nora tried to save the bowl of chips from Simon’s repeated onslaughts. “Rat poison,” she said. “That’s an unusual method.”

Henrik nodded. “On the other hand, it’s very easy to get. If you don’t have access to medical resources where you can get the more common poisons, then perhaps you might think it would work, if you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you ask most people I think they’d expect it to do the job.”

Thomas was all ears. “What do you mean by common poisons?” he asked, leaning forward.

“Arsenic, for example, or digitalis, which comes from ordinary foxgloves. A lot of people with heart problems take digitalis, but if you take too much, it’s fatal. The monks used it in the old days when they wanted to do away with someone secretly because the substance was so difficult to trace.” Henrik paused. He took another handful of chips, then continued, “Morphine works in the same way. A small amount eases pain; an overdose will kill. There are many pharmaceutical drugs that become a deadly poison if the wrong dosage is used.”