The boy in that other room wasn’t that much older than Elsa.

“What happened next?” Winter asked.

“They sent out a car, and then another one,” said Ringmar.

“Where to?” Winter asked.

“First to the Plitka playground at Slottskogen Park. Then, well…”

“Grasping in the dark,” said Winter.

“They were six miles apart,” said Ringmar.

Six miles between Plitka and the place where he was eventually found.

“Who found him?”

“The classic setup. A dog, and then the dog’s owner.”

“Where is he? The dog’s owner, I mean.”

“At home.”

Winter nodded.

“So four hours had passed,” he said.

“Just over.”

“How much do we know about the injuries?” he asked.

Ringmar made a gesture that suggested everything and nothing. It was as if he could barely raise his hand. The guitars had stopped resounding in the corridor. Who the hell was playing rock music in the hospital?

“There are obvious injuries to the boy’s torso,” said Ringmar. “And his face. Nothing under, er, below his waist.”

“I saw his face,” said Winter.

“I saw one of his arms,” said Ringmar.

“Does anything surprise you anymore?” Winter asked, prying himself away from the wall and massaging his forehead again.

“There are questions you can’t answer with a yes or a no,” said Ringmar.

“Where were the parents when the alarm was raised?”

“The man was at work-he has lots of colleagues-and his wife was drinking coffee with a friend.”

And I was drinking wine in a restaurant, Winter thought. A brief moment of calm and warmth in a protected corner of life.

“He must have had a car,” he said. “Don’t you think? Driving through the rush hour traffic when everybody else is staring straight ahead and looking forward to getting home.”

“He parked inside the park,” said Ringmar. “Or close by.” He scratched his chin and Winter could hear the rasp from the day-long stubble. “The crime-scene boys are out there now.”

“Good luck to them,” said Winter, without conviction. A million tire tracks one on top of the other in a parking lot. With some luck a soft and wet patch of grass; otherwise there would be no chance.

We’ll have to check up on the usual suspects, he thought. To start with. Either we find him there, or we don’t. This could be a long journey.

“I’ll have to talk to the nursery-school staff as well,” he said. “How many of them are there now? Or rather, how few?”

But first, the parents. They were sitting in an office that Winter recognized. It was Angela’s. She’d arranged for them to be settled there before going home. There was normally a photograph of himself with Elsa on her desk, but she had removed it before Paul and Barbara Waggoner arrived, bringing their desperation in with them. Good thinking. Angela was sensible.

The man was standing, the woman seated. They radiated a sort of restrained restlessness that Winter knew all too well from all his other meetings with the relatives of victims, who were also victims, of course. A restlessness that was a sort of tangible desire to reach back in time and preserve the past forever. Of course. The victims of crimes were always searching for a life in the past. Perhaps they were not the only ones. He himself would have liked to remain in Bistro 1965, an hour ago, which could easily have been in another era in another world. The protected corner.

Take me to that other place. Strictly speaking Bertil didn’t need to call him, but Bertil knew that Winter would want to be there. Bertil’s intuition on this occasion had scared Winter, but his colleague was never wrong in such matters: This was going to be a long, dark road and Winter needed to be there from the very beginning. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could explain to others. He noticed that Ringmar was standing beside the woman, who was sitting on the little visitor’s sofa. It’s something between Bertil and me. He rubbed his forehead again. My headache has gone.

“Will he be able to see again?” asked Barbara without looking up.

Winter didn’t respond, nor did Ringmar. We are not doctors, Winter thought. Take one look at us and you’ll see that.

“They are not doctors, Barbara.” The words came out more like an exhalation. “We’ve just finished speaking to the doctor.” Winter detected a slight but unmistakable foreign accent, possibly English. His name suggested that.

“He couldn’t say anything about that for sure,” she said, as if she were transferring her hope to the new specialists who had just entered the room.

“Mrs. Waggoner,” said Winter, and she looked up. Winter introduced himself and Ringmar. “May we ask you a few questions?” He looked at her husband, who nodded.

“How could anyone do that to a child?” she said.

Winter couldn’t answer that. He asked the hardest question first: Why?

“Isn’t that your job? Isn’t that what you are supposed to find out?” Paul asked, with the same intonation as before, an aggressiveness lacking in energy. Winter knew it could become much more forceful if he didn’t play his cards right. He must be an Englishman, he thought.

“We’re going to do everything we can to find whoever did this, you can count on it,” he said.

“What kind of a fucking monster did this?!” Yes, Englishman.

“We’ll-”

“Don’t you have a register of scumbags like this? All you have to do is look him up?” His accent had suddenly become more marked.

“We’ll do that,” said Winter.

“Why are you sitting here, then?”

“We have to ask some questions about Simon,” said Winter. “It will-”

“Questions? We can’t say any more than what you’ve seen for yourself.”

“Paul,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Please calm down.”

Paul looked at her, then at Winter, and then looked away.

“Ask your questions, then,” he said.

Winter asked about times and routines and clothes. He asked if Simon had had anything with him. Things he couldn’t talk to the boy himself about.

“What do you mean, anything with him?”

“Have you noticed anything missing? Something he had before but doesn’t have now?” Winter asked.

“A toy or something similar,” Ringmar said. “A stuffed animal. A charm, anything at all that he used to have with him or on him.”

“A keepsake?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I understand why,” said Barbara, who was sitting up straight now. Winter could hear a slight accent when she spoke now, very slight. He wondered if they spoke English when they were at home together, or Swedish, or both for Simon’s sake.

“Oh yes?” her husband said.

“If he’s lost something,” she said. “Don’t you see? If he… if the one that… if he took something from Simon.”

“Was there anything to take?” Winter asked.

“We haven’t thought about that,” said Paul. “We haven’t checked it.”

“Checked what?” asked Winter.

“His watch,” said Mrs. Waggoner, raising her hand to her mouth. “He never took it off.” She looked at her husband. “I didn’t see it.”

“It’s blue,” said the father, looking at his wife.

“A kid’s watch,” said the mother.

Ringmar left the room.

“Would you like me to fix some coffee or something?” Winter asked. “Tea?”

“We’ve already had some, thank you,” said Barbara.

“Is this a common occurrence?” asked Paul. “Does this happen to many children?”

Winter didn’t know if his question referred to the city of Gothenburg, or to Sweden, or to child abuse in general, or the type of crime they were up against now. There were various possible answers. One was that it was common for children to be abused by adults. Children and young people. It was most common within families. Nearly always within families, he thought, and looked at the Waggoners, who seemed to be about thirty, or possibly even younger, aged by the sharp lines and hollows that marked their faces in their distress. Fathers and mothers beat their children. He’d come across a lot of children who’d been beaten by their parents. He’d been in many such homes and tried to hide the experience away in his memory until the next such occasion. Children who were handicapped for life. Some of them could no longer walk. Or see, he thought, thinking of little Simon lying in the ward with eyes that were no longer like they used to be.