“I hope not,” said Ringmar.

“Would you prefer to sleep here?”

“Who needs sleep?”

“You, by the looks of it.”

“It’s only young guys like you who need to be dropping off to sleep all the time,” said Ringmar. “But we can rent a video and while away the gloom of Christmas Eve in your living room.”

“Your choice,” said Winter.

“

Festen,” said Ringmar. “A hot film. It’s about a fath-”

“I know what it’s about, Bertil. Come off it, for Christ’s sake! Otherwise we’ll-”

“Maybe I’d better go into hiding right away,” said Ringmar. “Are you going to report me to the police?”

“Should I?” asked Winter.

“No.”

“Then I won’t.”

“Thank you.”

“Do we have Bergort?”

“No. I didn’t get around to-”

“Where is he?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Is there anybody in his office?”

“Yes, there are a few. But he never showed up.”

“At home?”

“He hasn’t come back yet, according to his wife.”

“Damn it! I should never have let him slip through our fingers. But I told him not to be at home. I thought the girl wou-”

“You did the right thing, Erik. He would’ve taken off either way.”

“We’d better slam an APB on him right away.”

“But he’s not our kidnapper,” said Ringmar.

“He’s been abusing his daughter,” said Winter. “That’s enough to set the police on him as far as I’m concerned. We’ll have to see about the other business.”

The coffee room was quiet; they were the only ones there. Winter could see the day turning outside. A big spruce fir on a hill toward Lunden had been decorated and was glittering in the distance. He thought of Halders and his children. What were they doing now? Was Halders capable of boiling a ham, coating it with egg and bread crumbs, and roasting it for the right length of time?

“Something else has come up,” said Ringmar, putting two steaming mugs of coffee down on the table.

“Oh yes?” Winter blew at his machine-made coffee, which smelled awful but would do him some good nevertheless.

“Beier’s forensic boys got the results of the analyses of the boys’ wounds, and established a few other things.”

They had taped the injured students’ clothes and vacuumed their shoes, which was standard practice after violent crimes.

The children’s clothes had been carefully scrutinized in the same way, and the technicians had found dust and hair that could have come from anywhere until they had something to compare them with.

“They found some kind of clay,” said Ringmar.

“Clay?”

“There are traces of the same kind of mud on the students’ shoes,” said Ringmar. “And one of them-Stillman, I think-had it on his pants as well.”

“When did you hear about this?”

“An hour ago. Beier isn’t there, but a new officer came down to tell us. Strömkvist or something. I have-”

“And they’ve been working on this today?”

“They’re working overtime on the kiddies’ clothes, but the other stuff was sitting around doing nothing, as he put it. They had to put it on hold when the Waggoner thing happened, and the manslaughter out at Kortedala, and they just came back to it.”

“Anything else?”

“No. The rest is up to us. For the time being.”

“Mud. There’s mud everywhere. Gothenburg is full of mud. The town is built on clay, for Christ’s sake!”

“I know,” said Ringmar.

“It could be the mud outside the student dorms at Olofshöjd.”

“I know.”

“Have they started comparing?”

“Yes, but they can only do one thing at a time. The other-”

“There’s a quicker way,” said Winter.

“Oh yeah?”

“The mud out at Georg Smedsberg’s place.”

“You mean…”

“Bertil, Bertil. They were all there! There’s the connection! Gustav Smedsberg and Aryan Kaite were there, we know that. Why couldn’t the others have been there too?”

“Why haven’t they mentioned it, then?”

“For the same reason that Kaite didn’t mention it. Or lied about it. Or tried to keep quiet.”

“What is there to lie about?” said Ringmar. “What happened out there?”

“Precisely.”

“Why did they all go there together?”

“Precisely.”

“Did they witness something?”

“Precisely.”

“Are they being threatened?”

“Precisely.”

“Is that why they’re keeping quiet?”

“Precisely.”

“Were the assaults a warning?”

“Precisely.”

“Somebody will have to drive out there and do some digging,” said Ringmar.

“Precisely,” said Winter.

“What is this?” said Aneta Djanali, who was standing in the doorway of the coffee room.

39

“NOW LISTEN, MICKE. I HAVE TO GO OUT FOR A BIT. CAN YOU BE a good boy and behave yourself till I get back?”

The boy’s eyes opened then closed again, but he didn’t know if the boy had heard, or understood.

“I want you to nod if you understand what I say.”

The boy seemed to be asleep, didn’t nod. He could hear him breathing. He’d checked carefully to make sure that the scarf wasn’t covering the boy’s nose. If it was, he wouldn’t have been able to breathe!

The boy had said “hurt” when he untied the scarf some time ago, and he tried to find out where it was hurting but that was hard. He wasn’t a doctor. The boy must have been hurt even before he’d decided to look after him. Seeing as nobody else was. His mother, or whoever she was, hadn’t been taking care of him.

“It’s the best I can do.”

“Hurts,” the boy had said.

“It’ll pass.”

“Want to go home.”

What should he say to that?

“Want to go home,” the boy had said again.

“And I want you not to shout.”

The boy mumbled something he couldn’t hear.

He’d told the boy about himself. Things he’d never told anybody else before.

He’d adjusted the boy’s arms, which seemed to be lying awkwardly behind him. There were no marks from the string he’d used to tie him with, of course not. He’d only done that because he thought the boy needed to rest, he’d been running around too much. He needed some rest, as simple as that.

Micke was being well taken care of here.

He’d shown him the ceiling, the stars on one side and the blue sky and the sun on the other.

“I painted that myself,” he said. “Can you see? No clouds!”

It was his sky, and now it was the boy’s as well. They had lain side by side, looking up at the heavens. Sometimes it was night and sometimes it was day.

“When I come back you’ll get your Christmas present,” he told the boy, who was lying nicely now after the adjustments. “I haven’t forgotten. Did you think I’d forget?”

Winter, Ringmar, and Aneta Djanali were watching the video recordings, over and over again. The children looked so small, smaller than any of them had remembered, and the police officers looked like giants. It sometimes seems almost threatening, Winter thought. It’s not easy.

Ellen Sköld’s face was in the picture:

“Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa,” she said, and pirouetted like a ballerina.

“Do you mean your papa? Your daddy?” asked Djanali.

The girl shook her head and said: “ Pa-pa-pa-pa!”

“Did the mister say that he was your dad?”

She shook her head again.

“We-we-we-we,” she said.

Djanali looked at the camera, as if hoping for help.

“This is the part I was thinking of,” she said, nodding toward the picture of herself. She turned to Winter. “She says that over and over again.”

“Co-co-co-co,” Ellen’s voice came through the speakers.

Winter said nothing, continued watching and listening. Ellen told how some mister had said bad words on the radio. It was obvious she objected to that.

Winter came to the same conclusion as Djanali: The man hadn’t heard the bad words. But he’d had the radio on.