THE TURMOIL WAS so strong she was breaking apart, and combined with ten minutes of standing still and waiting, it was quite simply impossible. So to endure it, Britt-Marie walked two full turns around the Kronoberg police complex in the falling evening darkness, alongside something she’d never seen before—all the buildings had been encapsulated behind the sort of blue-and-white barrier tape that the police usually put up away from the police station. The entrance on Bergs Street looked exactly like the entrances via Polhems Street and Kungsholms Street and Police Station Park. The entire police operation was a single big crime scene. Even the underground had been blocked off and the buses diverted. She had gotten the same version from a couple of the many curious onlookers gathered side by side with journalists and photographers. Some kind of rather large crime had been committed inside the police station itself. Someone had even whispered excitedly that there was information about the largest theft in Swedish history.

After the second lap, she stopped at the low stone wall forming the boundary with the courthouse. She had an appointment to meet there with the young policewoman who had first picked up Leo and turned her whole house upside down, and later showed her a photo of the man in Leo’s car at the hospital—a workplace that should have been off limits. Elisa. An unusual first name, but a pretty one.

And there she was, coming out of the entrance to the police station. She lifted the thin plastic tape, walked under it, and zigzagged through the pack of onlookers.

“I only have a couple of minutes, unfortunately. As you can see, it’s a little chaotic in there.”

Britt-Marie nodded and smiled as best she could while she tried to find a comfortable position. Just as she hadn’t been able to stand still, it was also impossible for her to let her hands hang loose. So she secured them by crossing them over the upper part of her winter coat.

“Vincent called me. He’s my youngest son. I think you’ve also met him? He was upset. A little scared. He said he’d been contacted by a police officer.”

Elisa turned toward the group of onlookers. Someone who had tried to go over the barriers was turned back, politely but firmly.

“Excuse me, I had to. . . . What did you say, Britt-Marie? Had he been contacted by police? By us?”

“Yes. That was what he said. Do you know anything about that?”

“No. I’ve met your son Vincent on only one occasion, and that was yesterday at his place of work. He seemed calm then. A police officer? Did he or she say what it was about?”

“Only that it had something to do with Leo. And that he was urged to accompany a police officer—the same one who investigated the bank robberies before the prison sentence.”

Elisa was forced to engage with the increasingly vocal crowd again, assisting the two deployed security guards in a discussion with the photographers who had pushed their way to the front. And while Britt-Marie stood there at a distance waiting for her reply, she turned over what she had actually heard herself say just now.

A police officer demanding that Vincent do the one thing he didn’t want to—take part in an investigation of his brother.

“I apologize again, Britt-Marie. It’s starting to resemble the atmosphere of a riot over there. Reporters demanding answers because the editors who sent them are demanding answers. A crime inside the police station is evidently tantalizing. But now I’m back.”

Vincent, who decided never again to commit crimes, never again to have anything to do with the police.

“And as for your question, Britt-Marie, about your son Vincent, unfortunately I can’t help you. I have absolutely no knowledge about him right now. But I promise to look into it right away.”

Nevertheless, she simply knew: Vincent had been drawn into exactly what he feared.

And he had been right—this did not feel good at all.