FABIAN WAS BACK in the abyss. In the deep darkness, where it made no difference if he closed or opened his eyes. There was no light anywhere. True, he’d managed to get hold of Tuvesson, who had promised to contact a good lawyer, but that was all. Now, the only thing he could hope for was that Theodor had just been temporarily out of sorts after his first twenty-four hours behind bars and that somehow it would all work out and be behind them before he knew it.
He could only guess at how Sonja was feeling. The silence between them had been unbroken during their return journey across the sound. When they got back, he’d asked if she was okay with him going back to work, and she’d replied that he could do whatever he needed to silence his doubts.
As usual, she understood him better than he understood himself. No matter how fervently he wished it weren’t so, work was all that could take his mind off things enough to make the anxiety subside.
But right now, being at work was like dancing through a minefield; every step could be fatal. With the GPS tracker under his car, he risked drawing Molander’s suspicion regardless of what he got up to. Suspicion that would hardly be dispelled when he noticed his car had been parked outside his home on Pålsjögatan for almost two hours before he visited Theodor in prison.
Molander had already prodded him with insinuations about how absent he’d been from their investigations, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. His own secret investigation was now in such an intense phase he found it to be virtually impossible to sit across from Molander in meetings and pretend that nothing was going on.
But he had to pretend. Pretend that his focus was on the case they were all working on and that everything was right with the team.
That was why he parked his car on Kärngränden, outside the building where the Landgrens lived, took the stairs up and entered the flat, even though it was half past eight at night.
It could have been anyone’s home. A completely unremarkable home, characterized primarily by that inescapable chaos that accompanies all families with young children. A home where the children were finally asleep in their beds after toothbrushing, toilet visits and stories. Where parents were cleaning up after dinner so they could then curl up on the sofa with a cup of tea and watch the news.
But the plastic sheets covering the hallway floor all the way to the door where colourful wooden letters spelled out the name Ester revealed that this wasn’t a home like any other.
According to Tuvesson, the parents were not in a fit state to be interviewed and it was doubtful whether there was any reason to put them through it. The perpetrator had already been identified and now it was all about securing forensic evidence to tie him to the scene.
But that was the easy part. How they were supposed to figure out where he was going to strike next, before it was once again too late, was a lot harder.
When he reached the closed bedroom door, he paused to compose himself for a few seconds before opening it, ready to face Molander and return his gaze unflinchingly.
The problem was that there was no sign of Molander in the slightly untidy room.
‘Hi, where’s Molander?’ he asked the two forensic assistants in white protective suits, who were collecting samples and taking pictures.
‘Good question. Definitely not here, though,’ one of them said, using tweezers to drop a hair into a small evidence bag.
‘Okay. Did he just leave?’
‘No, I wouldn’t say that. He took off more or less straight after we got here this afternoon. Right, Fredde?’ The assistant turned to his colleague, who was taking pictures of the unmade bed where there was a dried-in ring on the sheet.
‘Yes, he said something about needing to get back to the lab to sort out something, and that we should get started without him.’
‘Okay.’ It wasn’t like Molander to hand over an entire crime scene investigation to his assistants, but he supposed there was a lot of forensic stuff to get on with. ‘So, have you found anything?’
‘I guess. The usual.’ The assistant placed the evidence bag in a carrying case. ‘Some fingerprints and hairs of various descriptions. But I can’t tell you if they’re relevant until we’ve had them analysed.’
‘And do you have a working theory for how it happened?’
‘Not beyond the fact that he must have drowned her, and he could have used practically anything to do that. But my guess is that he did it here, at the edge of the bed. If you look closely, there’s a round indentation here.’ He squatted down and turned his torch on the rug. ‘I think it’s from some kind of basin or bowl he filled with water.’
‘We found signs of water seeping in under the bed, too,’ the assistant with the camera added. ‘It made visible tracks through the dust.’
Fabian wasn’t listening any more. He’d spotted something else entirely, flashing from among the jumble of markers, loose sheets of paper and fuse bead pegboards. Something that brought to mind the CCTV footage from Ica, where something had flashed just like that in the killer’s hand.
He walked over to the table, picked up the object with a handkerchief and studied it. Unlike every dice he’d used as a child, playing Monopoly, Ludo or Yahtzee, this wasn’t made of wood or plastic but rather of brushed metal. ‘Has this been sitting on this table the whole time?’
‘No,’ said the assistant with the camera. ‘I found it under the bed, but I had to move it to take pictures of the water tracks in the dust.’
Chance. Could it be that simple?
Six sides. Six possible outcomes.