“How the hell can they tell?” someone asked from the middle of the room.

“Say that again?”

“How can they be certain that it was a tripod?”

“They aren’t certain, as we just pointed out,” Winter said. “But the lab is in the process of eliminating everything else.”

“So the bastard recorded the whole thing.” The inspector looked around the room from his spot by the door.

“That’s just speculation,” Winter said.

“What we do know is that there are marks from a tripod base in the dried blood,” Ringmar said.

“Can they tell when the marks were left there?” Bergenhem asked.

“What?” Djanali asked.

“Did he put a tripod there before or afterward?”

“Excellent question,” Ringmar said, “and I just received the answer.”

“Which is?”

“They think someone put it there before the murder.”

“In other words, the blood is from later on,” Bergenhem said.

No one spoke.

“So he was making a movie,” Djanali said. She stood up, then walked out of the room and through the corridor to the bathroom. She leaned over the sink for a long time. Where are all the guys? she wondered. Isn’t all this making anyone else sick to their stomach?

Winter had a lot to tell Karin and Lasse Malmström, but at first he just sat there with his hands in theirs. Nothing in here has a life of its own any longer, he thought. The grief has taken over and the shadows have crawled out from their hiding places.

“There’s nothing worse than outliving your own child,” Lasse said.

Winter got up and crossed the hallway to the kitchen on the left. He hadn’t been there for years, though he had been a frequent guest at one time. The days fly by like wild horses across the plains, he thought, trying three cupboards before he found the jar of instant coffee. He filled the pot with water and plugged it into the socket by the sink. Carefully measuring the powder and milk into three cups, he poured the boiling water. He found a tray in a compartment designed for a pastry board and put the cups on it.