“Do you know anybody who knows him?” asked Winter.

“Hey, what’s all this?” she protested. “I see you’re back at work again.” She looked at Winter, then turned to her father. “Sorry. It is serious. I didn’t mean to joke.”

“Well?” wondered Winter.

“I might know somebody who knows somebody who knows him. I don’t know.”

Vasaplatsen was quiet and deserted when Winter got out of the taxi. The streetlamps lit up the newspaper kiosk at the edge of Universitetsplatsen. A student of life, he thought as he punched the code to the front entrance.

There was a faint smell of tobacco in the elevator, a lingering aroma that could have come from him.

“You smell like alcohol,” said Angela when he bent down to kiss her as she lay in bed.

“Ödåkra Taffel Aquavit,” he said.

“I figured as much,” she said, turning over to face the wall. “You’re dropping off Elsa tomorrow morning. I have to get up by half past five.”

“I just looked in on her. Sleeping like a log.”

Angela muttered something.

“What did you say?”

“Just wait until tomorrow morning,” she said. “Early.”

He knew all about that. After six months’ paternity leave? He knew all there was to know about Elsa, and she knew all about him.

It had been a terrific time, maybe his best. There was a city out there that he hadn’t seen for years. The streets were the same, but he’d been able to view them at ground level for a change, in his own time, not needing to be on the lookout for anything more than the next café where they could pause for a while and he could sample some of that other life, real life.

When he went back to work after his paternity leave, he felt a sort of… hunger, a peculiar feeling, something he almost felt ashamed of. As if he were ready for battle again, ready for the war that could never be won but had to be fought well, regardless. That’s the way it was. If you chopped an arm off the beast, it promptly grew another one, but you just had to keep on chopping.