IT WAS A QUIET NIGHT AT THE EMERGENCY DESK, AND IT FELT LIKE the calm before the storm. But there won’t be any storm tonight, thought Bengt Josefsson, the duty officer, gazing out at the trees that were also still, like they are before an autumn gale. But it’s too late for autumn gales now, he thought. Soon it’ll be Christmas. And after that maybe we won’t be around anymore. They’re talking about closing down this station, and Redbergsplatsen will be handed back to the enemy.

The telephone rang.

“Police, Örgryte-Härlanda, Josefsson.”

“Ah, yes. Well. Er, good evening. Is this the police?”

“Yes.”

“I called the police switchboard and they said they’d connect me to a station close to Olskroken. Er, that’s where we live.”

“You’ve got the right number,” said Josefsson. “How can I help you?”

“Well, er, I don’t really know what to say.”

Josefsson waited, pen at the ready. A colleague dropped something hard on the floor in the locker room at the end of the corridor.

“Just tell me what it’s about,” he said. “Who am I talking to?”

She gave her name and he wrote it down. Berit Skarin.

“It’s about my little boy,” she said. “He, er, I don’t know… He told us tonight, if we understood him correctly, er, that he’s been sitting in a car with a ‘mister,’ as he put it.”

Kalle Skarin was four, and when he got back home from the nursery school he’d had a soft-cheese sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate-he’d mixed the cocoa and sugar and a splash of cream himself, and then Mom added the hot milk.

Shortly afterward he’d said he’d been sitting in a car.

A car?

A car. Big car, with a radio. Radio talked and played music.