“Don’t insult me.”

“When did you find the time?”

“In the early hours of yesterday. Just before two in the morning. And now it’s perfect.”

“Now it’s perfect,” she repeated. “All that’s missing is the schnapps, but we’re not allowed to have any of that, are we?”

“You are not allowed to have any of that,” he said. “I could indulge, but I’ll display my sympathy for your situation. For tonight, at least.”

“It’s quite usual for men to show their sympathy for their women in a situation like this.”

“Really?”

“Some of them even put on weight.”

“You can count me out on that score.”

Morelius felt stiff. He’d felt stiff before setting out for work, and it hadn’t gone away as a result of the routine workout before the upcoming night shift.

Afterward he sat on the bench in front of his locker, massaging his neck and looking at the pictures of naked women taped to the inside of Bartram’s locker door. They were fairly innocent pictures, cut out of some 1960s men’s magazine. Not the kind of thing that got printed nowadays. Bartram lived in the past. He sometimes claimed the pictures were of his wife, but he didn’t have a wife.

They were now in the last week of the six-week rotation. That meant an extra night shift this Friday followed by two more over the weekend. It was the last Friday of the month, payday He knew that people were already out celebrating the fact that their pockets were full. It was just eight o‘clock and the station was closed.

“A touch of a stiff neck, is it?” Bartram asked, who was fiddling with his pistol, checking the mechanism with an ease born of long experience. His SIG-Sauer still had the original wooden butt. Bartram sometimes went on about losing the Walther, which he considered a better weapon for the job, but not today. He was calm and serious, ready for the coming night and the coming weekend.