As you grow older you search for simplicity. I’m getting older. I’ll soon be forty. That’s old, relatively speaking. Maybe I’m not a simple person, but I can learn, still. Or perhaps I’ve always been a simple soul. Angela has noticed that. That’s why she’s picked me out of ten thousand others.

He put the fourth disc into the CD player and selected the tenth track, his favorite all this last month, or at least ever since the decision was made. The decision. I’m happy with you in my arms, I’m happy with you in my heart, happy when I taste your kiss, I’m happy in love like this. The simple life. Angela had understood. Maybe he would find happiness.

The ballad oozed through the room as he got undressed, happy, baby, come the dark, and suddenly he was in the shower thinking of nothing. He could hear the music through the water, and then the sound of a key as Angela let herself in.

Lars Bergenhem drove over Älvsborg Bridge. The car was rocking in the wind. He was off duty, and when he came to the tunnel he wondered what the hell he was doing there. In the tunnel. In the car. He could be sitting at home, watching his two-year-old daughter as she slept. That’s what he used to do. Ada would sleep, and he would watch. He could be watching Martina cleaning up the kitchen after Ada ’s evening meal. He could be doing the cleaning up himself.

It had started the way it always did. A word neither of them understood. After Ada had fallen asleep it was so quiet that he didn’t have the strength to try to find words that wouldn’t make everything worse. He was used to investigations, but this was too much for him. He was a detective, but he wasn’t a detective of love. Didn’t that come from some song or other? “Detective of love?” Elvis Costello? “Watching the Detectives.”

He turned northward when he came to Frölunda Torg, heading back. A drive he’d done before, but not for a long time.