"You're not doing yourself any favors."

Her voice got louder.

"Living with grief is one thing. But you can't regulate it. You're not living with grief, you're living for it. You're holding on to it, hiding behind it. Don't you understand, Superintendent Grens? What you're frightened of has already happened."

He looked at the dark window, the sun reflecting an older man who didn't know what to say.

"You have to let go. You have to move on. Without the routine." "I miss her so much."

Susann went back up the steps, grabbed the handle of the terrace door and was about to shut it when she stopped halfway, and shouted: "I never want to see you here again."

It was a beautiful flat on the fourth floor of vastmannagatan 79. Three spacious rooms in an old building, high-ceilinged, polished wooden floors, and full of light, with windows that faced out over Vanadisvagen as well.

Piet Hoffmann was in the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took out yet another carton of milk.

He looked at the man crouching on the floor with his face over a red plastic bowl. Some little shit from Warsaw: petty thief, junkie, spots, bad teeth, clothes he'd been wearing for too long. He kicked him in the side with the hard toe of his shoe and the evil-smelling prick toppled over and finally threw up. White milk and small bits of brown rubber on his trousers and the shiny kitchen floor, some kind of marble.

He had to drink more. Napij sir kurwa. And he had to throw up more.

Piet Hoffmann kicked him again, but not so hard this time. The brown rubber around each capsule was to protect his stomach from the ten grams of amphetamine and he didn't want to risk even a single gram ending up somewhere it shouldn't. The fetid man at his feet was one of fifteen prepped mules who in the course of the night and morning had carried in two thousand grams each from winoujcie, onboard M/S Wawel, then by train from Ystad, without knowing about the fourteen others who had also entered the country and were now being emptied at various places in Stockholm,