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The bins in the boiler room mostly contained old smelly men’s clothes. Black beetles scurried around. Lindell tossed the clothes back and looked through the next bin, that seemed more promising. Here there were cables and cords, coupling boxes, and what looked like an old fuse box. She tried the strength of an old copper wire but it was too bendable to work well as a passkey.

While she searched, ever more desperately, she started to notice a pungent odor. She sniffed the pile of clothes. It smelled, but it was not the source of the odor, which was sharper, somewhat bittersweet. Deep down she knew what kind of smell it was. She didn’t want to know, but the police in her took over. It felt like a game from childhood, “hide the key” it was called, and it was one of the few games where the whole family participated. Her father had taken a childish delight in hiding things that his wife and Ann had to try to find. Sometimes it was fun, but often too hard. Her father triumphed, gave them hints, and spurred them on to continue searching.

She finally determined that the smell was coming from a recessed area next to the boiler. It had a surface area of a couple of square meters. Big pieces of wood were piled into a high pile. Lindell started to pull the wood away, at first carefully with the thought that she didn’t want to make any noise, then more violently. She threw the pieces of wood down behind her. The stench increased with every layer she uncovered.

Suddenly she reached black plastic. From what she could tell it was a garbage bag. The beam of light was growing weaker. A rat scrambled past and made her jump back. It wriggled in amongst the wood. She heard a rustling in there. If there was one rat there were usually more. She shivered. The flashlight went out but she managed to shake some life back into it.

On her guard against new surprises she stretched out, picked off more blocks of wood, and uncovered a larger area. Small pieces of plastic were gnawed through. She stretched out her left hand with trepidation. She felt the contours of a human body under the bag. It was a human hand. A human claw.

A new rat appeared. It was significantly larger and bolder than the first and it studied the intruder with sharp eyes. The tail was at least ten centimeters long and the fur was flecked with black. Lindell stared bewitched at the animal and slowly got to her feet.

What she had smelled was a corpse. She had sensed what she was going to find but the shock and the feeling of revulsion, above all when she thought about the rats’ activities, made her stare mutely at the woodpile and the black wrapping.

Her own situation—alone in a basement with a rotting, rat-gnawed corpse, with a crazy mass-murderer one floor up and the awareness of Laura Hindersten’s crimes and the fact that she was probably planning more murders—blocked her brain for a few moments. Laura’s ice cold words “Now you die” returned. Lindell heard them repeated and she turned around as if Laura was standing behind her.

She backed out of the wood storage area and went as far away from the corpse as possible. She walked into the wine cellar, turned off the flashlight, and sank down on the floor with her back to the wall. For a moment she was tempted to take out one of the bottles and have a drink, but reconsidered.

A thought came to her: if I make it out of here alive I’m going to confiscate all the wine in this house. She started fantasizing about a wine tasting evening with Charles, Görel, and her husband.

What time is it? she thought suddenly. Erik needs to be picked up from day care. It must be four, maybe five. She let out a sob. He was going to wonder where she was. The staff would be angry, then worried.

Did anyone actually know she was going to look up Laura? She had made the unforgivable mistake of not telling anyone she was coming here. This was her punishment for her lack of judgment, for not trusting her colleagues and keeping them in the dark regarding the photograph of Alice Hindersten.

She pulled herself up to her feet again