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“I have bad news,” he said. “Berglund isn’t doing so well.”

Lindell saw his hesitation. She wanted everything to be fine with Berglund, and did not want to hear anything else.

“He has a brain tumor.”

“No!” Lindell exclaimed. “That’s not true!”

“They’ve done one of those scans,” Ottosson said, and proceeded with an account of what he knew.

He kept speaking somewhat disjointedly because the alternative was silence. Lindell listened, and the tears started to run down her cheeks. She mechanically wiped them away. Ottosson finished.

“What happens now?”

“He has an operation on Monday,” Ottosson said.

“Have you talked to him? How is he taking it?”

Ottosson nodded.

“You know how he is. He said to say hello.”

The thoughts surrounding the case, which for several minutes had filled her with optimism and a desire to act, suddenly appeared meaningless. Berglund was her favorite, her mentor, and her walking encyclopedia regarding policework and a general knowledge of Uppsala. Everything would seem meaningless if Berglund was no longer part of their unit.

“Berglund,” Lindell mumbled, and the tears started to flow again.

“We’ll have to hope for the best,” Ottosson said.

She saw that he wanted to say something comforting, as he was always prepared to do, but a brain tumor was a disease of such gravity that not even Ottosson could find words of encouragement.

Once Ottosson had left Lindell’s office, with some reluctance, she remained at her desk, reflective but distracted from all policework. The whole time she saw Berglund before her, his cunning smile, his laughter and the eagerness he could display when he saw interest and understanding in the person he was talking to. She caught herself already regarding him as dead and buried.

It took an hour before she got anything done. She called Beatrice and asked if she could bring in Konrad Rosenberg the following morning.

Haver returned shortly after three. Lindell let him talk, lacking the energy to jump in and tell him about Berglund. He would find out in due course. She remembered a conversation from the lunchroom recently when Berglund had talked about “Sture with the hat” and Rosenberg. Haver’s tone then had been superior, bordering on condescension.

Finally, he left to go down to the garage and join the technicians in examining Armas’s car, and Lindell was happy to be left alone.

Her peace did not last long, however. Sammy Nilsson walked in without knocking and she was on the verge of blasting him for his annoying habit, but then immediately noticed from his expression that he had something important to tell her.

“An escape from the Norrtälje prison this morning,” he started, in his usual abbreviated way. “Four men got out, with armed threats and hostage-taking.”

Lindell stared at him. A break-out in Norrtälje only indirectly involved law enforcement in Uppsala, and was above all a matter for the patrol units and criminal information service.

“One of the guys is of interest,” Nilsson went on. “He’s Mexican.”

Lindell became attentive.

“His name is Patricio Alavez and he was sentenced for illegal trafficking, that is to say, drugs.”

“Cocaine?”

“Yes,” Sammy Nilsson said smugly.

What a day, Lindell thought. Absolutely nothing one week, and then the information starts to rain down on us.

“I heard Johansson, you know that lug of a guy from Storvreta, talk about it down at the communications headquarters. When he said Mexico, my ears perked up.”

“Any traces? Is the hostage—”

“As if swallowed up by the earth. There is some information on a car, most likely an Audi, that drove through Kårsta at high speed, but it hasn’t yielded anything so far.”

“Mexico,” Lindell said. “We’re going to have to take this fucking nice and easy.”

Sammy Nilsson looked at her, at first with surprise, then amusement. Lindell cursed very infrequently.

“I am calm,” he said. “I’m fucking calm.”

Like Lindell, he sensed that they were closing in. She continued her line of reasoning,