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to get up from here?
    I want to call them, Janne and Tove, but what would I say?
    That I love them?
    That it’s raining?
    That I regret what I did?
    ‘Zacharias! Zacharias!’
    His wife Gunilla is calling from down in the kitchen with her sharp telephone-ring voice. What does she want now?
    ‘Martin scored two goals last night,’ she calls.
    Other women have a different voice.
    Zacharias ‘Zeke’ Martinsson, detective inspector with the Linköping Police, twists his body out of bed. Gets up, feeling that the damp in the room has made his body unnaturally stiff. Not much light is creeping past the edges of the black blind, so he knows the weather outside must still be atrocious, a perfect day for staying indoors, fix a few things that need doing around the house.
    Martin.
    He got an NHL contract in the end. After his success at the World Championships in Moscow they were throwing money at his agent, and six months ago he moved out to Vancouver.
    Rich.
    And famous.
    ‘If you want any money, Dad, for a holiday or a new summerhouse, or to come out and visit, just say. Linus is growing fast, you must want to see him?’
    Twelve thousand kronor.
    That’s how much the cheapest flights to Vancouver cost.
    Each.
    A hefty chunk of a detective’s salary.
    He’s eight months old now, the boy, my grandchild. I want to see him. But getting Martin to pay for the tickets?
    Never.
    All those millions that the lad’s earning just for entertaining a few exhausted uneducated souls. Sometimes it disgusts Zeke, just as ice hockey’s affected macho bullshit always has, the way the players and coaches and fans all think they’re so tough. But what do they know about real roughness, real danger, and the demands that makes of you? Have any of those prima donnas in their oversized padded shorts got what it takes if things really kick off? Sundin? Forsberg? Not a chance.
    ‘Zeke, they’re showing the goals on 4. Hurry up.’
    Gunilla has done the whole ice hockey thing. All the ferrying around. Cheering him on, while he couldn’t get past his dislike of the game and would rather sing with the Da Capo choir instead.
    He pulls on his underpants, feeling them stretch over his thighs and balls. Standing in the darkness of the room he rubs his hand over his shaved head. The two days of stubble is sharp against his hand, but not enough for him to need to shave.
    Goal.
    My son.
    And then Zeke smiles, against his will, the lad’s coping with those prima donnas pretty well. But rush downstairs?
    Never.
    She’s not sleeping by my side. This bed is an ocean of lost opportunities.
    Police Chief Karim Akbar would like to be able to put his arm around his wife, but she isn’t there, he’s been rejected in favour of someone else. But maybe it’s better this way? For the past few years he hasn’t dared approach her, scared of getting burned by her refusal.
    She was always tired.
    Tired after working double shifts as a social worker, when half her colleagues had emigrated to Norway to work for twice as much money for two thirds of their old hours.
    There’s something I’m not seeing, Karim had often thought. But what? He had turned the feeling into an abstract problem instead of grabbing it and trying to work out what it meant or what the consequences might be. He had reflected upon how two people can spend their whole lives living side by side without ever understanding each other, and that the feeling of emptiness that both destroys you and surrounds you in that sort of relationship must be similar to what his father felt when he arrived in Sweden as an engineer, but failed to find either a job or a place in society. His father had ended up hanging from a noose made with a nylon tie in a flat in Nacksta up in Sundsvall.
    Sometimes Karim has been struck by the idea that she wanted to get out. That she wanted a divorce. But if that was the case, then why didn’t she say so? He was a sufficiently enlightened man not to claim any right of