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in their early teens fly past them on their bikes. Bathing gear on their parcel-racks.
    On their way to cool down. To the pool out at Glyttinge, maybe? Or Tinnis?
    Chatter and commotion. Summer holidays and something lurking behind a tree in the dark.

5
     
    We’re going swimming, swimming, swimming, you say, have you seen my armbands, Mum, have you seen my rubber ring, where’s the rubber ring? I don’t want to sink, Mum.
    I hear you.
    You’re above my darkness but I don’t know if you hear me, hear me calling: Mum, Mum, Dad, Dad, where are you, you have to come and you have to come and get me and who are all these people shouting about swimming, about rubber rings, about ice cream?
    But I felt the drops.
    They’re lingering. What do the drops smell of? They have a different smell from how water usually smells. Do they smell of iron? Animal waste?
    Your feet.
    I hear them trampling on me.
    Above.
    And I think I’m lying down, but maybe I’m the one swimming, maybe the moist darkness around me is water. It must be water, I like water.
    And now you’re playing.
    Where’s my ball, Mum?
    Shall I catch it for you? My arms can’t. They’re stuck by my sides and I try to move them, I try, but they seem stuck in whatever it is that surrounds me.
    But why are you trampling on me?
    I don’t want you to trample on me.
    Where am I?
    Where are you, Dad?
    I can swim, I can float, but I’m not getting anywhere.
    I can swim. But I can’t breathe.
    My room is closed.
     
    The nursery on the other side of the small park outside the crime team’s meeting room is closed for the summer. There are no children using the swings or the red-painted slide, no three-year-old hands digging in the dry sand of the sandpit.
    The heat is barren, the city in summer almost the same.
    Instead there are two decorators inside the nursery school’s windows. They’re both up ladders, bare-chested, and are rhythmically rolling pink paint onto one of the walls, much faster than it looks.
    Happy colours.
    Happy children.
    Malin looks around the meeting room. Pale-yellow, fabric-textured wallpaper, a greying whiteboard on the short wall by the door. They were issued with new chairs back in the spring. There was a manufacturing fault on the old ones, and the new ones, of curved wood with black vinyl seats, are astonishingly even more uncomfortable than the old ones, and in the heat the vinyl sticks damply to the cloth covering your buttocks. The police station’s air conditioning can’t cope with providing a tolerable temperature.
    The clock on the wall of the meeting room says 10.25. The morning meeting is severely delayed today because of the girl in the Horticultural Society Park.
    How hot is it now?
    Thirty-five degrees outside, thirty in here?
    Opposite Malin sits a suffering Sven Sjöman. The patches of sweat under the arms of his brown checked shirt are now spreading towards his gut, which has grown even larger during the spring and early summer.
    Be careful, Sven.
    Heart attacks are common in the heat. But you’re sensible enough to move slowly. I know that much. If you have one defining feature, it’s that you’re sensible. You’re fifty-five years old, you’ve been in the police for thirty-three of them, and you’ve taught me all I know about this job.
    Almost, anyway.
    But most of all you’ve taught me to believe that I’m well-suited to detective work.
    You’re the most talented officer I’ve ever worked with, Malin.
    Do you realise what words like that mean, Sven?
    Perhaps you do, otherwise you wouldn’t say them.
    Zeke next to her. Pearls of sweat under his nose and on his brow. Her own scalp feels damp, like it does after she’s been to the gym.
    ‘Well, we make up the sum total of the Crime Department’s investigative unit this summer,’ Sven says. ‘So it’s entirely up to the three of us to make sense of last night’s events and work out what happened to the girl who says her name is Josefin Davidsson. Something