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Lars started working with them. He didn’t seem to judge Lars in any way at all, just took him as he was. That wasn’t his usual experience.
    Erik brushed the tobacco from his hands, looked Lars in the eye and nodded, then reached for a Danish pastry from a plate on the desk.
    “All right?” he rumbled.
    “All right?” Lars whispered.
    “Well, shit,” Erik said.
    “Yes, you could say that.” Lars replied, sitting down on the next chair.
    “Your call cheered her up.”
    Erik took a bite of the Danish, opened an abstract that was on his lap, and started to read.
    “Sorry, just have to read this.”
    “Of course,” Lars said, getting up a bit too quickly.
    Erik went on chewing behind his beard. “No, stay, for God’s sake.”
    “No, no,” Lars said, and went away with a somewhat forced steadiness in his walk.
    Lars hated his insecurity, always had. He had a sort of innate sense of awkwardness that seemed to govern everything he did in life. It had now grown into him in some unjust way. He felt it in the way he moved his body, in the whole of his being. From the outside he ought to have been attractive — his fair hair, ice-blue eyes, relatively chiseled facial features — but his insecurity overshadowed all that. In a picture taken from the right angle he could look reasonably OK, but in person he just looked awkward.
    Lars went over to the nearest of the room’s three large movable notice boards. He did that sometimes when he came into the office, mostly to avoid having to stand in a corner looking stupid. He could kill time this way.
    The Guzman board was covered with a mass of photographs and findings from the investigation. He stared for a while at photocopies of passports, birth certificates and documents from the Spanish authorities, looking at photographs of Aron Geisler and Hector Guzman fastened to the right-hand side. Below Hector’s there were photographs of his brother and sister, Eduardo and Inez, as well as an old picture from the late ’70s of their mother, Pia, originally from Flemingsberg. She was pretty, blond. She looked like she was straight out of a shampoo ad Lars had seen at the cinema when he was young.
    A red line connected Hector to two other black-and-white photographs on the left-hand side of the board. Two men that Lars didn’t recognize. One was a suntanned elderly gentleman with thin, slicked-back white hair — Adalberto Guzman, Hector’s father. The second picture was an enlarged passport photograph of a man with short hair and hollow eyes — Leszek Smialy, Adalberto Guzman’s bodyguard.
    Lars read extracts from the summary of Smialy below the picture. Leszek Smialy had been in the security forces in Poland during the communist era. He’d had a number of different bodyguard jobs since the fall of the Soviet Union. Probably started working for Adalberto Guzman in the summer of 2001.
    Lars moved on to Aron Geisler, and read the scant information about him. He attended the Östra Real Secondary School in Stockholm in the 1970s, was a member of Östermalm Chess Society in 1979. He spent three years doing military service in Israel during the ’80s. … He joined the Foreign Legion and had been part of the team that was first into Kuwait during the first Gulf War. His parents lived in Stockholm until 1989, when they moved to Haifa. Aron Geisler spent parts of the 1990s in French Guyana. There were large gaps in the timeline.
    He backed away from the notice board, trying to take in the big picture but understanding none of it. So instead he went to get himself a cup of coffee from the kitchen, pressing the buttons for sugar and milk, and a pale brown sludge trickled into a cup. When he came back into the room Gunilla hung up the phone. She raised her voice.
    “Today at 12:08 Aron Geisler went and picked up the nurse and drove her to a lunch restaurant, Trasten, in Vasastan, where she spent an hour and twenty minutes having lunch with Hector Guzman.”
    Gunilla put on her