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reading glasses.
    “Her name is Sophie Brinkmann, a qualified nurse, widow, one son — Albert, fifteen years old. She goes to work, comes home from work, she cooks. That’s pretty much all we know right now.”
    Gunilla took off her glasses and looked up.
    “Eva, you look into her personal life, see if you can dig up friends, enemies, lovers … anything.”
    She turned to Lars. “Lars, drop Hector for now, and concentrate on the nurse.”
    Lars nodded, took a sip from the cup.
    Gunilla smiled and looked around the group. “Sometimes God sends a little angel down to earth.”
    And with that the meeting was evidently over. Gunilla put her glasses back on and got back to work, Eva began typing on her computer, and Erik kept on reading the file as he tapped a blood-pressure tablet from a bottle of pills with a practiced hand.
    Lars wasn’t keeping up, he had a thousand and one questions. How did they want him to proceed? How much information did Gunilla want? How long should he work, evenings and nights? What did they do about overtime? What exactly did she want him to do? He didn’t like having to make that sort of decision himself. He wanted clear guidelines to follow. But Gunilla wasn’t that sort of boss, and he didn’t want to draw attention to his uncertainty. He headed for the door.
    “Lars. There are a few things I’d like you to take with you.”
    She pointed to a large box over by the wall. He went over and opened it. It contained an old Facit typewriter, a fax machine, a digital system camera, — a Nikon with matching lenses of various sizes, and a small wooden box. Lars opened the lid of the little box and saw eight pin-button microphones resting in molded foam rubber.
    “We’re surely not going to bug her?” he said, then immediately regretted it.
    “No, you just need to keep those handy. You can start using the camera right away, get photographs, keep an eye on her. We need to gather as much information as we can, as quickly as possible. Write up your reports on the typewriter and fax them to me. The fax is encrypted, you can just plug it into your normal phone socket at home.”
    Lars looked at the equipment, and Gunilla saw the quizzical look on his face.
    “Everyone here writes their reports and evaluations on typewriters. We don’t leave any digital fingerprints anywhere, we don’t take any risks. Bear that in mind.”
    He looked her in the eye, gave a quick nod, then picked up the box and left the office.

     
    Leszek came walking toward him, unwilling to look Guzman in the eye.
    Adalberto Guzman, or Guzman el Bueno as he was sometimes known, had just emerged from the sea. There was a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice on a small table on the beach. A towel was folded over a chair, a dressing gown hanging over its back. He dried himself off, sat down, and drank the juice as he looked out across the sea.
    As a child he used to swim alongside his mother as she swam in the same water he had just climbed out of. Every morning they would float there together. The swim remained the same, but the view from the return leg had changed over the years. In the early 1960s, around the time when he met the love of his life — the Swedish tour guide, Pia — he had bought all the available land around the villa, flattened the other houses, and planted cypress trees and olive groves. Now he owned the water he swam in and the beaches he landed on.
    Guzman was seventy-three years old, a widower and father of two sons and a daughter. Over the past three decades he had donated vast sums to charity without having any business interest in them whatsoever. He had built up an organization that had made him a wealthy man. He was known for his generosity, for his concern for those who were less well off; he was a friend of the church and a regular celebrity guest on the local television cookery shows. He was Guzman el Bueno — Guzman the Good.
    Guzman gave Leszek a brief pat on the arm when they met. Leszek