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soles and banged his hip. He’d been on painkillers for a week after that.
    A sign of old age, he thought. Being afraid of falling over.
    He didn’t usually work weekends. And certainly not this early on a Sunday morning. But Inspector Anna-Maria Mella had telephoned the previous evening and told him about the dead woman who’d been found in an ark up on the marshes, and he’d asked for a briefing the following morning.
    The prosecution offices were located on the top floor of the police station. The chief prosecutor glanced guiltily at the stairs and pressed the button to call the lift.
    As he passed Rebecka Martinsson’s room he had the feeling for some reason that there was somebody in there. Instead of going into his office, he turned around, went back, knocked on the door and opened it.
    Rebecka Martinsson looked up from behind her desk.
    She must have heard me in the lift and the corridor, thought Alf Björnfot. But she doesn’t let on. Just sits there quiet as a mouse, hoping not to be discovered.
    He didn’t think she disliked him. And she wasn’t shy, even if she was a real lone wolf. She wanted to hide how hard she worked, he presumed.
    “It’s seven o’clock,” he said as he walked in, removed a pile of documents from the visitor’s chair, and sat down.
    “Hi there. Come on in. Have a seat.”
    “Okay, okay. We operate an open door policy here, you know. It’s Sunday morning. Have you moved in?”
    “Yes. Would you like a coffee? I’ve got a flask. Instead of the wastewater from the LKAB pelletizing plant that’s in the machine.”
    She poured him a mug.
    He’d thrown her straight into the job as special prosecutor. She wasn’t the type to start off gently, observing somebody else for weeks on end, and he’d realized that from day one. They’d gone to Gällivare, sixty miles to the south, where the rest of the district prosecutors were based. She had gone round politely saying hello to everybody, but had seemed restless and ill at ease.
    On the second day he’d dumped a pile of files on her desk.
    “Small beer,” he’d said. “File the prosecution and let the girls in the office do the processing. If you’re not sure of anything, you only have to ask.”
    He’d thought that would last her a week.
    The following day she’d asked for more work.
    Her work rate made her colleagues uneasy.
    The other prosecutors joked with her, asking if she was trying to put them out of a job. Behind her back they said she didn’t have a life, and in particular that she didn’t have a sex life.
    The women in the office were stressed out. They explained to their boss that the new woman couldn’t possibly expect them to keep up with processing the summons applications in all the cases she was raining down on them, they did actually have other things to do as well.
    “Like what?” Rebecka Martinsson had asked when the chief prosecutor explained the problem as delicately as he could. “Surfing the Net? Playing solitaire on the computer?”
    Then she’d held up her hand before he could open his mouth to reply.
    “It’s okay. I’ll do it myself.”
    Alf Björnfot let her carry on working that way. She could be her own secretary.
    “It’ll work out fine,” he said to the office manager. “You won’t have to come up to Kiruna so often.”
    The office manager didn’t think it was fine at all. It was difficult to regard oneself as indispensable when Rebecka Martinsson seemed to be managing perfectly well without a secretary. She took her revenge by dumping three criminal court sessions a week on Rebecka Martinsson. Two would have been too many.
    Rebecka Martinsson responded by not complaining.
    Chief Prosecutor Alf Björnfot didn’t like conflict. He knew it was the secretaries, led by the office manager, who ruled his district. He appreciated the fact that Rebecka Martinsson didn’t moan, and found more and more reasons to work in Kiruna rather than Gällivare.
    He turned his cup around. It was