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smashing the ice that had formed overnight over a hole in the ice. The grief welling up. The eyes wrecked by weeping. No children to share the grief.
    Sven-Erik did have a child, a daughter who lived in Luleå, but he recognized that terrible bloody loneliness. He was divorced and lived alone. Although of course he had the cat, and nobody had murdered his wife and hung her from a chain.
    Every conversation and every letter from the assorted lunatics confessing to the crime had been checked out. But of course nothing had come of it. Just pathetic scraps of humanity who’d been temporarily fired up by the newspaper headlines.
    Because there had certainly been headlines. The television and the papers had gone completely mad. Mildred Nilsson had been murdered right in the middle of the summer when the news more or less dries up, besides which it was less than two years since another religious leader had been murdered in Kiruna—Viktor Strandgård, a leading figure in the church of The Source of All Our Strength. There had been a good deal of speculation about similarities in the two cases, despite the fact that the person who had murdered Viktor Strandgård was dead. But that was the angle they took all the same: a man of the church, a woman of the church. Both found brutally murdered in their respective churches. Priests and pastors were interviewed in the national press. Did they feel threatened? Were they thinking of moving? Was fiery red Kiruna a dangerous place to live if you were a priest? The reporters standing in for the summer traveled up and examined the police’s work. They were young and hungry and wouldn’t be fobbed off with “for reasons connected with the investigation…no comment at this stage.” The press had kept up a stubborn interest for two weeks.
    “It’s getting so you have to turn your damned shoes over and shake them before you put them on,” Sven-Erik had said to the chief of police. “Just in case some bloody journalist comes tumbling out with his sting at the ready.”
    But as the police weren’t getting anywhere, the news teams had eventually left the town. Two people who had been crushed to death at a festival took over the headlines.
    The police had worked on the copycat theory all summer. Someone had been inspired by the murder of Viktor Strandgård. At first the national police had been very reluctant to do a profile of the perpetrator. There was no question of dealing with a serial killer, as far as anyone knew. And it wasn’t at all certain that this was a copycat murder. But the similarities with the murder of Viktor Strandgård and the demands in the media had finally brought a psychiatrist from the national police profiling team up to Kiruna, interrupting her holiday to do so.
    She’d had a meeting with the Kiruna police one morning at the beginning of July. There had been a dozen or so sitting and sweating in the conference room. They couldn’t risk anyone outside hearing the discussion, so the windows were kept shut.
    The psychiatrist was a woman in her forties. What struck Sven-Erik was the way she talked about lunatics, mass murderers and serial killers with such serenity and such understanding, almost with love. When she cited real-life examples she often said “that poor man” or “we had a young lad who…” or “luckily for him he was caught and convicted.” And she talked about a man who’d been in a secure psychiatric unit for years, and had then been well enough to be released and was now on the right medication, living an orderly life, working part-time for a firm of decorators, and had a dog.
    “I can’t emphasize strongly enough,” she’d said, “that it’s up to the police to decide which theory you wish to work on. If the murderer is a copycat I can give you a plausible picture of him, but it’s by no means certain.”
    She’d given a PowerPoint presentation and encouraged them to interrupt if they had questions.
    “A man. Aged between fifteen