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Hermansson; she was doing the same.
    One hour and forty-five minutes since the alarm was raised, they still had plenty of time. The body hadn’t yet started to attract enough foreign particles to make a residue test worthless.
    Krantz opened his case and looked for a round tube of fingerprint lifting tape. He pressed the tape against the victim’s hand several times, in particular the area between the index finger and thumb. Then he went out into the kitchen, to the microscope that had been set up on the worktop, put the fingerprint lifting tape on the glass plate and studied it through the ocular.
    A few seconds passed.
    ‘No gunshot residue.’
    ‘As you thought.’
    ‘So the hand that was holding the gun didn’t fire it.’
    He turned around.
    ‘This is murder, Ewert.’

He put his left hand to his right shoulder and pulled at the leather strap until the pressure on his shoulders was released and he could hold the holster with one hand. He opened it and pulled out a Radom with a nine-millimetre calibre. He did a recoil operation, put the last bullet in the magazine, so that fourteen were in place.
     
    Piet Hoffmann stood still for a while, his breathing so loud he could hear himself.
    He was alone in the room and the flat that looked out over Vasagatan and Kungsbron. The last mule had taken the train south a couple of hours ago, and Mariusz and Jerzy had just started their car and headed off in the same direction.
    A long day, but it was still only the afternoon and he had to stay awake for hours yet.
    The gun cabinets stood on the floor behind the desk. Two identical cabinets, a couple of metres high, about a metre wide, a smaller shelf on top and two rifles on a considerably larger shelf below. He put the gun on the top shelf in the first cabinet, and the full magazine in the same place in the second.
    He walked through the rooms that had functioned as offices for Hoffmann Security AB for two years now. One of Wojtek Security International’s many branches. He had visited most of them several times, and the ones furthest north in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Oslo more often.
    The fireplace with its dark tiles and white frame was beautiful, the sort that he knew Zofia wanted at home. He fished up a handful of small dry twigs from the bottom of the wood basket and lit them, then waited until the larger, thicker logs that he placed on top started to burn before taking his clothes off. The jacket, trousers, shirt, underpants and socks were all eaten by the yellow flames. Next, a pile of Jerzy’s and Mariusz’s clothes. The flames were red and intense now, and he stood naked in front of the fire, enjoying the warmth until they died down sufficiently for him to close the bathroom door and shower away this awful day.
    A person had had half his head blown off.
    A person who probably had the same job as him, but had a less solid background.
    He turned on the shower and the hot water pummelled his skin, testing his pain threshold, but if he persevered, his body would eventually go numb and be filled with a strange calm.
    He’d been doing this for too long; he sometimes forgot who he was and it frightened him when his life as someone else encroached on his life as a husband and father, and day-to-day reality in a house in a neighbourhood where people cut their grass and weeded their flowerbeds.
    Hugo and Rasmus.
    He had promised to pick them up just after four. He turned off the water and took a clean towel from the shelf by the mirror. It was nearly half past four. He hurried back into the office, checked that the fire had died down, opened the wardrobe and picked out a white shirt, a grey jacket and worn jeans.
    You have sixty seconds to leave and lock the flat.
    He jumped and realised that he would never get used to the electronic voice that spoke to him from the coded lock on the front door, as soon as he had punched in the correct six digits.
    The alarm will be activated in fifty seconds.
    He should contact Warsaw