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immediately, he should have done it already, but had waited on purpose, he wanted to know that the delivery was secure first.
    The alarm will be activated in forty seconds.
    He locked the front door of Hoffmann Security AB and closed the wrought-iron gate. A security firm. That was how the organisation worked. That was how all branches of the Eastern European mafia worked. Piet Hoffmann remembered his visit to St Petersburg a year ago, a city with eight hundred security firms, established by ex-KGB men and intelligence agents, different fronts for the same business.
    He was halfway down the stairs when one of his two phones rang.
    The mobile phone that only one person knew about.
    ‘Wait a minute.’
    He had parked the car just down Vasagatan. He opened the door and got in, then carried on the conversation without the risk of being overheard.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘You need my help.’
    ‘I needed it yesterday.’
    ‘I’ve booked a return flight and will be back in Stockholm tomorrow. Meet you at number five at eleven. And I think you should make a trip yourself, before then. For the sake of your credibility.’

The gaping holes in the dead man’s head seemed even larger from a distance.
     
    Ewert Grens had followed Nils Krantz into the kitchen, but turned round again after a while to look at the man who was lying by an overturned chair and had
one
entrance wound in his right temple and
two
exit wounds in his left. He had been investigating murders for as long as the man on the floor had been alive and had learnt one truth – each death is unique, with its own story, its own sequence of events, its own consequences. Every time he was faced with something he had not seen before, and he knew even before he looked into the empty eyes that they were looking in a direction that he couldn’t follow.
    He wondered where this particular death had ended, what these eyes had seen and were looking towards.
    ‘Do you want to know or not?’
    Krantz had been squatting on the kitchen floor for a bit too long.
    ‘Otherwise I’ve got plenty else to be getting on with.’
    His hand was close to a crack in the marble floor. Ewert Grens nodded, I’m listening.
    ‘That spot there, can you see it?’
    Grens looked at something that was whitish with uneven edges.
    ‘Bits of stomach lining. And it’s definitely no more than twelve hours old. There are several similar spots in this area.’
    The forensic scientist drew a circle with his hand in the air around himself.
    ‘All with the same content. Food remains and bile. But also something far more interesting. Bits of rubber.’
    When Grens looked closer, he could see the white spots with uneven edges in at least three places.
    ‘The rubber is partly corroded, probably by stomach acids.’
    Krantz looked up.
    ‘And traces of rubber in vomit, we know what that means.’
    Ewert Grens gave a loud sigh.
    Rubber meant human containers. Human containers meant drugs. A dead man in connection with a delivery meant a drugs-related murder. And a drugs-related murder always meant investigation and lots of hours, lots of resources.
    ‘A mule, a swallower who’s delivered the goods right here in the kitchen.’
    He turned towards the sitting room.
    ‘And him? What do we know about him?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Nothing?’
    ‘Not yet. You have to have something to do, Grens.’
    Ewert Grens went back into the sitting room and over to the man who no longer existed, watched as two men took hold of his arms and legs, as they lifted him and put him into a black body bag, as they pulled up the zip and put the body bag on a metal stretcher trolley that they only just managed to push down the narrow hall.

He left Vasagatan and then got caught in a traffic jam by Slussen. It was nearly five o’clock and he should have been at the kindergarten an hour ago.
     
    Piet Hoffmann sat in the car and desperately tried to fend off the stress and heat and irritation caused by the afternoon traffic, which he could do