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lowered the backrest of the stroller, tucked his daughter in snugly with a blanket and began to rock the stroller quickly back and forth, back and forth. Aided by the rolling motion of the boat, it did the trick. She too fell asleep.
    Thomas applied the stroller brakes and made sure that his children were protected from the rain before going up to the railing to be embraced by the spray and the wind. A sudden and inexplicable sense of loss engulfed him. There was something here that he no longer had.
    It struck him that it was the sea water, the semi-salty water found in this part of the world. The way it felt, its characteristic scent.
    Something he had grown up with. The sea was a part of his frame of reference, it had always been there. Its pure transparent depths were not only a feature of Thomas’s childhood and the summer season, the sea had been a presence in Vaxholm as well, where he had lived until the age of thirty-two. That facet of his life had only slipped away during the past few years, and he had forgotten one of the cornerstones of his life.
    She isn’t worth it , he thought.
    And suddenly another thought struck him with full force: I regret it.
    Thomas gasped, never having allowed these feelings to surface before. The acknowledgement of his deceit tied his stomach up in knots, threatened to bring him down.
    He had betrayed Eleonor, his wife, all because of a fling with Annika Bengtzon. He had left his fine house, his home and his life to go and live in Stockholm, in Kungsholmen, in Annika’s ramshackle apartment building that was scheduled to be torn down, where there was no hot water. He hadn’t kept his promise to God and to Eleonor, he had let his parents, his friends and his neighbours down. In Vaxholm, he and Eleonor had been important members of the community, involved in the church and various societies. She was a bank manager and he had been employed by the local authorities as a chief financial officer.
    ‘All for a piece of tail,’ he told the wind.
    Then the pendulum of guilt swung back again, striking him with the same shattering force.
    Oh, Kalle , he thought. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.
    Turning his back on the sea, Thomas studied the children asleep in the shelter. They were fantastic, and they were his. His!
    Eleonor didn’t want to have children. He hadn’t really given it much thought until Annika had turned up on their doorstep that night right before Christmas, pregnant and weeping. How long ago was it? Three and a half years ago? Not longer than that?
    It felt like much longer. After that scene, he had only been back to the house once, accompanied by the movers. Eleonor had kept the house and he had put his share of the settlement into the stock market, into the Tech sector that his broker had so warmly recommended.
    ‘Don’t buy junk like that,’ Annika had said. ‘What’s the point of broadband connections when they can’t even make computers that work, for God’s sake?’
    Then she’d dropped her laptop on the floor and stomped on it.
    ‘Now that’s mature,’ he had told her. ‘Your analysis of the stock market is truly confidence-inspiring.’
    Of course, in the end she was right. A month later, the market took a nosedive, and his stocks took the worst beating of them all.
    Thomas moved out of the wind and noticed that he was cold and wet.
    And they hadn’t even passed Gåshaga yet.
    ‘Why isn’t the elevator working?’ Anders Schyman wheezed as he reached the fourth floor of the paper’s high-rise office building.
    Tore Brand regarded him with a sulky expression.
    ‘It’s the damp weather,’ he said. ‘The repairman will be here on Monday.’
    The managing editor tried to catch his breath, deciding that he wouldn’t broach the subject again until some other member of the maintenance staff was on duty.
    All on his lonesome, Spike was parked at his desk: feet up and the phone practically glued to his ear. He jerked in surprise when Schyman put