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Stockholm police, but who in practice worked very closely with, and could be called upon by, both the national and county departments. It was a political solution to something that shouldn’t have been a problem.
    Fredrika sank down wearily in the office chair behind her desk. Was there any better place for thinking and acting than behind her desk? She realized she had been naive to think that her specialized skills would be welcomed and made full use of within the police organization. She could not for the life of her understand police officers’ deep-rooted, all-embracing contempt for advanced, academic qualifications. Or was it really contempt? Did they in actual fact feel threatened? Fredrika couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She only knew that her current work situation was not tenable in the long term.
    Her route to Alex Recht’s team had taken her via an investigative role at the Crime Prevention Council, and then a couple of years with social services, where she had been an expert adviser. She had applied to the police force to broaden her practical experience. And she would not be staying on. But she was relaxed about her current situation. She had an extensive network of contacts that could gain her entry to plenty of other organizations. She just needed to hold her nerve, and some new opportunity would eventually turn up.
    Fredrika was very conscious of the way she was perceived by her colleagues in the force. Difficult and reserved. As someone with no sense of humour or normal emotional life.
    That’s not true, thought Fredrika. I’m not cold, I’m just so damn confused about where I’m going at the moment.
    Her friends would describe her as both warm and sympathetic. And extremely loyal. But that was in her private life. And now here she was in a workplace where she was expected to be private even on duty. It was completely unthinkable as far as Fredrika was concerned.
    It wasn’t that she felt nothing at all for the people she encountered in the course of her job. It was just that she chose to feel a little less.
    ‘My job’s not pastoral care,’ she had said to a friend who had asked why she was so unwilling to get emotionally involved in her work. ‘It’s detecting crimes. It’s not about who I am – it’s about what I do. I do the detecting; someone else has got to do the comforting.’
    Otherwise you’d drown, thought Fredrika. If I were to offer comfort to every victim I met, there’d be nothing left of me.
    Fredrika could not remember ever having expressed a desire for a police job in her life. When she was little, her dreams had always been of working with music, as a violinist. She had music in her blood. She nurtured the dreams in her heart. Many children grow out of their earliest dreams about what they want to be when they grow up. But Fredrika never did; instead, her dreams developed and grew more concrete. She and her mother went on visits to various music schools and discussed which would suit her best. By the time she started at secondary school, she had already composed music of her own.
    Just after she was fifteen, everything changed. For ever, as it turned out. Her right arm was badly injured in a car crash on the way home from a skiing trip, and after a year of physiotherapy it was obvious that the arm could not cope with the demands of playing the violin for hours every day.
    Well-meaning teachers said she had been lucky. Theoretically and rationally, Fredrika understood what they meant. She had been to the mountains with a friend and her family. The accident left her friend’s mother paralysed from the waist down. The son of the family was killed. The newspapers called their accident the ‘Filipstad tragedy’.
    But for Fredrika herself, the accident would never be called anything but The Accident, and in her mind she thought of The Accident as the most concrete of dividing lines in her life. She had been one person before The Accident, and became a different person