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had a look of conspiratorial delight on his face.
    “Someone who was also involved with Ambjörnsson?” Jacobsson protested. “An amorous woman who in the heat of passion kills horses and decapitates them, and then puts the heads on poles at the homes of her former lovers? That doesn’t sound terribly plausible, does it?” She gave her colleague a friendly poke in the side.
    “Never underestimate the power of love,” Kihlgård admonished her in a bombastic voice, shaking his finger like some sort of doomsday preacher.
    “Let’s stop joking around,” Knutas interrupted them, sounding annoyed. “This isn’t a game. We need to find out more about Mellgren. Who is he really? What sort of things does he do in his spare time? Is he politically active? What links can we find to Ambjörnsson?”
    “Yes, that’s worth looking into. Maybe they’ve run into each other in connection with various types of construction. Archaeologists are often brought in on building projects,” Kihlgård suggested.
    “Here on Gotland that’s true with nearly every building,” said Jacobsson. “The island is literally overflowing with ancient relics.”
    “There’s something else we should think about, just as Wittberg mentioned. Why did Mellgren seem so unaffected when he discovered the horse’s head? At least according to his wife,” said Knutas. “Yet he told me that he was panic-stricken, and that was why he didn’t contact the police immediately.”
    “Extremely odd.” Kihlgård tugged at a lock of his hair. “The guy is obviously lying.”
    “He must be a real cold-blooded type,” Jacobsson added. “First his wife goes through the shock of seeing a horse’s head stuck on a pole near their home. Then what does her husband do? He takes off and leaves her all alone, alarmed and frightened, and with four children. Not only that—he refuses to tell her where he’s gone!”
    “He doesn’t give a shit about her. That much is clear,” said Wittberg.
    “We’ve actually already come to that conclusion,” said Knutas. “But why was he in such a hurry?”

 
    In his hand he carried an invisible mirror in which he saw his parents. Sometimes their faces disappeared, and he couldn’t manage to conjure them up again, no matter how hard he tried. He had been interrupted.
    In the early evening, as he stood there painting with even strokes the rough surface of the facade and the air breathed peace and tranquility, the man had appeared from around the corner of the house.
    Not that it came as any surprise. The visitor was expected. The meeting could have ended in disaster, but he had managed to restrain his anger. They had talked, and he was indignant that the intruder had succeeded in his intention of upsetting him.
    When the man left, he felt shaken, and it had taken a good amount of time to recover his sense of equilibrium. That made him even stronger in his conviction, and in his mind he was able to anticipate enjoying the sweetness of retaliation.
    He sat down on the mound that he’d created only a few weeks earlier—yet another holy place that offered him inner peace.
    The earth hid its secrets; truth pounded beneath the surface, wanting to get out. It would soon be time. The labyrinth in which he had wandered all his life was about to come unraveled. The angles and corners, the detours and dead ends, the obscure recesses, everything was crawling out into the light, becoming clearer and simpler and filling him with hope for a much better life.
    He happened to think of a poem that he’d read in school and had saved ever since. It was by the great nineteenth-century Swedish author Carl Jonas Love Almqvist.
You are not alone. If among a thousand stars only one looks at you, believe in the star’s meaning, believe in the gleam in its eye …
    Someone was looking at him. Not just one, but many.

 
    Just as Knutas was considering calling it a day and heading for home, someone knocked on the door. It was Agneta Larsvik. She was normally so composed, but right now there was something agitated in her expression, and she moved in an abrupt manner as she sank onto the visitor’s chair in Knutas’s office.
    “I’ve just come back from the Mellgren place,” she explained. “I was in Stockholm over the weekend and didn’t get back until around three this afternoon. At any rate, I drove out to their farm in Lärbro, even though no one was home. I couldn’t get hold of Staffan Mellgren or his wife, so I took a