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.One of the friends in Bertil’s entourage.With a sunbed tan and an Armani suit.Latte happily received the chips and immediately spread them out any old way across the table.Like a free-range hen, Abbas thought.Then Bertil’s phone vibrated in his pocket.He had forgotten to turn it off.Bertil got up while pulling out the mobile, and pushed through away from the vultures behind the players’ backs to find a space further away.But not so far away that Abbas couldn’t keep an eye on him, like the professional croupier he was.Who saw nothing, but observed everything.Full focus on the gaming table, but faceted eyes which would have made even a wasp envious.So he saw how Magnuson, one of his regulars, held his mobile against his ear without uttering a word.But with an expression that revealed quite a lot about what he heard.It was not something he liked.Abbas found himself thinking about that conversation, later, when he slipped into the Riche bar.Not because it had been particularly long, but because immediately after that phone call Magnuson had left the casino.And left a small fortune on the table and an evidently confounded crony who hadn’t realised that Magnuson had left until he had used all his own chips.Then Latte had understood that he ought to go after him.But before doing that, he attempted to manage Magnuson’s capital in the best possible way, and lost it all in fifteen minutes.A free-range hen.Then he left.It was the phone call that Abbas wondered about.Why had Magnuson disappeared straight after that? What was it all about? Business? Perhaps, but Magnuson had been one of his regulars long enough for Abbas to know that he wasn’t reckless with money.Not stingy, but not somebody who just threw money around.Now he had just abandoned quite a hefty sum on the table.And simply left.Abbas ordered a glass of mineral water in the bar and went and stood a bit to the side.He was an observer, thirty-five years old, of Moroccan extraction, childhood in Marseille.In an earlier life he had supported himself as a street vendor of pirate-copy designer handbags.First in Marseille, then in Venice.Following a dramatic incident with a knife at the Ponte di Rialto, he had moved his business to Sweden.Then quite a lot of police water ran under quite different bridges, which ended with Abbas changing his beliefs and his profession, training as a croupier and becoming fascinated by Sufism.Now he had a permanent job at Casino Cosmopol.He was a non-committal sort of person, some people would have said, after a quick glance.Slender-limbed, smoothly shaved.He might occasionally apply a thin line of mascara to accentuate his eyes.Always dressed in nice-fitting clothes, always in discreet colours, perfectly tailored.From some distance they looked as if they had been painted directly onto his body.‘Hi!’The girl who had had her eye on Abbas for a while was blonde and very sober, and a bit lonely.He looked a bit lonely too, so she thought they could be lonely together.‘How’s things?’Abbas looked at the young girl, about nineteen? Perhaps twenty?‘I am not here,’ he said.‘Sorry?’‘I am not here.’‘You are not here?’‘No.’‘It looks as if you are here.’The girl smiled a little, hesitantly, and Abbas smiled back.His teeth became extra white against his brown face, his quiet voice remarkably penetrating right through the loud bar music.‘That’s only what you think,’ he said.At this point the girl made a quick decision.Difficult guys were not her thing, and this one was definitely a difficult guy.He must be taking something, she thought, gave a little nod and went back to her lonely corner.Abbas watched as she walked away and thought about Jolene Olsäter.She was about the same age and had Down syndrome.Jolene would have known exactly what he meant.* * *The projector lamp went out in the confined room in the police headquarters on Bergsgatan.Rune Forss turned the ceiling light on.He and his AHP group had just looked at a screening of a mobile film that they had downloaded.The film had shown the assault on Vera Larsson in the caravan out in the Ingenting forest.‘No direct images of the perpetrators’ faces.’‘No.’‘But the beginning of the film was interesting.’‘When they were having sex?’‘Yes.’There were four of them in the room, including Janne Klinga.They had all reacted when the mobile camera had filmed through the oval window into the caravan and showed a naked man on top of a woman they assumed was Vera Larsson.The man’s face could just be seen in a quick blurred movement.Too quick to show anything that would make him recognisable.‘We’ve got to get hold of that man.’The others agreed with Rune Forss.Even though it was unlikely that the man himself had assaulted Vera Larsson, he was nevertheless of considerable interest.He must have been on the scene almost at the same time that the assault took place.‘Send the film to the technical unit and ask them to work on his face, we might be able to get a sharper image of it.’‘Do you think it’s another homeless person?’ Klinga wondered.‘No idea.’‘Was Vera Larsson a prostitute?’‘Not as far as we are aware,’ said Forss.‘But you never can know with those types.’* * *Seen from the perspective of a hospital series on TV the whole thing was properly choreographed
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