He had a feeling something dramatic ought to happen, but so far nothing had interrupted the routine. The body was gone and the floor had been washed. The bloody bedclothes had been removed. The bed had been rolled away in one direction and the night table in another. All the personal belongings had been put in plastic bags, which had then been placed in a sack. This now lay in the corridor waiting for someone to collect it. The lab men were gone and not even a chalk outline on the floor recalled the existence of the late Stig Nyman. That method was old-fashioned and rarely used any more. The only ones who missed it seemed to be the newspaper photographers. As a matter of fact the only thing left in the room was the visitor’s chair, and Kollberg sat on that himself, and thought. What does a person do after killing someone? He knew from experience that there were a lot of answers to that question. Kollberg had killed a man himself one time. What had he done afterwards? He’d thought about it long and hard, for years in fact, and in the end he’d turned in his service revolver, with the license and everything, and said he never wanted to carry arms again.
