But that was the only thing that was the same. By now about fifty men were inside the extensive cordons, and outside them the crowd of curious onlookers got bigger and bigger. Many had been standing there ever since midnight, and all they had seen was police and ambulance men and wailing emergency vehicles of every conceivable kind. It had been a night of sirens, with a constant stream of cars roaring along the wet streets, apparently going nowhere and for no reason. Nobody knew anything for sure, but there were two words that were whispered from person to person and soon spread in concentric circles through the crowd and the surrounding houses and city, finally taking more definite shape and being flung out across the country as a whole. By now the words had reached for beyond the frontiers. Mass murder. Mass murder in Stockholm. Mass murder in a bus in Stockholm. Everybody thought they knew this much at least Very little more was known at police headquarters on Kungsholmsgatan. It wasn't even known for certain who was in charge of the investigation.
