Bertil Kvarnström

Bertil Kvarnström is 52 and for fourteen years has designed brochures, posters and logos for the insurance company. Born in a country town, the son of a watchmaker, he inherited from his father a steady hand and a love of clean lines. He studied graphic arts at night, worked at two advertising agencies and arrived at Nordvakt with a portfolio under his arm and the certainty that people trust what is well aligned.

He lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment, with a drafting table by the window, a shelf of typography books and a record player softly playing jazz. He walks to work, eats lunch at the same café every day and likes to explain to colleagues how to make a perfect margin. He corrects spelling errors on other people's invitations and offers to help before being asked.

He is thin, of medium height, with an angular, always clean-shaven face, metal-framed glasses and thin gray hair, combed to the side. In winter he wears dark wool buttoned to the neck, a gray scarf and leather gloves. Polite, talkative, he likes to make himself useful, and speaks of himself always in the third person of a trade: the designer, the employee, the witness.

He was the one who presented himself to the police as the main witness and has already told the story three times, with the best memory he has, because this is the worst day Sweden has lived through. When asked who could have done it, he points to the cinema doorman, who has a record for a bar fight and vanished from the door at just that hour. About the minister, he says he voted against him all his life, like half the country, but that disagreeing is not a crime in this land.

Bertil knows whoever offers to help the police stays too close to the investigation to go unnoticed. It could be the zeal of a citizen who wants to do the right thing. It could be someone who prefers to follow closely the story being told about him. The detective will have to decide which.