Ebba Nordgren

Ebba Nordgren is 33 and turns night work into a craft of patience. Born in a northern town, the daughter of a bus driver and a seamstress, she learned early to sleep by day and wake when the sun was already dead. Before becoming an insurance company guard, she worked on a ferry dock and in a canning factory. She likes places where the night is regulated by clocks and turnstiles.

She lives in a two-room apartment in a brick building near the station, with a brown velvet sofa, a convex-screen television and plants on the windowsill that she waters with lukewarm water. She leaves home at nine at night, with her lunchbox in her bag and a thermos of black coffee, and returns at six in the morning, when the neighborhood wakes. She has a habit of counting the steps on stairs and checking three times that the door is locked.

She is tall and broad-shouldered, with a round, freckled face, pale blue eyes and voluminous permed blond hair held by a headband. She wears a navy guard uniform, a wool sweater underneath, with a flashlight and key ring on her belt. She is practical, wary, answers in curt sentences and blushes when she lies, which she knows and hates.

She clocks in at 10, makes the 10:30 round and lets the turnstile print the rest, by itself. The night of the crime, she says, was calm until the sirens; afterward the police arrived and she never slept again. Of those who pass through, she says they are designers on the eve of a campaign and sometimes a manager forgetting his umbrella, quiet people, because nobody works at an insurance company to have fun. Someone who saw it from the street recalls that the reception lit up and empty from 11:00 to 11:40.

Ebba knows an empty reception on the wrong night looks like negligence to some and complicity to others. It could be the lapse of a guard who stepped away for a short time. It could be someone who chose the hour to be absent. The detective will have to decide which.