Free To the Top of the Mountain by Arne Dahl

that died seemed nice, he was the one who ordered.’
    ‘OK, thanks. So the rest of you were waitresses? You’re divided up, aren’t you? By tables?’
    ‘Yeah,’ the oldest waitress replied, a fake blonde of around forty-five. ‘I had the window. The hen party and the brokers. They were flirting with each other non-stop. And drinking a lot. I was working flat out to get them served. Also, I was having a break when it happened. He was already dead when I came out.’
    ‘More?’
    ‘I was in the corner,’ said another. ‘Saw nothing, heard nothing.’
    ‘Very concise, but maybe not complete.’
    ‘I was further in. Not much happened there. Business as usual.’
    ‘More.’
    ‘I had the middle row,’ explained the young Asian woman. ‘A group of students were sitting nearest to the door, they were talking about a social anthropology exam, I think. Then there was the guy pretending to read, sitting alone, and a group of southern Europeans who had a Swede with them. They were speaking English.’
    ‘You didn’t happen to hear what they were talking about?’
    ‘I try not to eavesdrop.’
    ‘Like on the social anthropology students?’
    She looked slightly embarrassed.
    ‘Come on,’ said Hjelm. ‘You heard something.’
    ‘They were negotiating about something. They weren’t friends. The opposite, I think. Distrust. They were trying to agree on something.’
    ‘On what? Try to remember.’
    ‘Weren’t we meant to be talking about the murder? I didn’t see that at all. I had my back to it.’
    ‘Just answer the question.’
    ‘No, I don’t know. A meeting place, maybe. I don’t know.’
    ‘But they left right away when the fight started? The whole gang? Did they go without paying?’
    ‘If you’re just drinking, you pay straight away. There wasn’t any bill to pay, everything had already been paid. But yeah, they disappeared pretty quickly.’
    Hjelm thought. Something fuzzy was shifting in his mind.
    ‘No bill? No, it’s bloody obvious. No bill to pay .’
    The waitresses regarded his curious little outburst suspiciously.
    ‘Who had the table by the door? Along the wall by the door, I mean.’
    ‘Me,’ said the youngest of the waitresses, a short-haired, sturdily built girl.
    ‘Who was sitting there, and what happened?’
    ‘Five really serious, quiet types.’
    ‘Salesmen?’
    ‘Not exactly, no, I don’t think so. I guess you could say that you’d expect them to be the rowdy kind but they weren’t at all. The opposite, they hardly said a word to one another. Just sat there, staring on the sly.’
    ‘Five macho gay men, staring at a kid who’s sitting there reading,’ Hjelm said clearly.
    ‘It wasn’t him they were staring at, it was further away.’
    ‘Were they listening to music?’
    ‘Hardly. One of them had a little earphone, but it looked more like . . . a hearing aid.’
    ‘And they didn’t pass that earphone around?’
    ‘No, it was just one of them that had it. He was sitting with his back to the room.’
    ‘And they didn’t drink much?’
    ‘A beer each at most.’
    ‘And none of them stayed behind to pay the bill?’
    ‘No, no, same thing. There wasn’t a bill. But one of them did stay behind. Shaved head and moustache.’
    ‘And the other four hadn’t left before the killing?’
    ‘No, but they left before anybody else. As soon as the glass broke. One of them pointed at the one who stayed behind and said something. Then he sat down again and waited.’
    ‘So they deliberately left Eskil Carlstedt behind?’
    ‘If that’s what he’s called, yeah. It looked that way. I was standing in the middle of the Hammarby gang next to them, trying to take an order. It was slow. I was standing with my back to . . . the killing . . .’
    Hjelm tried to catch Holm’s eye. She was drawing heavy lines in her notebook. Eventually, she looked up. She looked composed.
    ‘Shall we step out a moment?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes,’ said Holm. ‘But I just have one question