Four years and four months to be exact. Almost exactly the same amount of time she had lived in ignorance about who the father of her son actually was. But that was a deeply unfair comparison. Sandra’s life had got better—she had got happier. The Norling family’s lives had been smashed to pieces. Back then, when it had happened, and now again. It was inhuman. The rape was something she had got over. All that lingered was the contempt for the perpetrator.

As happened often, her thoughts ended up back in that Audi. His voice droning on about this and that, the scent of an expensive car, leather mixed with the smell of booze from lunchtime, black ice forming on the road and the speed of the car that seemed to increase in step with her knuckles turning white. His borderline sadistic approach to driving, which she knew was a direct response to her fear. How instead of slowing down he sped up when they reached the bend before the ravine. If they had met an oncoming car there, it could have been Sandra who had been trapped in a wrecked car covered in snow for four days. But they hadn’t—in fact, they were fortunate enough not to meet a single car during the final miles of their crazed journey.

Actually, wait a minute . . . Just before the bend after the ravine—hadn’t there been a car parked up in the woods? Yes, she remembered now: there had been a car in among the trees. And hadn’t a question flickered through her head at the time—what on earth was it doing there? In the middle of winter, in that awful weather—no cars ever drove up there and the road led nowhere. But she hadn’t had time to bring the thought to a conclusion, given that she had been fully occupied with fearing for her life, concerned about what they would encounter around the next bend. And now she could see it clearly—it must have been the grainy photo in the newspaper that had crystallised her thoughts. It was that car. The yellow company car featured in the newspaper, with its illegible logo—but at the ravine the logo had been fully visible. PN Auto. Her memory had stashed it away somewhere at the back of her mind, enabling her to retrieve it at some point in the future when she needed it.

Now.