Just as Sandra feared, it transpired that the car had been sabotaged. Someone had cut the brake lines under the car—a simple intervention for anyone with the requisite knowledge and the right tools—and it was perfectly clear that it wasn’t to make her drive gently into a ditch with no injury to life or limb. The sabotage must have taken place under cover of night—between midnight and a couple of hours later—when Sandra had been on the phone with Kerstin just a few metres away.

The thought of that panicky journey ending with going into the ditch made her feel dizzy. The ravine—what if she had been going faster when she had driven round the bend? The long downhill after that when the speedometer had been moving up at an alarming pace that she couldn’t influence, and the busy crossroads that had come towards her at a rapid pace . . . They had been lucky beyond comprehension, and that wasn’t something she could count on in future.

Sandra said nothing to her parents about the true reason behind the accident. They would only get worked up about it, and that wouldn’t help the situation in the slightest. On the other hand, she did report the entire thing to the police, somewhat against her better judgment. She reluctantly acknowledged to herself that everything was going off the rails and that couldn’t be allowed to go on without the police being made aware that something was off from the beginning. At the same time, she also notified them that she had felt under threat for some time: that on several occasions she had received funeral flowers sent to her anonymously.

On the other hand, informing the police who was behind the threats and the malicious tampering with her car would be moronic. Not to mention pointless, given that he would deny the accusations, and it would be impossible to find any evidence. Plus it would make Hallin furious, which might drive him to do even worse things. The fact that he was definitely going to punish her was the only thing she was certain of.

At least the police now knew that something was going on, and that might give her a slight advantage in what was to come.

She now needed to seek out Hallin’s wife. It wasn’t something Sandra wanted to do—most of all, she wanted to pull out of it all and have nothing more to do with him. But the more she thought about it, the more viable she saw that route was. It was no longer intended as a threat or designed to harm Hallin. It was a plea to the only person who—in the best-case scenario—could put a stop to this harassment.