Gunilla was at the hospital, so he was able to settle down in peace and quiet at the computer and continue reading the summer serial while eating his sandwich. To begin with, he read without concentrating while his thoughts drifted off in all sorts of directions, but after just a few minutes he snapped to attention. There was something very familiar about the events being described. Jan decided to read it all again from the beginning.

This time he paid greater attention, and his sandwich lay untouched. Jan sweated profusely. It couldn’t be true. Someone had written a book that was being serialised in Gotlands Allehanda, in which a person who bore a distinct resemblance to Jan Hallin was depicted as a rapist. What was more, it was done with such credibility that as he read it he instinctively took the side of the other party.

But that was just the beginning.

It transpired that immediately after the rape, the car crash, which he had read about the day before, had happened. The serious accident in which the driver in one car died after great and prolonged suffering. And the other car, which had avoided any harm, was being driven by the rapist. Who—given the fact he had just raped a woman nearby—decided to leave the scene.

All these similarities with Jan’s own experience had to be coincidence. Yet his mouth was completely dry. Someone had woven together a believable and exciting story based on equal parts fact and fiction. There had been some details about the car accident in the local press, and the rape . . . Surely rapes took place on an almost daily basis? It didn’t take much in the way of imagination to cook up a tale like that.

This was a story, he persuaded himself. With certain themes that happened to have things in common with something he himself had experienced. There was a lot that was wrong about the character that was reminiscent of him: name, places, car make, profession, to name but a few. That was probably true of all the other characters too, so what was there to say that anything at all was really factual in this account?

Nothing, of course. It was nothing but pure fiction. A socio-realistic figment of the imagination. But he still had to admit that some parts of this serial were awfully close to the truth.

He had to go into the kitchen and drink a glass of water. And another. He splashed some water on his face too—it was so bloody hot in here. Then he went back into the study and sat down at the computer again. He took a deep breath and continued reading.