Large swathes of the text—including the passages about the alky scum on the benches—didn’t especially interest him, so he hastily skimmed through those. But there were other parts that engaged him far more, which he read with his heart in his mouth. No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t stop reading. Jan downloaded issue after issue of the paper as he saw the story unfold on the screen in front of him with a rising sense of horror.

It turned out she was pregnant—the woman who had been raped. And she kept the child. Very soon, the man—the rapist, the hit-and-run driver—received a blackmail threat. A demand for the astonishing sum of six million kronor by way of support payments. How many people had received a letter like that? It didn’t exactly feel like the amount had been plucked out of thin air.

A knot formed in his stomach and it felt as though the air in the room had run out. He had to go to the window and open it wide. Breathe air into his lungs. Convince himself that any correlations between that bloody serial and real life were just coincidence. After a few minutes, he felt strong enough to withdraw from the window and sit back down at the desk.

He didn’t remain there for long—when he reached the bit about the hit-and-run driver realising that it was a passing acquaintance, a mechanic from his hunting club, who had witnessed the accident and therefore had to be the person who was blackmailing him for money, he was forced to rush into the kitchen and splash more water on his face.

And when shortly afterwards the hit-and-run driver cheerfully noted that the witness-slash-blackmailer had vanished from the face of the earth, it all got too much for Jan. He didn’t need to read any more to realise that the book was a crucifixion of himself. He was not only being identified as a rapist, a drunk driver, and guilty of a hit-and-run, which was bad enough, but also as a murderer.

The writer had even got inside his head and knew his reasoning. It seemed so improbable, but there was no room for doubt that someone out there had knowledge of all these details pertaining to Jan and his actions that day and in the period afterwards. How on earth that was possible was a mystery, but there was no doubt as to who she was. The mere thought of her left him furious.

Judging by his colleagues’ enthusiasm, this story had a lot of readers, and it would soon have even more. Because sooner or later someone was going to pick out Jan as the guilty man, and it was pretty likely the police would be brought in at the same time. But that hadn’t happened yet, and the serial hadn’t reached its conclusion.