So Jan climbed into the driver’s seat again and drove away. He used side roads to avoid meeting too much traffic. He drove calmly and carefully to avoid drawing attention to himself or risking anything else happening. And without music—the party atmosphere was well and truly gone.

21

Sandra

AFTER DOWNING a large amount of the remaining contents from the offending whisky bottle and lining up the pros and cons of reporting what had happened to the police, she deferred her decision. Instead, she did what so many others had done before her. She showered and scrubbed herself, cleaned and dusted, vacuumed and mopped. Everything that had to be done to eradicate every trace of that abominable man from her body and her home. All that lingered on was the loathing.

She never wanted to think about him again—she didn’t want to see anything that reminded her of him. She threw out the clothes she had been wearing that day, as well as the mugs even though only one of them had been used by him to knock back whisky.

She even got a new haircut, getting blonde highlights in her hair, and changed her glasses’ frame so that he wouldn’t recognise her if they bumped into each other anywhere. Gotland wasn’t a big place. The only thing she didn’t get rid of was the house itself—she couldn’t. She loved her little cottage in the country and wanted never to live anywhere else, so she wasn’t going to let him take that from her. The risk was that he could appear again—a fear that was ever present. On the other hand, he could turn up anywhere. If her identity was of any interest to him, he probably already knew who she was.

It was with some effort that Sandra adjusted to her new reality, but after a few weeks in isolation she was ready to meet the world again. Work colleagues, customers, friends, and family—she didn’t let on to any of them that the protracted bout of flu had been anything else.

In the end, so many days had passed since the rape that it would have felt stupid to report it. Intentionally eradicating all traces of the perpetrator before then demanding that the police conduct a serious investigation would be pathetic, she told herself.

It wasn’t long before she became accustomed to the idea that he would get away with it. That he might do something like that again, as well as having the memory of Sandra to build his perverse fantasies around. And that there was nothing she could do about it.

22

Jan

JUST A FEW MINUTES after leaving the scene of the accident, his hands began to shake violently, then his arms. For the majority of the drive home he was quaking. He was in some sort of shock, perhaps not medically, but it had hit him hard and he didn’t feel well.

It could just as well have been him who had ended up over the edge bleeding or stiffening or whatever the hell that road hog was doing right now. Before too long it would be pitch dark and the snow was coming down heavily. The car would soon be covered, and then there would be no chance of it being found until the snow melted, which would take at least a week according to the latest forecast.