The sound of the uninvited guest made her more alert, and the light May evening didn’t make it any easier for her drift off. Instead, her thoughts began to whir, and for better or worse it was Hallin who dominated them.

It had been a week and she hadn’t heard from him. She wondered what his reasoning was—she tried to put herself in the shoes of someone like him in a threatening situation like this.

The denial was hardly sincere on his part. In all likelihood, he remembered the event. That was unless he had raped so many women that he couldn’t keep count, but this was highly unlikely since Sandra hadn’t heard any suggestion of there being a serial rapist on Gotland. It hurt her a little to think that others who had been affected behaved more soundly than she had, and actually reported the attacks.

Nevertheless, Hallin was probably thinking about it right now, speculating which direction the devilment that had hit him might take.

The easiest thing would simply be to cough up and be done with it. But perhaps he couldn’t do that without his wife getting curious and starting to ask questions, and that was possibly a fate worse than death for him. It might also be that he couldn’t afford it—however improbable that sounded for a man of his age and stature in society. Three thousand seven hundred kronor a month ought to be manageable for most people in his situation.

The other option was to let Sandra report the case to the social services, whereupon he would still be forced to pay support at parity with Sandra’s fairly generous offer once there had been a paternity test. Which wouldn’t enable him to keep it from his wife either. There was also the risk here that Sandra would report the rape—something he must be scared to death about. But perhaps he thought the risk was minimal that Sandra would have the energy to start a process like that after so many years, and that she would lose if she did. Perhaps he was also fostering some hope that he wasn’t the father of the child and he therefore had no intention of putting a penny in her account until she had managed to prove it.

A third possibility was obviously to stick his head in the sand and hope the threat went away by itself. He had tried that tactic the last time someone had tried to extort money from him four years ago, and it had succeeded.

There was naturally another scenario—even if Sandra dismissed it as unrealistic. He could always try to scare the so-called gold digger into silence.

THE MORNING AFTER, when Erik and Sandra were going out to the car, she discovered something that had to be a bouquet of flowers dropped on the floor outside the front door. They weren’t wrapped in the usual paper from a florist’s but were in newspaper.

She let Erik wait outside while she picked off the tape, took out the flowers from their original wrapping, and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. They were beautiful, but there was no card—nothing to reveal where they had come from.