Ewa squeezed her arm gently as she left her at the entrance to the female wing. Agla went straight to her cell. The door stood open, and she was panicked by a thought: would the noose still be hanging from the radiator? But then she saw someone lying in her bed.

‘Hæ,’ the girl said, sitting up. ‘You’re supposed to be on suicide watch, so you’re in the security cell and I’m in here now.’

Agla stared at her and her eyes scanned the cell. It was as if she was in a dream – reality had been shoved to one side and twisted. She recognised the place, but didn’t. There were clothes all over the floor, a suitcase was open on the desk and the girl on the bed was surrounded by scattered sweet wrappers.

‘Did you try and top yourself?’ she asked, putting a piece of chocolate in her mouth. ‘Sorry, I was in rehab right after I was sent home from Holland to finish my sentence here, and now I’m completely hooked on sugar.’

Agla opened her mouth to ask who she was, but stopped. There was still no sound coming from her larynx, and it was even painful to whisper. It was no business of hers who this skinny, scruffy bitch who had stolen her cell might be. She turned in the doorway and went to the cell at the end, next to the door to the communal area, and there she found her things. One of the warders had laid out her personal stuff on the shelf in the bathroom and stacked her books on the table, but her clothes were still folded up in a cardboard box.

Agla let herself fall back on the bed and stared up at the all-seeing eye of the security camera that glinted in its glass dome in the middle of the ceiling. There seemed to be no end to this fuck-up. For the coming days and weeks, she would have to put up with being streamed live.

10

Ingimar sat for a long while at Rebekka’s bedside, watching her sleep. She was lying just as she had been the night before when he had come to check on her – on her left side with her right hand under her cheek, her left hand oddly stretched out and resting on the bedside table. The wedding ring had twisted around on her finger so that the diamonds were on the palm side. This was not what he had foreseen eighteen years before, when he slipped that ring onto her finger. But that’s the problem with passion; it blinds you to what would actually be better for you. It would have been better for him to have remained unmarried.