‘I broke into the warehouse last night, and they caught me. I was thrown out. It was all very heavy-handed.’

As she thought of the pistol barrel being rammed into her cheek, the feeling again came over her that she was about to faint. She sat down on the kerb outside the motel.

‘I had no idea I was sending you into anything dangerous,’ Agla said. ‘Maybe it’s best if you just come home. We’ll leave things as they are.’

‘No chance.’ María felt the obstinacy well up inside her. She wasn’t going to give up right away. She wasn’t going to let these scumbags scare her off. ‘If they had nothing to hide in that warehouse, then they would have called the police and had me arrested. But instead they called someone who told them to erase the pictures from my phone and to check the messages.’

‘Do you think they saw the message you sent me?’ Agla asked.

‘No,’ María replied. ‘I fixed the settings so that outgoing messages are deleted – just like you showed me.’

Agla laughed and María couldn’t help smiling as well. This had been the focus of endless questions when she had been at the special prosecutor’s office and Agla had been a person of interest under interrogation. María had asked again and again if Agla had replied to this or that message, while across the table Agla had sat silent and impassive. There had been nothing for it but to take all kinds of roundabout routes to get to her emails.

‘Take care, María,’ Agla said at last.

María said ‘yes’, and ‘thanks’, and ended the call with the bizarre feeling that Agla was her thoughtful friend instead of her sworn enemy.

She threw her case into the back of the car and limped over to the diner, where she ordered two American pancakes and bacon. When the food arrived, she squeezed a generous helping of maple syrup over everything and tore into it. She asked for coffee in a take-out paper cup. This was one shithole she couldn’t wait to leave behind her.

46

Anton would really have preferred orange, but he thought it would look immature to wait for a boy two years older than he was and already in college with a glass of fizzy orange in front of him. So instead he ordered a latte and stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into it. That made him a grown-up man meeting another guy in a coffee house to discuss serious business. He had to play the part properly. That was why he hadn’t brought Gunnar along. He would have screwed things up with some crap about Molotov cocktails and fireworks. Anton sipped his coffee, which wasn’t too bad once there was sugar in it. He would have much preferred hot chocolate.