The tears forced their way from the corners of his eyes, and he whispered ‘I love you’ into the bright summer night, which seemed to have a tranquillity all of its own for the few hours around midnight, as if even the birds drew the line at staying awake all night long. His whispered, loving words were almost a sacrilege against the silence, so he didn’t repeat them, even though he would have preferred to shout them out over the lava field, to fill his lungs, and yell with all the power in his body and soul that he loved her. Instead, he crouched and laid his lips cautiously on the hand. He stayed that way for a while, and before he realised it, the warmth of his lips had passed into the back of the hand so that the skin appeared to have come to life. His lips moved over it as he kissed the cold hand again and again, kissing the knuckles, the wrist, the fleshy part of the palm that he had heard somewhere was called the Point of Remembrance, and the fingers, one at a time, until his lips touched something hard: the engagement ring.

He pulled at it, but the finger seemed bloated, and the ring refused to move, half sunk in the swelling that had enveloped the hand. He licked the finger and spat onto the ring, working it back and forth until it finally came off. He dropped it into his pocket and quickly kissed the hand once more, fighting back the desire to unzip the case to see the face one last time. He wanted to know if it had swollen, if it had taken on the same blue tinge as the hand. But at the same time, he had no desire to see what death had done to her beautiful face. Everyone knows that flesh loses its colour once the blood no longer flows, that a grey pallor takes over after a few hours. Death destroys everything.

He wiped away the tears and sniffed hard. Then he carefully 2pushed the hand back inside the case and zipped it shut. He climbed out of the fissure and looked down at the dark-red suitcase that lay in it, not right at the bottom, but caught on the jagged lava points. It was still out of sight, though, unless you stood right at the edge of the fissure and looked down.

This moment in the lava field marked a turning point in his life. Sorrow had left him devastated, but at the same time he felt a certainty in his chest that cut deep and pained him like razor-sharp steel. Now everything was different. He wasn’t the man he thought he had been. Now he knew he could kill.

3

WEDNESDAY

1

Disappeared. That was what her mother said on the phone, and Áróra could hear her voice crack in a way that never happened unless there was something serious going on.