He was big, she’d told them. Big and heavy. But she never saw him. With one arm around her throat, he’d half carried, half dragged her into a nearby shrubbery. The same verdant guelder-rose shrubbery Anita Kollbar had smiled at as she jogged towards it, just a few seconds earlier. The almost deafening tweeting of the sparrows hiding in the dense foliage. And the rustle when they suddenly took wing as one.

The way he had laid her down on her stomach, straddled her, facing her feet. How he had effortlessly pulled down her sweatpants and underwear and angled her lower legs up. The way he’d handled her like an angry child handles a rag doll. The way she’d felt like his weight was going to suffocate her, snap her ribs and collapse her ribcage. How she hadn’t been able to scream, had been too scared to resist.

The shame in her eyes when she said that.

She doesn’t know what he did next, doesn’t know in what order. She thinks he dug around inside her with his fingers first. Then he got up and went behind her, forced her legs apart. Rooted around inside. Laid down on top of her . . . she thinks he might have tried to penetrate her, but failed.

He hadn’t said a word, just grunted.

And then, when she thought it was all over, when she felt him get off her and she’d lain completely still, thinking he was either going to kill her or run away, that’s when she’d been ripped apart. She hadn’t been able to comprehend what was happening, had just felt as though she was being devoured, ground to pieces by a slicing pain. She had asked God to let her die.

She doesn’t remember anything else, she’d told them. Not when he left, not how long it lasted. Doesn’t remember having a lock of hair taken. Doesn’t remember the dog owner, her neighbour, who had found her a few hours later. He’d saved her, she’d been told when she woke up at the hospital, she wouldn’t have lasted much longer. There had been extensive blood loss.

‘I wish no one had found me,’ she’d said.

*

‘How many mopeds in this town?’ Karen says with her eyes on a Nissan approaching slowly, on the lookout for an open spot.

‘No idea. But none of them is registered, so we’ll never know. Still, I texted Johannisen the moment she said it so they’re aware when they continue the door-knocking. Other than that, I suppose we’ll have to go back to everyone we’ve already talked to in the area and ask about it.’

‘I guess the real question is if the sound she heard has any connection to the attack. How many men between the ages of twenty-five and forty use a moped to get around?’

‘One would be enough.’