‘Stop it, Milo!’ Agnes grabs his collar, but the dog whirls around, lets out a low growl and shows his teeth. Agnes drops her phone between the seats.

‘Milo!’

Her shocked tone seems to bring the dog up short. He slides onto the floor and hides behind Agnes’s camera bag.

‘He’s never growled at me before,’ Agnes says, on the verge of tears. ‘Never!’

‘I expect he needs a wee,’ Anna says reassuringly. ‘You can see how ashamed he is. Let him out.’ The second the car door opens the little dog shoots past Agnes and disappears among the trees.

‘Milo! Milo, come here!’ Agnes grabs the camera bag and runs after him, gravel spraying up around her worn-down Converse. Anna gets out of the car and waits. Right now she has no desire to chase after Milo. Plus, as Agnes has icily pointed out on many occasions, he’s not her dog.

She can hear him barking excitedly in the forest, followed by Agnes yelling at him. She can’t help smirking. Stupid dog.

She looks at the other car – a newish, spotlessly clean Passat. No child seats, no McDonald’s packaging on the floor, no Winnie-the-Pooh sun-screens on the side windows. A bottle of Ramlösa mineral water in the holder between the seats is the only indication that the car has an owner.

She stretches, takes a few deep breaths. The autumn air is cold and clear; it smells of earth and damp leaves, sweeping away her unease and replacing it with excitement and anticipation. They’ve arrived. Arrived at their new home. Once again it strikes her that Tabor is at least as beautiful as in the pictures, and in spite of Agnes’s bad mood and Milo’s escape attempt, this is a good start to their new . . . flight, Håkan whispers before she can stop him.

The shingle in the courtyard is neatly raked and looks fresh. The doors, windows and bargeboards are freshly painted. Some of the roof tiles are paler in colour, which means they’ve been replaced. The house has two doors – a large one by the corner of the shorter, right-hand side, although a steel bar with a heavy padlock suggests that it is no longer in use. The other door is just to the left of the centre of the building, only a few metres from where she is standing. It is green, with a wide step polished by thousands of footsteps over the years. As she is about to move closer, the door opens and a man of about her own age emerges. He is about six feet tall and is wearing black-rimmed glasses. Jacket and tie, jeans.

‘Hi, there – you must be Anna Vesper,’ he says, holding out his hand. ‘Lars-Åke Gunnarsson, Gunnarsson Law. Call me Lasse, everyone does.’