The door opened with a crash no one heard and we all three rushed in.

The woman sitting on the toilet had her skirt up and her knickers down over her knees as if to legitimise her occupation 124of the toilet, but that wasn’t why she was here. The disposable syringe lay like a larva cocoon on the floor, and the butterfly that had flown into her eyes was already dying.

A man in his thirties, wearing a lightweight, light-coloured jacket, the kind that has sleeves you can roll up, was pissing in the basin. He didn’t even react when we stormed in, as though he hadn’t been expecting anything else.

Stig turned away, as if in disgust. ‘She’s not here. Fuck! Let’s try the next floor.’

He pushed past us and out. Jakob stared at the scene before us and sent me a helpless look.

I stared back. Then at the woman. She was old enough to know better. She was far from dead, except from mentally, and she would be standing up and walking, as all mechanical dolls do, in a few minutes.

She just had to rest a little after the long trip. And she had the conductor with her. What was more, he was waving the flag: ‘Take your seats, close the doors.’

We closed the door after us when we left.

In the hall outside there was the makings of some elbow room and a current of fresh air, from below.

‘I’m off,’ Jakob said. ‘Home,’ he added, as if to make sure I understood. ‘Will you get in touch, by Monday at the latest?’

I nodded. ‘Talk soon. Bye.’ Then I followed Stig upwards, feeling as if I was climbing the Tower of Babel.

‘Be careful!’ Jakob shouted after me. Then he was gone.

The flat above wasn’t quite as packed, but the furnishings were the same and the music identical. The same speakers blasted out the same music, controlled by a demonic disc jockey from somewhere in the underworld. We ploughed our way through the crowd, opened the door to the vacant toilet and searched in vain.125

Stig wiped the sweat from his brow. His moustache drooped from his top lip like an impaled millipede. ‘Let’s try at the top,’ he groaned.

We tried at the top. There was a slanting ceiling upstairs. Water dripped in through a draughty skylight, which created a circular clearing in the forest of human bodies. We stood there on tiptoe, slowly getting wet hair and scanning the sparsely populated dance floor in every direction. No Belinda anywhere and no Johnny.

In the toilet we found the absolute highpoint of our tour: a man with a spindly beard, glasses on the end of his nose and port-wine cheeks was sitting on the toilet. Straddling his lap was a woman with grey highlights in her hair, a red dress drawn up around her hips and large white buttocks grinding away like two millstones on top of what must have been his stressed pecker. He looked about as happy as a prisoner facing the Inquisition. We never became more closely acquainted. Her hair and dress didn’t belong to the person we were looking for. We closed the door carefully behind us. Nothing suggested that either of them had noticed we had been there.