“Is it?” I thought about that one and ended up by no means certain. It surely might be right to force someone into a rehabilitation program even if they wanted to keep on injecting heroin, or make a family live in a hygienic new house no matter how much they might prefer their dirty cottage. I told Silver this and he said he didn’t know, but the family analogy was a bad one because only the parents probably would make the decision, while the children, who benefited or suffered as much as they, had no say in the matter.

“You’re thinking of Jason, the little boy,” I said.

But he hadn’t been. He had forgotten about Jason and said he’d only believe in him when he’d seen him himself. He was speculating as to what Lane and Barrie were doing there, if they had been there from the first or recently moved on from some other hiding place that had proved unsafe, if indeed it was them at all, when there came a shattering scream from the living room. We rushed out to find Håkan Almquist trying to manhandle Liv out of the flat. He had two plastic sacks into which he had presumably packed her clothes and these he was pushing across the floor with his feet, necessarily very slowly, while he dragged Liv, pulling her by the welt of her sweater. The sweater welt stretched as if made of elastic and Liv, straining backward and trying to dig her feet into the thin old carpet, reminded me of a shaggy dog dragging on the end of its leash.

Mr. Almquist stopped pulling when he saw us and Liv broke free. A furious altercation between them was incomprehensible to us, but we knew very well she was saying she wouldn’t go with him and he telling her she must. “I shall call the police,” he shouted at Silver, “and they will make her come home with me.”

At the idea of the police Liv looked as if she was going to faint. She crawled onto the sofa and huddled into the far corner of it, hugging her knees. Silver was very polite, but what he said was unlikely to please Liv’s father. It would be useless calling the police. Liv was over-age, an adult woman, and no one could take her anywhere if she wanted to stay.

“But she is my daughter. She lives in my home.”

“I expect you’ll find the law is the same in Sweden,” Silver said.