She stretched toward me, in almost a yearning way, as if she were pleading for something. “Yes, oh yes. And the blood—oh, the awful blood. It is done, I know why it is done. Like that—there!”

I too knew why it was done there. It might have been better—almost—if Jonny had killed him. Later on, a psychiatrist who talked to Wim and encouraged him, in vain, to talk to her, said that Jonny’s act had been a symbolic castration. We knew better.

It seemed likely to me that Liv would never want to go back into that room. But I never really understood her, I constantly underestimated her. When she had finished her tea and her second cigarette she got off the sofa and went into the bedroom. I followed. The bed was stripped, the sheets were gone, but blood had seeped through to the mattress, the walls were splashed with it. There was blood on the rugs and drops of it on the bedside cabinet and Wim’s chocolate bars and cigarette packet he’d left there. Liv pulled on a pair of jeans and pushed her feet into trainers. Blood was still all over her, under her clothes. She ran her fingers through her hair.

For the first time I noticed that the room had been ransacked. The cupboard door was open, drawers had been pulled out and one lay overturned on the floor. Liv knelt down and rummaged through its spilled contents to find a pair of nail scissors. Her tears had stopped, color had come back into her face. She looked up and gave me what in any other circumstances I’d have taken for a smile of triumph.

“Now I will show you,” she said.

Like most of the curtains in the flat, those at Liv’s window were never drawn. A blind kept out the daylight. The curtains were made of some blue linen-like material and had a very deep hem, something like four inches deep, presumably made that way in case they shrank in the wash. Not that they’d ever been washed. Their dark color was more due to dirt than the original dye. Liv took the scissors in her hand and began unpicking the hem on the left-hand side. Instead of allowing the notes to fall out, she picked them out one by one as the hem came undone. I watched her, fascinated. When she had built a small stack of notes on the windowsill she began on the other side. Her expression was concentrated but quite calm and, unbelievable though this was, cheerful. Both hems let down, she took the £50 notes in her hand and held them out to me, to see, to touch perhaps but not to hold. She kept a firm grip on them. Then she counted them. Curiously— or perhaps not curiously at all—she counted them in Swedish.

“En, tva, tre, fyra, fem, sex, sju—”