Was that him, jumping down from his hiding place? If he’d been up a tree or in a hunter’s blind, he would definitely have seen her. Wasn’t that footsteps she could hear now? Yes, she could even hear a twig snapping.

Should she get up and try to run away? No, that would just make her an easier target. Better to keep her gun at the ready and… The sound made her stop thinking and start acting. The sound of something metal being pulled out of its sheath.

With her gun in both hands, she rolled around and saw his outline against the blinding sun, with a butcher’s knife in his hand and a rifle slung over his shoulder.

The seconds were dragged out as if to give her more time to aim at his leg and squeeze her right index finger harder and harder around the trigger. But something made her hold off.

Even though his eyes, nose and mouth looked the way she remembered from the police cordon in Bjuv, she felt increasingly sure something wasn’t right. The smile wasn’t there, for example, and when a cloud finally hid the sun and she could see his face more clearly, she instantly realized what the problem was.

It wasn’t him.

32

He took up position a few feet from the stone wall down at the Parapet Pier in Helsingborg’s Northern Harbour. It was just over three feet tall and curved almost exactly like Lennart Andersson’s meat counter at ICA Maxi in Hyllinge. There was no point going for a longer run-up now since he wouldn’t get one when it actually came to doing it for real.

His first attempt had gone so-so. He’d hesitated and not managed to gather enough momentum to get over the wall. His second attempt had gone better and on his third, he’d made it across the entire road, landing on one of the big rocks on the other side. On his fourth try, he hadn’t even needed his hands for support.

Like with so many things, it was about believing it would work. Like when he was a little boy and learned how to break a pencil with his index finger. He’d worked at it a whole weekend straight without succeeding; it had felt like his index finger was about to snap, not the pencil. It was only when he’d made his mind up to go all in without hesitation that he finally did it, and from then on, it hadn’t even been hard.