Fabian hurried over to the sink, filled a plastic cup with water from the tap and helped her drink it. ‘Just so I’m definitely getting this right. This Greta. Is that the ghost you and Esmaralda were talking to in the basement?’

‘Not a ghost.’ Matilda shook her head. ‘A spirit. She said someone in our family’s going to die.’

Fabian had thought those Ouija board games had been a bad idea from the start, but now the whole thing had become such a fixation it was the first thing she thought about when she woke up. ‘But, sweetie, you survived.’

‘But if it’s not me… Then one of you—’

‘Matilda, listen to me. What happened to you should never have happened. It should never even have come close to happening. But it did, and neither you nor some spirit calling itself Greta is to blame for that. I am. I’m the one who—’

‘It’s no one’s fault,’ Matilda breathed. ‘She just knows what’s going to happen, that’s all.’ A single tear trickled down her cheek.

Fabian hugged her. ‘Matilda, it’s not that I don’t understand that you’re worried. Quite the opposite. You clearly believe in these things. But try to think of it as a dream.’

‘Dream? It’s not a dream.’

‘In a way, that’s exactly what it is. The problem is you can’t see it. And how could you? How could you know you’re actually just asleep?’

Her eyelids were growing heavier. But her lips were moving; to hear what she was saying, he leaned in closer.

‘What if you’re the one who’s asleep.’

5

Even with the fluorescent lighting, the flash of the camera lit up the room enough for Lilja’s shadow to be sharply drawn on the white concrete wall behind her. During her six years as a violent crime investigator, she’d seen quite a few things that would have given the most hardened person insomnia. Everything from bodies that had lain undiscovered for so long the coroner had to scrape them off the floor to bodies that had been so badly tortured it hurt just to think about what they’d been put through.

Bodies.

That was how she had always thought of them when she was in the coroner’s office or, like now, at the scene of a new murder. Bodies. Not people with real lives, dreams and hopes, but lifeless bodies. A conglomeration of atoms that together formed a mass. All to push down her feelings, keep a clear head and think logically.