He wanted to shout out no there goddamn isn’t. She was barely a teenager and he was getting awfully close to fifty. No one was going to tell him about his dinner that he had cooked. And it wasn’t fucking okay to just hole up in your room and gobble down sugar either. It wasn’t about whether or not there was enough food. Esmaralda was going home, and she could take her bloody Ouija board with her.

But this time, he managed to rein in his feelings. ‘Of course there’s enough,’ he said in as calm and sympathetic a tone as he could muster. ‘But I think Esmaralda understands that we need it to be just family, considering everything that’s happened.’

The ding from the phone in his hand was so quiet he almost didn’t hear it. Even so, Matilda seized the opportunity to pull Esmaralda upstairs and was gone before Fabian had time to react. If the text he’d just received hadn’t been from Gertrud Molander, he would have run after Matilda and made it clear to her that he was serious.

As it was, he hurried down into the basement instead.

58

Irene Lilja turned into the driveway, put down her kickstand and got off the Ducati. She was late back, considering she’d left the station over two hours ago. And the reason wasn’t that she’d been stuck in traffic or that she’d run out of petrol.

No, she had simply felt a need to be alone, which was why she’d given in to a sudden whim in Åstorp and instead of taking the 21 eastward had turned left on the 112 going north.

It was the texts that refused to stop coming. She’d received six so far. Each more threatening than the last. She wasn’t just going to be raped when she least expected it. She was going to be whipped, stoned and fucked until her stinking fucking Jew cunt was nothing but mincemeat. She was going to be pissed and spat on and kicked, and it had carried on like that all day.

She hadn’t told anyone so far. Neither Tuvesson nor anyone else on the team knew about the threats, except for the ones Sievert Landertz had delivered openly in the newspapers. It wasn’t that she didn’t take them seriously or find them disconcerting. On the contrary, she was deeply shaken and probably in some kind of shock.

That thought had occurred to her when she suddenly burst into tears after driving all the way up to the Kullen lighthouse and taking a seat on one of the viewing benches to let the sea winds blow through her while she gazed out across a sea where the white-crested waves were wild and eternity could be touched.