The orange flame of her lighter caressed the petrol-soaked wood. But for some reason, the wall was refusing to burn. At least, not as quickly as you might imagine it would after being doused with all that petrol.

She could hear the security guards coming out now, calling the dogs in the night. How long it would take them to find the dogs – and, by extension, her – was impossible to say.

It took two full minutes for the fire to start to spread. Slowly at first, then faster and faster like a quiet fuse along the underside of the façade and then off around the corners.

As the flames climbed higher along the walls, the security guards started screaming at the people inside the building. Less than a minute later, the whole barn was ablaze and the panic inside was a fact.

Apart from a few scantily dressed women, most of the people dashing out of the building were long-haired men with beards, tattoos and frayed denim waistcoats. Some of them were drunk and staggered through. Others threw themselves on the ground and rolled back and forth to put out the fire on their clothes. They were all completely unprepared for gunfire.

Lilja fired one shot and then another. One bullet ripped open the leg of the big man with the Terminator tattoo. The other shattered the kneecap of the man behind him. Both fell to the ground, screaming in pain. She didn’t lower her weapon and walk up to them until people had stopped emerging from the inferno.

‘Fucking Jew cunt,’ the tattooed man hissed. ‘You’re dead, get it. So fucking dead.’

Lilja walked up to him, squatted down and studied his bleeding leg in silence. The blood-soaked trousers, the smaller entry wound on the front of his thigh and the bigger on the back.

‘You think you know what we do to little police cunts like you,’ he continued. ‘But you have no idea. No fucking idea.’

She held his gaze without a word and stood up, let her empty magazine fall to the ground and pushed another one in. Then she turned to the others. ‘You know my name and you know where I live. Some of you have been there, riding your motorbikes around on my lawn, and some of you have broken into my house and spray-painted my walls while I was asleep. It stops now!’

‘What makes you think it will ever stop, fucking Jew freak?’ the tattooed man growled. ‘Your hell hasn’t even started.’

‘I don’t know if the rest of you heard, but your little Terminator friend over here had a question. He wondered why you should leave me alone. And that’s a fair question, especially since I just burned down your little clubhouse. But I happen to be convinced you’re the arsonists behind some of this year’s fires at various refugee centres!’

‘You can’t prove that,’ someone shouted.