Everything was icy. The air conditioning was still playing up, and relations between those gathered in the room were frosty. Alex, Fredrika and Margareta Berlin bent over the unprepossessing sheet of paper that had been collected and driven to HQ in a patrol car, blue lights flashing. They read the short lines until they knew them by heart.

I am doing what you cannot do and have never been able to do.

I am making a difference.

And I am putting everything right.

The message had been in an envelope with Alex’s name on the front, and nothing else. No address, no stamp. The sender had personally placed it in Alex’s mailbox, or used a messenger to do so.

‘Have you received anything like this before?’ Berlin asked.

‘Oh yes. I get so many fucking letters like this that it’s hard to keep track of them all.’

Berlin sighed. ‘Enough, Alex.’

‘Of course I haven’t had anything else like this.’

Berlin pushed her glasses up into her hair.

Fredrika knew Alex hated that gesture, along with everything else about his boss. It was because she’d been head of HR, and was far too pedantic for his taste. Fredrika had to agree. The woman had no leadership qualities. The day they found out she was taking over, Alex and Fredrika had gone out and got drunk after work – the first time in ten years, as far as Fredrika was concerned. It had been much needed, and extremely liberating.

‘Time to go home,’ Alex had said when midnight had come and gone. ‘And tomorrow we’ll find that we’ve drunk Berlin into oblivion, just like we wanted.’

How wrong he’d been. Neither Berlin nor the bad dreams had gone away. The memory of how the night had ended still made her cry. She’d been so happy, so tipsy, so high on life. She had done her best not to wake the children when she got home, but had still managed to knock over Spencer’s beloved umbrella stand, scratching the parquet. She had collapsed on the floor, trying in vain to stop giggling. And suddenly there he was beside her.

‘Sorry,’ she’d said, attempting to adopt a serious expression. ‘I’ll buy you a new umbrella.’

As if she thought she’d broken them all.

She hadn’t been able to stop laughing, or to pick up the stand. And there in the hallway she had experienced her last moment of pure happiness.

‘Fredrika, there’s something we need to talk about.’

She remembered the words with absolute clarity. Something we need to talk about. The laughter disappeared and never came back. Something we need to talk about. They went and sat in the kitchen, then came the next sentence, which had branded itself on her long-term memory.

‘I have a brain tumour, and it’s inoperable.’

And then yet more searing, inescapable pain:

‘This is not the death I want.’