However, the further down she went, the less noticeable the smell became. By the time she reached the laundry room, it had disappeared completely. She scratched her head. Weird. She quickly turned and headed back upstairs. The smell made its presence felt on the second floor. On the third floor, where Elvira lived, it was worse. When she got to her own floor, the smell had become a stench. Slightly out of breath, she continued up to the top floor. It was unbearable up there. Vendela moved from door to door, sniffing. She glanced up at the attic and decided to check it out. It was damp and rather too warm during the summer, but the smell had noticeably diminished. It was like a little world of its own; the unpleasantness hadn’t managed to get as far as the attic.

‘Weird,’ she mumbled again, and went back down to the fifth floor. She rang one of the doorbells, but no one answered. She tried the other three; no luck.

She returned to her own apartment; she had an advertising campaign to finish off. She closed the door and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee. She stood beneath the air vent inhaling the disgusting smell.

Something’s rotting, she thought.

Chapter 8

Lovisa Wahlberg didn’t have much to be proud of, and plenty of people had felt the need to tell her this over the years – mainly her parents. She hadn’t achieved a fraction of what they had expected of her.

‘You need to get yourself a decent apartment,’ her mother had said on her last visit.

By which she meant ‘an apartment of your own’, not one that belonged to someone else. As if it was just a matter of making the decision. As if absolutely anyone could buy an apartment in Stockholm, or magic up a rental agreement rather than a sublet. Lovisa had stopped listening. She’d been living here for over a year now, and would be able to stay for four more years. The owners were in Dubai and loved the life out there. No doubt Lovisa would have loved it too.

She didn’t look around when she left the cake shop in the Söder district where she worked. She went straight across the street to her bicycle. The fear was in her blood, there was no getting rid of it. It made her focused and distracted at the same time.