They cross the bridge, pass by families having coffee, as if everything is normal. But the children press their faces against the large windows as sirens cut through regular traffic noise and drown out the quiet music streaming over the cafe’s speakers. Blue lights flash down on the street, police cars drive by at high speed down below.

‘Dad, look! So cool!’ Jacob hears a little girl say in a Skåne accent.

Jacob turns around to look at her, a girl with long, dark hair, in jeans, a cap on her head, maybe six years old. She pulls her dad by the hand towards the window. Nothing unusual about the day in here. Just a family shopping together after school.

‘Hats on and hoods up,’ Yassim says.

He leads them into the department store and down the escalators, past the shops and the people, out onto the street. The sirens shriek just a few blocks away, maybe not even that.

‘They’ll soon find the car,’ he says. ‘Follow me.’

He turns left onto a side street by the department store and walks over to a dark-blue Japanese SUV. It’s a bit beaten up and seems to have at least ten years under its belt. The door is unlocked.

‘One of you has to drive,’ he says. ‘I’ve been driving for ten hours with one arm.’

George hesitates for a moment, then he crawls into the driver’s seat. Yassim walks around the car and sits down in the passenger seat, and Jacob hesitantly gets into the back. Yassim bends down, fiddling with something under the steering wheel.

‘Hold down the clutch,’ he says to George.

Then the engine starts running, and George calmly steers the car out onto the street. Behind them, the sirens are becoming ever more distant.

‘Lucky I had time to prep an extra car,’ Yassim says.

‘You stole this?’ Jacob asks.

Yassim shrugs. ‘We can’t exactly use a car with Belgian licence plates. That would be a little too obvious.’

Yassim turns to George now. ‘But who are you?’ he says.

‘I could ask you the same thing,’ George says. ‘But I think I already know.’

They pass police cars as they make their way out of Malmö and up onto the highway to Helsingborg, but all the cars are headed in the opposite direction – no one is following them. They drive in silence at first, overcome by the moment, by the fact that they have actually escaped and that Yassim is here.

‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ Jacob says at last. ‘I don’t understand anything.’

He looks out through the window to the water stretched out under the grey afternoon sky. In front of them sit the port and cranes in what must be Landskrona.

‘First of all, I don’t even understand how you could be alive.’

But Yassim doesn’t answer, and Jacob bends forward between the seats.