Roland does a careful U-turn on the now completely snow-packed parking lot and slowly rolls on towards the highway. It’s been snowing so heavily that you can only barely make out the tyre tracks of the other cars. Klara turns around and looks up at the illuminated facade of the newer, bigger nineteenth-century church. She feels a kind of relief, something close to freedom. The funeral is over. Grandma is with her sister. Maybe she can go to Stockholm with Gabriella without feeling guilty.

She starts to go back to the parish house, but something in the twilight makes her start, freezes her in her tracks. Slowly, she turns back to the parking lot, not sure what exactly it was that stopped her. There’s the church, quiet with a gentle creamy white in the slight illumination of its walls. The snow is falling down in sheets in the grey light in front of her. All the tyre tracks you can still see lead out towards Highway 210, of course – it’s the only way out of here.

All but one.

She turns her head towards the forest and the gravel road that leads down to the sea and a small campsite. And there they are, the tracks of a pair of tyres heading around the curve and disappearing. They can’t be old, or the snow would have covered them. Someone drove down there after the funeral. But who would drive to a closed campsite in a snowstorm?

Klara shrugs her shoulders and shakes off the snow, buries her paranoia, or whatever it is. This is Grandpa’s funeral; she doesn’t have the energy to think of more than that.

12 August

Beirut

A week goes by. Jacob learns how to get to the temporary embassy using service, the confusing blend of taxi and bus that’s the only cheap way to get around in Beirut. He stumbles through Arabic phrases and after getting a few quick tips from Agneta, he won’t be fooled by taxi drivers again.

For the most part, it’s just him and Agneta at the embassy. The rest of the small staff is in Stockholm or on other trips or at meetings.

‘It’s so stressful and chaotic right now,’ Frida, a young deputy secretary, tells him one afternoon, sitting on the edge of her desk in the corner.

Her blonde hair has dark roots that need dyeing, and the furrow on her forehead speaks to how stressful things have been for a while, maybe her whole life.

‘It’s not clear what’s going to happen to this embassy anyway, and I’m sorry you ended up assigned here right now. But we’ll find something useful for you to do, I’m sure.’ She nods encouragingly towards his desk. ‘In any case, you certainly seem quick and competent,’ she says, smiling tiredly, before taking off for the airport and a conference in Ankara.