He anxiously turns back to the harbour again and sees Yassim take the phone from his ear and turn back towards the restaurant. He raises his hand in an apologetic greeting. Jacob waves back before turning back to Myriam again.

But she’s disappeared as if she were never there. There’s just a napkin lying on the table next to a half-eaten plate of hummus. He turns it over.

YOU HAVE UNTIL TOMORROW.

That’s it.

‘Who were you talking to?’ Yassim asks and sits down on the chair opposite him.

Jacob grabs his glass of wine, his thoughts racing, the whole restaurant shaking around him.

‘Nobody,’ he says. ‘Just some British lady who wanted to know how to get a taxi back to Beirut.’

‘Maybe she thought you were cute,’ Yassim says with a smile. ‘Not so strange.’

Jacob forces out a smile. ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘I’m popular with women.’

Yassim leans over and grabs his hand, stares deep into his eyes. ‘I have to go back to Syria,’ he says. ‘Soon.’

Jacob is so relieved that there are no more questions about Myriam that he doesn’t even understand what Yassim is saying at first. When he does, the air rushes out of him. ‘Okay,’ he says stoically. ‘But you just got back.’

Yassim nods calmly. ‘But after that,’ he says. ‘Do you want to go to Europe with me? In a few weeks.’

Jacob shakes his head and lets go of Yassim’s hand. ‘What?’ he says. ‘What do you mean?’

‘A job,’ Yassim says. ‘I just got asked to do a job in Europe in about a month and I don’t want to go without you.’

The napkin with Myriam’s command is turning damp in Jacob’s hand. He looks at the face in front of him, remembers the cool of the pistol beneath the table against his fingers.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, I want to go.’

22 November

Stockholm

It’s not yet two in the afternoon, but it feels like a grey twilight is settling in around Klara as she sits in the car in front of Trattoria Romana and opens the black notebook to the first page. She holds it close to her eyes, trying to make our Gabriella’s messy handwriting.

‘Cucumber. Yoghurt. Garlic. Bread.’

A grocery list.

Beside the insight that Gabriella was probably planning on making tzatziki, this doesn’t give her much, and Klara keeps flipping forward.

Gabriella seems to use the notebook for all sorts of scribbling. Most notes are lists, a couple about work, a few sentences about a meeting or a conversation with a client.

Klara flips quickly until she gets to the middle of the book where the notes end abruptly. With a sigh she starts from the beginning, reading each page a bit more carefully. But there’s nothing, as far as she can see, that seems to be linked to what happened this morning.