Lelle sat completely still and watched them being led away, first Anita and then the boys. There were so many police officers and they dragged in snow and cold air, which made it hard for Lelle to speak through his chattering teeth. A policewoman asked him what had happened, but he still couldn’t get any words out. Someone put a blanket round his shoulders and a mug of hot soup in his hands. Lelle let the steam warm his cheeks, but he didn’t even realize the soup was for drinking. Outside the window black, shadowy shapes crowded together in the darting beams of torches. More police cars arrived. The gate was wide open now. Someone stood over him and put a dressing on his head. He knew he smelled of blood, but he wasn’t in pain anywhere.

‘They killed my daughter.’

That was all he could say. The smiling officer didn’t seem to understand, but then all of a sudden she was in a hurry.

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said, and disappeared out into the cold.

Lelle followed her on to the veranda, staggered slightly in the slush and had to sit down again. There was a group of police officers and excited voices.

‘We’ve found the girls!’

The policeman had kind eyes and if he judged her he didn’t show it. He made her forget the hospital bed and the drip. Meja wasn’t used to anyone listening to her so intently, unused to being able to explain anything from beginning to end. She hesitated and stumbled over the words at first, but soon the words were stumbling over each other in haste. The policeman was called Hassan and he didn’t seem to mind that it was past midnight. He didn’t look at the clock at all.

‘Take it from the beginning,’ he said.

Meja told him about the train journey to Norrland, how they had sat up for the whole journey, because they couldn’t afford a berth. Over ten hours with nothing to do but stare at each other. They had moved many times over the years, but never this far. Torbjörn had been kind, even though he smelled and collected porn magazines, but Silje stayed the same. It didn’t matter how far they moved, Silje was always Silje. She told him about her loneliness in the triangular room and how it drove her out into the forest. That was where she met Carl-Johan, by the lake. She stopped smoking the very next day. It was love at first sight.

She thought of his special smell, the way it smoothed everything out. All the talk about war and destruction had stayed on the periphery. Perhaps that’s what made love dangerous. Not because you became blind, exactly, but because you didn’t heed the warning signs. She wondered what Lelle would say about that deduction, whether he would agree.