After an hour or so, he was done. He stabbed the shovel into the turf and sank down onto the ground. His shirt was dripping with sweat and his hair was lank. I walked over and looked down into the grave. Roots were flaring out from the walls of the dark pit. Some were thick and knobbly, others hung down like black, blindly searching tendrils.

‘Are you sure he’s going to fit?’

‘That’s his problem,’ Håkan said and got to his feet.

*

He hadn’t moved while we were gone. It would, naturally, have been extremely alarming if he had, but it still seemed strange to me, probably a symptom of my guilt. He was staring at the ceiling in a way that was anything but peaceful; I looked away because I knew that face was going to haunt me until my dying day. Håkan, on the other hand, seemed unperturbed and I worried it was because the mouse was wreaking havoc inside him. That being said, he’d probably seen a thing or two, in his line of work. Dead bodies were likely nothing to him. At least that’s the impression he gave when he grabbed the dead man’s feet, pulled him down onto the floor and then paused to ponder how to proceed. He wore a belt with a box-frame buckle, which he took off and wrapped under the arms of the dead man and buckled around his chest. Then he grabbed the belt and dragged the body across the floor, out onto the landing and over to the stairs. Once there, he paused for another think. It looked like he was contemplating how to move a piece of furniture and I thought to myself that it couldn’t be professional detachment, it had to be something else.

The mouse never left our side. It ran in circles around us, watching everything intently. Håkan pushed the body until it rolled down the stairs. Then he ran after it. The mouse zipped down the trim along the edge of the steps.

Håkan had squatted down next to the body and was holding a wallet that had fallen out of the dead man’s back pocket. It was connected to a belt loop by means of a clip-on keychain.

‘Don’t do it,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s better not to know. Makes it easier to forget.’

The wallet had a Velcro closure; he was turning it over in his hands.

‘It never happened. Remember?’

That made him push the wallet back into the man’s pocket.

‘Would you mind checking?’ he said with a nod at the front door.