Ipa turned off the engine, pulled the handbrake, grabbed both phones with one hand and climbed out. She took the front steps in one stride, threw open the front door and called out. Then she stood talking to someone in the hallway who seemed not to want to show themselves.

Lennart opened his door and heaved himself out. The car sagged under his weight. A face slipped out of sight in a window. He scanned the yard. A horse trailer. A green Ford Scorpio with tinted windows in the back.

‘Well now, we have fancy visitors, do we? The celebrity has come.’

Mikko Jokela had appeared in the doorway. He stood there for a moment before stepping out into the light. Under his unbuttoned military jacket, he wore nothing except a lot of gold necklaces of varying thickness and a pair of black plastic sunglasses that dangled from the chain that hung lowest on his chest. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and stroked the beard that was growing in a neat circle around his mouth. An enormous signet ring sparkled on his pinkie.

‘Where’s Erasmus?’ Lennart said.

‘Rasmus? There’s no one by that name here.’

The look of theatrical puzzlement he had put on morphed into a smile that revealed an incomplete set of teeth.

‘Where is he?’

‘What happened to your paw?’

Ipa stepped out through the door and down from the porch. She motioned to Lennart to get back in the car. Mikko had put on his sunglasses. Stood there staring at him, glittering with gold, grinning scornfully.

*

They drove along the edge of the lake and stopped in front of a cabin. A dark cabin with gingerbread window frames. The garden looked like a scrapyard. There was a hob sitting next to the front steps.

‘Is he in here?’

‘Here? No, this house is empty.’

‘Then what are we doing here?’

‘You’re going to live here.’

He stepped out of the car and after it left, he looked around. Paper bags bursting with decomposing newspapers in the tall grass. A picture frame with gilded embellishment. A moose shed gnawed to pieces by tiny teeth. It looked like the remnants of a truly terrible car boot sale.

A pungent smell of corpse greeted him when he stepped through the door. Every room was crammed with stuff; what the floor might look like was anyone’s guess.

He located the bathroom and sat down with a snowmobile magazine that kept falling to the floor when he tried to hold it open in his lap. The dimmer switch was buzzing like a bug in his ear; he turned it off with a hard slap.