‘I get if you were worried, but I’m back now. Look. I’m here, Håkan. A bit black and blue, but mostly in one piece.’

He didn’t look at her, and it didn’t seem like her words were getting through to him. She had a mind to ask him what diagnosis he would give a father behaving this way. It was as though he was enacting a mental collapse of exactly the kind he liked to talk about with arch contempt during discussions about the rocketing number of people on medical leave and the failing work ethic of the general population. But she bit her tongue. Sarcastic digs were unlikely to help improve his state.

‘How long have you been sitting here? Håkan.’

‘Go away.’

‘Can you tell me what’s wrong?’

‘It’s nothing. I just want to sit here.’

‘You just want to sit there? In the shower?’

He nodded.

‘And how long were you planning on sitting there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better if you went to bed?’

No answer.

‘What do you want me to tell your daughter?’

His body twitched; she assumed it was meant as a shrug.

When she exited the bathroom, Kiruna was sitting on the stairs, watching her. Her eyes were bigger than normal and her mouth was open solemnly; she wondered how much the little girl had overheard. She shut the door behind her.

‘Daddy’s sick,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave him be.’

When Roland told me he had asked…

When Roland told me he had asked a couple of friends of his from Malmberget to decontaminate Susso’s garden, I was cross with him for having the gall to joke about something like that. But he wasn’t joking and when that sank in, I had to sit down. A stool met me halfway, but mentally I continued down through the stone floor and straight into the abyss of the Kiruna mine, where I tumbled around in a darkness without dimensions.

‘We can trust these lads,’ he said.

He had a younger brother and I might have understood if he’d gone to him for help, but he just shook his head at that. There was no one in the world he trusted more than these boys. Two good old village lads, he called them.

Since I’d never heard him mention any friends of his, I had more or less assumed he didn’t have any. At least none you could turn to with something like this. I mean: who does? So they were supposedly going to materialise out of nowhere and dig up and transport and dispose of a corpse, a corpse that had nothing whatsoever to do with them. Just like that, no questions asked? Was he going to pay them for it?