He took a sip of his beer and after putting his glass down he caught his moustache with his lower lip and sucked down the droplets that were stuck in the bristles. Then he asked in a quieter voice how my daughter liked her new potato patch.

They didn’t know Susso was still missing, so I told them about Diana’s little trip to Norway. I left out the part about her saviour wearing the face of a dead man and having the tail of a German Shepherd, because I was in no mood to be scoffed at.

They hadn’t heard about the suicide wave in Tornedalen last spring, but they knew about Lennart Brösth and Harr wanted to know more about him and his kidnapping cult. I didn’t know how to answer his questions; Roland had to ride to the rescue.

‘Well, I did tell you,’ he said, turning his bottle in his hands, ‘what kind of people Gudrun and her daughter have got on the wrong side of. That they are tough to label. So to speak.’

‘Trolls,’ Harr said. ‘That was the word you used.’

He said it loudly and with a naturalness that made me embarrassed; it was as though he had shouted out a four-letter word.

‘Yes,’ Roland said. ‘But as I said, that’s just a word.’

Harr unbuttoned the breast pocket of his denim shirt and dug around in it with his index finger, either looking for something or seeking to reassure himself something was still in there.

‘We made fun of that word, you know,’ he said and closed the pocket by pushing the button with his thumb. ‘On our way to Vittangi. We had a good laugh at your expense, Rolle. For finding a woman on the internet who not only believes in trolls but is pestered by them too.’

That this man, a bigoted bus driver with swirls of lichen around his mouth, a tragic bachelor from Malmberget who didn’t take his hat off in restaurants, who thought he was a troubadour, that he described me like that didn’t bother me in the slightest; if anything, his ignorant arrogance gave me a soothing feeling of superiority. If only you knew, I thought to myself.

At that moment, the mocking glint in his eye vanished.

‘But afterwards, when we were leaving,’ he said, ‘we didn’t much feel like laughing. Did we?’ He glanced at Ensimmäinen, who with a graceful movement of the hand caught a stray lock of white hair and pushed it behind his ear.

‘Something happened while we were there,’ Harr said without taking his eyes from me. ‘And Nänne and I haven’t been able to talk about it. We have tried to talk about it, but it’s as if it can’t be done.’ He leaned forward. ‘Why is it so hard to talk about?’

‘What’s so hard to talk about?’