Before long, the dark mirror of a lake appeared among the trees, the järvi in Rumajärvi, and after walking a bit further, she could make out houses too. A shed down by the shore and further up, the tin roof of a house. She sank into a squat and scanned the area for people. She buried her face in her hands and the air rushing out of her nostrils with each breath felt hot against her skin. She stayed in that position until the squirrel started making a racket above her head. When she looked up, it had jumped down into the underbrush, where it rolled about, emitting squeaking sounds. On closer inspection, however, it turned out it wasn’t the squirrel squeaking, but rather a swollen little lemming with dappled yellow-and-brown fur. The two animals circled each other in some kind of hostile dance that ended with the lemming disappearing like a ball among the ferns.

Diana picked the squirrel up, placed it in her kangaroo pocket and walked down toward the village. A rusty old banger was parked on the grass in front of an older house, a white Nissan Sunny, and she could see someone hiding behind it. Diana said hello, but the girl neither replied nor came out, so she walked around the car. She had seen that little face before. The mongoloid slits of her eyes, her flat nose, her thin upper lip. A textbook example of foetal alcohol syndrome. The girl had a grimy, hot-pink winter coat on over a floral-print dress and was holding the handlebar of an old-fashioned doll’s pram with its canopy up.

‘What’s your name then?’

‘Sästin.’

Diana was about to ask her the name of her doll but changed her mind after peeking in under the canopy. A squirrel was tucked in under the blanket. Both its eyes had popped out and were dangling on threads, one was a lingonberry, the other a wrinkled blueberry, and an ugly tooth glinted inside the contorted mouth.

The door to the house opened to reveal an elderly woman watching her with a severe expression.

Diana had forgotten why she was there and had to think about it for a second.

‘I’m looking for a person who’s supposed to be here.’

The woman waved over the child, who immediately ran in under her arm. Then she came outside. Diana followed her and was shown to a house surrounded by tarpaulins.

‘She’s my age,’ she said, but the woman just stared at her and then left.

*

Sitting outside the house were two men. One was an old man with a hat and a long grey beard; she knew that was Erasmus. The man sitting next to him looked like a criminal. He was topless and had gold chains around his neck. He was holding a knife, some kind of samurai knife, which he was testing with his ring-bedecked fingers.

They watched her in silence.