‘I’m looking for someone.’

‘Are you from the police?’

‘Is she here?’

‘Who?’

‘Susso.’

The old man was sitting with one leg folded over the other, bobbing his shoe up and down.

‘Who’s that in your pocket?’ he said.

When she didn’t reply, he grinned at her and then started singing: ‘I have seen you, little mouse, running all about the house.’

‘I’m taking her with me.’

The man with all the bling grinned languidly.

‘What has done?’ he said. ‘Has been naughty?’

Erasmus muttered something to the man in Finnish that made him get up and shuffle into the house. Not long after, a young woman came out. She wore a cloth Alice band in her blonde hair and looked completely normal, as far as Diana could make out.

‘Where is she?’

The old man watched her in silence. Then he stood up and walked toward her. He had a limp. She took a step back and when he came closer still, she took another.

While he studied her face, his tongue popped out to moisten his lips, which were unnaturally hard and dark. Suddenly, his hand shot out. Diana turned aside, shielding her pocket, because she thought he was after the squirrel. But he wasn’t. He pinched her breast through her sweater and he pinched hard. She leapt back. Stared at him and then at the young woman.

‘Has anyone suckled these?’ he asked.

She was dumbfounded.

‘Do you have children?’ the woman said.

Diana barely heard the question. She was looking at the window. The man with the gold chains was moving around behind the glass and in front of him on the windowsill was a row of dolls of various heights. Some had hats on, some didn’t. They looked like something that might have crawled out of a box of Christmas decorations cursed by an evil sorcerer. Because they were not still like dolls. One of them had even placed its claw-fingered little rat hands against the glass; its cheerful face was twisted by a horrifying craniofacial deformity.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘I have children.’

‘A girl,’ the woman said. ‘It’s a girl, isn’t it?’

She nodded against her will.

‘How old,’ the man whispered, but not to Diana.

‘How old is she?’

‘Four.’

‘And what’s her name,’ the old man said.

‘Kiruna,’ she heard herself say.

‘Kiruna,’ he said, nodding slowly. ‘And you live in the town of that same name then, I imagine.’

She nodded.

‘At what address?’

‘What?’

‘What’s your address?’ the woman said.

‘It’s Duvvägen. Number fourteen.’

‘If you ever come here again, we will come find you at Duvvägen fourteen and take your little girl.’

‘Maybe I’ll make her my maid,’ the old man said, ‘maybe I’ll let other people use her and then maybe we’ll drown her in the lake over there when we’re tired of her. Who knows? No one knows.’