Then it struck me she was practically blind without her contacts and that she might not be able to make out who I was. So I stood up and went over to her.

Her head shifted slightly on the pillow, but she didn’t look away. Not wanting to spook her, I reached out very slowly before I started stroking her hair.

‘It’s Mum,’ I said.

‘You haven’t changed.’

‘I haven’t?’

She nodded solemnly.

‘I wish I could say the same.’

‘You can.’

‘You haven’t changed,’ I said and received a wan smile in return.

Every once in a while, Anders was…

Every once in a while, Anders was somewhere else. He slipped inside himself and was enveloped by memories in constant flux. The cast of the life he had left behind swirled around him and the feelings they evoked obscured everything else. Words reached him as though from a different room and what he saw with his eyes was blurred and irrelevant. This lasted no more than a few moments at a time; sometimes it was just a flash, but each recurrence was horrifying.

Outside the window was the drawn-out, paralysing light and the massive silence that exerted a constant pressure on his ears. She alone could grant him relief, such as it was. With her fingertips, she could caress away the remorse twisting his features and for that reason, he stayed close to her at all times. It made him ridiculous to the others and that was likely why they were now standing outside the door, giggling.

They had been out there for a long time. It might be five in the morning, it might be four, maybe it wasn’t even three; it was impossible to tell.

If they had come to fetch something from the house, whatever it may be, they should have left long ago. He didn’t know who they were, but he thought he’d heard Näcken’s voice.

He had pushed at Stava, but she didn’t wake up and he didn’t dare speak, not even softly, because then they would know they were awake, which might be interpreted as an invitation.

*

It was Näcken and two young men whose names he didn’t know; one of them couldn’t be much older than William. They forced them out of bed and ogled them while they got dressed.

They walked toward the tarpaulins, to a garage with wide-open doors. Erasmus was standing inside and the man standing next to him was Christer, the little girl’s father. He was barrel-shaped and the nipples on the fleshy folds of his chest protruded through his vest top. His beard was plaited into a long finger like the beard of some Ancient Egyptian king.

Anders didn’t want to enter the garage, so he was pushed inside and then he stood there next to Stava, looking at the wolf lying on the filthy concrete floor.