They had wrapped a blue nylon rope around its long muzzle and tied its paws together, the front and back separately. The animal sluggishly raised its head and looked at him, the same way it had looked at him when it had been under a spruce tree in a different time.

Erasmus spoke quietly in Finnish to a young man, who nodded and nodded and then strode off, leapt onto a quad bike and roared away.

‘If you want to,’ Erasmus said, ‘you can remove the rope.’

Stava fell to her knees and stroked Ransu’s chest, which was moving slowly up and down. She untied the knot and pulled the rope off. His maw instantly opened in what looked like a yawn.

It was not until Christer raised his arm that Anders realised he was holding a hammer, a claw hammer with a polymer grip.

The blow landed awkwardly because Stava was in the way. The avenging father shoved her aside and bent down and struck the animal’s temple and then struck it again. When Stava tried to stop him, Näcken took a step forward, grabbed hold of her hair and pulled her backward.

The hammer was raised again; Anders turned away. Näcken was watching open-mouthed; sitting in his cupped hand was a bizarre, hairless creature about the size of a rat, hideously pale and with sensitive bat ears that seemed to be opening toward the unpleasant noises caused by the hammer hitting the skull, which disintegrated a little more with each blow.

When Christer was done, he put the hammer down on the workbench. His breaths were sharp and short, his hand red like a barn painter’s and his vest top speckled. The pale creature sitting in Näcken’s hand stared at the growing pool of blood slowly winding its way toward the drain with eyes as black as screw holes.

‘Anders,’ Erasmus said. ‘You need to prove that I can still trust you.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

The old man made an inviting gesture toward the workbench and the hammer on it.

‘Please, Daddy,’ Stava said.

Erasmus put a finger to his lips, hushing her.

Anders went up behind Stava and weighed the hammer in his hand. He aimed like he would with a nail; a strand of her long black hair stuck to the gory head of the hammer when he pulled his arm back to strike.

Her dad was fiddling with something…

Her dad was fiddling with something in the back seat of the car; when Diana pulled into the driveway, he quickly looked up. Seeing it was her, he leaned back in and finished unbuckling the little girl from the car seat.

Kiruna ran up to her and threw herself in her arms. Diana recognised her immaculate plaits from old pictures of herself and without checking, she knew her little nails were both clean and meticulously cut.