Then the van came creeping toward us. All three of them were in the front seat, like a gang of slit-eyed copper thieves; the impression seemed deliberately evoked. Harr was in the middle; as they drew near, he held something up for us to see.

It was a shaggy grey wolf’s head, pulled halfway out of a supermarket carrier bag. Its tongue lolled out of its gaping maw and Harr stuck his tongue out and grimaced in an attempt to mimic the animal’s simultaneously aggressive and helpless attitude.

That didn’t sit well with me. I don’t know why. I instinctively felt it was wrong to make fun of the wolf and that Harr would pay for it, sooner or later.

After getting out of the car, he held the bag out to me and I was so caught off guard I took it. The head was unexpectedly heavy; it was like he’d handed me a bowling ball in a bag.

‘That one, let me tell you, that one you should stuff and mount and put up in your shop. As a warning to others.’

‘I think I’d rather not.’

‘But if that makes them leave you alone?’

‘I don’t think that would be the reaction.’

‘No?’

‘No. And it’s also incredibly illegal.’

‘You’re right, of course. How can I not have thought of that?’

I only then realised he was mocking me. His crooked front teeth glinted under the overhang of his moustache when he smiled. Roland opened the bag and looked in it.

‘What do you reckon, Rolle, shouldn’t she put it up in her shop?’

‘What a bloody brute.’

‘Yep. Less cocky now, though.’

Ensimmäinen took the rifles out of the van and put them in the hatchback’s boot and Pontus had squatted down to unscrew the licence plate.

‘Take a gander at this,’ Harr said.

The rest of the wolf was lying on the metal floor in the back of the van.

He grabbed its hind legs and pulled the body closer. Then he held up one of its front paws and stepped aside so we could see it. There was an oblong patch of skin on it with no fur. The skin was reddish and marbled and there seemed to be something repulsively spongy about it.

‘This,’ he said, scraping it with his thumb, ‘is probably the only sign of something being amiss.’

‘Was it like this?’

‘Nah, his head was still attached when we ran into each other.’

‘But weren’t there more of them?’ Roland said.

Harr shook his head.

‘But Susso said there were more,’ I said.

‘This was the only one we saw. And I actually killed it in self-defence. He came at us like a rabid dog.’

‘And Lennart Brösth, was he there?’

He shook his head.

‘What about the woman in the wheelchair?’

‘No wheelchairs,’ he said and closed the doors.