She was in her own car.

The boot cover prevented her from getting up, so she rolled over on her back, bent her knees to her chest and pushed her feet upward. The cloth yielded and let in light that blinded her. She kept kicking with flaring nostrils; the effort was helping clear her head.

‘Diana! Stop that.’

She lay still. A Norwegian man. Who knew her name. And was driving her car? She started kicking again, and this time she screamed too, filled with terror and rage: she roared so loud her ears popped.

The car slowed down. Stopped.

She lay still, waiting.

A door slammed shut. Footsteps against the asphalt. The boot opened. The man stared down at her. He had curly black hair and a furrowed face, with stubble like a shadow across his cheeks.

‘I’m going to have to ask you to stop that,’ he said pleasantly.

To get some idea of where she was and what was going on, she tried to catch a glimpse of what it looked like behind him. A dead straight road with sparse forest on either side. No houses, no signs.

‘We don’t really need you, so if you make trouble, I’m going to leave you here.’

It was only then she realised there was something wrong with him. Half his face contorted with spastic tension and he was staring at her with one eye like an old sea captain.

He motioned with his head toward the gravelly side of the road.

‘Do you understand what I’m telling you, Diana? I’m going to dump you here like a bag of rubbish.’

He sounded so friendly she didn’t know how to take his threat. A car was approaching; as it drove past, she started kicking again. That made the man grab the boot cover and pull it off. She immediately calmed down. He was going to free her now.

He looked at her with his lopsided face. In her panicked state, she had to admit he was good-looking, despite his defect. A tall man in jeans and a red shell jacket with a standing collar. It was a Tierra jacket, she could tell from the tiny ice axe on his chest, and her dazed mind told her that Håkan had a jacket of that same brand, so he couldn’t very well harm her.

He leaned in over her and put a hand on her shoulder. The fear that he would hurt her slipped into her awareness but had no time to trigger a reaction. Because her field of vision was split by lightning and after the lightning, there was nothing.

Every now and then …