The air in the car was crackling with her displeasure. Anders sat shaking his head; he shook it incessantly. Like a mental patient facing the wall in a common room. As though his entire existence revolved around a single question to which he was doomed to answer no for the rest of eternity.

‘We can’t arrive empty-handed,’ she said.

Anders said nothing. He was too busy shaking his head, convinced terrible pain would set in the moment he stopped moving it.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m glad we’re in agreement.’

Her eyes roved across the landscape. Fields sprinkled with silage bales. Red wooden houses immersed in verdant greenery.

‘Are there any rich people around here?’

‘Rich people?’

She nodded.

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘No neighbour of yours?’

‘Why am I feeling like this, what’s happening to me?’

Lennart followed behind the motorhome…

Lennart followed behind the motorhome. Sometimes he saw Ingvill’s elbow moving in the rear-view mirror. They had crossed over into Norway. The fens and low-trunked birch woods disappeared, replaced by blue-tinted mountainsides and roads leading up and then down and then up again.

They stopped for petrol in Varangerbotn and then followed the road that ran along the stony shores of the sea fjord. Every now and then, a breeze smoothed dark fields on the water. Far out in the distance, there was a person in a boat, their life jacket like an orange dot.

The further out on the barren peninsula they got, the further apart the houses were, and the more derelict.

Once the boy woke up, he sat watching Lennart with enigmatic patience. Lennart told him to look at the sheep lining the road like grey rocks, but the boy never took his eyes off him.

*

The road up the mountain to the bunker was little more than a trail. A woman was walking along its edge and when Lennart climbed out of the car, he heard a dog barking not too far away.

He followed Abraham into the motorhome. Grete was sitting on the floor by the sofa. Her shiny scalp could be glimpsed between her wilting strands of hair. Her top lip arched, wrinkled and taut, across the teeth of her upper jaw as she tugged at the blanket in an attempt to hide her legs. When Abraham knelt down to lift her up, she let out a sound that made him shy away. He straightened up, bewildered. Ingvill said something inaudible from over by the bed and Grete smiled without looking at them.

‘I’m tired, lads. You’ll have to come back later.’

They went outside and stood in silence, united in confusion.

‘There’s too many people around,’ Lennart said. ‘We have to wait for nightfall.’

Abraham took out his weasel. It lay curled up in the palm of his hand; which end was which was anyone’s guess.