They walked almost a mile to get to her car. A small, white off-road vehicle, a Lada Niva, parked on a diagonal with the sun on its windscreen. Ipa opened the boot and helped the animal scramble in. It wasn’t a big space, but that didn’t seem to bother the wolf, who immediately lay down and placed its head between its front paws. She put the backpack on the back seat and had Susso climb in next to it.

Once she was behind the wheel, she took her cap off. She pulled the hair tie out of her blonde hair and put it between her teeth, tossed her hair about, gathered it up, took the hair tie out of her mouth and made a new ponytail.

The car bounced along on the uneven terrain; Lennart hit his head on the ceiling. Then he hit it again.

Before long, they had reached the road.

‘Disengage the locking differential,’ he said, nodding at the dashboard. ‘The left lever. No, the left one.’

‘Fucking Russian piece of crap,’ she said.

Anders looked at the house on the other side…

Anders looked at the house on the other side of the horse pasture. A big brick house with a gable roof. The pool like a gash of mareel in the lawn. The L-shaped stable was as tall as the main house and a row of cars was parked along its side.

He climbed out, shut the door behind him, accepted the rifle she handed him and loaded it with trembling fingers. One cartridge fell into the gravel; he didn’t bother picking it up.

The old man he’d been too scared to think about was standing in the middle of the road, wrapped in a sheet he was holding closed under his chin with his clumsy, werewolf-like hand. His face wrinkly and ugly like a bog mummy.

Anders stared at the cartridge on the ground and couldn’t move; he could barely breathe.

‘What’s the matter?’ Stava said.

Anders didn’t reply.

‘You don’t have to be afraid of him.’

‘Who is he?’ he mumbled.

‘It’s Ransu,’ she hissed and wrapped the rifle in a blanket. ‘And you’re going to have to pull yourself together. It makes him sad when you don’t recognise him.’

‘I do recognise him, I do, I do, I promise, I was just a bit …’

‘Get it together!’

They walked toward the house. The tape fencing in the horse pasture drew white lines through the twilight, and white was the shroud around the figure eagerly dragging himself along behind Stava, like a deformed child on its way to a fancy-dress party in a useless costume his tired mum put together at the last minute.