He got to his feet.

‘The pillow,’ she said.

The boy turned around, took the pillow from Moa and went inside. Torgny and Yvonne looked down at the table; Moa cried silently.

After a while, he came back.

‘I can’t find a gun, there’s just this black thing …’

‘That’s it,’ Torgny said.

‘Should I lock the safe when I’m done?’

‘Either way,’ Stava told him.

When he returned, Stava took the pillowcase from him and looked in it.

‘Lovely little goody bag,’ she said.

She took out the bolt gun and turned it over in her hands. A heavy cylinder of lacquered black steel surrounded by nuts and counter-nuts that lent it a curved shape. After putting it back in the bag, she pulled out a wallet and flipped through the notes.

‘Take this,’ she said to Lukas and handed him a thousand-kronor note. ‘Put it in your pocket.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘As a matter of fact, you do. Here you go. And you, take off your rings. Lukas thinks they look valuable. They’re probably eighteen carats. In Finland, the standard’s fourteen carats. Everything’s a little bit shitter in Finland.’

When Torgny and Yvonne had twisted off their rings, Stava received them into the palm of her hand.

‘Are these diamonds?’ she said and Yvonne nodded. Stava shook the pillowcase gently, stuck her head in and pulled out a gold ring.

‘Whose ring is this, then?’

‘It’s probably my mother’s ring,’ Yvonne said quietly. ‘Or my father’s. Both were in the safe.’

Stava put the diamond ring in the bag and handed the rest to Lukas.

‘Put them in your pocket,’ she said.

Then she turned to Torgny.

‘You’re going to go to bed now.’

They didn’t move.

‘But I don’t want to,’ Torgny mumbled.

‘It’s late,’ said Stava, who was still digging around in the pillowcase, examining its contents.

Torgny got up slowly. A small amount of blood had trickled from his nose; it looked like the dark cavity of his nostril had widened.

‘Come on,’ he said, but Yvonne angrily snatched her arm away when he tried to make her stand up. He spoke softly to her and in the end, she followed him into the house.

*

He had seen animals stunned with a bolt gun several times, before being exsanguinated, but he had never operated one himself. That was why he was now sitting on the sofa in the living room, trying to figure out how it worked. Lukas was sitting next to him. The boy wanted to know why it was called a gun, since it looked more like a stick than a gun. Anders found the boy’s companionability uncomfortable and didn’t answer his incessantly repeated, pointless questions.