He’s lying on his back beside her on the grey sheet and his toned body stands out against the closed venetian blind. He’s talking, his voice is calm and clear, with all its hardness and warmth intact and she tries to understand what it is he’s asking her.

‘So you’ve split up?’

She’s lying beside him and hears herself reply, with breathless, drifting words.

‘It wasn’t working. I ended up hitting him.’

‘It never works. How could you believe it could?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘What about the Petersson case? Are you getting anywhere? If I were you, I’d take a good look at Goldman.’

‘Sod the case, Daniel.’

His hoarse laughter. And she wants to creep next to him, lay her arms around him, but it’s as if he’s not really there beside her, unless it’s her capacity for closeness that doesn’t really exist?

‘Shall we go another round?’ His hand on my thigh, but I can’t feel it, and his neutral words seem to contain a desire to express something else, as if he had actually been waiting for me, as if he thinks it might somehow be possible to discover something together.

Wasn’t that what we were just doing? Malin thinks.

Then she stands up, gets dressed, and he watches her silently.

‘You’re going?’

Idiotic question.

‘What do you think?’

‘You can stay. I can make some sandwiches if you’re hungry. You look tired, maybe you could do with someone making a fuss of you for a while.’

‘Don’t talk crap, Daniel. I can’t think of a worse suggestion.’

‘Go on, then. The Hamlet’s probably still open.’

‘Shut up, Daniel. Just shut up.’

Zacharias Martinsson has pushed Karin Johannison’s skirt high up over her stomach, he’s pulled off her white nylon tights and carried her through the laboratory in the basement of the National Forensics Lab and put her down on her back on a stainless steel workbench.

She is writhing before him and he is eating her, absorbing her moisture and sweet scent and taste, and he hears her groaning, is that the tenth, the twentieth time now?

Gunilla back at home. No doubt waiting with the evening meal when he called to say he had to work late, that he probably wouldn’t be home until eleven at the earliest.

He tries to bat away the image of his wife alone in the kitchen at home, but it refuses to budge.

He found a reason to pay Karin a visit once last autumn, and she made time for him, leading him down to the laboratory to show him something, and it just happened. They had both been longing for it, and she whispers: Now, come inside, come in Zacharias, and he lifts her down onto the floor, pulls down his trousers and he’s hard and she’s warm and soft and pliable and she looks at him, whispers, My neck’s sweaty, lick the sweat from my neck.

Maria Murvall’s face in front of Malin.

The photo of the bruised rape victim’s face is lying on the parquet floor of the living room, and she twists and turns the image of her own obsession.

Maria.

Your secret.

Preserved within you.

Within your silently screaming body in the white room of Vadstena Mental Hospital, tomorrow I’m going to another hospital, to another mute person.

The bells of St Lars Church strike ten and Malin wonders if Maria is asleep now, and if she is asleep, what would she be dreaming of?

Tove.

Probably on the bus with her friend now.

She won’t come here. And who can blame her, the way I’ve been behaving? I pleaded with her, and she’s probably like everyone else deep down. If they catch a glimpse of weakness, they take the chance to show their own power.

Did I really just think that, about my own daughter?

Malin stops mid-thought, feels shame take a sucking grasp of her body.

Thrusts the thought away.

Who was she going to the cinema with? A boy? How can I let go after what happened? The evil disappears, diminishes in memory over time. Only a hesitant electricity remains as a vague fear, doesn’t it? A fear that can excuse anything.

I don’t understand all this. I don’t understand myself.

And Janne. His warmth like a vanishing dream deep inside a memory. She doesn’t want to talk to him, doesn’t want to ask for forgiveness. What sort of person am I? she wonders. Capable of feeling such derision towards my own love?

Malin goes out into the kitchen and gets the bottle of tequila from the cupboard above the fridge.

Half left.

She raises the bottle to her lips.

What’s this autumn doing to you, Malin Fors? To all of you?

Where is it going to take you?

Look where it took me.

Something you should know: sometimes I’ve felt Andreas close to me, I’ve been able to feel his breath, free from any heat or cold or scent. I haven’t been able to see or hear him, but I know he’s both near me and as far away as he can get.

Jasmin’s here too, part of her.

Should I be scared of them?

Do they wish me harm now?

My world is white. Theirs may be black or grey and cold as the night when the car rolled into the memory of both the living and the dead.

You can’t find out my secret, Malin, and if you did, it probably wouldn’t help you. There’s power in secrets.

My secret?

Uncover it if you want to.

Follow the trail all the way out into loneliness and fear.

Maybe I can have forgiveness then.

If there’s any reason for it.

Forgiveness.

The word zigzags through Janne’s head as he makes a sandwich for Tove, and he looks over at the kitchen worktop where Malin stood screaming just a week ago, where she raised her hand and hit him.

Can you spread forgiveness over time?

How can we approach forgiveness, Malin and me? Because somehow it’s as if we can only do one thing together: feel that we have some sort of debt to each other, that our lives are nothing but an insult, an inadequacy, an injustice that needs to be apologised for.

Have we grown too old, Malin?

How long must an apology be allowed to work between people like us? Twelve years. Thirteen?

Tove likes liver pate with pickled gherkins.

She’s sitting watching television upstairs.

Curled up in its glow.

At home here.

You’re going to want me to apologise for her making that choice, Malin. Aren’t you?

She’s been to the cinema with her friend Frida.

Seems to steer clear of boyfriends, hasn’t really had one since Markus. Since Finspang.

‘The sandwiches are ready, Tove. Do you want herbal or ginger tea?’

No answer from upstairs.

Maybe she’s fallen asleep.

Tove leans back on the sofa and zaps through the channels.

Desperate Housewives. Some reality show. A football match. She ends up watching a documentary about an artist who’s made a sculpture of one of the people who jumped from the World Trade Center, a woman falling to the ground. The sculpture was going to be placed where the towers stood, but people said it was degenerate. Unworthy.

As if they refused to accept that there were people who were forced to jump from the buildings.

She takes a bite of her sandwich.

She couldn’t handle going to see Mum. Not tonight. Tonight she just wants to sit in the darkness and watch television, hear Dad doing whatever he’s doing downstairs.

And the sculpture on television.

A crouching bronze figure. Slight in the wind, just like in the real world. It looks like you, Mum, Tove thinks. And she wants to go down to Dad, ask him to take her home to Mum’s, see how she is, maybe stay there with her. But Dad probably wouldn’t want to do that. And maybe Mum would be cross if they just showed up like that.

Her mobile buzzes.

A text message from Sara. Tove taps a reply as the television shows a close-up of the sculpture’s frightened face, its shimmering bronze hair floating in the wind.