Caution! Children playing! Jan reads through the side window of the taxi. The words are printed on a blue plastic sign, and beneath it is the exhortation to DRIVE SLOWLY.

‘Bloody kids!’ the driver yells.

Jan is thrown forward. The taxi has swung around a corner and braked sharply in front of a tricycle.

A child has abandoned the trike virtually in the middle of the road.

The street is in a residential area in the town of Valla. Jan can see low wooden fences in front of white houses, and the big warning notice.

Caution! Children playing! But the streets are empty, in spite of the three-wheeler. There are no children here to necessitate caution.

Perhaps they are all indoors, Jan thinks. Locked inside.

The driver glances at him in the rear-view mirror. He looks close to retirement age, with deep lines etched on his forehead, a Father Christmas beard and a weary expression.

Jan is used to weary expressions; they are everywhere.

The driver had hardly said a word before the sudden outburst when he slammed on the brakes, but as the taxi moves off again he has a question for Jan: ‘The hospital... St Patricia’s... do you work up there?’

Jan shakes his head. ‘No. Not yet.’

‘Not yet? So you’re applying for a job there?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I see,’ says the driver.

Jan lowers his eyes and does not respond. He doesn’t want to reveal too much about himself, and he doesn’t know what he’s allowed to tell other people about the hospital.

The driver goes on: ‘You know there’s another name for that place?’

Jan looks up. ‘No. What’s that?’

The driver gives a little smile. ‘I’m sure they’ll tell you when you get there.’

Jan gazes out of the window at the rows of houses, thinking about the man he is soon to meet.

Dr Patrik Högsmed, senior consultant. His name was at the bottom of a job advert Jan found at the beginning of July:

The wording below the heading was similar to many others that Jan had read:

Much of this applied to Jan. He was a young man, a qualified pre-school teacher, he enjoyed play, and had been something of a drummer in his teenage years — although mostly on his own.

And he didn’t like abusive behaviour, for personal reasons.

But was he open and honest? That depended. He was good at appearing open, at any rate.

It was the contact details that made Jan cut out the advert: Patrik Högsmed, Admin Department, St Patricia’s Regional Psychiatric Hospital, Valla.

Jan had always found it difficult to sell himself, but the advert had stared at him from its place on the kitchen table for several days, and in the end he had called the number below the senior consultant’s name.

A deep male voice had answered. ‘Högsmed.’

‘Dr Högsmed?’

‘Yes?’

‘My name is Jan Hauger, and I’m interested in the position you’re advertising.’

‘What position?’

‘At the pre-school. Starting in September?’

There was a brief silence before Högsmed responded: ‘Oh yes, that position...’ He spoke quietly and seemed distracted. But he continued with a question for Jan: ‘May I ask why you are interested in this post?’

‘Well...’ Jan couldn’t tell the truth; he had immediately started to lie, or at least to conceal things about himself. ‘I’m curious,’ was all he said.

‘Curious,’ said Högsmed.

‘Yes... curious about the working environment and about the town. I’ve spent most of my time working in pre-schools and nurseries in cities. So it would be exciting to move to somewhere slightly smaller, and to compare the way in which a pre-school is run in that kind of place.’

‘Good,’ Högsmed had replied. ‘Of course this is a slightly unusual situation, since the children’s parents are actually patients...’

He had gone on to explain why St Patricia’s Hospital had a pre-school: ‘We started it a few years ago, as an experiment. The central idea is based on research into the critical aspect of a child’s relationship with its parents in terms of the child’s development into a socially mature individual. Both long-term and temporary foster homes always fall short in some respects, and here at St Patricia’s we believe it is extremely important for the child to have both regular and stable contact with the biological mother or father, in spite of the special circumstances. And of course, for the parent, this contact with the child forms part of their treatment.’ The doctor paused, then added, ‘That is what we do here: we treat the patients. We do not punish them, whatever they might have done.’

Jan had listened, and noticed that the doctor hadn’t used the word cure.

Högsmed had concluded with a further question: ‘How does that sound?’

Jan thought it sounded interesting, and had submitted an application along with his CV.

At the beginning of August Högsmed had called him: Jan had been shortlisted for the post, and the doctor wanted to meet him. They had agreed on a time, and then Högsmed had added, ‘I have a couple of requests, Jan.’

‘Yes?’

‘You will need to bring some form of photo ID — your driving licence or passport, just so that we can be sure of who you are.’

‘Of course, that’s fine.’

‘And one last thing, Jan... don’t bring any sharp objects with you. If you do, you won’t be allowed in.’

‘Sharp objects?’

‘Any sharp objects made of metal... No knives.’

As he walks over to Dr Högsmed and shakes his hand, Jan works out that it is no ordinary barbed wire that surrounds St Patricia’s psychiatric hospital — it is electrified. The strands of wire form an electric fence a metre high right on top of the wall, with glowing red diodes flashing on each post.

‘Welcome.’ Högsmed looks at him through his spectacles, without a trace of a smile. ‘Did you have any trouble finding your way here?’

‘No, not at all.’

The concrete wall and the electric fence remind Jan of some kind of old-fashioned zoo, a tiger enclosure perhaps, but on the gravel to the right of the gate he spots a little bit of everyday life: a bicycle rack, with ladies’ and men’s bicycles in a row, kitted out with baskets and reflectors. One of them even has a plastic child seat on the back.

The steel door clicks and is slid to one side by invisible hands.

‘After you, Jan.’

‘Thank you.’

Walking in through a prison gate is like taking the first steps into the mouth of a pitch-black cave. An alien, isolated world.

The door slides shut behind them. The first thing Jan sees is a long, white surveillance camera, with the lens pointing straight at him. The camera is fixed to a post next to the door, silent and motionless.

Then he sees another camera on another post closer to the hospital, and yet more attached to the building itself. A yellow sign by the road carries the warning CCTV CAMERAS IN OPERATION 24 HOURS.

They walk past a car park festooned with several more signs: one of them says AMBULANCES ONLY, another POLICE VEHICLES ONLY.

Now he is inside the wall, Jan can see the hospital’s entire pale-grey façade. It is five storeys high, with long rows of narrow windows. Strands of some kind of ivy are creeping around the windows on the ground floor, like big hairy worms.

Jan feels slightly claustrophobic out here, trapped between the wall and the hospital. He hesitates, but the doctor leads the way, walking purposefully.

The path ends at a second steel door. It is closed, but the consultant swipes his magnetic card and waves to the nearest camera; after approximately thirty seconds, the lock clicks open.

They enter a smallish room with a glassed-in reception area, and yet another camera. The place smells of cleaning fluid and wet concrete — the floor has just been mopped. A broad-shouldered shadow is sitting behind the dark glass.

A security guard. Jan wonders if he is armed.

The thought of violence and guns makes him listen out for any noise from the patients, but they are probably too far away. Locked up behind steel doors and thick walls. And why should he be able to hear them? They’re hardly likely to be bellowing or laughing or hammering on the bars with metal mugs. Are they? Their world is more likely to consist of silent rooms, empty corridors.

The doctor has asked a question.

Jan turns his head. ‘Sorry?’

‘Your ID,’ Högsmed repeats. ‘Did you remember to bring it with you?’

‘Of course...’ Jan rummages in his jacket pocket and holds out his passport. ‘There you go.’

‘You hang on to it,’ says Högsmed. ‘Just open it at the page with your personal details and hold it up in front of this camera.’

Jan holds up his passport. The camera clicks and he is registered.

‘Good. We just need to take a quick look inside your bag as well.’

Jan has to unzip his bag and take out the contents in front of Dr Högsmed and the guard: a packet of tissues, a waterproof jacket, a folded newspaper...

‘All done.’

The doctor waves to the guard behind the glass, then leads Jan through a big steel archway — it looks like a metal detector — and on to another door, which he unlocks.

It seems to Jan that the air grows colder and colder as they make their way further into the hospital. After three more steel doors they are in a corridor which ends in a plain wooden door. Högsmed opens it. ‘So, this is where I hang out.’

It’s just an ordinary office. Most of the items in the doctor’s room are white, from the walls to the framed diplomas hanging next to the bookshelves. The shelves are also white, just like the piles of paper on the desk. There is only one personal possession on display: a photograph on the desk shows a young woman who looks tired but happy, holding a newborn baby in her arms.

But on the right-hand side of the desk Jan notices something else: a pile of assorted headgear. Five items, all well worn. A blue security guard’s hat, a white nurse’s cap, a headteacher’s black mortar board, a green hunting cap and a red clown’s wig.

Högsmed indicates the pile. ‘Choose one if you like.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I usually let my new patients choose one of the hats and put it on. Then we talk about why he or she chose that particular hat, and what it might mean... You’re welcome to do the same, Jan.’

Jan reaches out his hand. He wants to choose the clown’s wig, but what does that symbolize? Wouldn’t it be better to be a helpful nurse? A good person. Or a headteacher, who represents knowledge and wisdom?

His hand begins to tremble slightly. In the end he lowers it. ‘I think I’ll pass.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well... I’m not a patient, after all.’

Högsmed gives a brief nod. ‘But I could see you were thinking of choosing the clown, Jan. And that’s interesting, because clowns often have secrets. They hide things behind a painted smile.’

‘Oh?’

Högsmed nods again. ‘John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer, used to do voluntary work as a clown in Chicago before he was arrested; he liked performing in front of children. And of course serial killers and sex offenders are children in a way; they see themselves as the centre of the world, and have never grown up.’

Jan doesn’t say any more, he just tries to smile.

Högsmed stares at him for a few seconds, then he turns and points to a pine chair in front of the desk. ‘Take a seat, Jan.’

‘Thank you, Doctor.’

‘I know I’m a doctor, but please feel free to call me Patrik.’

‘OK... Patrik.’

Jan thinks this sounds wrong. He doesn’t want to be on first-name terms with the doctor. He sits down, lets his shoulders drop and tries to relax, glancing quickly at the senior consultant.

Dr Högsmed seems young to be in charge of an entire hospital, but he doesn’t look too good. His eyes are bloodshot. Once he is seated behind his desk, he quickly leans back in the ergonomic office chair, takes off his glasses and opens his eyes wide, staring up at the ceiling.

Jan wonders what on earth Högsmed is up to, then he sees that the doctor has taken out a little bottle of eye drops. He squeezes three drops into each eye, then shuts them tight for a moment.

‘Keratitis,’ he explains. ‘Doctors can be ill too; people sometimes forget that.’

Jan nods. ‘Is it serious?’

‘Not particularly, but my eyeballs have felt like sandpaper for the last week.’ He leans forward, trying to blink away thin tears, before putting his glasses back on. ‘As I said before, welcome to St Patricia’s, Jan. I assume you know what the locals call this place?’

‘I don’t think I...’

The consultant rubs his right eye. ‘Down in the town... the nickname people have come up with for St Patricia’s?’

Of course Jan found out the name only a few minutes ago; it was going round and round in his head when he walked in, along with the name of the murderer Ivan Rössel, but still he looks around as if the answer might be written on the walls. ‘No,’ he lies. ‘What do they call it?’

Högsmed looks slightly strained. ‘I’m sure you already know.’

‘Maybe... The taxi driver mentioned something on the way here.’

‘Did he indeed?’

‘Is it... is it St Psycho’s?’

The doctor gives a quick nod, but still seems disappointed with the answer. ‘Yes, that’s what some outsiders call it. St Psycho’s. Even I have heard the name a couple of times, and I don’t always...’ Högsmed breaks off and leans forward slightly. ‘But those of us who work here never use that term. We use the correct name: St Patricia’s Regional Psychiatric Hospital — or just “the hospital” if we’re short of time. And if you are employed here, I would insist that you use one of those terms.’

‘Of course,’ says Jan, meeting Högsmed’s gaze. ‘I’m not keen on nicknames either.’

‘Good.’ The doctor leans back in his chair. ‘And you wouldn’t be working inside the hospital anyway, if you get the job. The pre-school is separate from the hospital.’

‘Oh?’ This is news to Jan. ‘So it’s not in this building?’

‘No. The Dell is a completely separate building.’

‘But what do you do with... with the children?’

‘What do we do with them?’

‘When they come here, I mean. How do they get to spend time with... with their mother or father?’

‘We have a visitors’ room. The children come in through a sally port.’

‘A sally port?’

‘There’s an underground corridor,’ says Högsmed. ‘And a lift.’

He picks up several sheets of paper from the desk. Jan recognizes them: his application form. Attached is a printout from the criminal records bureau, showing that Jan Hauger has never been convicted of any kind of sexual offence. Jan is used to requesting this proof from the police; it is always required when someone applies to work with children.

‘Now let’s see...’ Högsmed screws up his red eyes and slowly begins to leaf through the form. ‘Your CV looks excellent. You worked as a classroom assistant in Nordbro two years after you left grammar school, then you qualified as a pre-school teacher in Uppsala, and you’ve had several temporary posts at various nurseries and pre-schools in Gothenburg. You’re currently unemployed, it seems, and still living there.’

‘I’ve only been out of work for a couple of months,’ Jan says quickly.

‘But you’ve had nine temporary posts in six years. Is that correct?’

Jan nods without speaking.

‘And nothing permanent so far?’

‘No,’ says Jan, pausing for a moment. ‘For various reasons... I’ve usually been covering for someone on maternity or paternity leave, and naturally they’ve always come back to work.’

‘I understand. And this is also a temporary appointment, of course,’ the doctor says. ‘Until the end of the year, in the first instance.’

Jan can’t ignore the faint implication that he is a restless person. He gestures in the direction of his CV. ‘The children and the parents always liked me... And I’ve always had good references.’

The doctor carries on reading, and nods. ‘So I see, they’re excellent... from your last three employers. They all recommend you without hesitation.’ He lowers the papers and looks at Jan. ‘And what about the others?’

‘The others?’

‘What did the rest of your employers think? Were they unhappy with you?’

‘No. No, they most certainly were not, but I didn’t want to include every single positive—’

‘I understand,’ the doctor interrupts. ‘Too much praise starts to look suspicious. But is it OK if I give them a call? One of the nurseries you worked at in the early days?’

The doctor suddenly seems alert and curious; his hand is already resting on the telephone.

Jan sits there in silence, his mouth half-open. It’s all down to the hats, he suspects — he refused Högsmed’s psychological test. He wants to shake his head, but his neck won’t move.

Not Lynx, he thinks. You’re welcome to call the others, but not Lynx.

He finally manages to move his head to indicate his assent. ‘That’s fine,’ he says, ‘but unfortunately I don’t have the numbers.’

‘No problem — they’ll be on the internet.’ Högsmed casts a final glance at the list of Jan’s former employers, then keys in a series of letters on the computer.

The name of one of the nurseries from the early days. But which one? Which one? Jan can’t see, and he doesn’t want to lean across the desk to find out if it’s Lynx.

Why did he include it in his CV?

Nine years ago! Just one mistake with one child, nine years ago... Is all that business going to be dragged up again?

He breathes calmly, his fingertips resting gently on his thighs. It’s only lunatics who start waving their arms around when they’re under pressure.

‘Excellent, there’s the number,’ Högsmed murmurs, blinking at the screen. ‘I’ll just give them a call...’

He lifts the receiver, keys in half a dozen numbers and glances over at Jan.

Jan tries to smile, but he is holding his breath. Who is the doctor calling?

Is there anyone left from his time at Lynx — anyone who still remembers him? Anyone who remembers what happened in the forest?

‘Hello?’

Someone has answered the phone; the doctor leans forward across the desk. ‘Patrik Högsmed, senior consultant at St Patricia’s Hospital... I’m looking for someone who used to work with Jan Hauger. That’s right, H-A-U-G-E-R. He was with you on a temporary basis eight or nine years ago.’

Eight or nine years ago. Jan lowers his head when he hears those words. In that case it has to be one of the nurseries in Nordbro. Either Little Sunflowers or Lynx. Jan left the town where he grew up after that.

‘So that was before your time, Julia? OK, but is there anyone who was there when... Excellent, if you could put me through to the person who was in charge back then... yes, I’ll hold.’

The room falls silent again, so silent that Jan can hear a door closing somewhere down the corridor.

Nina. Jan suddenly remembers that the person in charge at Lynx was called Nina Gundotter. Strange name. He hasn’t thought about Nina for many years — he has pushed all his memories from Lynx into a bottle and buried it.

The white clock is ticking away on the wall; it is quarter past two now.

‘Hello?’

Someone is speaking to the doctor, and Jan digs his fingers into his thighs. He holds his breath as he listens to Högsmed once more introducing himself and explaining his reasons for ringing.

‘So you do remember Jan Hauger? Excellent. What can you tell me about him?’

Silence. The doctor glances briefly at Jan, and carries on listening.

‘Thank you,’ he says after thirty seconds. ‘That’s very helpful. Yes, of course I’ll pass on your regards. Thank you very much indeed.’

He replaces the receiver and leans back. ‘More positive comments.’ He looks encouragingly at Jan. ‘That was Lena Zetterberg at the Little Sunflowers nursery in Nordbro, and she had nothing but good things to say about you. Jan Hauger was enthusiastic, responsible, popular with both parents and children... Top marks.’

Jan begins to smile again. ‘I remember Lena. We got on very well.’

‘Good.’ The doctor gets to his feet and picks up a plastic folder from the desk. ‘Let’s head over to our own excellent pre-school... You do know that we use the term pre-school these days, Jan?’

‘Of course.’

Högsmed holds the door open for Jan.

‘The term nursery has become just as outmoded as playschool,’ he says, before adding, ‘And it’s the same with psychiatric terms; they lose their acceptability over the years. Words such as hysteric, lunatic and psychopath... They are no longer used. We don’t even talk about sick or healthy people at St Patricia’s, we simply refer to functioning or non-functioning individuals.’ He turns to Jan. ‘Because who amongst us can say that we are always healthy?’

A difficult question, and one to which Jan does not reply.

‘And what can we really know about one another?’ the doctor goes on. ‘If you were to meet a man walking along this corridor, Jan, could you tell if he was good or evil?’

‘No... but I suppose I would assume that he wished me well.’

‘Good,’ says Högsmed. ‘Trusting others is mostly a matter of how secure we are in ourselves.’

Jan nods and follows him through the hospital.

Högsmed is ready with his magnetic card once more. ‘This is actually the quickest way to the pre-school,’ he explains as he unlocks the door. ‘You can go through the hospital basement, but it’s a tortuous and not very pleasant route, so we’ll go back out through the gate.’

They leave the hospital the same way they came in. As they pass the security guard’s office Jan glances at the thick safety glass and asks quietly, ‘But some of the patients here must be dangerous, surely?’

‘Dangerous?’

‘Yes — violent?’

Högsmed sighs, as if he is thinking of something tedious. ‘Well, yes, but they’re mostly a danger to themselves. Occasionally they might be violent towards others,’ he says. ‘There are of course certain patients who have destructive impulses, antisocial men and women who have done what you might call bad things...’

‘And can you cure them?’ Jan asks.

‘Cure is a big word,’ says Högsmed, looking at the steel door in front of him. ‘Those of us who are therapists do not attempt to enter the same dark forest in which the patients have lost their way; we stay out in the light and try to entice the patients to come to us...’ He falls silent, then continues: ‘We can see patterns in the behaviour of those who have committed violent crimes, and one common denominator is childhood trauma of various kinds. They have often had a very poor relationship with their parents, with frequent instances of abuse and lack of contact.’ He opens the outer door and looks at Jan. ‘And that is why we run this particular project, the Dell. The aim of our little pre-school is to maintain the emotional bonds between the child and the parent who is a patient here.’

‘And the other parent agrees to these visits?’

‘If they themselves are well. And still alive,’ Högsmed says quietly, rubbing his eyes. ‘Which isn’t always the case. We are not usually dealing with socially stable families.’

Jan refrains from asking any more questions.

Eventually they are back outside in the sunshine again. The doctor blinks in pain at the bright daylight.

They walk towards the high wall. It hadn’t occurred to Jan before, but the air seems so pure on this autumn day. Dry and fresh.

‘After you, Jan.’

The gate in the wall slides open and Jan steps out. Out into freedom. That’s actually the way it feels as he stands there in the street, even though he could have left the hospital whenever he wanted to, of course. No guards would have tried to keep him there.

The steel gate closes behind them.

‘This way,’ says Högsmed.

Jan follows him, gazing across towards the outskirts of the town to the south. Beyond a wide, freshly ploughed field he can see several blocks of small terraced houses. He wonders what the owners of those houses think about the hospital.

Högsmed also glances across at the houses, as if he can hear what Jan is thinking. ‘Our neighbours,’ he says. ‘In the past the town wasn’t quite so extensive, of course, so the hospital was more isolated out here. But we have never had any problems with protests or petitions, unlike some other psychiatric units. I think the families over there know that our operation is secure... that the safety of all concerned is our number-one priority.’

‘Has anyone ever escaped?’

Jan realizes this is a provocative question.

But Högsmed raises his forefinger to indicate the number one. ‘Just one patient during my time here. It was a young man, a sex offender, who had managed to build a rickety structure out of fallen branches in one corner of the grounds. He simply climbed over the fence and disappeared.’ Högsmed looks over towards the houses again and goes on: ‘The police picked him up in the park that same evening, but by then he’d already made contact with a little girl. Apparently they were sitting on a park bench eating ice cream.’ The doctor looks up at the electric fence on top of the wall. ‘Security was tightened up after that, but I’m not convinced that anything nasty would have happened. Sometimes those who run away seek out children simply because they are looking for security. They are small and frightened inside.’

Jan says nothing, he simply keeps on walking along the track in front of the wall. He has guessed correctly; they are heading towards a wooden building north of the hospital. The Dell.

The wall curves away before they reach the Dell, crossing a grassy area before it disappears behind the hospital. There is only a low fence around the pre-school. Jan can see several swings, a red playhouse and a sandpit, but no children. Presumably they’re indoors.

‘How many children do you have here?’ he asks.

‘About a dozen,’ says Högsmed. ‘Three of them are staying here on a permanent basis at the moment, for various reasons. Six or seven come during the day. Then there are a few more whose attendance is more sporadic.’ He opens his folder and takes out a sheet of paper. ‘We do have a small number of rules when it comes to dealing with the children. Perhaps you could read through them now.’

Jan takes the sheet of paper; he stops by the gate leading to the pre-school, and begins to read:

There is a dotted line at the bottom of the page, and when Jan looks up he sees that Högsmed is holding out a pen.

He takes it and signs his name.

‘Good,’ says Högsmed. ‘As I said, I thought it was best if you had a look at it before we go in. All pre-schools have their own rules and regulations, after all. You’re used to that, no doubt?’

‘Absolutely.’

But Jan has never come across any of these rules before. And the order from those in charge at the hospital is crystal clear:

Keep quiet about St Psycho’s.

No problem. Jan has always been good at keeping secrets.

Jan had started work at the Lynx nursery when he was twenty years old, the same hot summer when Alice Rami’s debut album came out — the two events were linked in his mind. He had bought her record when he spotted it in a shop window; he took it home and played it over and over again. Rami and August was the title of the album, but August wasn’t a person’s name; it was her band, which consisted of two guys playing drums and bass guitar. There was a picture of them with Rami, two guys with black spiky hair on either side of her angel-white head. Jan looked at the picture and wondered if either of them was her boyfriend.

The following day he bought a cheap portable CD-player so that he could listen to Rami on his way to work at the nursery. The shortest route was through a dense coniferous forest; he ambled along the paths listening to her whispering voice:

Other texts were about power, darkness, drugs and moon shadows. Jan listened and listened all summer until he knew the words by heart; he felt as if Rami was singing to him. Why not? She even had a song on the album with the name ‘Jan’ in it.

In the middle of August a number of new children started at the nursery. One of them was special. A little boy with blond, curly hair.

Jan was standing by the entrance to Lynx when the boy appeared. He actually saw the boy’s mother first; Jan thought he recognized her. A celebrity or an old acquaintance? Perhaps it was just that the mother looked older — between thirty-five and forty, quite old to have a child at nursery.

Then Jan caught sight of the boy — small and as thin as a rake, but with big blue eyes. Five or six years old. He had golden-blond hair, just like Jan had had at his age, and he was wearing a tight red jacket. He walked towards the nursery holding his mother’s hand, but they went past Lynx and headed for the door leading to Brown Bear.

He thought they were an ill-matched pair: the mother was tall and slim, dressed in a light brown leather jacket with a fur collar, while her son was so small he barely came up to her knees. He was having to trot along with short, scampering steps just to keep up with his mother’s strides.

The boy’s outdoor clothes looked inadequate in the autumn chill. He could do with new ones.

Jan had opened the door of Lynx, on his way into the warmth with half a dozen children in front of him, but he stopped and watched when he saw the mother and child. The boy kept his eyes fixed on the ground, but the mother gave Jan a passing glance and an impersonal nod. He was a stranger to her, an anonymous classroom assistant. Jan nodded back and remained in the doorway long enough to see them walk up the slope and open the door to Brown Bear.

On the outside of the door was a dark-brown bear cut out of chipboard, and on the door Jan had just opened was a yellow lynx. Two forest carnivores. Ever since he had started at the nursery the previous summer, Jan had thought the names sounded wrong; after all, bears and lynx were no ordinary animals. They were predators.

The boy and his mother had disappeared. Jan couldn’t stand here in the doorway, he had work to do. He went to join his own group of children, but he couldn’t forget the brief encounter.

The registers for all the nursery classes were held on the computer, and before Jan set off home accompanied by Rami’s music, he sneaked into the office to find out what the new boy at Brown Bear was called.

He found the name straight away: William Halevi, son of Roland and Emma Halevi.

‘Coffee, Jan?’ asks Marie-Louise.

‘Yes please.’

‘A drop of milk?’

‘No thanks.’

Marie-Louise is the supervisor at the Dell. She is between fifty and sixty years old, with light-grey curly hair and deep laughter lines around her eyes; she smiles a great deal and seems to want everyone around her to feel comfortable, whether they are big or small.

And Jan actually does feel comfortable. He doesn’t know what he expected the pre-school to be like, but in here there is no hint of the high concrete wall just a few metres away.

After St Patricia’s bare corridors and Högsmed’s white office, Jan has entered a rainbow world where vibrant children’s drawings cover the walls, where green and yellow wellingtons are lined up in the entrance hall, and where big boxes in the playroom overflow with cuddly toys and picture books. The air in here is slightly warm and heavy, just as it always is in a room where children have been playing.

Jan has been in many bright and clean pre-schools over the years, but the Dell made him feel calm as soon as he walked in. There is harmony in this little place — it feels cosy.

At the moment it is very quiet, because the children are having their nap in the snuggle room. This means that all the staff are free to meet.

There are three younger colleagues at the table with Marie-Louise. Two of them are women. Lilian, who has dark-red hair piled on top of her head, is about thirty-five. She has a sorrowful look in her eyes which she tries to hide; Lilian talks a great deal, moves nervously and laughs just a little too loudly. Hanna, who has straight blonde hair, is perhaps ten years younger; she is wearing a white blouse and pink jeans. Pretty blue eyes; she doesn’t say much.

Lilian and Hanna are not alike, but they do have one interest in common. In the middle of their coffee break they go outside for a cigarette just on the other side of the fence surrounding the Dell; they seem to be very close. Lilian whispers something and Hanna nods.

As Marie-Louise looks out of the window at the two smokers, a small furrow appears between her eyebrows. Then they come back inside, and she is smiling again.

Marie-Louise smiles even more frequently at the fourth employee: Andreas. He doesn’t smoke, he just takes snuff, and with his broad shoulders he looks more like a builder than a classroom assistant. There is something reassuring about Andreas; nothing seems to bother him.

Dr Högsmed is also sitting at the kitchen table. He began by introducing Jan, referring to him as ‘the male candidate’ — which gave away the fact that there was at least one other person under consideration for the post — but since then he has left the staff to do the talking.

But what can they talk about? Jan has just read the rules and regulations, and has no intention of breaking them, not today. So he can’t ask any questions about the hospital, and he can’t talk about the children. He searches for a topic of conversation. ‘Who was St Patricia?’ he asks eventually.

The doctor looks at him. ‘A saint, of course.’

‘But what did she do? Where did she live?’

The only response is silence and shaking heads.

‘We don’t have much to do with saints here,’ says Högsmed with a grim smile.

The room falls silent again, so Jan asks Marie-Louise about working hours.

‘The Dell is staffed around the clock at the moment,’ she replies. ‘We have three children who don’t have placements in foster care for the time being, so they are staying here overnight.’ She pauses. ‘Would that be a problem for you, Jan, having sole responsibility for the children overnight?’

‘Not at all.’

There is a tentative tapping on the kitchen window next to Jan, and when he turns his head he sees that it has begun to rain. Soon heavy drops are spattering against the glass. Beyond the curtain of rain he can just make out the wall and the hospital. He gazes out at the hospital until Lilian asks a question:

‘Do you have any family, Jan?’

That’s a new question. Is Lilian particularly interested in families? He gives her an involuntary smile. ‘My younger brother is studying medicine in London, and my mother lives up in Nordbro. But I’m not married... and I don’t have any children of my own.’

‘What about a girlfriend?’ Lilian says quickly.

Jan slowly opens his mouth, but Marie-Louise leans forward, her expression slightly troubled, and says quietly, ‘That’s personal, Lilian.’

Jan notices that neither Lilian nor Hanna is wearing a ring on her left hand. He shakes his head briefly. No. That could mean either that he’s single, or that he doesn’t want to answer.

‘So what do you do in your spare time, Jan?’ The question comes from Dr Högsmed this time.

‘Oh, this and that,’ he replies. ‘I’m interested in music, I play the drums a bit... and I enjoy drawing.’

‘And what kind of thing do you draw?’

Jan hesitates before replying — this is also beginning to feel rather personal. ‘I’m working on a kind of comic strip... An old dream project.’

‘I see... Is it for a magazine?’

‘No. It isn’t finished, far from it.’

‘You’ll have to show it to the children,’ says Marie-Louise. ‘We read to them a lot.’

Jan nods, but he doubts whether pre-school children will want to read his comic-strip story about the Secret Avenger. There is too much hatred in it.

Suddenly they hear a muted cry from the snuggle room. Marie-Louise stiffens, Andreas turns his head.

‘That sounds like Matilda,’ he says quietly.

‘Yes,’ Marie-Louise agrees. ‘Matilda dreams a great deal.’

‘She’s got a vivid imagination,’ Lilian says. ‘She’s always making up stories.’

That is all Jan hears them say about any of the children. They sit in silence around the table; it is as if they are waiting for more cries from the snuggle room, but nothing happens.

Högsmed rubs his eyes and looks at his watch. ‘OK, Jan, perhaps you’d like to be heading home?’

‘Yes... it’s probably time.’ He understands the hint — the doctor wants rid of him. He wants to hear what the staff think of the male candidate.

‘I’ll be in touch, Jan — I’ve got your phone number.’

Jan says his goodbyes, with a friendly smile and a firm handshake for everyone.

Outside the autumn rain has passed.

There is not a soul in sight by the wall as he walks out through the gate of the Dell. But St Patricia’s itself looks almost alive; the rain has darkened the façade, and the hospital looks like a great stone colossus, looming over the pre-school.

Jan stops and gazes over at the hospital. At all those windows. He is expecting someone to show themselves — a head moving behind the bars, a hand placed against a pane of glass. But nothing happens, and eventually he begins to worry that one of the guards will spot him and think that a lunatic is standing there staring at the place. He sets off, with a final glance at the little pre-school.

St Patricia’s enormous wall is eerily fascinating, but he must stop thinking about it. He must concentrate on the Dell, the little wooden building with its sleeping children.

Pre-schools are like oases of tranquillity and security.

He really wants the job, even though he is still feeling tense following Högsmed’s scrutiny. The hat test. And even worse, the phone call to his former employer.

But what happened at Lynx is not going to happen at the Dell. He had been young then, a twenty-year-old classroom assistant. And totally off balance.

After the heavy rain, the autumn air in Valla is cold and fresh. The town looks as if it is contained within some kind of cauldron; it lies below Jan as he walks back through the residential areas, across the railway and down into the centre where the streets are full of pensioners and teenagers. The young people are standing outside the shops, the elderly are sitting on benches. He sees dogs on leads and small groups of birds gathered around the rubbish bins, but very few children.

The next train to Gothenburg leaves in an hour, so Jan has plenty of time to stroll around. For the first time he wonders what it would be like to live in Valla. Today he is a visitor, but if he gets the job he will have to move here.

As he is walking down Storgatan his mobile suddenly rings. A chilly breeze is blowing up the street; he shelters by a wall and answers.

‘Jan?’ The voice is croaky and weak: his elderly mother. She goes on immediately: ‘What are you doing? Are you in Gothenburg?’

‘No, I’ve been... I’ve been for a job interview.’

He has always found it difficult to tell his mother what he is doing. It has always felt too personal.

‘A job interview, that sounds good. Is it in town?’

‘No, a little way out.’

‘Well, I mustn’t disturb you...’

‘It’s OK, Mum. It went well.’

‘And how’s Alice?’

‘Fine... she’s fine. Still working.’

‘It would be lovely if you came up here some time. Both of you.’

Jan doesn’t reply.

‘A bit later in the autumn, perhaps?’ his mother suggests.

There is no hint of criticism in her voice, as far as Jan can tell; just the quiet wistfulness of a lonely widow.

‘I’ll come up soon,’ Jan promises, ‘and I’ll... I’ll check with Alice.’

‘Lovely. And good luck. Remember you have to be happy with your employer as well.’

Jan says a quick thank you and ends the call.

Alice. He happened to mention her name to his mother at some point, and slowly she has taken shape and become his girlfriend. There is no Alice in his life, of course, she was just a dream, but now his mother wants to meet her. Eventually he will have to tell her what the situation really is.

He carries on wandering around the centre of Valla and sees lots of imposing shop windows, but no church. And no churchyard either.

There is a very good local-history museum by the river, with a little café. Jan goes in and buys a sandwich. He sits down by the window and gazes out towards the bus station.

He doesn’t know one single person in Valla — is that frightening or liberating? On the plus side, a stranger can start a completely new life, and choose which details to share if someone should ask where he comes from. The fewer answers the better. He doesn’t need to say a word about his former life. Not a word about Alice Rami.

But it is thanks to his adoration of her that Jan is sitting here.

He first heard about St Patricia’s Hospital at the beginning of June, when his last temporary post at a pre-school in Gothenburg was just coming to an end. It was quite an enjoyable evening; he was almost feeling happy.

He was the only man in a group of women, as usual. His colleagues invited him out for a meal to thank him for his work, and he accepted. Afterwards he did something he had never done before — he asked them back to his small apartment in Johanneberg, a cramped one-room flat which he had taken on as a sublet.

What could he offer them? He rarely drank alcohol; he couldn’t really cope with the taste.

‘I think I might have some crisps at home if you’d like to come back with me.’

His five colleagues were delighted, but Jan had already begun to regret the invitation as he led them up the stairs and unlocked the door.

‘I’m afraid it’s not very tidy...’

‘That doesn’t matter!’ they shouted, giggling and tipsy.

Jan let them in.

His diary was hidden in a desk drawer, along with his drawings of The Secret Avenger. So he had nothing else to hide, apart from the pictures of Alice Rami. If he had known about this visit he would probably have hidden those too, but as his colleagues walked in they saw the framed record sleeve in the hallway, of course, plus a concert poster in the kitchen, and the big poster that had been given away with a music magazine ten years ago, pinned up next to the bookcase.

It was a black and white picture of Rami, standing on a little stage with her electric guitar, legs apart, her spiky hair illuminated by the spotlights, the rest of the band like blurred ghosts behind her. Her eyes were closed, she was twenty years old, and she looked as if she was growling into the microphone. It was the only pin-up of her he had ever found, which was why he had kept it all these years.

One of his colleagues, a few years older than Jan, stopped to look at it. ‘Rami?’ she said. ‘Do you like her?’

‘Sure,’ said Jan. ‘Her music, I mean... Have you heard her sing?’

His colleague answered, her eyes fixed on Rami, ‘I used to listen to her when the first album came out, but that was a long time ago. She never released a follow-up, did she?’

‘No,’ Jan said quietly.

‘And now they’ve put her away.’

Jan looked at her. This was news to him. ‘Put her away? What do you mean?’

‘She’s in some kind of mental hospital. St Patrick’s, on the west coast.’

Jan held his breath. Alice Rami in a mental hospital? He tried to picture it.

Yes, he could see it. ‘How do you know?’ he asked.

His colleague shrugged her shoulders. ‘I heard it somewhere a few years ago, I don’t really remember... it was just gossip.’

‘Do you know why... Why she ended up in there?’

‘No idea,’ she said. ‘But I assume she must have done something stupid.’

Jan nodded without speaking.

St Patrick’s Hospital. He wanted to ask more questions, but didn’t want to appear obsessed with Rami. From time to time over the years he had joined various forums on the internet to search for news of Rami, but had never found anything. This was the best lead so far.

Jan’s telephone rings at quarter past eight on the following Thursday morning, while he is lying in bed. He crawls out and answers; there is a male voice on the other end.

‘Good morning, Jan! Patrik Högsmed at St Patricia’s here. Did I wake you?’ The doctor’s voice is full of energy.

‘No... it’s fine.’

His own voice is hoarse and slow; he slept heavily, with weird dreams. Was Alice Rami in them? There was definitely a woman, wearing a dark fur coat and standing on a stage, she had climbed into a big box...

The doctor brings him back to the present. ‘I just wanted to let you know that we had a little chat after you left the day before yesterday, the staff at the Dell and I. It was a very productive discussion. Then I went back to the office and gave the matter some thought, and had a word with the hospital management. And now we’ve made our decision.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘So I was wondering if we could go over the terms of your contract now? With a view to you starting work here next Monday?’

‘THIS IS THE timetable, Jan,’ says Marie-Louise, pointing to the fridge door. ‘We have to stick to these times every day. Sometimes we deliver a child to the hospital when we go to collect one of the others.’

He looks at the piece of paper. It shows a series of names, dates and times relating to handovers in the coming week.

At the top it says Leo: Monday 11–12. Then Matilda: Monday 2–3, and Mira and Tobias: 3–4.

It’s only quarter to nine at the moment.

‘We go with them,’ says Marie-Louise, ‘and we collect them. There are also special occasions when the other parent comes to visit, and in that case they go up together.’

Jan nods. The other parent. She is talking about the mother or father who is free. The one who isn’t locked up.

He has met several of them already; they have popped into the cloakroom to deliver the children who do not live at the Dell. But are they the children’s biological parents, or foster parents? Jan is not allowed to ask, of course. They are all neatly dressed men or women from the age of about thirty upwards. Some looked as if they might be pensioners.

He has stood in the cloakroom with Marie-Louise welcoming the children one by one. All the children who will be at the Dell today have arrived; there are eleven of them.

When children are dropped off there can sometimes be despair and lots of tears, as Jan well knows, while the parents can be exaggeratedly cheerful and talkative in order to hide their anxiety or embarrassment at having to leave their children. But here at the Dell the adults seem somehow subdued. Perhaps it is because of the concrete wall — the shadow of St Psycho’s falls over everyone at the pre-school.

And the children? They are quite shy, for the most part. They smile and whisper and stare at the new person standing next to their teacher, wondering who he is. During all the years he has spent in various pre-schools, Jan has encountered almost exclusively children who are curious and wide-eyed. Children are subdued only when they are really ill. Unlike adults, they can never hide how they are feeling.

There are no CCTV cameras at the Dell, which is a good thing of course. But Jan can’t see a television either.

‘A TV? No, we only have a radio in here,’ Marie-Louise says seriously. ‘If we had a TV we’d soon end up with a whole pile of cartoons the children would want to watch, and a passive child is an unhappy child.’

The children are having great fun in the playroom; they have laid out the thick crash mats on the floor and are pretending to be shipwrecked sailors drifting along on rafts. Jan joins in the game; it feels good after his subterranean trip.

He spots a notice in Marie-Louise’s neat handwriting up on the wall. The children can’t read yet, of course, but it appears to be meant for them:

Lilian is also playing with the children; they leap from mat to mat in order to escape from the sharks swimming in the sea. Just like Jan she joins in the game wholeheartedly, but from time to time he sees a shadow of sorrow pass across her face when she looks at the children.

After a while they sit down on one of the crash mats to recover; he wants to ask her if something is wrong, but Lilian gets in first: ‘Are you settling in OK, Jan?’

It sounds as if she really cares.

‘In Valla, you mean?’ Jan needs to think about what he’s going to say. ‘Yes, although of course I’ve only just moved here. But it seems like a good place... Lovely surroundings.’

‘What do you do in the evenings?’

‘Not much... I listen to some music.’

‘Haven’t you got any friends here?’

‘No... not yet.’

‘Well, why don’t you come down to Bill’s Bar?’ says Lilian. ‘It’s by the harbour, there’s a good house band...’

‘Bill’s Bar?’

‘I hang out there all the time,’ says Lilian. ‘There are usually a few people from St Patricia’s there too. You’ll get to know plenty of new people at Bill’s.’

Should Jan start going to the pub and being sociable? He’s never done it before, but why not? ‘Maybe,’ he says.

They carry on playing with the shipwrecked children until Jan hears the shrill sound of the alarm clock in the kitchen. Good, he has been waiting for it.

He collects the magnetic card, opens the basement door and heads down the stairs and along the corridor alone.

Nothing is moving down there. The pictures on the wall are still there, hanging in straight lines.

It is five to twelve and the window in the door of the lift is still in darkness; Leo has not been sent down yet.

Jan stops. Go up in the lift, he thinks. Go up and have a look around inside St Psycho’s.

But he stays where he is, waiting for the lift for a minute or so, then he looks over towards the other end of the corridor. Over towards that sharp bend to the right. He is a little curious about what there might be around that corner. Another way into the hospital?

The lift has still not appeared, so Jan walks away slowly. He’s just going to have a quick look to see where the corridor goes.

Around the corner the corridor continues for a little distance, and ends at a massive steel door. It is firmly closed, and has a long iron handle. Jan reads the words SAFE ROOM on a white sign next to the door. And underneath it says: This door must be kept locked at all times!

A safe room — Jan knows what that is. It’s like an underground bunker.

A picture of little William comes into his mind, but he pushes it away and reaches for the iron handle.

It moves. It seems possible to open the door.

But at that moment there is a clicking sound in the corridor behind him. The lift door. Jan quickly lets go of the handle and hurries back.

Leo has been sent down via the sally port. He is trying to push open the heavy door, but can’t quite manage it.

Jan helps him. ‘Have you had a nice time, Leo?’

Leo nods without speaking; Jan takes his hand and they set off back towards the Dell.

‘I think it’ll be sing-along time soon. Do you like singing, Leo?’

‘Mm.’

Perhaps it is Jan’s imagination, but Leo seems a little more subdued than he was before his visit to see his father. Otherwise he looks exactly the same. No bleeding scratches on his face, no ripped clothes. Of course not — why shouldn’t he look the same?

They have reached the foot of the staircase leading up to the Dell. Jan is ready with the magnetic card, but glances at Leo one last time and decides to risk asking a question: ‘Was it nice seeing Daddy today?’

‘Mm.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘We talked,’ said Leo. There is a brief silence, then he goes on: ‘Daddy talks a lot. All the time.’

‘Oh?’

Leo nods again and sets off up the stairs. ‘He says everybody hates him.’

During his first week at the Dell, Jan works from eight until five every day. And every evening he goes home to his dark apartment. He’s used to it, he’s always come home to a silent apartment, but this one isn’t even his. It doesn’t feel like home.

Sometimes in the evening he sits down at his drawing board and continues working on the Secret Avenger’s struggle against the Gang of Four, but if he is tired he just flops down in front of the TV and stays there.

During the day he learns the names of the children, one by one. Leo, Matilda, Mira, Fanny, Katinka, and so on. He gets to know which ones are chatty and which ones are quieter, which ones get cross when they fall over and which ones start crying if someone happens to bump into them. Which ones ask questions and which ones listen.

The children have so much energy. When they’re not under orders to sit still during assembly, they’re always on the move, always heading off somewhere. They crawl, they run, they jump. Out in the playground they dig in the sandpit, climb and swing — and want to join in everything.

‘Me too! Me too!’

The children fight for space, for attention. But Jan makes sure that no one is excluded from a game, that no one is nudged out of the group and ends up on their own, as he often did.

The group of children at the Dell feels harmonious, and it is easy to forget their proximity to St Psycho’s — until the alarm clock rings in the kitchen and someone has to be taken to or collected from the lift beneath the hospital. But the trips along the underground corridor also become routine, in fact — although Jan does keep a slightly closer eye on Leo, whose father sounds somewhat paranoid.

Sometimes Jan thinks the pre-school is like a zoo.

It always starts late in the day, when everyone is tired: one of the children kicks off, and the others get dragged in. It’s usually one of the boys who has some kind of manic outburst, suddenly becoming hyperactive and hurtling around the rooms, perhaps knocking down someone’s carefully constructed tower of building blocks or trampling all over someone else’s Lego house.

That’s what happens at the Dell on Friday afternoon, when Leo suddenly decides to hit Felix in the face with a cushion. Felix hits him back, roaring at the top of his voice and with tears pouring down his face. Leo starts yelling too, and all at once the entire group is filled with fresh energy; the other boys start wrestling or fighting with cushions, the girls start screaming or sobbing hysterically.

‘Quiet!’ Jan shouts.

It makes no difference. The playroom turns into a blurred mess of agitated children, jumping around and making it feel like a cramped cage.

Jan is the only adult present, and he can feel a wave of panic beginning to rise in his chest. But he puts a stop to it; he breathes in and moves to the centre of the room. Then he raises his voice like a hell-and-damnation pastor: ‘Quiet! Stop that right now!’

Most of the children stop dead, but little Leo carries on. His eyes are wide open and he is flailing around wildly with his cushion.

Jan has to move across and put his arms around him; he feels like a lion tamer. ‘Calm down, Leo. Calm down!’

The little body is struggling in his arms; Jan holds on tightly until Leo stops wriggling completely. The beast has been tamed, but afterwards Jan is exhausted.

After lunch on Saturday Jan goes down to the communal laundry room in the apartment block for the first time, and meets an old man. A white-haired neighbour whose beard is equally white is just leaving the room containing the washing machines.

Afterwards Jan realizes he should have spoken to him rather than merely nodding as the man walked past.

The man is carrying an old laundry bag over his shoulder, and as Jan glances at the fabric bag he can see that there are letters printed on it: T ICIA NDRY. There must be more letters, but they are concealed by the folds of the material.

Jan continues on into the laundry room. But suddenly his brain forms the words: St Patricia’s Laundry.

Could that possibly be right? It is too late to check — by this stage the old man has already left the cellar, the door has closed, and Jan is alone with his washing.

‘So how are you feeling, Jan?’ asks Marie-Louise. ‘Would you like to tell us?’

‘Of course... but there isn’t much to say, really. I feel fine.’

‘Is that all? No problems fitting in with the team?’

‘No.’ Jan looks around the table at Andreas, Hanna and Lilian. ‘No problems at all.’

‘We’re all very pleased to hear that, Jan.’

Monday’s feelgood meeting for the staff takes place before the children begin to arrive.

This is Jan’s first time. They are all looking at him, the new boy, but he finds it difficult to relax and talk at the same time.

‘This is an important job,’ he says. ‘I’m well aware of that.’

They stop staring, and a few minutes later the feelgood meeting is over. Thank goodness.

‘Jan! Jan!’ The children shout happily. ‘Over here, Jan!’

Jan really likes the children at the Dell, and they have accepted him completely. Everything feels fine.

His first late shift starts at one o’clock on Wednesday afternoon and ends at ten in the evening. It almost feels like a practice for the night shift, when he will be alone with the three children who are staying at the pre-school all the time at the moment: Leo, Matilda and Mira.

Andreas and the children are out in the playground when Jan arrives. The temperature is only six degrees today, and Andreas has a thick blue woollen scarf wound around his neck.

‘Hi there!’ He is standing there with his hands pushed down into the pockets of his jeans, steady as a rock in the autumn wind.

‘Everything OK?’ says Jan.

‘Absolutely fine,’ says Andreas. ‘We’ve been outside most of the time.’

They let the children play for another fifteen minutes or so, then they go inside where it’s warm and hand out the lunch boxes which have been prepared over in the hospital kitchen.

Andreas stays on for an extra half-hour, but Jan doesn’t want to ask why. Perhaps he’s following orders from Marie-Louise; has she asked him to keep an eye on Jan?

Eventually Andreas leaves; the sun is low on the horizon. Jan is now solely responsible for the Dell.

But everything will be fine; he will take good care of the children.

First of all he gathers them together in the playroom. ‘What would you like to do?’

‘Play!’ says Mira.

‘And what would you like to play?’

‘Safari parks!’ Matilda shouts, pointing. ‘Like over there!’

Jan doesn’t understand until he grasps that she is pointing at the window and the fence outside. ‘That’s not a safari park,’ he says.

‘Oh yes it is!’ Matilda says firmly.

She doesn’t seem to connect her visits to the hospital with the high fence, and Jan decides not to tell her that there is a link.

‘Cheers!’ Shouts Lilian, raising her glass.

‘Cheers,’ Jan says quietly.

‘Cheers,’ says Hanna, even more quietly.

Lilian drinks the most, knocking back half the contents of her glass. ‘Do you like Bill’s Bar, Jan?’ she asks.

‘I do, yes.’

‘What do you like about it?’

‘Er... the music.’

They are talking loudly, almost the way they do to the children at the pre-school, in order to be heard above the house band. The Bohemos are made up of four youngish men in scruffy leather jackets, standing on a small raised stage. The singer’s hair is pulled back in a blond ponytail, and he delivers rock songs in a hoarse baritone. The stage is cramped, but the band manage a few simple dance steps with their guitars from time to time without bumping into one another. Even though the people in the bar chat away through most of the music, they are still generous enough to give the Bohemos a brief round of applause when each number comes to an end.

Jan prefers Rami’s whispering songs about loneliness and longing, but he still claps politely.

He raises his glass. The beer he is drinking tonight is stronger, and the alcohol has gone straight to his head like a rocket. His mind is floating free.

Right now it would be brilliant to be a regular here, but Jan doesn’t have much of a talent for finding friends in pubs. He realized this earlier in the evening when he pushed his way to the bar without making eye contact with a single person. He finds it difficult to relax in the company of adults; it’s much easier with children.

At least he got a friendly nod from the bartender when he went up for his second beer, and now his colleagues from work have joined him at his table. They just turned up and sat down: Hanna with her blue eyes, Lilian with her red hair.

Lilian empties her third glass and leans across the table. ‘Did you come here on your own, Jan?’

He thinks about quoting Rami — I am a lost soul in a desert of ice — but instead he merely smiles. Mysteriously, he hopes.

‘Oops, empty again.’ Lilian gestures in the direction of the bar. ‘Keep my seat, I’m just going for another.’

Jan and Hanna’s glasses are still half full, but when Lilian comes back she has bought them another drink too. ‘The next round’s on you!’

Jan doesn’t want to drink another drop, but he accepts the glass anyway. They carry on chatting, first of all about the Bohemos; according to Lilian they are definitely the best band in town, even if hardly anyone outside Bill’s Bar has heard of them.

‘They only play at Bill’s as a hobby,’ she says. ‘They’ve got other jobs.’

‘They work up at St Patricia’s,’ says Hanna. ‘Well, a couple of them do.’

Lilian glances at her sharply, as if she has said too much.

‘Do they?’ Jan looks over at the band with renewed interest. ‘At St Patricia’s?’

‘We don’t know them,’ Lilian says.

Jan is feeling good now; he buys the next round. And then Hanna buys three more bottles. The beer is flowing! That’s OK by Jan. After all, he can have a lie-in tomorrow, before his night shift at the Dell.

But Lilian is drinking more than Jan and Hanna put together, and her head is sagging lower and lower. Suddenly she straightens up. ‘Jan... lovely Jan,’ she says, blinking tiredly. ‘Ask me if I believe in love.’

‘Sorry?’

Lilian shakes her head slowly. ‘I don’t believe in love.’ She holds up three fingers. ‘These are the three men I’ve had in my life... The first one took two years from me, the second took four, and I married the third one. And that ended last year. So now I’ve only got my brother. Just one brother. I used to have two, but now I’ve only got one...’

Hanna leans over. ‘Shall we go home, Lilian?’

Lilian doesn’t answer; she empties her glass, puts it down and sighs. ‘OK... Let’s go home,’ she says.

Jan sees that Bill’s Bar is closing up. The music has stopped, the Bohemos have left the stage, tables are emptying around them.

‘Fine,’ he says, nodding. ‘Let’s go.’

He keeps on nodding; he realizes he’s actually drunk for the very first time, and his feet seem to have a mind of their own when he stands up. ‘I am a lost soul in a desert of ice,’ he says, but neither Hanna nor Lilian seems to hear.

‘This is the emergency telephone,’ says Marie-Louise, pointing to a grey phone on the wall in the staffroom, next to Jan’s locker. ‘All you have to do is pick up the receiver and wait, and it rings through automatically.’

‘Where to?’

‘To the main security office by the entrance to the hospital. They’re on duty around the clock over there, so someone will always answer.’ She gives Jan a slightly embarrassed smile and adds, ‘Sometimes it’s nice to know that there’s somebody not too far away at night... although I’m sure you’ll be fine here, won’t you?’

‘Absolutely.’ Jan nods and straightens his back so that he looks alert.

Marie-Louise runs her hand slightly nervously over her throat. ‘Obviously you must ring them if anything happens, but we’ve never needed to do that up to now...’ She quickly turns away from the emergency phone, as if she would prefer to forget about it. ‘So, any questions?’

Jan shakes his head. Marie-Louise has gone through all the routine procedures twice, so he is well prepared. And stone-cold sober. He felt quite shaky when he woke up this morning after the night in Bill’s Bar, but he’s fine now.

It is the Friday evening of his second week at the Dell, and his first night shift — his first night shift ever, in fact. He is on duty from nine thirty in the evening until eight o’clock on Saturday morning, but he has been told that he doesn’t need to stay awake all the time. There is a sofa bed in the staffroom and he can sleep all night, as long as he wakes up if one of the three children needs help or reassurance.

‘Everything seems very clear,’ he says.

‘Good,’ says Marie-Louise. ‘Did you bring your own bedlinen?’

‘I did. And my toothbrush.’

Marie-Louise smiles and seems satisfied. She has already put on her coat and her woolly hat, and she opens the door to face the darkness outside. ‘In that case I will wish you a peaceful night, Jan. Hanna will come and take over in the morning, and I’ll see you tomorrow evening. Goodnight!’

The door closes. Jan locks up behind her and looks at the clock. Twenty past ten. There isn’t a sound inside the Dell.

He goes into the staffroom and makes up the narrow sofa bed, then he has a sandwich in the kitchen before brushing his teeth.

But these are just the routine tasks he’s supposed to carry out; the problem is that he doesn’t feel the least bit tired. What else can he do? What does he want to do?

Check on the children.

Quietly he pushes open the door of the children’s bedroom, and listens to their soft breathing in the darkness. Matilda, Leo and Mira are fast asleep in their beds. Even Leo is lying completely still. According to Marie-Louise, none of the children normally wakes until it’s time to get them up in the morning.

Normally. But when is anything ever normal?

Jan leaves the door ajar and goes into the dining room at the back of the school. He stands by the window looking out, without switching on the light.

St Psycho’s is also virtually in darkness. Floodlights illuminate the fence, but the complex beyond is full of shadows. Grey shadows on the grass, black shadows beneath the fir trees. No one is outside smoking tonight.

The hospital itself looms up some forty or fifty metres away, and there are lights in only four of the windows up at the top of the building. It looks as if the light is coming from white strip-lighting in a corridor — just like the ones down in the basement.

The basement. The way into the hospital — although it isn’t really, because there are locked doors down there too. And the door to the basement is also locked, of course.

Jan thinks about that door for a while. And the underground corridor, and the sally port. Then he goes back into the kitchen and opens one of the drawers. There they are, the magnetic cards. He picks one of them up.

Can he remember the code? Of course he can, it was Marie-Louise’s birthday. He has delivered or collected a child on a dozen occasions and keyed in the code at least twenty times since he arrived at the pre-school. He taps it in again and swipes the card, and the lock clicks.

Open. So it works at night too.

The steep staircase looks like a precipice, or the mouth of a cave leading straight down into the underworld. It is dark down there, but not pitch black; a faint light is just visible along the corridor.

The light from the lift up to the hospital.

Jan hesitates and looks around furtively. The cloakroom is empty, of course — he locked the outside door when Marie-Louise went home.

He leans forward, reaches out and presses the switch. The strip-lights flicker and hum into life down below in the corridor. He can see the steep staircase clearly now, with the carpet leading towards the lift like a welcome mat. He can’t see the actual door of the lift, but if he just went down four or five steps he would probably be able to see it in the distance.

Rami, are you there?

He moves down two steps in silence, then stops with his hand clutching the rail. He listens. There isn’t a sound to be heard, neither in front of him nor behind him.

He moves down another step, then three more in quick succession. He can see the door of the lift now. The light in the little window tells him that the lift is down in the basement. It is standing there waiting for him.

One more step.

But he is finding it more and more difficult to move his legs. There is a mental barrier. He is thinking too much about the children, about Leo, Matilda and Mira; they are fast asleep in their bedroom and he is responsible for them, just as he was responsible for William nine years ago.

He can’t do this. He glances at the sally port leading to the hospital one last time, then turns and goes back up the stairs.

When he reaches the cloakroom he closes the door behind him and checks to make sure it’s locked. Then he turns off all the lights except for the nightlight in the hallway, and goes to bed. He shuts his eyes in the darkness and lets out a long breath.

But it is difficult to get to sleep. Impossible. Now it’s dark it seems to Jan that the pre-school is full of sounds. Clicking, tiptoeing, whispering... Someone is lying there in the hospital just yearning, someone who wants him to come.

Alice Rami.

Jan closes his eyes, but she is gazing at him, her eyes glowing. Come here, Jan. I want to look at you.

They are small, made of white plastic, and they look just like cheap walkie-talkies. Electronic baby monitors. There are lots of different kinds, but the one Jan has chosen is called Angelguards. Guardian angels.

‘This model is actually our top seller,’ says the assistant. ‘It’s incredibly reliable, the nine-volt battery lasts for several weeks, and it transmits using a completely different frequency from mobile phones and radios. And it has an integral nightlight, which can also be used as a torch.’

‘Excellent,’ says Jan.

He is standing in a shop full of things for children: clothes, books and buggies. They sell every imaginable kind of protection and barrier and lock and alarm for little ones — ergonomic spoons and bibs that light up and little tubes to suck the snot out of a baby’s nose — but Jan is interested in only one thing: the baby monitors.

‘What’s the range?’

‘At least three hundred metres, in any conditions.’

‘Does it work through metal and concrete as well?’

‘Absolutely... Walls are no problem.’

Jan buys the Angelguards. The young sales assistant probably thinks he is yet another anxious father, because he winks at him and says, ‘These angels are set to transmit one way only, so you can hear the child, but the child can’t hear you.’

‘Brilliant,’ says Jan.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

‘Oh, both... and they’re different ages,’ Jan answers quickly. ‘I’ve got three.’

‘And they’re restless sleepers?’

‘No, no, things are usually pretty quiet, but, I mean, you want to make sure they’re safe, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’ The assistant places the Angels in a bag. ‘That will be three hundred and forty-nine kronor, please.’

The hour is late and as sluggish as treacle in Bill’s Bar, but his recent shift pattern at the pre-school has turned Jan into a night owl. On his mornings off he has slept until ten, then in the evenings stayed up until well after midnight. A new lifestyle for him, but in spite of the fact that he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol, he is always tired.

The Bohemos have just finished playing after a whole hour of jamming, and Jan’s glass of alcohol-free beer is almost empty. At the next table two young men are energetically discussing self-defence.

‘What about a knife, then?’ one of them says.

‘A knife is a whole different ball game,’ says the other. ‘You can’t defend yourself if he’s got a knife.’

‘No, I know that, but...’

‘I mean, if you come at him with your fists he’ll just slash them to bits.’

The first man laughs. ‘In that case I’d better make sure I’ve got a sword!’

Jan doesn’t attempt to join in the conversation, he just finishes his beer. There is no sign of anyone he knows in here tonight; no Lilian or Hanna. No one. He has no friends, and he is ready to go home alone. And sleep. Alone.

Suddenly a shadow falls over his table. ‘Hi.’

Jan looks up. A man about his own age has stopped opposite him. A total stranger with black eyebrows and a blond ponytail.

No, come to think of it, Jan recognizes him — he’s one of the Bohemos. The lead singer. He’s taken off the leather jacket he always wears on stage, and is now dressed in a white cotton sweater with a towel looped around his neck. After a long evening under the spotlights both are drenched in sweat.

‘How’s things?’ he says.

Jan doesn’t quite know what to say, but opens his mouth anyway. ‘Fine.’

The singer sits down at the table. His voice is slightly hoarse after the gig, but it is warm and friendly. He wipes his forehead with one end of the towel. ‘We don’t know each other,’ he says. ‘I know that... but it’s cool.’

‘Absolutely,’ Jan answers uncertainly.

‘But I’ve seen you,’ the singer goes on. ‘Have you seen me?’

‘No... what exactly do you mean?’

‘I’ve seen you through the fence, when I’m doing my other job. You’ve started cycling to the pre-school now, haven’t you?’

Jan puts down his glass; he is slowly beginning to understand, and automatically lowers his voice. ‘So you work at St... at the hospital?’

The man nods. ‘Night security.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I work nights in the security department.’

Jan feels a shudder down his spine, and his pulse begins to race. He thinks about the underground corridor and the safe room, and suspects that he has been filmed down there. Filmed, or observed. He is waiting for a posse of guards to rush out and hurl him to the ground, grab hold of his arms, search him, interrogate him...

But the singer from the Bohemos is still sitting there smiling, apparently unconcerned. ‘I know your name is Jan,’ he says. ‘Jan Hauger.’

Jan nods. ‘And what’s your name?’

‘Rettig... Lars Rettig.’

‘Right. A bit of a coincidence, meeting up like this.’

Rettig shakes his head. ‘I know who you are. I wanted to meet you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we need help.’

‘With what?’

‘To help those who are lost.’

‘Lost?’

‘The patients in St Psycho’s... Would you like to help them feel better?’

Jan doesn’t say anything. He shouldn’t really be sitting here talking to a hospital security guard about their place of work — what happened to the confidentiality agreement? But he has begun to relax. Lars Rettig doesn’t seem to be after him.

‘Maybe,’ Jan says. ‘But what’s it all about?’

Rettig doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, as if he were planning a little speech. But then he looks around, leans forward and lowers his voice. ‘It’s about all the things we’re not allowed to do. We’re sick and tired of it.’

‘Who’s we?’

But Rettig gets to his feet without answering the question. ‘We can talk more another time. I’ll be in touch.’ He nods encouragingly, and adds, ‘You’ll help us, Jan, I just know it. I can see it in your eyes.’

‘What can you see?’

Rettig shoots him another smile. ‘That you are ready to protect the weak.’

All the children are walking around clutching animals. It is cuddly-toy day at the Dell, and those who don’t have a toy of their own are allowed to borrow one out of the basket. That includes the staff. So there are teddy bears and tigers and giraffes with wobbly legs in every room. Mira is carrying around a red and white striped snake, and Josefine has a pink elk.

Guardian animals, Jan thinks.

He has chosen a golden-yellow lynx. He found it in the basket, and when everyone else had taken what they wanted, he picked it up. It’s quite a shabby lynx, but at least it doesn’t smell.

‘What’s its name?’ asks Matilda.

‘This is... Lofty the Lynx, and he comes from the forest... a forest far, far away from here.’

‘So why isn’t he there any more?’ Matilda wants to know.

‘Because... he likes the children here at the Dell,’ says Jan. ‘He wants to see where you live... He wants to play with you.’

Leo is holding on to a one-eyed cat; he is clutching it so tightly that its body has become elongated and dented.

‘What’s the name of your animal, Leo?’

‘Freddie.’

‘And what kind of animal is it?’

‘Don’t know... but look!’ He holds out his small clenched fist, and opens it.

On his palm Jan sees the cat’s other eye: Leo has plucked it out.

Jan looks into Leo’s face and wonders whether it is innocence or unhappiness he sees there. Jan doesn’t know. He only knows that in some parts of the world it is not cuddly toys that children carry around, but rifles and machine guns.

How can he help the children? How can he help just one child, like Leo?

You are ready to protect the weak, the singer from the Bohemos had said. That may well be true, but there isn’t much Jan can do.

The main entrance to Jan’s apartment block locks automatically at eight o’clock every evening; after that you need a key or an entry code to get in.

He has been back from work for a couple of hours by this stage; he has had dinner and settled down at the kitchen table with the picture books from the Dell in front of him. He has finished the first book, The Animal Lady; he has improved the illustrations and coloured them in. He wonders what Rami would think of the result.

He has made a start on the next book, Viveca’s House of Stone. He is thinking about how to fill in the faint pencil drawings as he reads through the text.

Jan reads the page twice, then begins to ink in the drawing. Viveca is a skinny woman with big eyes. Her head is sticking up out of a coffin.

Jan notices that the name Blanker is in this book too, just as it was in The Animal Lady.

He reads on, captivated by the story, as he goes over the thin pencil lines.

At that point Jan’s doorbell suddenly rings with a loud, cheerful tone. He gives a start and glances towards the hallway. Who’s there? Jan has spent eight hours with pre-school children, and he wants his peace and quiet.

The bell keeps on ringing. He quickly hides the picture book in one of the kitchen drawers, then answers the door.

‘Evening, Jan!’ A blond man is standing there smiling. It is Lars Rettig from Bill’s Bar, wearing his leather jacket. ‘Am I disturbing you?’

Jan feels as if he has been caught out somehow, but shakes his head. ‘No... no, it’s fine.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Sure. For a while.’

The evening chill from the street still clings to Rettig’s jacket, and spreads through the hallway as he takes off his shoes and carries on into the living room. He has a carrier bag in one hand.

‘Sorry to push in... I didn’t want to stand out there drawing attention to myself.’ He looks at all the furniture and boxes piled up along the walls. ‘Wow, you’ve got plenty of rubbish.’

‘That’s not mine,’ Jan says quickly. ‘It’s a sublet.’

‘Right.’ Rettig sits down on the sofa, still looking around. ‘And you’ve got drums... Do you play?’

‘A bit.’

‘Cool.’ Rettig’s eyes flash: he has had an idea. ‘You could come and do some jamming with us if you want. Our drummer in the Bohemos has just become a dad, so he can’t always make the rehearsals.’

‘OK,’ says Jan, without even thinking. He feels a shiver of anticipation, but keeps the impassive mask in place: ‘Perhaps I could come along and help out if you like... but I’m not all that good.’

Rettig laughs. ‘Or else you’re just being modest. But we can give it a try, can’t we?’ He takes something out of the bag. It’s a steaming-hot kebab with bread, wrapped in foil. He looks at it hungrily, then glances at Jan. ‘Want some?’

‘No thanks — you carry on.’

Jan closes the outside door and stands in the doorway of the lounge. ‘How did you know where I live?’

‘I checked the hospital computer... Every employee’s address is on there.’ Rettig takes a bite of his kebab. ‘How are you getting on at the nursery?’

‘Fine... but it’s a pre-school.’

‘OK, pre-school.’

Jan doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, then he asks, ‘So you really do work at St Patricia’s?’

‘Indeed I do. Four nights a week, with lots of free time in between. That’s when I play with the Bohemos.’

‘And you’re a security guard there?’

Rettig shakes his head. ‘We prefer the term care worker. I work with the patients, not against them. Most of them are no trouble at all.’

‘And do you see them often?’

‘Every day,’ says Rettig. ‘Or every night, I should say.’

‘Do you know their names?’

‘Most of them,’ says Rettig, taking another bite. ‘But new faces come along at regular intervals. Some are allowed to go home, others are admitted.’

‘But you know the names of the ones... the ones who’ve been in there a long time?’

Rettig holds up a hand. ‘One thing at a time... We can chat about our guests, but first of all I want to know if you’ve decided.’

‘Decided what?’

‘Whether you want to help them.’

Jan takes a couple of steps into the room. ‘I’d be happy to hear more... At Bill’s Bar you said something about there being too many things you’re not allowed to do.’

Rettig nods. ‘That’s what it’s all about. There’s too much bureaucracy at St Patricia’s, too many rules... particularly when it comes to the closed wards. The daytime security team rules the roost up there.’ He sighs gloomily at the thought of his colleagues on the day shift, and looks up at the ceiling. ‘The patients are not allowed to write letters to whoever they like, and their post is checked. They’re hardly ever allowed to watch TV or listen to the radio, they get searched all the time...’

Jan nods, remembering how he had to open his bag when he first went inside the hospital.

‘You just get tired of all the supervision, that’s all,’ Rettig says. ‘Some of us have been talking about this, and we think well-behaved patients ought to have a little more contact with the outside world.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Through letters, for example. People write to the patients. Their parents, their friends, their brothers and sisters write to them... But the daytime security team stop the letters. Or they open them and have a good snoop... So we want to try and smuggle the letters in.’

Jan looks at him. ‘And how would that work? Nobody from the pre-school is allowed into the hospital.’

‘Oh yes they are,’ Rettig says quickly. ‘You are, Jan. You and your children.’

Jan doesn’t say anything, so Rettig goes on: ‘You’re allowed to go up to the visitors’ room, unsupervised. There are no cameras in there, no checks. And at night that room is completely empty. Anyone could go up and leave a bundle of letters in there... letters that could then be collected by me and taken into the hospital.’

Jan glances around sharply, as if Dr Högsmed is standing behind him in the apartment. ‘And these letters,’ he says. ‘Where do they come from?’

Rettig shrugs his shoulders. ‘From the people who write them. People send all kinds of stuff to the hospital, but most of it gets stopped. So I’ve got to know this guy in the sorting office in town, and he’s started putting aside all handwritten letters addressed to St Patricia’s. Then he gives them to me.’

Rettig looks pleased with himself, but Jan isn’t smiling.

‘So you don’t know anything about these letters? You don’t know what’s in them?’

‘Yes, we do,’ says Rettig. ‘Paper, paper with words on it... They’re just ordinary letters.’

Jan’s expression is doubtful. ‘I’m not smuggling drugs.’

‘It’s not drugs. Nothing illegal.’

‘But you are breaking the rules.’

‘We are.’ Rettig nods. ‘But so did Mahatma Gandhi. For a good cause.’

Silence falls.

Jan clears his throat. ‘Can you tell me a bit about the patients?’

‘Which ones?’

Jan doesn’t want to mention Rami’s name, not yet. ‘I’ve seen an old woman up there,’ he says. ‘Grey hair, dressed in a black coat. She goes around sweeping up the leaves just inside the fence... I wondered if she works at St Patricia’s, or if she’s a patient.’

Rettig has stopped smiling. ‘She’s a patient,’ he says quietly. ‘Her name is Margit. But she’s not as old as you might think.’

‘Really? I’ve seen her standing by the fence, watching the children.’

‘She’s done that ever since the pre-school opened,’ says Rettig. ‘Whenever she’s allowed outside she goes and stands by the fence.’

‘Does she like children?’

Rettig doesn’t answer at first. ‘Margit had three children of her own,’ he says eventually. ‘She was married to a potato farmer in Blekinge... This was twenty-five years ago. Her husband used to leave the farm on Fridays and go into town to meet customers. But one day Margit found out from a neighbour that he had a room in a hotel in town, a room where he used to entertain his girlfriend... maybe several girlfriends. So she went to the gun cupboard and took out his shotgun.’

Jan looks at him. ‘She went to the hotel and shot him?’

Rettig shakes his head. ‘She took the children out to the barn and shot them. First of all the two oldest, then she reloaded and shot the little one.’ He sighs. ‘She’s been locked up in St Patricia’s ever since.’

The room is now deathly quiet.

Rettig has stopped eating. He shakes himself, as if he wants to forget what he has said, then goes on: ‘But Margit is kept well away from your children, there’s no need to worry... She’s kept away from all children.’

Jan slowly opens his mouth. ‘I don’t think I wanted to know that.’

‘Well, now you do know,’ Rettig says. ‘There’s a lot we don’t want to know about the people around us... I know way too much, personally.’

‘About the patients?’

‘About everyone.’

Jan nods slowly. He is thinking about the children’s books hidden in his kitchen. He has secrets of his own.

‘And it’s only letters you want me to take in? Nothing else?’

‘No drugs, no weapons, just letters,’ Rettig insists. ‘Think about it, Jan. I work there. Do you think I want people like Ivan Rössel to get their hands on drugs or knives?’

Jan stares at him. ‘Is Ivan Rössel in there?’ He recognizes the name from the newspapers and TV. And the taxi driver mentioned him too.

‘He is.’

‘Ivan Rössel the serial killer?’

‘That’s right,’ Rettig answers in a subdued voice. ‘We’ve got quite a few celebrities among the guests at our establishment... If you only knew.’

Alice Rami, Jan thinks. But out loud he simply asks, ‘So when do you want an answer about the letters?’

‘Preferably now.’

‘I need to give it some thought.’

Rettig leans forward. ‘There’s a place down by the harbour; we use one of the rooms for our rehearsals. We can meet up there, do some jamming with the Bohemos... and afterwards we can have a chat. How about that?’

Jan isn’t sure, but he accepts the invitation anyway.

‘Come down there tomorrow, about seven. It’ll be cool, as they say.’

The room where the Bohemos rehearse smells of sweat and dreams. It’s not far from the harbour, just a few blocks away from Bill’s Bar. The room is as bare as a scruffy youth centre — apart from the egg boxes. Hundreds of egg boxes have been stuck to the walls in order to reduce the echo.

Jan is sitting behind the drum kit, establishing the rhythm and being swept along by it at the same time. The Bohemos started with the classic ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, with a steady four-stroke beat which Jan was able to follow with no problem. That got them going, and now they have been playing old rock songs for almost an hour.

From time to time Rettig has turned around from his place at the microphone and nodded to Jan; he seems pleased. ‘A bit softer on the snare, Jan!’

Jan nods and obliges. After all those years of sitting alone at home accompanying bands on his stereo, it’s a strange feeling to be playing with real live musicians. He was a bit shaky at first, but he’s getting better and better.

The drum kit he’s using is an old Tama, not quite as good as his own; the skin on the bass and snare is worn and almost split in places. But it means he can be a bit less careful as he provides the backing.

‘Good,’ says Rettig. ‘Tighter and tighter.’

Two other members of the Bohemos have turned up. The bass guitarist is called Anders, and the rhythm guitarist is Rasmus. They are both about the same age as Rettig, and play without speaking. Jan has no idea what they think of the fact that he has taken over from Carl, the usual drummer; they haven’t said a word to him all evening, just glanced over at the drums occasionally.

Jan wonders whether Carl, Anders or Rasmus are also care workers at the hospital.

Hanna Aronsson is working at the Dell the day after Jan’s practice session with the Bohemos, and she is just coming out of the children’s room when he walks into the cloakroom. She looks very tired, and quickly puts her finger to her lips when she sees him.

‘Ssh...’

Jan realizes that she has only just got the children off to sleep. He waves to her and goes into the staffroom, quickly placing his rucksack in his locker. The rucksack containing the envelope; his secret mission as a postman.

Then he joins Hanna in the kitchen; she is busy unloading the dishwasher.

‘Are they all fast asleep?’

‘I hope so.’ She sighs. ‘They’ve been a real handful tonight. Bad-tempered and bickering non-stop.’

‘Oh? How many of them are there?’

‘Three... Leo, Matilda and Mira, as usual.’

There is an awkward silence; this always happens when Jan is alone at work with Hanna. It’s easy to talk to the other staff at the Dell, but Hanna doesn’t say anything beyond what is absolutely necessary.

Although of course there is something Jan wants to discuss with her, and after a moment he takes a deep breath. ‘Hanna, what I said to you last week, when we were walking home...’

‘What?’

‘That I used to work at a nursery... and I lost one of the boys in the forest.’

She nods; he can see that she remembers.

‘Did you... did you mention it to anyone else?’

Hanna’s expression is blank, as usual. ‘No.’

‘Good,’ Jan says.

It looks as if Hanna is about to say something else, or ask a question, but instead she puts away the last of the dishes and closes the cupboard doors. ‘That’s me done for today, then.’

‘Fine. Do you have any plans for this evening?’

‘I don’t know... I might go to the gym.’

Jan could have guessed that Hanna was a gym bunny. She is slender but looks toned and fit. Not skinny like Rami.

Before setting off for his night shift on Friday, Jan picks up an empty coffee cup and leaves his flat. He’s not going out this evening, just down two flights of stairs to visit his neighbour behind the door marked V. LEGÉN.

He can’t hear a sound; he has rung the bell on two previous occasions, but no one has answered. He tries again.

This time someone is coming; then there is a rattling sound. Legén has put the chain on the door, but he opens it just a fraction.

‘Evening,’ says Jan, holding up the cup.

His neighbour doesn’t say a word.

‘My name is Jan Hauger... I live upstairs,’ Jan goes on. ‘I wondered if you could spare some sugar? I’m making a cake.’

Legén stares at him like a weary boxer facing his arch enemy. He’s not in a good mood today. But he takes the cup and turns away. Jan silently steps forward and peers into the hallway.

It is dark and untidy, and it stinks of tobacco. The fabric bag he last saw down in the cellar is lying on the floor, next to the shoe rack. The text is clearly visible now: ST PATRICIA’S LAUNDRY. He was right.

Jan is wearing a satisfied smile when his neighbour returns with the cup half-full of sugar.

‘Perfect. Thanks very much.’

He is about to carry on chatting; he was intending to point to the bag and say that he actually works at St Patricia’s too, but Legén simply nods and slams the door shut. There is a click as the key turns in the lock.

Jan goes back up to his flat and tips the sugar into the bin in the kitchen.

Jan stays where he is, protected by the thick walls of the safe room. He doesn’t move a muscle.

Make your mind up, he thinks.

All he did when the lift door opened was to reach out and switch off the light in the safe room, to avoid giving himself away. But ever since he has been in the same place, frozen to the floor.

He is standing completely still, just listening, with no idea of what to do. Every sound he can hear now is coming from the basement, bouncing around the sharp corners and echoing between the concrete walls.

He clearly hears the door of the lift close, and thinks he can hear footsteps moving across the thin carpet of the corridor. Quiet steps, gradually moving away.

Someone is calmly walking away from the lift and along the corridor.

Someone is on the way up the stairs to the Dell.

On the way up to the three sleeping children: Leo, Mira and Matilda.

Jan must move, and in the end he manages it. He turns around and takes one step towards the door. His shadow moves across the wall. Two steps. Three.

But suddenly the light in front of him goes out. The shadow disappears; the corridor is in total darkness.

Jan realizes what has happened: the person who came out of the lift has now reached the top of the stairs, and switched off the light.

The door leading to the pre-school rattles as it opens, then closes again. The visitor from St Psycho’s must have had a key card with him or her.

And now the visitor is inside the Dell. And Jan, who is responsible for the children up there, is trapped.

He has his own card and can get out of the basement, but that won’t be enough. He needs a weapon. Something with which to defend himself and the children, anything at all. He gropes around in the darkness of the safe room, finds the empty wine bottle on the floor and picks it up.

A kind of club. He can grab the bottle by the neck and hold it up in front of him.

Out in the corridor it is almost pitch dark, with only a faint yellow glow from the window of the lift, and he gropes his way along the wall towards the stairs.

He has almost forgotten the Angel on his belt, but suddenly he hears muted, metallic sounds coming from the little box. Scraping sounds, then something that sounds like breathing. The sound of someone who has crept into the children’s bedroom.

Someone is with the children.

Jan’s heart begins to pound, he increases his speed.

Most of the patients in the hospital are not dangerous, that’s what Dr Högsmed said. And yet right now he can’t help thinking about those who are dangerous. About Ivan Rössel, the serial killer. And Margit, the old woman, with her smoking shotgun...

Fuck. Jan moves along with short, rapid steps, feeling his way. The concrete wall feels like sandpaper to his touch.

He hears a thud; he has knocked down one of the animal pictures, but he doesn’t stop. All at once his shoe hits something hard. The bottom step. He climbs the stairs cautiously, one by one, until his hands brush against the door. But it’s locked.

Jan will have to unlock it, but suddenly he can’t remember the code. His mind has gone completely blank. Marie-Louise’s birthday — but exactly when is it?

When?

He turns up the volume on the baby monitor and hears the sound of scraping footsteps, someone moving inside the room where the children are sleeping. A visitor from St Psycho’s.

The code, what’s the code?

Jan needs to think. He tries to relax, and gradually coaxes out the numbers; they pop into his head, one by one. Three, one, zero, seven. He fumbles in the darkness, keys in the numbers, swipes the card and hears the lock click.

Slowly he opens the door, the bottle raised in front of him. The small rooms in the Dell are silent now.

He takes two steps into the cloakroom, turns and sees that the door of the children’s room is standing wide open. It was closed when he left. The hand holding the bottle is slippery with sweat.

Three children are sleeping in there — Leo, Matilda and Mira. He abandoned them. Holding his breath he moves as quietly as he can towards the doorway.

A room in darkness.

He peeps in, expecting to see a big black shadow looming over the beds, but he sees nothing.

Nothing is moving in there. The three children are safely tucked up, their breathing quiet and even. Jan tiptoes in and listens, but the room is small; there is nowhere for anyone to hide.

It’s empty. So where has the visitor from the hospital gone?

Jan leaves the children, closes the door and switches on the light in the hallway. Then he goes from room to room, checking every corner, but he can’t find any sign of the visitor.

Eventually he returns to the hallway. The outside door is closed, but when he presses down the handle he discovers it isn’t locked. Someone has unlocked it and gone outside.

Jan opens the door and looks out, but there is no one in sight. ‘Hello?’ he calls out into the night, mostly to hear the sound of his own voice.

No answer. The playground is empty, the street beyond is deserted.

He closes the door against the cold, locks it and exhales. He looks at the clock: quarter past twelve.

There is one last thing he must do before he goes to bed: he must go down to the basement and hang the picture back on the wall. And of course he must replace the bottle — an empty wine bottle would be a little difficult to explain if Marie-Louise found it in the pre-school.

When he comes back up, he also jams a chair under the handle of the door leading to the basement so that no one will be able to open it from the other side — not even if they have a key card.

The second envelope from Rettig is delivered to Jan that morning when he is back in his own bed. His mind has drifted off into a warm, soothing dream about love, but he is abruptly woken at nine o’clock. He can’t work out why at first, but then it dawns on him that it was the clatter of the letter box.

He no longer remembers the dream; he might as well get up. When he peers out into the hallway there is an envelope lying there which looks familiar. This one is pale yellow, that’s the only difference. But it is just as thick as the first one, with the letters S. P. printed on the front.

This time Jan does something he didn’t have the courage to do last time: he opens the envelope. He takes it into the kitchen, places it on the table and studies the seal. It’s ordinary transparent sticky tape — the kind you can buy just about anywhere — and that’s what makes him begin to pull at it, teasing it away from the back of the envelope.

He hesitates for a brief moment. Is it wrong to open letters that shouldn’t ever be delivered anyway? He pushes the question aside.

When he has removed the tape it is very easy to slide a sharp knife under the flap and gently work it open. He reaches inside and removes the contents.

Rettig wasn’t lying. The envelope contains letters, nothing else. Jan counts thirty-four, in all colours and sizes. There are names on the front in pen or pencil, in different handwriting, all with the same address: St Patricia’s Hospital.

Jan slowly looks through the names, and notices that one particular name comes up several times: Ivan Rössel. Rössel the serial killer has received nine letters altogether.

There are no other names on the letters that Jan recognizes. There is nothing for Alice Rami, or Maria Blanker.

Jan rubs his eyes and thinks. If he can’t get in to see Rami, perhaps he can send a letter to her? What does he have to lose?

He has a set of stationery in one of the kitchen drawers. His mother gave it to him when he left home, with handmade envelopes and thick paper, but in ten years he has hardly ever used it.

He picks up a pen and stares at the empty sheet of paper for a few seconds, wanting to fill it with words. There is so much to say. But in the end he writes just one question: DEAR SQUIRREL — WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET OVER THE FENCE?

He signs his own first name. He considers adding his address, then realizes that Lars Rettig or one of the other care assistants will almost certainly see the envelope containing Rami’s reply. If she replies. So he writes Jan Larsson, and his old address in Gothenburg.

Then he places the sheet of paper in an envelope, writes Maria Blanker, St Patricia’s Hospital on the front, seals it and tucks it in among all the rest.

Like a criminal, a spy or a secret courier, Jan is careful not to run any risks with the letters from St Psycho’s. He takes a long detour on his journey to work the next morning and quickly stuffs the whole lot in a postbox on a deserted street. Good luck. Forty-seven letters from patients, on their way out into the world.

Frost and patches of ice are starting to appear on the roads now; he will have to stop cycling soon if he wants to avoid skidding. It’s lethal.

Small feet come racing up to him in the cloakroom when he arrives at the Dell. It’s Matilda, and her eyes are shining. ‘The police are here!’

She’s joking, of course.

‘Oh yes?’ Jan says calmly, unbuttoning his jacket. ‘And what do they want? Have they come to have a glass of squash with us?’

Matilda looks confused until he winks at her. Pre-school children can say just about anything; they find it difficult to distinguish between what is true and false, between reality and fantasy.

But the police actually are there. Not at the pre-school, but at the hospital. When Jan looks out of the kitchen window a quarter of an hour later, he sees a police car parked over by the entrance, with two uniformed officers walking along the inside of the perimeter fence. Their eyes are fixed on the damp ground, as if they are looking for something.

Only then does Jan feel a small beat of anxiety in the back of his mind. This always happens when he sees police officers, ever since what happened at Lynx.

Marie-Louise comes into the kitchen.

‘What are the police doing here?’ Jan asks.

‘I don’t know... something seems to have happened up at the hospital.’

She doesn’t sound concerned, but Jan presses her. ‘Has someone escaped?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ says Marie-Louise. ‘But I’m sure we’ll find out tomorrow when the report comes out.’

She is referring to Dr Högsmed’s weekly report. It comes through to the computer in the pre-school and Marie-Louise prints it out, but so far it has made very dull reading.

Jan waits, but there is no peremptory knock on the door of the pre-school. The next time he looks out of the window the police car has gone.

He starts to relax and forgets the visit, until it is almost ten o’clock and time for Felix to be escorted to the visitors’ room. Marie-Louise comes over to him in the playroom and says quietly, ‘No visits today, Jan — they’ve been postponed.’

‘Oh?’ Jan automatically lowers his voice as well. ‘Why’s that?’

‘There’s been a death up at the hospital.’

‘A death?’

Marie-Louise nods, and whispers, ‘A patient died last night.’

‘But how?’

‘I don’t know... but it was obviously unexpected.’

Jan doesn’t ask any more questions; he carries on playing with the children. Tag and hide-and-seek. But his mind is elsewhere. He keeps on thinking about the letters he left in the visitors’ room last night. Love letters, but perhaps threatening letters as well.

The concrete wall by the pre-school carries with it a feeling of hopelessness. Hopelessness and brutality. Sometimes Jan is filled with those feelings when he stares at the wall, so when he is out in the playground with the children he often looks across at the school’s other neighbours, the rows of terraced houses.

Everyday life goes on over there — cars come and go, children walk to school, lights are switched on in bedrooms on dark mornings and switched off at night. The people in the houses have their daily routines, just as everyone in the pre-school does.

It is the middle of October, and dark clouds come scudding across from the coast. The children are playing outside, but suddenly icy raindrops begin to spatter the ground, and Jan quickly takes everyone into the playroom. It will soon be time for their health assessment anyway. Hanna Aronsson, who turns out to have trained as a nurse in the past, calls the children into the staffroom one by one and checks them over, examining their pupils and measuring their blood pressure and heart rate.

‘Fit as fleas,’ she says afterwards.

They gather in the snuggle room, where Marie-Louise leads the weekly suggestion session. The children always have lots of requests.

‘I’d like a pet,’ says Mira.

‘Me too!’ Josefine shouts.

‘But why?’ asks Marie-Louise. ‘You’ve got your cuddly toys, haven’t you?’

‘We want real animals!’

‘Animals that move!’

Mira looks at Marie-Louise and Jan, her eyes pleading. ‘Please... please can we have a pet?’

‘I want stick insects!’ Leo shouts. ‘Lots of stick insects!’

‘A hamster,’ Hugo says.

‘No, I want a cat,’ says Matilda.

The children are excited, but Marie-Louise is not smiling. ‘Animals have to be looked after,’ she says.

‘But we will look after them!’

‘They have to be looked after all the time. And what happens when there’s nobody here?’

‘Then they can live here on their own, in a cage,’ says Matilda with a smile. ‘We’ll just lock them in with loads of food and water!’

Marie-Louise still isn’t smiling; she shakes her head. ‘Animals shouldn’t be left locked up.’

It’s a few days before Rettig delivers another envelope to Jan. But by then Jan has met the nocturnal visitor to the pre-school.

The sun shines on these October days, and life is looking better and better; the shadows from the Unit and Lynx are slowly fading. In Jan’s opinion he is a totally reliable colleague at this stage, popular with both the children and the other members of staff. The letters he smuggles into St Psycho’s cannot alter the fact that he is an extremely conscientious pre-school teacher.

After all, he likes the children. Perhaps it is a sense of guilt, or the fear of being found out, that makes him work so hard for the welfare and security of the children, building a solid foundation for lifelong learning and enabling them to develop into responsible and ethically aware citizens, and all the other excellent aims he learned about during his professional training.

The other members of staff sneak out occasionally for a bit of fresh air or a quick smoke, but Jan remains with the children all the time. He jokes with them, listens to them, calms them down, dries their tears and sorts out all their little arguments. He spends a great deal of time with Leo, trying to gain his trust.

Sometimes when he is in the middle of a game he can see no difference between himself and the children. The years fall away, he is five or six years old and able to live completely in the present. No demands, no worries about the future, no anguish because of his loneliness. Just cheerful shouts and a warm feeling of total involvement. Life is going on here and now.

But sometimes he catches a glimpse of someone moving behind the perimeter fence at St Patricia’s, and he abandons the game for a moment and thinks of Rami.

Rami the animal lady, Rami like an animal in a cage.

In a safari park the predators are enclosed together with the herbivores. But the difference between the dangerous animals and those that are harmless is always difficult to see.

The squirrel wants to be free, Rami wrote. And he wants to get inside St Psycho’s to see her. He wants to talk to her, just like before.

‘Jan!’ the children shout. ‘Look, Jan!’

Sooner or later one of the children starts tugging at his arm, and he is back in the moment.

Jan and Hanna end up at the Medina Palace, at her suggestion. The night club is in the cellar of the Tureborg, Valla’s only luxury hotel, a towering structure of steel and glass which seems to aspire to being a real skyscraper. As pre-school teachers coming straight from work they’re not exactly dressed for the occasion, and Jan actually has milk stains on his jumper after Matilda knocked her glass over during break. The suited and booted bouncer opens the door for them, but his expression is slightly dubious.

‘Do you come here often?’ Jan jokes.

‘Sometimes.’

Hanna has already smoked two cigarettes since they got off the bus; she answers him quietly, looking down at the floor as they walk into the club.

Into an enormous playroom.

Jan has never been to a real night club, not even in Gothenburg, and when he sees the high, black ceilings adorned with long, curved pipes, and the cold metal surfaces of the walls, he knows he shouldn’t be here. But there aren’t many people in the club this Thursday evening. The music is just right — quiet enough for them to be able to talk, but loud enough to stop anyone eavesdropping.

Jan chooses a glass table in the corner — a secluded table for sharing secrets. ‘What are you having?’

‘Something with orange juice in it.’

Jan goes over to the bar. The selection is more upmarket than at Bill’s Bar; there is a range of cocktails, champagne, cognac... He goes back with two glasses of orange juice, but when Hanna takes her first sip, she looks disappointed.

She nods in the direction of the bar. ‘I said something with orange juice in it... Can you go and get me a proper drink?’

‘Like what?’

‘Something to calm me down.’

Jan looks at her. ‘You mean vodka or something?’

‘Good idea.’

Five minutes later they are staring at their drinks in silence.

‘So you crept up on me this evening,’ Hanna says eventually.

‘Well, I don’t know about that... I thought Lilian seemed a bit tense when she arrived, so I waited in the playground to see if I could find out why.’

Hanna gazes down at the table. ‘Did you know I was up at the hospital?’

‘No, but I know someone has been there and then left via the school, so I’ve been wondering who it might be. Have you been up there often?’

Hanna takes a huge gulp of her drink, as if her vodka and orange juice was a health drink after a sauna. Jan takes a small sip of his.

‘A few times,’ Hanna says. ‘I haven’t kept count.’

‘And how long has this been going on for?’

‘Since May. I’d been working at the Dell for four months by then.’

‘And Lilian knows about this?’

Hanna gazes at him with her blue eyes; she seems to be wondering how much to tell him, and in the end she says, ‘Yes. I mean, we’re friends, so she keeps an eye out for me... I only go up there when she’s on nights.’

‘No,’ says Jan. ‘You were up there one night when I was working. I heard you coming down in the lift. Then you went out through the Dell.’

‘You’re right... I was late that night.’

‘And you were in the visitors’ room at the hospital tonight?’

Hanna nods without speaking.

‘What do you do up there?’

No reply.

‘Are you meeting someone? Is it one of the guards?’

Hanna takes a couple of sips and peers into her half-empty glass. Then she changes the subject. ‘I get so bloody tired of the kids sometimes. I enjoy the job most of the time, but when I’ve been with them for too long I start to get a bit panicky. They just want to do the same things, over and over again. Play the same games...’

Jan has never actually seen Hanna playing with the children; usually she just stands there watching them while they play on their own. But he smiles. ‘Everybody feels like that now and again.’

Hanna sighs. ‘I feel like that nearly all the time. I can’t cope with hordes of kids, somehow.’

Jan sees the children from the Dell in his mind’s eye. Cheery faces. Josefine, Leo and all the others. ‘You should try to see them as individuals,’ he says. ‘They’ve all got their own character.’

‘Oh yes? They sound like a troupe of monkeys to me. They spend all bloody day screaming; I’m practically deaf when I get home after work.’

Hanna empties her glass and an awkward silence falls.

Jan stands up. ‘I’ll get another round in.’

She doesn’t object. When he returns with fresh drinks he wants to get back to the previous topic of conversation, so he looks around before asking, ‘So do you know someone up at the hospital, then?’

Hanna hesitates, but then mumbles that she does.

‘Who is it?’

‘I’m not telling you. Who do you go to see?’

‘Nobody,’ Jan says quickly. ‘Not one of the patients, anyway.’

‘But you want to get to them, don’t you? I mean, you were down in the basement that night when I came back... Why do you go creeping around down there?’

Now it is Jan’s turn to fall silent. ‘Curiosity,’ he says eventually.

‘Yeah, right.’ Hanna smiles wearily at him. ‘But there’s no point in searching for a way in down there.’

‘Oh? But you get through the sally port without any problems?’

She nods quickly. The vodka seems to be making her more relaxed. ‘I’ve got a contact. In the hospital, I mean. Someone I can trust.’

‘A guard?’ Jan immediately thinks of Lars Rettig.

‘Kind of.’

‘Who is it?’

‘I’m not saying.’

This is like a game of chess, Jan thinks. A game of chess in a night club.

The music is louder now, and the place no longer seems quite so big. More people have arrived and begun to fill up the tables and the stools by the bar. It’s only to be expected, of course; the Medina Palace is a night club, with the emphasis on night — people arrive late, and now they’re here to stay. The night people.

But no one comes to join Jan and Hanna; they are sitting very close together now, as if they have been friends since childhood.

‘You and I should trust each other too,’ Jan says.

Hanna’s blue eyes are cool. ‘Why?’

‘Because we can help each other.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, in different ways...’ Jan breaks off. He has grasped that Hanna might be able to help him meet Rami, but he doesn’t know how.

Hanna’s glass is empty. She looks at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’ She starts to get up, a little unsteadily.

‘Wait,’ Jan says quickly. ‘Stay a bit longer. I’ll get us another drink. Do you like liqueurs?’

Hanna sits down again. ‘Maybe.’

‘Good.’ He dashes over to the bar; he is as fast as Rami’s squirrel, and he comes back with four small glasses on a tray. A double round of coffee liqueurs, to save time. ‘Cheers, Hanna.’

‘Cheers.’

The drink tastes sweet and the world becomes even more noticeably wrapped in cotton wool. The beat of the music grows louder, and he leans closer to her. ‘So what do you think of Marie-Louise?’

Hanna gives a little smile. ‘Miss Control Freak,’ she says with a snigger. ‘She’d have a heart attack if that thing you told me about happened at our place.’

‘What thing?’

‘That business with the boy who disappeared in the forest.’

Jan gives a curt nod, but keeps his eyes fixed on the table. He doesn’t want to talk about William, so he changes the subject. ‘Is Lilian married?’

‘No. She was, but it didn’t work out... Her husband kind of got bored.’

Jan doesn’t ask any more questions, but he wonders about the man who walked Lilian to work this evening. Has she got a new boyfriend?

Jan is quite pleased when there is a brief silence, because it means he can have another drink. He tries to pull himself together, and looks at Hanna over the top of his glass. ‘Shall we play a game?’

Hanna empties her own glass. ‘What kind of game?’

‘A guessing game.’

‘What about?’

‘I’ll try to guess who you meet at St Psycho’s, and you try to guess who I want to meet up there.’

‘St... We’re not supposed to call it that.’

‘I know.’ Jan gives her a conspiratorial smile. ‘OK, I’ll go first... Is it a man?’

Hanna gazes at him tipsily, then nods. ‘And yours? Is it a woman?’

Jan nods in return, and goes on: ‘Is it someone from your past? Someone you knew before he ended up in St Psych— St Patricia’s?’

She shakes her head. ‘Did you know this woman?’

Jan nods and sips his drink. ‘I met her before... years and years ago.’

‘Is she famous?’ Hanna asks with a smile.

‘Famous?’

‘Yes. Did people talk about her, did she have her name and her picture in the papers? Because of some crime?’

Jan shakes his head; he isn’t lying. After all, Rami was never famous — not as a criminal, anyway. She wasn’t very well known at all; as far as he is aware, she never appeared on television. He raises his glass to Hanna. ‘And your friend on the inside,’ he says. ‘Is he famous?’

Hanna stops smiling; her gaze slides sideways. ‘Maybe,’ she says quietly.

Jan carries on looking at her. Suddenly another name comes into his head, a very well-known name, but it’s such a stupid idea that he almost laughs out loud. ‘Is it Rössel? Ivan Rössel?’

Hanna visibly stiffens — and suddenly it isn’t funny any more.

Jan puts down his glass. ‘Surely that’s not who you’re meeting up there, Hanna? Not Ivan Rössel? He’s a murderer!’

She opens her mouth and hesitates briefly, then gets to her feet. ‘I have to go.’

And that’s exactly what she does, without another word. Jan watches her go, a straight-backed pre-school teacher with blonde hair, making a beeline for the exit.

He stays where he is, holding on to his glass. It’s empty, but Hanna’s second coffee liqueur is still standing there untouched, so he reaches out and knocks that back as well. It tastes horrible, but he drinks it anyway.

Then he gazes blankly into space, suddenly remembering what Lilian said about Hanna Aronsson: She’s young and a bit crazy, but she has a very exciting private life.

A bit crazy? She must be, if she’s sneaking into St Psycho’s and hanging out with Ivan Rössel.

The child-killer.

That’s what one of the newspapers called him, and another referred to him as Ivan the Terrible.

What is Hanna doing with Rössel?

Ivan Rössel is smiling at Jan as if they are good friends. He has broad shoulders and black, curly hair that flops down over his forehead; he looks like a middle-aged rock star. He wears the satisfied expression of a man who seems to enjoy being photographed. Or a man who thinks he is smarter than the photographer.

The photograph was taken by the police, and it is on Jan’s computer screen.

Rössel was not a rock musician when the police arrested him, nor a celebrity of any kind; he was a high-school teacher of chemistry and physics at a school here on the west coast. Unmarried and with no close friends. Rössel was popular with the pupils, but some of his colleagues found him arrogant and boastful at times.

His elderly mother has also spoken to a number of newspapers, describing him as ‘a good boy with a kind heart’.

Needless to say, most of the articles about Rössel that Jan finds on the internet are concerned with the murders of young men and women allegedly committed by the teacher in various places in southern Sweden and Norway. He has been dubbed the child-killer, but in fact he is suspected of murdering teenagers. And his only conviction is for a series of arson attacks.

Rössel was a pyromaniac — or at least fires occurred remarkably frequently in houses and shops wherever he was living, and on two occasions people died as a consequence. Someone broke in at night, stole money and valuables, then set fire to the place.

It wasn’t until Rössel had been arrested and sentenced to long-term psychiatric care for the fires and the burglaries that the police began to investigate another remarkable coincidence: the fact that several teenagers had been murdered or had vanished without a trace in the areas where Rössel had been living.

Many aspects of the murder investigation have been kept under wraps, but the newspapers keep on repeating the few details that were made public. Ivan Rössel was not only a teacher, he was also a great camping enthusiast. He owned a large, soundproofed caravan which he would set up in a secluded corner of some Swedish or Norwegian campsite early in the summer. There he would stay until the beginning of the autumn term, keeping himself to himself but undertaking lots of excursions in the area. A number of teenagers were found murdered in the vicinity of the campsites on which he had stayed, and one young man disappeared without a trace. Nineteen-year-old John Daniel Nilsson went outside for a breath of fresh air during a school dance in Gothenburg one evening in May, and never came back.

Jan actually remembers that particular case; he had been living in Gothenburg when John Daniel disappeared, six years ago.

Once Rössel had been locked up for the arson attacks, the police began to investigate the connection between him and the young people who had died or disappeared. But by that time Rössel’s caravan had just happened to catch fire, his car had been scrapped, and any evidence was lost. And Rössel himself refused to admit anything.

There are many articles about Rössel’s background and camping trips — hundreds of articles — but after reading half a dozen Jan has had enough.

Rössel is incarcerated, and St Patricia’s seems to be the right place for him. Surely Hanna Aronsson can’t be interested in such a disturbed individual? Or can she?

Instead Jan begins to search for another name on the internet: St Patricia’s. But he doesn’t find any pictures or long articles, just brief facts and statistics about the hospital from the Prison Service. And a link to St Patricia takes him in completely the wrong direction, to a website about patron saints. He learns that St Patricia was a nun, a member of the Order of St Clare in Stockholm in the fifteenth century. Patricia helped orphaned children, the sick and the old, and the poorest of the poor in the narrow alleyways of the city.

There are just a few lines about the saint, nothing more.

Jan shuts down the computer, stands up and starts to pack. He is going to visit his elderly mother and his childhood home in Nordbro for the first time in six months.

Jan is back in Valla. He has cleaned his flat: he is expecting a visit from Hanna.

It was his idea to meet up this evening; when he went back to work at the Dell after his long weekend off, Hanna was also on duty, and when the staffroom was empty he stuck a note in her jacket pocket, with his address and a question: COFFEE AT MINE, 8 O’CLOCK? JAN H.

He didn’t get an answer from her before he left, but bought bread on the way home anyway. She has to come — they have shared interests.

Shared secrets.

And Hanna rings his doorbell fairly punctually, at five past eight. She doesn’t say much as she walks in, but Jan is pleased. ‘I’m glad you came.’

‘Thanks.’

Jan tries to relax; he leads her into the kitchen, makes tea and offers sandwiches. Then he makes small-talk about work, but eventually they get to the subject he really wants to discuss: St Patricia’s. ‘The women up there... Are they separated from the men?’

Hanna looks at him, her expression blank as usual. The air in Jan’s kitchen suddenly feels thick and heavy, but it is still better to ask Hanna about the hospital than Lars Rettig. ‘Yes,’ she says eventually, ‘there are a couple of women’s wards... One secure and one open.’

‘Are they close together?’

‘Not exactly next door, but I think they’re on the same floor.’

‘And which floor is that?’

‘The third, I think. Or the fourth... I’ve never been in there.’

Jan tries to come up with more questions, but suddenly Hanna has something to say: ‘Tell me who it is, Jan.’

‘Who what is?’

‘The person in the hospital that you’re in love with... What’s her name?’

She is staring at him, but Jan refuses to meet her gaze.

‘It’s different,’ he says.

‘What do you mean, different?’

‘Different from you and Ivan Rössel.’

Hanna slams down her teacup. Her blue eyes are cold. ‘What do you know about how things are between us? You don’t know anything, you don’t know why I got in touch with him... How can you make a judgement?’

Jan looks down at the table. The atmosphere is suddenly icy. But he was right — it is Rössel she has met up with in the visitors’ room.

‘I’m just guessing,’ he says. ‘But you do like him, don’t you?’

Hanna is still staring at him. ‘You have to see the person beyond the crime,’ she says eventually. ‘Most people can’t do that.’

‘If you’re sneaking in to see Rössel, surely you must like him?’ Jan says. ‘Even though he’s done... bad things?’

It takes a while before she answers. ‘I don’t see him,’ she says. ‘The contact is through one of the guards. Ivan is working on a project to make the time pass more quickly in there... and I’m helping him.’

‘With what? What’s he doing?’

‘It’s a writing project. He’s working on a manuscript.’

‘A book?’

‘Kind of.’

‘What, like the memoirs of a murderer?’

Hanna’s mouth tightens. ‘He’s a suspect. He’s never confessed.’ She sighs. ‘He says his book will explain everything... People will realize that he hasn’t done anything.’

‘And he believes that?’

‘Yes, he does.’ Hanna’s voice is more animated now. ‘Ivan feels really terrible about how things have turned out; there’s a much greater risk that he’ll take his own life rather than anyone else’s. Right now it’s only my letters that are keeping him going...’

She stops, and Jan doesn’t know what to say. The intense look in Hanna’s eyes makes him uneasy; he doesn’t really want to talk about Rössel any more.

Neither does Hanna, apparently. ‘I have to go soon.’ She looks at her watch, then at Jan. ‘So are you going to tell me now?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘Her name... the woman you’re seeing up there?’

Jan lowers his gaze. ‘I haven’t seen her yet.’

‘So what’s her name, then?’

Jan hesitates. He has two names to choose from — Rami or Blanker — but he decides on the least well known. ‘Wait a minute,’ he says. ‘I’m just going to fetch something.’

He goes into the living room and comes back with the picture books: The Princess with a Hundred Hands, The Animal Lady, The Witch Who Was Poorly and Viveca’s House of Stone. He puts them down in front of Hanna. ‘Have you seen these before?’

Hanna shakes her head.

‘They were up at the pre-school. They’re handmade... so this is probably the only copy of each one that exists. And somebody must have put them in the book box.’

‘Marie-Louise usually puts books in there,’ says Hanna.

‘Not these... I think one of the children was given them by their parent up in the visitors’ room.’

Hanna leafs through the books, then looks up at Jan. ‘Who wrote them?’

‘She calls herself Maria Blanker,’ he says. ‘She’s Josefine’s mother... I’m almost sure of it.’

‘Blanker... So she’s the one you want to meet at the hospital?’

‘Yes... Do you know who she is?’

‘I’ve heard a few things about her,’ Hanna says quietly.

‘From Rössel?’

She shakes her head. ‘From Carl... my contact.’

Jan recognizes the name, of course. The drummer from the Bohemos.

Hanna is still looking at the books. ‘Can I borrow them?’

Jan hesitates. ‘OK,’ he says eventually. ‘Just for a few days.’

She gathers up the books and gets to her feet; it’s time to go home.

But Jan has one last question: ‘Is Maria Blanker on the secure ward or the open ward?’

‘I don’t know where she is, I’ve never been inside,’ says Hanna, before adding, ‘But I should think she ought to be on the secure ward.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Blanker is psychotic. She’s completely out of it. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.’

‘Do you know what she’s done?’

‘She’s dangerous.’

‘Is she a danger to herself?’ Jan asks. ‘Or to others?’

Hanna shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. So you’re going to have to go in and ask her.’

Jan smiles at the joke, but Hanna isn’t smiling. ‘I’m serious,’ she says. ‘There’s always a way in, if you’re willing to take it.’

‘But everything is locked at St Patricia’s.’

‘One way is open.’

‘And you know about this?’

She nods. ‘I know where it is, but it isn’t that easy to get through... Do you suffer from claustrophobia, Jan?’

Being locked in wasn’t all that bad, surely — not if you had plenty of food and drink, and you were warm enough? And a talking robot to keep you company?

Jan convinced himself that this was true, over and over again, whenever he thought about William inside the bunker.

In fact, being locked up behind thick concrete walls could make you feel really safe and secure.

It was half past eight in the evening, and the police had called off the search for William half an hour ago. They had continued after darkness had fallen, using torches, but it had all been very badly organized, in Jan’s opinion. And they found nothing. William had vanished without a trace; he could have stepped off the edge of the world.

Or at least disappeared from solid ground. The police had spent the last hour searching the long shore of the lake, and Jan realized they were afraid that the five-year-old had fallen in the water.

Lynx had become an assembly point for the search parties. But they were all tired now, and many of those who had been out looking for the boy were on their way home. When daylight came on Thursday morning, the search would resume, with increased manpower.

Jan had walked back to Lynx with an older police officer, who had puffed and panted his way through the forest. ‘Bloody hell... I hate this kind of thing. Let’s hope he makes it through the night, but there’s not much chance of that.’

‘Well, it’s quite mild at the moment,’ said Jan. ‘I’m sure he’ll be fine.’

But the officer didn’t appear to be listening. ‘Bloody hell,’ he repeated. ‘I remember once a kid was found dead on a forest track... He’d been hit by somebody’s car, then they’d hidden him in the forest, like a sack of rubbish.’ He looked at Jan with weary eyes. ‘You never forget something like that.’

With each autumn evening that passes, St Patricia’s grey façade seems a little colder and darker to Jan. As he cycles past the wall on this particular evening, the hospital behind the wall looks like a great fortress. Pale, shimmering lights are visible in many of the windows, but they do not convey a welcoming atmosphere. Shadows seem to be moving inside the rooms, gazing out with longing from behind the bars.

Is one of the windows ajar up there?

Is that guitar music he can hear in the night?

No. Just his imagination.

Jan quickly cycles on past the hospital and down to the pre-school, away from the wall. It is Sunday, and only two months to go until Christmas. He is free this weekend but has come down anyway; he and Hanna parted company four days earlier with a kind of promise to help each other. Or at least not to give each other away.

‘You can’t get into the hospital through the sally port,’ Hanna had said in Jan’s kitchen. ‘Nobody gets in that way... I’ve never got past the visitors’ room.’

‘So your friend Carl... he lets you and Rössel meet up there?’

‘No, Ivan stays in his room. I send him letters.’

More secret letters, Jan thought. But he merely asked, ‘So how do I get in, then?’

‘Through the basement,’ Hanna said. ‘I can show you the entrance, if you like.’

Jan definitely liked the idea. He remembered that Högsmed had talked about a way from the hospital to the pre-school through the basement. But it’s not a very pleasant route, the doctor had said.

What does that mean? Are there rats in the basement? Or people?

Hanna stares at the equipment Jan has just taken out of his locker.

‘What’s that?’ she asks.

‘An electronic baby monitor. Have you never seen one before?’

‘No.’ She shakes her head as she contemplates the two plastic boxes. ‘What are they for?’

Jan looks at her. ‘It’s obvious you haven’t got kids... They enable you to keep a check on the children while they’re asleep.’

‘But why can’t you just go and see if they’re OK?’

‘Not everybody has time... or it’s a question of security, I suppose. If the children are safe, the parents feel secure.’ He thinks about William Halevi, and adds, ‘If the parents don’t feel secure, they’re unhappy.’

Hanna takes one Angel, but doesn’t look convinced. ‘So what are you going to do with them now?’

‘I’m going to use one as a torch,’ he says. ‘And if I leave the other one with you, you’ll be able to hear me.’

‘And that will somehow make you feel more secure?’

‘A bit.’

Hanna weighs the Angel in her hand and says, ‘I can listen, but I can’t do any more. I mean, if you need any help down there, I can’t—’

‘It’s enough if you can hear me,’ Jan interrupts her.

It would be a lifeline. A bit like going into a cave with a rope around your ankle.

‘Are you afraid?’ she asks.

‘No. I left the fear in the pocket of my other trousers,’ he says. He smiles, but doesn’t relax. He doesn’t know what is going to happen, he doesn’t know if the guards patrol regularly, but if he meets anyone down there he had better hope it is Lars Rettig, or some friend of his. If they are to be trusted.

Jan couldn’t see much of the forest in the darkness, but he was surrounded by all the sounds of the countryside at night. His boots scuffed rhythmically over rocks and gravel, the night breeze soughed in the fir trees, an owl hooted down by the lake. And the drums kept on beating, but that was just inside his head.

It was almost half past nine and he was on his way out of the narrow ravine. The hillside looming up on his left was no more than a black, shapeless lump, but Jan had found his way easily.

He reached the path down below the bunker a few minutes later; he stopped and listened intently. He couldn’t hear any shouting or crying.

He crept up the slope like a cat, silent and wary. When he reached the steel door he lifted away the branches, placed his ear to the metal surface and listened again. Not a sound.

Slowly he drew back the bolts, opened the door and looked in. He heard nothing, felt nothing. It was neither hot nor cold inside the bunker.

Nor was there the smell of fear.

Jan held his breath. Nothing was moving, but in the stillness he could just make out the faint sound of someone breathing.

He tiptoed inside. Slowly and carefully he took out his mobile and switched it on so that a weak white light illuminated the bunker. Roboman was in the middle of the floor, switched on, its little lights flashing away. Jan noticed a couple of empty drinks cartons in one corner, along with open packets of sweets and crumpled sandwich wrappers.

That was good; William had eaten and drunk during the evening. And if he had needed to pee, there was the bucket Jan had placed at the far end of the room.

A little body was lying on the mattress: William. He was moving very slightly in his sleep. At some point during the evening he must have felt tired, and settled down next to the wall. He was now sleeping peacefully beneath a thick layer of blankets.

Jan crept across the room, took the bucket outside and emptied it a few metres away. Then he went back inside and lay down on his back to listen to William’s breathing.

At this particular moment Jan felt a fantastic sense of calm suffusing his body. He felt victorious, almost happy that everything had worked out so well today. William had been lured away and locked up, but no harm whatsoever had come to him.

Jan could do this, no problem. Forty-six hours would soon pass.

William’s parents were in the worst position; Jan knew they would be suffering agonies right now. Anxiety would have turned into fear, then into sheer terror. They wouldn’t sleep tonight, not for one minute.

Jan sighed and closed his eyes. All was well in the forest.

He would just lie here for a while and keep watch over William, even though he was under no obligation to do so — no adult had kept watch over Jan when he’d been locked up.

Jan takes short steps through the basement of St Patricia’s, stopping frequently, like an explorer in an unfamiliar system of caves. Slowly he gropes his way through dark rooms and corridors turning this way and that, his only support a small torch. The Angel in his right hand has not gone out yet, but the light is growing weaker all the time.

The room he came to first doesn’t appear to have any other exits, so he turns back and continues down the corridor. It bends to the right after a few metres, then right again, then left and into another big room with tiled walls and floor. Something crunches beneath his shoes: there is broken glass on the floor.

The Dell seems far away right now; a part of him longs to turn around and head back to the familiarity of the safe room. But instead he keeps on going.

The darkness around him remains silent, which is reassuring.

Jan can see four black doorways leading out of this large, tiled room. He walks over and shines his torch through them one by one, but beyond each opening there is only a dusty passageway leading to a rusty metal door. He decides to ignore three of these passageways, but there is less dust on the floor of the fourth, as if someone has walked on it fairly recently. The door also looks less rusty, so he turns the handle.

Behind it is another corridor, lined with a series of doorways. He peers into the first opening and sees a small, bare room with an old iron bed, but no mattress. When he steps inside and holds up the Angel, he can just make out faded and yellowing postcards pinned to the walls, and some illegible graffiti. It seems to be an old sick room, or a cell.

Jan remembers the Black Hole at the Unit, and quickly backs out.

He glances into each cell, but sees only more bare walls and old iron beds. His steps are getting shorter and shorter. He has never been particularly afraid of the dark, but he is beginning to feel more and more alone down here. The doorways gape at him like black mouths, ready to swallow him up. Are they really empty?

Eventually he switches the Angel’s transmitter back on. ‘I’ve gone further into the basement,’ he begins, ‘but I don’t think this area is in use any more. The lights don’t work.’

The Angel in his hand is silent, but he hopes Hanna is listening.

‘OK, I think I’m going to turn back soon...’

Then he stops; he doesn’t feel entirely comfortable with the idea of talking down here. With each word he utters, the sense that someone is listening grows stronger. Attentive ears, lurking somewhere in the darkness.

‘See you soon,’ he whispers, hoping once more that Hanna can hear him before he switches off the transmitter.

The corridor takes a sharp turn, and he edges along it. It leads to yet another large tiled room with steel benches and white plastic curtains; is this a different room, or has he been here already?

Just keep walking. One step, then two, three, four...

Jan had been a little bit scared of encountering rats when he crawled out from under the floor, but now he realizes that he is in fact the rat. He is the one who daren’t let out a squeak as he cautiously moves across the concrete floor, alert to the slightest sound.

In the big room the shadows gather around him. Fear of the dark begins to creep up on him, so he turns to the right and tries to stick close to the wall.

At first glance these rooms also look as if they have been closed up for many years, but gradually Jan begins to discover signs of more recent visits. On a wooden shelf beside some dark-glass containers, he sees a rolled-up football programme from a local match, and when he opens it up he finds it is from the previous season.

There is more graffiti on the walls, in black felt-tip pen. Just below the ceiling someone has scrawled JESUS SAVE ME IN THY BLOOD, and on another wall nearer the floor are the words I WANT A HOT WOMAN! It looks as if both sentences have been written with the same pen.

It is chilly in the underworld, yet Jan is sweating.

He pulls a cracked plastic curtain aside and discovers an old desk. He tries to open the drawers, but they are locked.

He gives up and stares thoughtfully at the ceiling. Rami is somewhere up above him. There are two wards for the women in the hospital, according to Hanna. But how is he going to get up there?

And where is Ivan Rössel? Here in the darkness he feels palpably close; Jan recalls his smile on the computer screen. But Rössel and the other violent patients must be kept behind locked doors, surely?

Suddenly Jan hears a low, rumbling sound in the distance, followed by an extended cry, like an echo.

He doesn’t know exactly which direction the sound is coming from; perhaps it is just his imagination, but it makes him stop and listen, motionless.

He hears nothing more, but eventually he turns around. It’s a combination of the noise, the darkness, the isolation down here. The hour is late, and the light from the Angel is growing weaker and weaker. He shines the beam around the big room — but which of the doorways did he actually come through? He can’t remember.

He chooses the one on the right. Beyond it there is a long corridor, and suddenly he can see light. He keeps on walking, turns a corner and finds himself in a fairly large hallway with subdued lighting. On the far side is a wide glass door with a green sign that says EXIT, and through that door there is a pale-stone flight of stairs leading upwards.

Jan believes that he has found the way up to the wards, and eagerly steps forward — then stops abruptly. There is a metal box with a black, staring lens up above the glass door.

A camera.

If he walks over to the door, the camera will pick him up. So he turns around, goes back into the big room, and chooses the opening on the left.

This corridor is only three metres long and ends in a closed steel door.

Jan is lost.

There is panic in his head and legs now, but he suppresses it, turns around and slowly makes his way back across the tiled floor. It’s fine, he will find the way if he just keeps moving and tries every door. He sweeps the dying light of the Angel across the wall and chooses a doorway at random. This time the long corridor feels both alien and familiar at the same time; he passes two more closed doors, and this time the corridor ends in an ordinary wooden door.

He lowers the Angel and opens the door, to be met by a sudden brightness. Strip-lights on a low ceiling. Warm air smelling of bleach rushes towards him, and he sees large white machines with dials and flashing lights. Huge fans and electric motors are whirring and throbbing, and there are baskets full of bedlinen and clothes, as well as a rail attached to the ceiling.

This is a laundry, Jan realizes — St Patricia’s Hospital laundry.

He is not alone. A tall, thin man in grey overalls is standing with his back to Jan only five or six metres away, folding sheets. The man has an Mp3 player attached to his belt, his earphones are on, and he hasn’t yet noticed Jan. But if he turns around...

Jan doesn’t wait for that to happen; he closes the door quickly and silently. Then he goes back down the corridor and into the tiled room, heading for the other doorways. He nearly got caught just now — and yet he feels calmer. There are people down here after all, ordinary people doing their jobs.

That is when he hears more sounds, much closer this time: someone is singing, chanting quietly. Several voices in harmony. It sounds like an old hymn, but there is too much of an echo in the tiled room to enable Jan to make out any words.

Staff or patients?

Jan doesn’t want to know who is singing like this so late at night. He moves cautiously forward, keeping close to the wall. Ready to run.

Eventually he finds the right way. He recognizes the very first corridor with the little cells, and from there he makes his way through the first tiled room and back to the safe room. He feels almost completely at ease now.

He doesn’t need to crawl under the floor this time: from this side he can open the steel door and make his way back to the Dell.

He is in the warmth and the light once more, and Jan switches off the Angel.

Jan is tired when he gets home from the Dell well after midnight — not physically, but mentally. The visit to St Psycho’s has used up all his energy.

But he sleeps peacefully for the rest of the night; he wakes at half past seven and sets off for work on his bike an hour later.

Everything looks perfectly normal in the playground. The swings are empty and there are a few plastic spades in the sandpit, waiting for the children.

But when Jan opens the door, he can see that something is wrong. Hanna and Andreas are standing in the cloakroom with some of the children — but Hanna isn’t supposed to be here, she should have gone home an hour ago.

‘Morning, Jan,’ says Andreas.

Jan smiles at his colleagues, but neither of them smiles back. He asks, ‘Everything OK?’

Andreas nods. ‘I think so... but we’re having a meeting shortly.’

‘A staff meeting,’ Hanna says.

‘What, a feelgood meeting?’

‘I don’t know... I don’t think so.’

Andreas doesn’t sound remotely curious. Jan tries to look equally unconcerned, but as he is taking off his jacket he catches Hanna’s gaze for a second. Her blue eyes are just as blank and unreadable as usual, and she quickly looks away.

On the way home after his day shift, Jan makes a decision: no more secret visits to St Psycho’s. No more trips down to the basement, or to the safe room. After the staff meeting with Marie-Louise, that’s it.

He doesn’t think he was the one who forgot to close the door; it seems more likely that it was Hanna, but it doesn’t actually matter. Hanna ought to put a stop to her nocturnal visits too.

Not ought to — she must stop.

But when he gets home and opens the door, there is something waiting for him. A large, fat envelope is lying on the hall floor — but of course it isn’t addressed to him. He is only the courier; the envelope is marked S. P.

Jan sighs and steps over the envelope. He doesn’t want to touch it, but it can’t just stay there, and eventually he picks it up. Now he is holding it in his hand, he might as well open it.

Thirty-six letters, large and small. Jan slowly shuffles through them on the kitchen table. None is addressed to Maria Blanker, but eleven of the letters are for the same person: Ivan Rössel. He seems to have plenty of pen friends.

But what do they want?

Jan ponders for a few seconds, thinking about Hanna and the open door. Then he quickly picks up one of Rössel’s letters. It’s an ordinary white envelope, with no sender’s name, and it isn’t very well sealed. He fetches a knife and slides it under the flap, which opens almost at once.

Prying. Jan doesn’t like that word, but he still inserts two fingers in the envelope and removes the contents. There are several thin sheets of paper, covered with neat writing in ink:

The letter goes on for three more pages, with lengthy declarations of love to Ivan Rössel and dreams of a life together. A photograph is attached: it shows a smiling woman with two barking dogs.

Jan folds the sheets of paper and carefully puts them back in the envelope, then he fetches a glue stick and reseals the flap. He doesn’t open any more letters.

A love letter to Ivan Rössel. Well, that’s what it sounded like anyway. Jan has read that notorious violent criminals who have ended up in prison often get fan mail — piles of letters from people they have never met. Letters from women who want to help them become better people. Do all of these letter-writers want to help Rössel?

Then he thinks about Rami, and the letter he started writing to her. But his love is different. Completely different.

The squirrel wants to get over the fence, she had written. The squirrel wants to jump off the wheel.

That was almost two weeks ago, and he hasn’t written to her since then. And he promised himself that he wouldn’t smuggle any more letters.

In spite of this he gets out a sheet of paper. If Rami is in the hospital under the name Blanker, and if he were to write a letter to her — what would he write? He doesn’t want to sound like some lovesick stranger, like Carin from Hedemora.

Jan wants to explain who he is. So he picks up his pen and begins to write:

Jan stops and looks at the words. To escape — that’s what he wants to write, isn’t it? But he doesn’t do it. He can’t write something like that unless Rami herself wants it to happen.

In the Unit she had talked about running away virtually every day. She wanted to get out of that place, she wanted to go and see her older sister, she wanted to go to Stockholm — she was only fourteen years old, but she had big plans.

Jan had no big plans at all. He just wanted to be with Rami.

True love does not die of natural causes. It is murdered by those who rule over us.

He ought to write that instead; this letter is no good. He screws it up and starts again:

‘Look!’

Rami’s cry made Jan jump. He had been sitting on the floor, calmly and quietly drumming along to her guitar chords, almost lulled into a soporific state by the rhythm, but she had suddenly stopped playing. She had got up from the bed and gone over to the desk by the window.

She was pointing at something. ‘Have you seen my guardian animal?’

Jan stopped drumming. ‘What?’

‘He’s out there on the grass.’

Jan had no idea what she was talking about, but he got up and looked out of the window. He saw a small greyish-brown creature darting around on the lawn. Every so often it stiffened and looked around, then it was off again.

‘It’s a squirrel,’ Jan said.

‘Squirrels bring luck, according to my grandmother,’ Rami said. ‘I’ve conjured him up... I can send him off to freedom.’

And almost at that same moment the squirrel dashed off towards the fence. It jumped up and gripped the wire netting with its paws, then slipped through the barbed wire before taking an insane leap towards the branch of a tree outside the grounds. It grabbed the tip of the branch, swung itself inwards towards the tree and disappeared.

‘There you go, freedom...’ She looked at Jan. ‘Those were my thoughts, escaping over the fence. Now they are free!’

Jan gazed at Rami, wondering if she was serious. She was. She wasn’t smiling, at any rate.

He suddenly realized that he had leaned forward, and was standing very close to her now. He was aware of the smell of her, a mixture of grass and pine resin. It was beginning to feel slightly embarrassing. He had to say something. ‘So your... your name is just Rami?’

‘I used to be called Alice, but Rami is fine.’ She went back over to the bed and picked up the guitar, played a couple of chords and glanced up at Jan. ‘Do you know what we ought to do?’

‘No, what?’

‘We should do a gig. We’ll practise a bit more, then we’ll play for the ghosts.’

‘What ghosts?’

‘All those who are imprisoned in here.’

Jan nodded, but he didn’t regard himself as a prisoner. For him, the fence provided protection from the rest of the world.

Suddenly Rami’s door opened and a woman with black hair and big, shiny glasses poked her head in. ‘Alice?’

Rami looked defiant. ‘What?’

‘Don’t forget our counselling session today. Three o’clock.’

Rami said nothing.

‘We’re just going to have a chat,’ the woman said. ‘I know it will make you feel better.’

The door closed.

‘The Psychobabbler,’ Rami said. ‘I hate her.’

There is one thing Jan loves at the pre-school, something he sees every day: the children’s innocent faces. Their honest eyes. Children don’t hide anything — they don’t know how. They haven’t yet learned to lie convincingly, the way adults do.

But when he arrives for a night shift, Lilian is also struggling to hide how she feels this evening. Her red hair is uncombed, her blouse is creased and her eyes are dark and tired. She feels bad.

‘Everything OK, Lilian?’ Jan asks.

‘Brilliant.’

‘Anything wrong?’

She shakes her head. ‘No. I just want to go home.’

It is more likely that she is intending to go out, possibly to Bill’s Bar. Jan thinks that she is looking more and more worn out with every passing day. Perhaps it’s the autumn. Perhaps it’s the drink. She drinks too much, he knows that. But it’s not the sort of thing people talk about.

Thanks, but I’ve got problems of my own, he thinks.

When Lilian has left he goes to join the children in the playroom. Mira and Leo, the only children who are staying overnight, are sitting there among a sea of building bricks.

Jan smiles and sits down beside them. ‘What a fantastic building!’

‘We know!’ Mira shouts.

As usual Leo looks less pleased, but at least he seems calm today.

Jan picks up a couple of bricks. ‘I’m going to build a hospital.’

Jan is awake at five, long before the children. He has managed only a few hours’ sleep, and has been troubled by unpleasant dreams; he was swimming in a lake and his legs got stuck in the mud at the bottom. He struggled and struggled, but was unable to free himself.

Marie-Louise arrives at half past seven, and he immediately tells her what has happened — or at least the little he knows.

‘Someone escaped?’

She seems horrified by the news, so Jan says, ‘Well, someone tried.’

His memory of the night’s events is already woolly.

‘I’ll find out what’s happened,’ says Marie-Louise.

Then the Dell is open and the day’s activities begin, but while the children are resting after lunch Marie-Louise calls a staff meeting.

Jan sits down at the table, ready for anything.

‘We’ve received a directive from the hospital board,’ Marie-Louise announces. ‘It has been decided that the Dell will be closed at night.’

Everyone absorbs the news in silence, Jan included. But he is surprised — he’s due to do two more night shifts later in the week.

‘So we’re only going to be operating during the day?’ Lilian asks.

‘That’s right.’ Marie-Louise doesn’t seem particularly upset by the decision as she goes on: ‘Having the children here overnight was never a permanent solution, we’ve always known that. After all, children should be living in a proper home, and now social services think they have found suitable families for both Mira and Leo. So everything will work out perfectly.’

Jan leans forward and asks, ‘When is this going to happen?’

‘Quite soon. We will be working days only from the middle of November.’ Marie-Louise seems to pick up on some hint of anxiety in his expression, because she adds, ‘But there’s nothing for you to worry about, Jan — your temporary contract won’t be affected by this. Nobody will be affected, really — we’ll just have to redo the rota and allocate more day shifts.’ She smiles reassuringly at her staff. ‘It means more companionship and less lone working.’

Jan makes an effort to look pleased, but it is only superficial. He is waiting for an answer from Rami — how is he going to get hold of it now? He is also certain that the Dell is being closed at night for security reasons. Perhaps because of last night’s attempted escape, or because Marie-Louise found the basement door open. Perhaps she no longer trusts her staff.

When the others have left the room, Jan hangs back. ‘Did they say anything about what happened last night?’

Marie-Louise gives a brief nod, as if she would prefer to think about something else. ‘Yes. It was a patient who had been sectioned; he managed to get out of the ward and made it as far as the fence. It happens from time to time. But they caught up with him there, and security has been tightened up... Stepped up a level, they said.’

‘Excellent,’ says Jan, in spite of the fact that increased security at the hospital is the day’s second piece of bad news as far as he is concerned.

Jan doesn’t recall ever having spoken to a neighbour, not in all the years he has lived in apartment blocks. He might have said hello if he met someone on the stairs, but he has never stopped to chat. To him a stairwell is not a meeting place, it is just a no-man’s-land where the only sound is the reverberating echo of doors closing.

But here in Valla there is one neighbour he has spoken to, and now he wants to see him again.

When he gets home after the evening with Hanna, he places Rami’s picture books on the kitchen table. He sleeps well that night.

He is still tired when he wakes up, but there are things he must do, and after breakfast he picks up an empty coffee cup and goes down two flights of stairs to the door that says V. LEGÉN on it, and rings the bell.

It takes almost a minute before the door opens. An aroma of pipe tobacco and alcohol reaches Jan’s nostrils as his grey-haired neighbour stares blankly at him, but he gives Legén a big smile.

‘Hello there,’ Jan says. ‘Me again, from upstairs... I’m baking another cake, and I wondered if you could possibly spare a bit more sugar?’

The neighbour seems to recognize him, but doesn’t bother to say hello. ‘Ordinary sugar?’

‘Any kind.’

Legén simply takes the cup and turns away; he doesn’t invite Jan into the dark hallway, but Jan steps inside anyway.

There is no sign of the bag from St Patricia’s that was lying on the floor last time; Jan follows Legén into the kitchen. There are plates piled high all over the place, little islands of bottles and cans on the floor, and the windows are covered in a grey film of dust and grease.

‘I work at St Patricia’s, by the way,’ he says to Legén’s back.

His neighbour doesn’t react at all; he simply carries on tipping sugar into the cup.

‘You used to work there too, didn’t you?’ Jan goes on.

There is no reply this time either, but he thinks he picks up a brief nod over by the worktop. So he tries again: ‘Did you work in the laundry?’

This time Legén definitely nods.

‘How long were you there?’

‘Twenty-eight years. And seven months.’

‘Wow. But you’ve retired now?’

‘Yes,’ Legén says. ‘Now I just make wine.’

Jan looks around. It’s true; that’s what the bottles and cans are for. The fruity, alcoholic aroma is coming from the containers, not from Legén.

‘But maybe you still remember how things looked up there... in the hospital?’ Jan says slowly.

‘Maybe.’

‘Any secret passageways?’ Jan says, smiling to show that this is a joke. Which it isn’t.

Legén stops pouring sugar and looks at Jan, who adds, ‘I’d really like to hear some of your stories, if you feel like talking.’

‘Why?’ asks Legén, picking up the cup of sugar.

‘Well, I work there... I’m just curious about the place. I’ve never been up to any of the wards.’

‘Oh?’ says Legén. ‘So where do you work, then?’

Unable to come up with a convincing lie, Jan replies, ‘At the pre-school.’

‘Pre-school? There is no pre-school.’

‘There is now. It’s for children whose parents are in St Patricia’s.’

Legén simply shakes his head in amazement; he considers Jan’s request for a moment, then hands over the cup of sugar. ‘OK... A hundred, in that case.’

‘A hundred what?’

‘A hundred kronor and I’ll tell you. You can try my wine as well.’

Jan thinks about it, then nods. ‘If you talk to me I’ll fetch the money afterwards.’

Legén sits down at the kitchen table; he doesn’t speak for a little while, but eventually he says, ‘There are no secret passageways. Or at least I’ve never seen one. But there is something else.’

He rummages among the newspapers and receipts covering the surface of the table, and finds a pencil and a torn piece of paper. He begins to draw squares and narrow rectangles.

‘What’s that?’ Jan asks.

‘The laundry.’ Legén draws an arrow. ‘You go to the drying room. There’s a big, wide door. But you don’t go through it, you use the door on the right, just here. That takes you into a storeroom’ — he draws a thick circle around one of the squares — ‘and in there, behind all the stuff, is the way up.’

‘A staircase?’

‘No. An old lift. It goes straight up to the wards... The whole place. But not many people know about it.’

Jan looks at the messy sketch. ‘But there are usually people in the laundry. And plenty of security guards.’

‘Not on Sundays,’ says Legén. ‘The laundry is empty on Sundays; you can operate the lift from inside, and go up and down as you wish.’

For the first time he meets Jan’s eye, and Jan gets the feeling that Legén is talking about himself. All of a sudden there is some kind of understanding between them. Twenty-eight years at St Psycho’s, Jan thinks. Plenty of time to learn about every square metre of the place, every door and every corridor.

And he must have met many of the patients. Seen them and thought about them.

‘Did you use the lift?’ Jan asks.

‘Now and again,’ Legén replies.

‘On Sundays?’

‘Now and again.’

‘You used to meet someone up there?’

Legén nods. He seems to be remembering those encounters. ‘A woman?’

Legén’s expression is mournful. ‘She was beautiful, really lovely... but she carried hell inside her.’

Jan doesn’t ask any more questions.

The detective inspector had bright-green eyes that stared and stared and never looked away. She was sitting at Nina’s desk in the office and seemed completely at home, as if she were now in charge of Lynx. Jan was trying to appear equally relaxed — he was just one of the members of staff being interviewed by the police.

‘Did you see anyone else out in the forest?’

‘You mean... any other adults?’

‘Children or adults,’ said the officer. ‘Anyone who wasn’t part of your group.’

Jan pretended to think back. He could have come up with a shadow among the trees, a crouching male figure spying on the boys with greedy eyes, but he knew that the police were hunting for a kidnapper now, and he didn’t want to link himself to such a figure in any way. He shook his head. ‘I didn’t see anyone... but I did hear some noises.’

‘Noises?’

Jan hadn’t heard any noises, of course, but he had to carry on now he’d started: ‘Yes... creaking branches, as if something was moving about among the fir trees. But I thought it was an animal.’

‘What kind of animal?’

‘I don’t know... A deer, maybe. Or an elk.’

‘Something large, in other words?’

‘Exactly, a large animal... But not a predator.’

The inspector narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you mean by predator?’

‘Well... there are predators in the forest. You don’t see them very often, because they’re so timid, but there are bears and lynxes and wolves... or maybe not wolves, not this far south.’ Jan knew he had started to babble; he closed his mouth and gave a slightly strained smile.

The inspector didn’t ask any more questions. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, writing something down in her notebook.

Jan stood up. ‘Will you be organizing another search party?’

‘Not just at the moment. The helicopter is going out, and there will be a number of specific targeted initiatives.’

‘I’d be happy to help,’ Jan said. ‘With... anything at all.’

‘Thank you.’

When Jan left the room he looked at the clock. It was twenty past two. Soon it would be twenty-four hours since William had entered the bunker and Jan had crept up and locked him in.

It felt like a year.

Nina and the rest of his colleagues from Lynx and Brown Bear were sitting in the staffroom. They barely spoke to one another; they were just waiting. It felt like a funeral tea. Sigrid Jansson wasn’t there — she had signed herself off sick after her interrogation by the police and gone home.

Because that was what they were doing, wasn’t it? Interrogating people? That’s what it had felt like, and Jan was exhausted after all the questions. He knew that the police had read the letter he had sent to William’s parents, and that they were searching for the boy’s kidnapper, but surely he wasn’t a suspect?

He poured himself a cup of coffee, sat down with the others and tried to relax. There was no longer any sign of the sun outside the window. It was still too early for twilight, but it was on the way.

William’s second twilight in the forest, followed by evening, followed by night.

‘How are you feeling, Jan?’ one of his colleagues asked quietly.

He looked up. ‘Not too bad.’

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘Thanks.’

Not his fault. Sometimes Jan actually thought this was true, and that William had just somehow disappeared. But then he remembered what had really happened, and he felt sick. He was tired, beaten. He wasn’t strong enough.

The nursery was unbearably quiet without the children. Silent and still. Not much happened; uniformed officers came and went in the corridor, their expressions still grim, and Jan realized that William had not been found.

He finished his coffee and looked out of the window again. The forest up above the nursery loomed like a dark shadow.

Stop this, a voice said inside his head. Do the right thing and stop this ritual now. Let him go.

Jan got to his feet. ‘I have to go.’

‘Do you want to go home?’ asked Nina.

‘I don’t know... I might take a walk up to the forest.’

He looked helplessly at Nina, but she turned and gazed sadly out of the window. She said quietly, ‘They don’t think he’s there any more.’

‘OK... But I might just wander up there anyway before I go home. I have to do something.’

Some of his colleagues gave him sympathetic smiles, but Jan didn’t smile back.

The dell looks so fragile from a distance, Jan thinks. It’s only a wooden hut after all, built to function on a trial basis for a few years before it disappears without a trace. Winter is on its way, and one severe storm sweeping in from the sea could rip off the roof, smash the walls and race through the rooms.

St Psycho’s is a different matter altogether. The grey-stone building has stood for more than a hundred years, and will doubtless stand for a hundred more.

It is Saturday, and Jan has a night shift at the pre-school. He expects to hear the happy voices of the children when he opens the door, but all is quiet. The only sound is a faint clinking from the kitchen, and as Jan is taking off his jacket Hanna appears. She is holding a knife in her hand, but it’s only an ordinary table knife; she’s in the middle of emptying the dishwasher. ‘Hi,’ she says.

‘Hi. I thought Lilian was working today?’

‘She’s ill.’

Jan looks around. ‘Where are the children?’

‘They’ve gone to visit Mira’s new foster family.’

‘Oh, right... When will they be back?’

‘Any minute now.’

Jan takes a step closer to Hanna, in spite of the fact that there is no one else in the building, and says quietly, ‘Listen, all the stuff we’ve talked about... all those secrets. You won’t mention anything to anybody else, will you?’

He feels really stupid, but Hanna merely shakes her head, her expression blank. ‘Secrets bind us together.’

‘You’re right,’ Jan nods. ‘We have a pact.’

He has no time to say any more; the door bursts open and two small bodies dressed in waterproofs come hurtling in: Mira and Leo.

Mira shouts with joy when she spots Jan, and both he and Hanna automatically move apart. Maintain the façade in front of the children.

Mira and Leo are accompanied by a man in a blue cap, a light-brown jacket and sturdy boots. He looks calm and reassuring; he smiles and shakes hands, first with Jan and then with Hanna, introducing himself as ‘Mira’s second daddy’. They both smile back at her new foster father.

‘It all went very well today,’ he says. ‘They’re great kids... This is going to be fantastic.’

‘Absolutely,’ Jan says.

Now the children are back he can’t talk to Hanna any more. She finishes at half past six, and goes home dead on time, with big hugs for Mira and Leo and a brief nod to Jan.

When he is alone with the children he makes supper and sits down at the table with them. ‘Did you have a good time today?’

Mira nods. ‘I’m going to live on a farm. They’ve got horses!’

‘Wow,’ says Jan. ‘Did you get to stroke them?’

Mira chatters on, brimming over with excitement. Jan sees the look on her face, and it makes him feel happy too.

Then he glances over at Leo. He knows that Leo is also going to live on a farm outside the town, but he can see no trace of excitement in Leo’s eyes. ‘Have you had enough to eat?’ he asks.

‘Maybe... Can we have some sweets?’ asks Mira. She knows it’s Saturday.

The children have some chocolate, read two picture books, then go to bed at quarter past eight, after the usual protests.

Jan sits down in the kitchen to wait. The underground passageway leading to St Psycho’s is calling to him, but he has no intention of going down there tonight. That can wait until tomorrow, when the laundry will be empty and security will be slightly more relaxed. Tonight he will just slip up to the visitors’ room. He has to take that risk.

At half past ten he goes up in the lift. He opens the door a fraction at first, but the room is empty and in darkness.

Nothing has changed, but when he quickly goes over to the sofa and lifts up the cushion, he finds a new envelope. It is pale blue this time, and not as fat.

When Jan is safely back in the kitchen, he opens the envelope and discovers that it contains eighteen letters, but he is really interested in only one of them. It is addressed to him, to Jan, and he rips it open immediately, like a Christmas present.

Inside there is a small piece of paper, with a short message in spidery handwriting. But Jan reads it over and over again:

A reply. A reply from Rami. It has to be. Jan puts down the piece of paper; his hand is shaking. Through the window he can see the lights of the hospital, but he suppresses the urge to go straight out into the night to search for Rami’s room.

‘Keith Moon meets Topper Headon!’ Rettig shouts. ‘That’s exactly what it sounds like when you play, Jan!’

Jan nods and plays one last roll. He has been sitting behind the drum kit for almost an hour, and the music has made him forget the letters from the hospital.

And now Rettig has paid him a compliment, which is kind; Jan isn’t sure whether to pass on the bad news about the Dell. But eventually he decides to tell him. When only he and Rettig are left in the rehearsal room, he casually says, ‘By the way, the pre-school is going to be closed at night.’

Rettig carries on packing away the instruments. ‘From when?’

‘Soon... next week. All the children have foster families now.’

‘OK, thanks for letting me know.’

‘But you realize what this means?’ says Jan.

‘What?’

‘That none of the staff will be there at night... So it looks as if we’ll have to stop playing postman.’

But Rettig shakes his head. ‘Just think about it, Jan.’

‘Think about what?’

‘About the fact that the Dell will be closed at night... What does it mean when something is closed?’

Jan gets up and puts down the drumsticks. He has been hard at it, and he has blisters on his fingers. ‘It means no one can get in,’ he says. ‘When something is closed, the doors are locked.’

‘Absolutely,’ says Rettig, ‘but you’ll still have a set of keys, won’t you?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘And the most important thing is that the place will be empty... There won’t be anybody there at night, will there?’

‘Maybe not.’

‘And if someone has a key to a place that’s closed, they can just go in and do whatever they want, can’t they?’

‘I suppose so,’ says Jan. ‘As long as they don’t have some kind of surveillance.’

‘There’s no surveillance at night. I’m in charge then, remember.’ Rettig closes his guitar case and goes on: ‘But we can take a break from the deliveries if you think it’s a good idea. We’re running a major security exercise at St Patricia’s in a couple of weeks, and things usually get a bit tense up there until everything falls into place.’

Jan is thinking about everything that has happened over the past few weeks. About the strange noises in the corridors. ‘The hospital basement,’ he says. ‘Is it completely empty at night?’

‘Why do you ask?’

Jan hesitates. He doesn’t want to give anything away. ‘Dr Högsmed mentioned something about the corridors in the basement when he was showing me around,’ he says. ‘He said it was unpleasant down there.’

‘Högsmed’s the boss, but he knows nothing,’ Rettig replies. ‘He’s hardly ever been down to the basement.’

‘But is there anyone else down there?’

Rettig nods. ‘The communal areas are down there... The patients from the open wards are allowed to spend time down there without supervision. There’s a swimming pool and a small chapel and a bowling alley — a bit of everything, really.’

Jan looks at him. ‘The open wards... so those patients aren’t dangerous?’

‘Not usually,’ Rettig replies. ‘But sometimes they get ideas, and then you have to be on your guard.’

Jan knows he has to be on his guard, all the time. But Rami feels so close now, and he wants to ask Rettig one last question: ‘And if you happened to find me down there, would you sound the alarm?’

The question doesn’t go down well with Rettig. ‘You’d never get in, Jan... And why on earth would you want to get into St Patricia’s? Do you really want to know what an asylum looks like on the inside?’

‘No, no,’ Jan says quickly. ‘I was just wondering, if I did get into the hospital, would you give me away?’

‘We’re mates.’ Rettig shakes his head. ‘You don’t grass on your mates. So I wouldn’t do anything... I’d leave you alone.’ He looks at Jan. ‘But I wouldn’t be able to help you either, if someone else found you. I’d deny the whole thing, just like in that American TV series.’

Jan can’t ask for anything more. ‘OK. I’ll just have to improvise.’

‘Everybody improvises up there at night,’ Rettig says.

‘What do you mean?’

Rettig shrugs his shoulders. ‘The days are well organized at St Patricia’s; we have good, solid routines. But the nights aren’t quite as peaceful. Anything can happen then.’ He grins at Jan and adds, ‘Especially when there’s a full moon.’

Jan doesn’t ask any more questions. He moves away from the drum kit; he didn’t perform particularly well tonight, whatever Rettig thinks. He’s not really a team player.

Jan goes to work earlier on the Sunday; he wants to get to the hospital before the sun goes down. It is shining like a big yellow ball in a dark-blue sky this afternoon. Autumn days can be so fresh and clear sometimes.

The sunshine is perfect, because after the reply from Rami, he wants to see the hospital in daylight.

I have marked out my nest, the letter had told him. Come out of the forest and see.

The forest is at the back of St Patricia’s, so Jan has to make a detour. This is not without risk — he must keep out of range of the cameras and alarm systems. But the slope leading down to the brook that runs alongside the fence is thick with undergrowth and dense fir trees, and he is able to remain hidden in the shadows.

He stops between two firs and gazes over the fence at the rows of windows. From the edge of the forest he spots something new on the stone façade: something is fluttering in the wind up there.

A white flag. It looks as if it has been made from a torn sheet or a handkerchief, and it is hanging down from one of the windows.

Now he understands what the squirrel meant when she said she had marked out her nest.

Jan counts silently, circling the window with the flag in his mind’s eye, as if the façade were a map: fourth floor, seventh window from the right. He must remember that position.

There is no sign of anyone behind the glass; the room is in darkness, but Rami has shown him exactly where she lives.

All he has to do now is get there — but the only way is through the basement.

The rattling ascent in the old hospital lift takes an hour — or at least that’s how it feels to Jan. He holds the claustrophobia at bay by keeping his eyes closed and picturing Rami; he conjures up her face and remembers her eyes beneath that blonde fringe. She was the only one he could talk to about the Gang of Four.

But the floor and the walls are shaking, and he is constantly reminded of where he is. If one of the cogs were to break and the lift were to get stuck between floors... He doesn’t want to think about that. The drumbeats reverberate inside his head.

Suddenly the lift comes to an abrupt halt. Everything falls silent.

Jan switches off the Angel’s torch and reaches out to the door in front of him. At first it won’t move. The fear sinks its claws into him immediately, but then the door slowly gives way and slides open.

It stops after about forty or fifty centimetres; there is something heavy in the way. Jan peers out. There is a faint light, but all he can see is grey metal.

Slowly he begins to manoeuvre his way out. It feels as if he has woken up inside a coffin in a big house, just like Viveca in Rami’s book.

His upper body is out now, and he can see that there is a metal cupboard in the way. The room beyond it seems to be some kind of medical storeroom, with bandages and packs of tablets on the shelves. The light is coming in through a narrow pane of glass in the door.

There isn’t a sound.

Jan tentatively lowers his feet to the floor next to the cupboard, then he stands up and looks over at the exit. Three steps and he is there, reaching out his hand.

The door opens from the inside. He pulls it three or four centimetres towards him, feels fresh air come pouring in, and listens carefully. He still can’t hear a thing.

St Psycho’s is sleeping.

Jan tugs the door further towards him. He sees a long, wide corridor with pale-yellow walls. The glow of the ceiling lights is subdued, perhaps because it is night time. There isn’t a soul in sight. He can smell disinfectant, so there must be cleaners around somewhere.

And patients.

And security guards, of course. Rettig and Carl and their friends.

Jan pulls himself together and steps out of the storeroom. The corridor extends in both directions, with rows of closed doors on both sides. The black hands on a large, round clock above the door are showing quarter to twelve.

Jan tucks a couple of the pieces of paper he has left into the lock to keep the door open. Then he moves along the vinyl floor, as quietly as possible.

Suddenly he feels like a fourteen-year-old again, back in the corridors of the Unit. There is the same silence, the same cold walls and closed doors.

A surprising sense of calm descends on him. Being here in the Corridor of the Closed Doors is almost like coming home.

He looks to the right and begins to count the unmarked doors. The seventh looks just like the rest — but to Jan’s eyes it seems to shine with a greater luminosity, and it is waiting for him just seven or eight metres away.

He moves along slowly, past all the other doors. On each one there is a steel handle, with a small metal hatch beside it.

He has almost reached his goal. Should he knock on Rami’s door, or try to open it?

Jan makes a decision: he will knock.

‘Excuse me? Who are you?’

The sound of a voice makes him jump.

He has been caught. A security guard has opened the door at the far end of the corridor, and is staring at him. But it isn’t Rettig or Carl — this is a middle-aged woman.

She takes a couple of steps towards him. ‘Where have you come from?’

Jan blinks, desperately searching for an answer. ‘From the laundry.’

‘You’re not supposed to be here,’ the woman says. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I got lost,’ Jan says.

The woman stares, but doesn’t say anything else; suddenly she turns and hurries away. To fetch help?

Jan needs to get away.

He glances at Rami’s door one last time. So close, but there is nothing he can do right now. There is nothing he can give her.

No — maybe there is one thing.

He opens the small metal hatch in the wall next to her door and peers inside. The box is empty apart from a couple of sheets of paper. A menu, and information about a forthcoming fire drill.

Quickly he unclips the Angel from his belt and slips it into the box, hiding it beneath the sheets of paper. Then he closes the hatch.

The corridor is still empty, and Jan rushes back to the storeroom. He removes the pieces of paper that were keeping the door open, but pushes one of them right into the lock to hold the catch pressed in. As he silently closes the door he hears heavy footsteps in the corridor. The guards are on their way.

The lift is just as cramped as before, but this time he clambers inside without hesitation. He presses the button on the far right, and the lift clunks into life.

Jan keeps his eyes closed all the way down.

When the lift stops he quickly opens the hatch; he is impatient and less tentative now. It is well after midnight, and he wants to get out of the hospital.

He gropes his way along, out of the laundry and through the tiled rooms. He has no Angel to help him this time, but somewhere up ahead he can see a flickering light.

And he can hear singing — is someone singing hymns down here?

He fumbles his way forward, staring down at the tiled floor. Where are the bits of paper? He can’t see them in the darkness.

The light grows stronger as he shuffles down the long corridors. Eventually he turns a corner and sees a doorway filled with light; there are candles burning in a couple of wooden sconces on the walls.

He is standing in a narrow room with a bank of wooden benches. A few grey sacks have been thrown on the floor. It’s a small chapel, and right at the front he sees an altarpiece — an old, cracked image of a woman with a gentle smile. He moves closer and is able to read the name PATRICIA painted in angular letters on the frame of the picture.

Patricia, the hospital’s patron saint.

He turns away — but the grey sacks have begun to move.

They are patients. Three men in grey tracksuits, with grey faces. One older man with heavy jowls, and two younger men with shaved heads. They are staring at Jan, their expressions blank and empty. Perhaps it’s because of the medication.

The older man points to the altar. His voice is mechanical. ‘Patricia needs peace and quiet.’

‘So do we,’ says one of the others.

‘Me too,’ Jan says quietly.

‘Do you live here?’ one of the patients asks.

‘Yes,’ Jan replies. ‘I live down here.’

The older man nods, and Jan takes a step past the three men. Slowly and carefully. Rettig has warned him. But the patients remain motionless, and Jan goes back out into the corridor.

Eventually he finds one of his scraps of paper on the floor. And then another. They show him the way, and he hurries along, following the white trail. He hears voices in the chapel behind him — the men have started singing hymns again. Jan speeds up, heading towards the end of the corridor.

Into another corridor, around several corners in this labyrinth — and at last he is back in the safe room.

He shuts the steel door behind him, then scurries along the familiar corridor, past the animal pictures and up the stairs. His adventure is over.

The last thing he does at the top of the stairs is to listen for footsteps from down below. But no one is pursuing him.

He closes the door and breathes out, but he can’t relax. He checks on the children, and has a terrible shock.

Only one head is visible in the beds. It is Leo’s. Mira’s bed is empty.

Jan is utterly panic-stricken; he can’t move. You let them down. Another child is missing. Missing, missing—

Then he hears the toilet flush in the bathroom.

Mira is almost six; she has learned how to go to the toilet on her own, without calling for an adult. She emerges from the bathroom and walks straight past him, still half asleep. She hasn’t even noticed that he wasn’t there.

‘Goodnight, Mira,’ he says behind her.

‘Mm,’ she replies, and gets back into bed.

A few minutes later she seems to have dropped off, and Jan is gradually able to wind down. He removes the other Angel from the children’s room and puts it in his locker. If things work out this will be his link to the hospital. A way of transmitting secret messages.

‘Is everyone feeling ok?’ Marie-Louise asks.

There are a few indistinct mumbles.

The response is muted. Winter is on its way. It is late autumn, a weary grey Monday morning at the Dell, with an excess of darkness and very little light.

Jan says nothing, but no one seems to notice his silence. His night shift actually finished an hour ago, but in spite of his tiredness he has stayed on to attend the morning meeting. He wants to know if his visit to the hospital has been discovered — if Dr Högsmed has sent over a report about an intruder. The security guard was quite a long way from him, she can’t possibly have seen his face all that clearly, but...

Marie-Louise doesn’t mention it. She is behaving exactly the way she always does, except that she is slightly more subdued. Perhaps it’s because of the autumn darkness outside the window.

Lilian is positively drooping. Her head is bent over her coffee cup so that the red hair covers her face; she seems to be half asleep. When Marie-Louise turns to her, Lilian doesn’t look her in the eye.

‘Lilian,’ Marie-Louise says tentatively. ‘What’s that?’

‘Sorry? What’s what?’

Lilian raises her head and Jan sees that she still has the snake on her cheek. Her weekend tattoo.

‘On your cheek... Have you painted something on your cheek?’

‘This?’ Lilian runs her fingers over her face, and seems surprised when she notices that her fingertips are slightly black. ‘Oh, sorry, that was for a party... I forgot to get rid of it. Sorry. I’m really sorry.’ She coughs loudly and suppresses a belch, and the smell of alcohol spreads across the table.

Marie-Louise frowns. ‘Lilian, could I have a word with you in private?’

Lilian closes her mouth. ‘What for?’

‘Because you are far from sober.’ Marie-Louise’s voice is no longer gentle.

Lilian looks at her for a few seconds, then she gets up and leaves the table, her lips tightly pressed together. She walks out of the room after pausing to address the others: ‘I am not drunk,’ she mutters. ‘I am hung-over.’

Marie-Louise follows her. ‘Back in a moment.’

Both women seem to have repaired to the cloakroom; that’s where their voices are now coming from. The conversation begins as a quiet discussion, but the volume rapidly increases. Marie-Louise’s voice remains controlled, but Lilian responds with loud questions.

‘Can’t a person go out and relax after work? Wind down a little bit? Or are we all supposed to dedicate our lives to the kids, just like you’ve done?’

‘Calm down please, Lilian — the children can hear you...’

‘I am fucking calm!’

Around the table you could hear a pin drop. Hanna and Andreas keep their eyes lowered, and Jan can’t think of anything to say.

The tirade continues: ‘You’re sick, that’s your problem! You need to get some help!’

Is that Lilian or Marie-Louise? Jan can’t tell; the voice that is yelling is too shrill.

‘And you’re so fucking perfect! I just can’t do it any more, I can’t be like you... The nut jobs can look after their own fucking kids!’

That must be Lilian, Jan realizes.

Marie-Louise’s response is cold and curt: ‘Lilian, you’re hysterical.’

Hysteria is no longer an acceptable term, Jan hears Dr Högsmed saying inside his head.

The quarrel is making Andreas look ill; he shudders and gets to his feet. ‘I’ll go and see to the children.’

He goes into the playroom and soon Jan hears jolly nursery rhymes from the CD player, drowning out the loud voices from the cloakroom.

But like most arguments, this one soon comes to an end. After a few moments the front door slams shut; there is a brief silence, then Marie-Louise is back, smiling once more.

‘Lilian has gone home for the day,’ she says. ‘She’s going to have a little rest.’

Jan nods without speaking, but Hanna asks softly, ‘Is she getting any help?’

Marie-Louise stops smiling. ‘Help?’

‘To cut down on her drinking,’ Hanna says calmly.

Jan can feel the tension in the air.

Marie-Louise folds her arms. ‘Lilian is not a child. She is responsible for her own actions.’

‘But the employer also has a certain level of responsibility,’ Hanna insists. She sounds as if she is quoting from some legal document when she goes on: ‘If an employee is drinking too much there should be a treatment plan for their rehabilitation.’

‘For their rehabilitation,’ Marie-Louise repeats. ‘Well, doesn’t that sound marvellous?’

Hanna doesn’t look amused. ‘Is there a rehabilitation plan for Lilian?’

Marie-Louise stares at her. ‘There are many eyes on us here, Hanna,’ she says eventually. ‘Just bear that in mind.’

Then she turns and walks out of the staffroom.

There are only the two of them left at the table now. Hanna rolls her eyes at Jan, but he shakes his head.

‘Now she’ll think you’re a troublemaker,’ he says quietly.

Hanna sighs. ‘I care about Lilian. Don’t you?’

‘Well yes... obviously.’

‘So why does she drink so much? Have you given it any thought?’

Jan hasn’t given it any thought. ‘To get drunk,’ he says eventually.

‘But why does she want to get drunk?’

Jan shrugs. ‘I suppose she’s unhappy. But there’s unhappiness everywhere, isn’t there?’

‘You don’t know anything... you just don’t understand,’ Hanna says, getting to her feet.

Jan stands up too. It feels good to leave the table, and equally good to think that he can soon go home. This has not been a pleasant Monday morning; the feelgood meeting was more about feeling bad.

He just wants to go home and get some sleep. He wants to be normal. He wants to look to the future, make a life for himself.

Never to be shut in again, he thinks.

He has no one to make a life with. Perhaps that is the worst thing of all. Not having someone to listen.

Rami had climbed off her bed and sat down on the floor next to Jan. In the end his story about the Gang of Four had captured her attention.

‘Had they locked you in the sauna?’

‘Not locked... there was no lock,’ he said. ‘But they’d jammed something up against the door. I didn’t know what it was, but it wouldn’t move. It was rock-solid.’

‘So you were trapped in the heat,’ Rami said.

He nodded.

‘How did you get out, then?’

‘I didn’t,’ Jan said. ‘It was Friday... Everyone had gone home.’

Legén is drinking yellowish wine out of a cracked coffee mug. He pours a generous mug for Jan too; they are sitting among the mess at Legén’s kitchen table. ‘There you go.’

‘Thanks.’

Jan is thirsty, but not for lukewarm yellow wine. He takes the mug containing the liquid and wonders how he is going to empty it without his neighbour noticing.

Legén’s apartment is filthy and chaotic, but Jan actually enjoys these quiet sessions. He rang his neighbour’s doorbell after work because he wanted someone to talk to. But to what extent does he trust Legén? How much is he actually prepared to tell him?

‘I think there’s snow on the way,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ says Legén. ‘This is the time for chopping wood. We used to have a shed when I was little, but we kept all kinds of stuff in it, so there wasn’t any room for the wood. But you could sit inside the shed and have a bit of peace and quiet...’

The wine is making his neighbour quite talkative.

But eventually he runs out of steam, and Jan ventures, ‘I went down to the hospital cellar and had a look around on Sunday... I saw some of the patients.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ says Legén. ‘There’s always been a fair amount of activity down there.’ He takes a deep swig of his wine. ‘But I was never worried. We just got on with things in the laundry, for almost thirty years. The dirty laundry came down and we sent it back up... We found all kinds of things. Wallets, bottles of pills, all sorts.’

‘There’s a chapel in the basement,’ Jan says. ‘Did you know that?’

‘Yes, but we never went in there,’ Legén replies. ‘They kind of please themselves when the bosses have gone home.’

‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for the patients?’ Lilian says, laughing over her beer. ‘They do a pretty good job of that all on their own, the lot of them. They sit up there behind the wall feeling sorry for themselves, insisting that they’re innocent.’

‘Do they?’ Jan asks.

‘Of course. Every paedophile and murderer is entirely innocent, you must know that... No one behind bars ever accepts responsibility for anything.’

Jan doesn’t agree, but he says nothing.

Jan stays up reading crime reports on the internet until half past two in the morning in order to find out more. He discovers that John Daniel Nilsson was nineteen years old when he disappeared from the school dance on the outskirts of Gothenburg. One of his friends had smuggled in some vodka, and John Daniel had got drunk and been sick. He had gone outside alone at about eleven thirty, either to try and sober up or to go home — no one knew for certain — and he hadn’t been seen since. The family had searched for him, along with the police and lots of volunteers, but John Daniel had vanished without a trace.

It remained an unsolved mystery. Rössel was a suspect, but had stayed silent. Until now, when, according to Hanna, he had begun to hint that he had been the last person to see the boy alive.

Jan goes on reading until his eyes begin to smart, and he starts to see William Halevi’s boyish face in front of him, instead of the missing nineteen-year-old. He shuts down the computer and goes to bed.

The first snowflakes of winter are big and wet, and start falling on the Dell after lunch on Thursday. They land heavily on the ground around the pre-school, covering the sandpit and the swings like a dirty-grey fluffy blanket.

Jan watches the falling snow through the window, but with none of the excitement he used to feel when he was little. These days the winter weather just means even more layers of clothes on the children: vests, woolly socks, snowsuits and hats with ear flaps — it takes longer and longer to get them outside. They end up looking like little barrels, or little fabric robots lumbering across the playground.

He helps them get ready and goes out. Andreas and Marie-Louise are still working as a team, joking and laughing behind him. Hanna and Lilian are already outside, and have stopped for a cigarette break. They are not laughing; they are whispering, their heads close together.

Marie-Louise and Andreas. Hanna and Lilian.

Jan feels excluded from both pairings, so he turns his attention to the children as usual.

‘Look at me!’ they shout. ‘Look at me!’

The children want to show how clever they are, playing on the swings and jumping around and building fragile sandcastles in the middle of the sandy, snowy slush. Jan helps them, but glances over at Lilian and Hanna from time to time, wishing he could hear what they are talking about.

When Marie-Louise comes outside the conversation stops, cigarettes are stubbed out and Lilian and Hanna help to gather the children together. But Jan sees them exchanging looks as they go back inside, like conspirators.

Marie-Louise doesn’t appear to notice anything; she stands on the steps with Jan, smiling at the children as they stomp back indoors. ‘They’re so good,’ she says.

Then she looks over at the wall surrounding the hospital and stops smiling. ‘Were you ever afraid when you were little, Jan?’

He shakes his head. Not when he was little. He was never afraid, not even of the atomic bomb, until he met the Gang of Four. ‘What about you?’ he asks.

Marie-Louise also shakes her head. ‘I lived in a small town when I was little, and nobody bothered to lock their doors,’ she says. ‘There were no burglars or muggers in those days... no dangerous criminals at all. Well, nobody talked about them, anyway. But there was an asylum in the middle of the town, and the mad people were allowed out sometimes... They wore strange clothes, so you could always tell where they came from. They looked nice, and I thought it was fun to say hello to them on the bus; they were always so pleased to have someone to talk to. Everyone else used to sit there, stiff as pokers, staring straight in front of them when some confused old soul got on, but I thought they were nice.’ She looks at Jan and adds, ‘So I used to say hello, and the old men would cheerfully say hello back.’

‘That’s nice,’ Jan says.

Marie-Louise gazes over at the high wall again, and almost seems to be talking to herself. ‘But such terrible things happen these days... There are such dangerous people in the world.’

‘Or we’re just more frightened,’ Jan says.

But Marie-Louise gives no indication that she has heard him.

Jan rings the doorbell and waits. He listens. He can hear the sound of voices inside Lilian’s house, but it could well be the murmur of a television.

It is Lilian’s older brother who opens the door. Jan doesn’t know his name. The man greets him with a nod and calls over his shoulder, ‘Minty?’

The television is turned down. Lilian’s voice says something incomprehensible, and her brother continues: ‘Your little friend is here.’

He turns and leaves the house without looking at Jan again.

Crazed attack by mountain lake.

Jan is sitting in his apartment reading the headline in an old newspaper cutting; he reads it over and over again.

Crazed attack. He thinks about the term. An attack carried out by a crazy person. Someone else. Not the person who writes the words, and not the person who’s reading them.

Someone else. But who?

It’s Friday evening and he’s back from work. There is exactly one week to go until the fire drill, and Lilian is still determined to go ahead with her plan to take Ivan Rössel to task in the visitors’ room. She and Hanna have started whispering to Jan as well now, not only to each other. Now he knows what is going on, they obviously want to be sure he is with them.

Jan has only promised not to tell on them, nothing else.

As he was cycling past the hospital on his way home, he saw Dr Högsmed striding along by the wall. The doctor recognized him and raised his hand; Jan waved back with a smile, and watched him disappear through the steel door. Perhaps he was going up to his office to try out the hat test on someone.

Högsmed is probably a good psychiatrist, Jan thinks, but he has no idea what goes on in the hospital at night. He doesn’t know about the secret route from the pre-school, or the secret letters and the meetings in the visitors’ room. Högsmed thinks that everything at St Patricia’s is ticking along nicely, just the way he and the board have planned it.

But Jan believes the desire to kick against routine is part of human nature; both children and adults are constantly tempted to bend the rules.

A week to go. Time cannot be stopped.

Jan feels stressed by the ticking clock, just like when he was at Lynx.

He takes out the old diary again — the one Rami gave him in the storeroom at the Unit. He looks at the picture on the front, the Polaroid Rami took the very first time they met. He is surprised at how young and healthy he looks, bearing in mind how close to death he had been the day before the picture was taken. First almost completely dehydrated in the sauna, then drugged with sleeping tablets, bleeding from wounds inflicted with a razor, and almost drowned in a pond. And yet he is staring straight into the camera, with his head up.

The diary contains not only his own memories and thoughts. There are also some folded newspaper cuttings, and perhaps they are the reason why he has kept the diary. He has taken them out and read them from time to time, late at night.

The first is an entire page, with a big black and white picture of a rock jutting out several metres above the shining surface of a lake, with that headline, CRAZED ATTACK BY MOUNTAIN LAKE, followed by a subheading: Two boys killed on camping trip.

Jan has read the article time and time again over the past fifteen years or more, and he practically knows it by heart at this stage.

The article continues for two more columns, with comments from a detective inspector and a certain amount of speculation.

There is another cutting from the following day:

It seems likely that a hit and run driver is responsible for the condition of a 16-year-old boy who was found in a shallow ditch outside Nordbro early on Wednesday morning. The boy was unconscious and was suffering from head injuries, multiple lacerations and several broken bones. He was taken to the emergency department at the Western Hospital, but has yet to regain consciousness.

The police are not ruling out a connection between this tragic event and the double murder of two teenage boys near a mountain lake just a few kilometres away.

‘Evidently these three boys were on an overnight camping trip together when someone attacked them with a knife,’ says Inspector Hans Torstensson.

He was not prepared to comment or speculate on the suggestion that the same person might have murdered the two boys, then deliberately driven into the third boy as he tried to flee from the scene of the crime along the main road.

‘The investigation will continue until all the outstanding issues are resolved.’

Black clouds have gathered in the night sky, hovering above the hospital and releasing a fine drizzle over the forest. Jan wipes the ice-cold drops of water from his forehead, crouches down in the undergrowth and tries to find some shelter under a birch tree.

He takes out the Angel. The hospital looms up in front of him; Jan has a friend in there, so the rain and cold don’t matter at all.

‘Are you there, squirrel?’ he whispers into the microphone, his gaze fixed on the forbidding façade. Fourth floor, seventh from the right.

The light goes off, then comes back on again.

A clear signal — Rami is back in her room.

Jan slowly exhales, and asks, ‘Do you still want to get out?’

The light flashes off and on. Yes.

‘As soon as possible?’

Yes.

Both responses are instant, with no hesitation. The woman who is answering him is definitely not drugged or confused.

‘I want to see you too, I want to hear what happened after you left the Unit. I waited for an answer from you, but it never came... I just know you fulfilled your part of the pact. You stopped the Gang of Four.’ Jan pauses for a moment, gathers his thoughts, then goes on: ‘But how did you do it? You told me you knew people who could take care of them, and I’ve wondered all these years... Who was it?’

The Secret Avenger, he thinks. But who was the Secret Avenger?

There is no answer, of course. The light stays on.

‘I didn’t feel sorry for Niklas, Peter and Christer. I just couldn’t. And now there’s only one member of the Gang of Four left. His name is Torgny, Torgny Fridman. I told you about him fifteen years ago. He owns an ironmonger’s shop back in Nordbro, where I grew up. And he’s got a wife and a child and a successful life... but I find it difficult to forget what he did.’

The light in the window doesn’t go off, but he believes that Rami is listening.

‘There’s something else I need to tell you... I qualified as a classroom assistant ten years ago. And in one of my first temporary posts I was looking after a little boy called William... When I saw William’s mother, I recognized her. She was the Psychobabbler from the Unit, your psychologist. You remember her, don’t you? You asked me to do something to her. To punish her.’

Silence. Jan has reached the heart of his confession. He had meant to sound triumphant, but his voice lacks strength, as if he were apologizing. ‘So... so one day when we were in the forest, I lured William away from the rest of the group and locked him up in an old bunker. He was fine in there, as far as possible, anyway. It was much worse for his parents... for the Psychobabbler. She was worried for a long time.’

The confession is over, but Jan has one thing left to say: ‘Your escape route, Rami. Listen carefully.’ He keeps his eyes fixed on the window, and goes on: ‘During the fire drill next Friday evening, all the patients will be let out of their rooms. I presume you already know about it?’

The light flashes.

‘You need to move away from the others. There’s a storeroom on your floor, not far from your room. The door won’t be locked — I’ve jammed the catch with a bit of paper. And inside the storeroom, behind a cupboard, there’s an old laundry lift. It goes straight down to the basement.’

The light flashes. Rami understands.

‘I’ll be waiting for you down there,’ Jan says. ‘Then we can make our way out together.’

Can he really make that promise? He doesn’t want to think about the things that could go wrong; he is just waiting for an answer.

And it comes: the light flashes one last time.

‘Good... See you soon, Rami.’

Jan switches off the Angel. He is glad to leave the forest; it is a lonely place. But soon he won’t be lonely any more.

Waiting in the darkness, fifteen years after their flight from the Unit.

Jan is alone, but not for much longer. He is standing down in the hospital basement, waiting for Rami. He has made his way in via the laundry, and is by the old lift in the little storeroom.

It is twenty past ten on Friday night, and Jan is really supposed to be up in the Dell. That is where Lilian thinks he is, but he has left his post and entered the hospital through the safe room. He knows his way around down here now, and the laundry was completely deserted when he arrived, just as Legén had said it would be. The only unusual sign was a series of small yellow lights flashing on a panel on the wall; perhaps they were something to do with the impending fire drill.

Jan listens for the sound of shuffling steps behind him, or voices raised in song from the chapel. But all is silent in the underworld.

He is the only one here — and soon Rami will be here too. At least he hopes so, and if he closes his eyes he can hear her singing: Me and Jan, Jan and me, every night, every day...

He blinks and gives himself a shake; he must remain alert.

Jan is driving a murderer through the night. A murderer who is holding a razor to his throat. But a murderer who somehow cares about him, Jan realizes: Rössel reached out and turned up the heat, then asked, ‘Too hot?’

‘No.’

The gentle hum of the heater is quite soporific. Out on the streets it is bitterly cold, but inside the car it’s as warm as a summer’s day. The razor blade is still in place.

‘Turn right here,’ Rössel says.

Jan turns right. His eyes are still smarting, but his vision is gradually improving.

There are few cars out and about; the only vehicles they meet are a couple of taxis.

‘Straight on,’ Rössel instructs. Jan drives straight on.

They head away from the centre and through the middle of a deserted industrial estate. Jan doesn’t attempt to think, he just drives, and eventually they are on the motorway that leads to Gothenburg. That too is almost deserted.

‘Put your foot down.’

A lorry thunders past on its way out of town, and the lights of farmhouses are visible among the trees on both sides of the road, but these are the only signs of human life tonight. It is Friday, and people are at home. There is no police surveillance on the motorway.

‘We’re out of town now,’ Rössel says. ‘Out in the country.’

Jan doesn’t say anything. He maintains a steady speed, but after ten minutes Rössel leans forward with a new order: ‘Pull in over there.’

Jan sees the entrance to a lay-by and picnic area, illuminated by a couple of lights but with no sign of any other cars. He pulls in and brakes immediately; he wants to keep the car close to the lights, and Rössel doesn’t object.

‘Switch off the engine.’

Jan obeys, and there is silence inside the car. Total silence.

Rössel lets out a heavy sigh, then says, ‘The smell has gone now... The hospital smell.’

But Jan is still aware of the acrid stench of tear gas and lighter fluid from Rössel’s clothes, and asks quietly, ‘What happened back there?’

Rössel takes a deep breath. ‘There was a real fire,’ he says. ‘I’d managed to smuggle some thinner out of the paint shop, and a lighter. I poured the lot on the floor in the corridor and set fire to it.’

The razor moves away a fraction when Rössel is speaking, so Jan asks another question: ‘Then what?’

‘Chaos, of course. It wasn’t a drill any more. It’s always chaos when their plans don’t work. But I kept calm and went to the storeroom. It wasn’t locked, so all I had to do was walk in. But I had to change my plans at the last minute.’ He sighs again. ‘Someone tried to stop me.’

‘His name is Carl.’

‘I know that. But he doesn’t need a name now.’

Jan keeps quiet. It occurs to him that Rössel hasn’t used his name either. Not once.

Rössel shuffles in his seat. ‘There is no smell, not any more. It’s the loneliness that smells in a hospital... Long corridors of loneliness, like in a monastery.’ He leans forward. ‘And you, my friend? Are you lonely too?’

Jan looks out at the empty lay-by. He resists the impulse to move his head — the razor is too close to his throat again. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Only sometimes?’

Jan could say anything, but he tells the truth: ‘No... often.’

Rössel seems satisfied with the answer. ‘I thought so... You smell of loneliness.’

Jan turns his head slowly. No sudden movements.

‘I was waiting for someone else tonight,’ he says. ‘Her name is Rami. Alice Rami.’

‘There is no Rami in the hospital.’

‘She calls herself Blanker in there... Maria Blanker, on the fourth floor.’

Rössel sounds irritated. ‘You know nothing,’ he says. ‘Maria Blanker is not Rami. She’s her sister. And Blanker’s room is on the third floor.’

‘Rami’s sister?’

‘I know everything,’ says Rössel. He sounds very certain, sitting behind Jan. ‘I listen, I read letters, I put the pieces of the puzzle together... I know everything about everybody.’

‘I wrote letters to Maria Blanker. And she replied.’

‘Who knows where letters end up? You wrote letters, but it was me you were writing to. I gave Carl some money, he let me read the letters, and I read and read... Your letter was different, I was curious. So I wrote back and told you my room was on the fourth floor. You left that little machine in my letter box, and you called out to your squirrel. I replied with the light... Off, on, off, on. You remember?’

Jan remembers. Rössel’s words are beginning to sink in.

No Rami. Only Rössel, all along.

What did he put in the letters? What did he tell him via the Angel?

Everything. Jan thought he was talking to Rami, so he talked about everything. He had so much to tell her.

‘So it’s all over now,’ he says.

He is empty and exhausted. But he doesn’t move; he can still feel the razor against his skin just below his right ear.

‘It isn’t over at all,’ Rössel says. ‘It just goes on and on.’

Suddenly he lowers his arm. The razor disappears and Jan hears Rössel let out a long breath, then say quietly, as if he is talking to himself, ‘That feeling just now, an open road in the darkness... The feeling of freedom. I’ve had walls and fences around me for five years. And now I’ve left it all behind.’

Jan turns his head a fraction. ‘And all those people who wrote you letters... have you left them too?’

‘Of course.’

‘Including Hanna Aronsson?’

‘Ah yes, Hanna.’ Rössel sounds smug. ‘She’s not here, is she? She’s somewhere else tonight.’

Jan understands. Rössel has fooled everyone.

He’s a psychopath. He lacks the capacity to feel guilt, Lilian had said. The only thing he wants is attention.

Jan tries to imagine Rössel as a teacher. With such a soft voice, he must have inspired confidence in the classroom. And not only there; many people he encountered in the street, on his camping holidays, out in the country, must have thought he was trustworthy. Totally harmless.

Hi, my name’s Ivan; I’m a teacher making the most of the summer holidays... Listen, I don’t suppose you could help me carry this table into my caravan? It’s that one just over there, on its own. Yes, a coffee table, it would be brilliant if we could get it inside... I know it’s late, my friend, but perhaps you’ve got time for a cup of coffee afterwards? Or something stronger? I’ve got beer or wine... Of course, you go in first. Careful, it’s dark in here, you can hardly see a thing. That’s it, go straight in...

Jan shivers, in spite of the heat inside the car.

He hears Rössel moving behind him, then his voice very close to Jan’s ear: ‘We’ll be on the move again soon, driving down the open road... We’re going on a trip together, you and I.’

Jan has only one thought in his mind, and in the end he has to come out with it: ‘We ought to go back to the hospital.’

‘Why?’

‘Because... because the people up there will be worried if they know you’re out.’

Rössel lets out a cough, or perhaps a chuckle. ‘They’ve got other things to think about right now.’ He pauses, then goes on: ‘But this is what I’m talking about, the freedom of the open road. I want to do things out here. Write books, confess my sins... You know I promised to show everyone where a missing boy is hidden? That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Jan says. ‘That would be a good thing.’

‘Or... or we could do other things. Things nobody wants to talk about. The things you think about all the time.’

Jan’s mouth is dry; he listens to the soft voice and feels Rössel’s words crawl inside him. But he turns his head and faces the back seat. ‘You don’t know me.’

‘Yes, I do. I know you. You told me everything. And that’s good. It’s nice not to have any secrets.’

‘I haven’t—’

But Rössel interrupts him: ‘So now you have to choose.’

‘Choose what?’

‘Well, you want to do things, don’t you?’

‘What things?’

‘There are fantasies you want to be a part of,’ says Rössel, pointing to the Angel on the front seat. ‘I heard your dreams... Someone hurt you deeply when you were young, and you have dreamed of revenge ever since.’

Jan gazes at the empty road, with Rössel’s voice in his ear: ‘If you could choose between good and evil... between saving a family and taking revenge for the hurt that was inflicted on you, which would you choose?’

Jan says nothing. The car feels very cold now, and the darkness comes crowding in.

‘It is opportunity that creates an avenger,’ Rössel goes on. ‘But before the opportunity comes along, the fantasies must exist... fantasies like yours.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. You dream of locking someone up. A boy.’

Jan quickly shakes his head, but doesn’t speak.

The darkness is complete, and the road and the night are calling.

‘Not a boy,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ Rössel says. ‘The fantasy runs through your mind like a film, doesn’t it? We all have our favourite fantasies.’

Jan nods; he knows.

‘Fantasies are like a drug,’ Rössel’s soft voice continues. ‘Fantasies are a drug. The more we fantasize, the stronger they grow. We want to hurt someone. Carry out an evil ritual. You can never escape from those thoughts. Not until you do something about them.’ He leans forward again. ‘Which would you choose?’ he asks. ‘Would you choose to do good or evil?’

Choose?

Jan lowers his gaze. ‘I can’t choose.’

‘But you must,’ Rössel says. ‘Atonement or revenge? Look out at the road; soon we will come to a fork. You have to choose now.’

Jan blinks.

He looks out at the dark road. He closes his eyes.

Choose now, he thinks.

Jan hardly needs to press down on the accelerator or move the steering wheel — the Volvo obeys him anyway. It glides along on the crown of a black highway. Away from St Psycho’s. Heading east along the open road.

He and the Secret Avenger sail past Swedish towns and villages that sound a bit like a nursery rhyme: Vara, Skara, Hova, Kumla and Arboga. The coniferous forest grows denser on either side of the road.

During the journey Jan tells the Secret Avenger about the revenge he wreaked on the Gang of Four. He thinks he knows what happened now.

Jan is driving the car, looking out at the motorway through the windscreen. He has fantasized about one route through the night, but he has made a different choice. He will not go back to Nordbro with Rössel, he will not go and see Torgny, he will not take away his son.

It was a fantasy that he allowed to play out to its conclusion, but all desire for revenge has left him now. He knows that every violent fantasy ends in the same way when it becomes reality: with fear and regret and loneliness.

He and Rössel have been travelling along the motorway for almost an hour, and they have reached the suburbs of Gothenburg. Rössel has directed him here, and when Jan chose the route the razor was removed from his throat.

‘I knew you would make this choice,’ Rössel says. He is still sitting in the back seat like a king; then he leans forward. ‘We’re on the right road. We’re going out into the forest... we’re going to find a grave there. That’s what I promised.’

‘Yes,’ Jan says. ‘But what about afterwards? Are you going back to the hospital?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I mean, there are psychologists at St Patricia’s, aren’t there? They can help you.’

Rössel bursts out laughing. ‘Psychologists,’ he says, sounding as if he is talking about vermin. ‘Psychologists want answers they can’t have. They ask about my childhood, whether there’s a history of mental illness in the family... They want to find a good reason why I used to travel around with my caravan in the summer picking up teenagers, but there are no reasons. The world is incomprehensible... So do you know why I did it?’

‘No,’ says Jan. ‘And I don’t want to...’

‘I took them because I was evil, of course,’ Rössel goes on. ‘Because I am the son of Satan, and I want to be the master of life and death... Or maybe it was just because the ones I chose were defenceless and drunk, while I was strong and sober. Or then again, maybe I’m innocent, who knows? Only time will tell.’

Jan wants to stop this, and looks in the rear-view mirror. ‘Were you ever in the forests around Nordbro?’ he asks. ‘Did you ever camp up there?’

‘Nordbro? No, I never went that far north.’

Jan wonders if Rössel is lying. Probably not. Perhaps the truth lies in the simple answer that came from Jan’s subconscious, put into words by a fantasy figure; perhaps one member of the Gang of Four killed two of the others.

The world is incomprehensible, and dark. So Jan keeps on driving, his hands gripping the wheel. But the petrol gauge is dipping into the red zone — he didn’t think of this before they set off. He sees a Statoil sign beside the motorway, and points to it. ‘We need petrol.’

There is no reply from the back seat. When he looks in the mirror he sees that Rössel is leaning back with his eyes closed; the razor is beside him, and he has one hand on the tear-gas canister.

Jan turns off for the service station, slowly pulls in between two HGVs and stops by a pump under the stark neon light.

He takes his credit card from his wallet and steps out into the cold. As he moves away from the car he feels the plastic loops pressing against his stomach. The restraints he took from Carl and hid under his jumper — they’re still there. Would he use them on Rössel if he got the chance?

And if a patrol car slid into the petrol station now, would Jan alert the police? If he did, Rössel would be taken into custody and Jan would be free.

But Lilian’s brother would never be found.

And that is why they are here.

Jan unhooks the nozzle and tries to think, glancing into the car every few seconds. Rössel’s head and face are hidden by the roof of the car, but he can see the body in its grey trousers on the back seat. It is completely motionless. Has Rössel really fallen asleep?

He carries on filling up the car and looks around. The ranks of shiny petrol pumps are standing to attention in the neon light, and a short distance away a lorry is moving off with a muted hissing sound.

The pump clicks. The tank is full, and Jan replaces the nozzle.

Another quick glance into the car — but the back seat is empty.

Rössel is gone, along with the razor and the tear gas.

Jan looks around. The parking area is deserted. There isn’t a soul in sight, but there are plenty of HGVs ten or twelve metres away, parked so close together that they form a labyrinth on the tarmac.

Has Rössel sneaked in between them?

Jan leaves the car and moves cautiously towards the trucks. He crouches down and tries to look underneath them, but he can’t see any grey trousers moving on the other side.

He has a bad feeling in his stomach as he slowly walks back to the car.

‘Here I am,’ a voice says behind him.

Jan stops dead and turns around.

‘Did you think I’d done a runner?’

Jan shakes his head. He and Rössel understand one another. They are going to the grave now, and neither of them is about to pull out. Whatever happens afterwards.

‘Where were you?’

Rössel is holding a couple of spades with sharp edges under one arm, and something shiny in his other hand. A bottle. ‘I was doing a bit of shopping,’ he says. ‘I bought the spades, then I went over to the trucks. They’ve come from all over Europe... and sometimes the drivers are carrying booze. So I bought a bottle.’

He holds it up, and Jan sees that it is vodka.

‘And what did you use for money?’

‘I used yours.’ Rössel is offering Jan a small object — his own wallet. ‘You left this in the car.’

Jan takes the wallet. ‘I don’t need alcohol.’

Rössel opens the bottle and takes a swig. He isn’t smiling. ‘Yes, you do. Tonight we need both spades and spirits.’

Fifteen seconds later Jan is lying slumped on the ground.

Rössel has knocked him down, and it happened very quickly. One whirling blow with the spade in the darkness as Jan was staring at Hanna Aronsson, trying to understand why she was here. And who is the boy?

Rössel stepped forward and aimed at Jan’s right leg. The steel spade hit him just below the knee, the leg gave way and Jan went down in a flash of pain and nausea.

He loses consciousness.

Seconds pass, perhaps minutes.

‘Did everything go OK up there?’ He can hear Rössel’s voice.

And Hanna’s reply: ‘Yes, but I had to wait a while until he was outside on his own.’

‘Good,’ Rössel says.

The voices and the cold slowly bring Jan round, and when he looks up he can see a faint light. The Angel is lying in front of him, switched on, and in its glow he can just make out Rössel and Hanna like two shadows, a few metres away.

‘And he didn’t see you?’ Rössel asks.

‘No. Nobody saw me.’

Rössel has lowered the spade; he seems to be relaxing. He takes three steps towards Hanna and kisses her on the cheek, touches her blonde hair. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for so long,’ he says.

But his movements look stiff. His hands are unused to intimacy.

Jan has also recognized the boy: it is Leo. Leo Lundberg. Five years old, missing and the focus of a police search — Jan remembers Marie-Louise’s call, telling him that the boy had disappeared from his foster parents’ garden.

The blindfold covering Leo’s eyes is wide and black. He is breathing, but doesn’t appear to be awake; his body is heavy and inert in Hanna’s arms.

Jan watches as Rössel takes Leo and lays him down next to the hollow by the pine tree. ‘This is where he will lie,’ Rössel says. ‘Down here.’

It is like watching a shadow play. Jan feels dazed and somehow distant, but the pain in his leg is beginning to ease. He tries to sit up.

Rössel notices and turns to him. ‘Don’t move.’

Jan slowly shakes his head and sits up anyway. He tries to get Hanna to meet his gaze. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks. ‘Why have you brought Leo here?’

‘We didn’t bring him,’ Rössel says. ‘You did.’

Jan stares at him. ‘Me?’

‘This is the scene of the crime, this is where it all ends,’ Rössel says. ‘You even drew a map... A map with a confession, admitting what you’d done. It’s in the car, waiting for the police.’

Jan listens and looks at Hanna again, still trying to make eye contact. ‘What are you doing here, Hanna?’

But she merely glances at him, then looks away; in the light of the Angel her expression is blank, her eyes empty. ‘Sorry,’ she says, lowering her gaze. ‘But you were a perfect fit... You can save Ivan if you take the blame for the crimes he’s suspected of.’

‘I’m not taking the blame.’

‘Yes, you are. You’ve abducted boys in the past.’

Jan understands. Hanna has chosen him; he is a murderer who will be found dead next to an old victim and a new victim, while she and her Ivan disappear into the night. Rössel can be back at the hospital in an hour, and with a bit of luck no one will have noticed that he’s been gone.

Folie à deux. Shared psychosis. Or love over the wall. Jan recalls Dr Högsmed’s warning about getting too close to a psychopath, and looks at Hanna. ‘You got lost in the forest,’ he says.

She shakes her head. ‘I know what I’m doing. I’m here to set Ivan free... and you would do exactly the same for your Rami.’

Jan doesn’t answer.

Leo, he thinks. How is he going to save Leo?

‘Do it now, Hanna,’ Rössel says, offering her the spade. ‘Show me how strong you are.’

Hanna looks at the spade for a long time, then she closes her eyes. She doesn’t move. ‘I can’t,’ she says quietly.

‘It’s only a body.’ Rössel is still holding out the spade. ‘It can’t feel anything.’

‘I can’t do it.’

Only Jan is looking at Leo. He is still lying on the ground by the hole, but Jan suddenly notices that he is moving. The little boy can’t see because of the blindfold, but whatever Hanna has used to knock him out, chloroform or something similar, is starting to wear off.

But not quickly enough. Jan must keep talking: ‘There’s no way Rössel is going to be released, Hanna. He killed a guard tonight during his escape... He slit Carl’s throat.’

She looks sharply at Rössel. ‘Is this true?’

‘I did what I had to do,’ he replies. ‘And now it’s your turn.’

Hanna stays put; she is staring at the spade. ‘No.’

‘Yes,’ says Rössel in a louder voice.

Jan can see Leo stretching in the shadows on the ground; he isn’t fully awake, but he’s getting there.

A metre or so from Jan’s leg is the Angel, the only light on the hillside. And even closer, right next to him, he can see his spade.

Rössel sighs and gets out the bottle again. He takes a swig and nods. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

Jan reaches out and closes his fingers around his spade as Hanna looks at Rössel once more.

‘Ivan, we don’t need to—’

He cuts her off abruptly. ‘I’m going to do it now.’

But Jan’s time has come, and he finally takes his chance. In one single rapid movement he is on his knees, raising the spade with both hands like a long, slender club.

‘Leo!’ he yells to the boy. ‘Run! Just get away from here!’

Leo is on his feet. He has begun to move.

Jan strikes. The spade comes crashing down and there is a crunching noise from the Angel. The light goes out.

The autumn night sweeps in; it is almost pitch dark now. The only discernible light is coming from the buildings far below. Jan has already dropped the spade, and he shouts again, ‘Run towards the lights, Leo!’

The drums are pounding inside his head, several beats per second. There isn’t much time now.

He sees a small body disappearing into the darkness, running away. Leo has torn off the blindfold.

‘Run!’

Jan gets to his feet, using the spade for support.

‘Don’t move!’ Rössel bellows.

He is standing in front of Jan like a black shadow, with his own spade raised high above his shoulders. And then he strikes, two hard blows that shake the handle of Jan’s spade; the third blow knocks it out of Jan’s grasp, and it clatters away across the stones.

But Rössel’s spade is also useless — the handle has split and cracked in the middle. He tosses it away and takes something else out of his pocket, holding it up in front of him.

Not the tear gas, but the razor.

‘Jump,’ Rössel says.

Jan backs away holding his hands up in front of him, but his leg is still hurting and won’t obey him properly. He stumbles over a stone or a root, dangerously close to the sheer drop. He tries to pretend that there is solid ground everywhere, but the dizziness is taking hold.

Rössel moves forward with the razor at the ready. He makes a rapid swiping movement and the back of Jan’s hand burns with pain and begins to bleed. Several veins have been slashed.

Rössel holds the blade up even higher. ‘Jump,’ he orders again. ‘You might survive.’

But Jan doesn’t move any further backwards. He looks at Rössel’s outstretched hand, the hand holding the razor, and fumbles under his jumper. He has no weapon, of course, but he does have the plastic loops he took from Carl. Thin, strong loops that can catch something and hold it fast.

He removes one of the loops and reaches out.

Rössel isn’t fast enough. Jan grabs hold of his hand and manages to slip the loop over both their hands. All he has to do now is pull, and his own wrist is firmly attached to Rössel’s. Jan can now control the razor, and keep it away from him.

Rössel is breathing hard in the darkness, tugging and jerking. He tries to transfer the razor to his left hand so that he can cut himself free, but Jan grabs hold of that hand too.

They are holding on to each other like a couple about to start dancing, and there is no escape: Jan is trapped by Rössel and Rössel is trapped by Jan.

Rössel keeps on fighting, but Jan won’t let go.

He closes his eyes. He hopes that Leo got away. That he heard Jan’s shouts and ran down the slope, heading towards the lights.

‘Give up,’ Rössel says. ‘Before you die.’ He is breathless and his voice has lost all trace of softness. The predator has emerged, the beast that has been hiding behind the self-possessed teacher.

Jan is finding it impossible to regain his balance, and Rössel cannot let him go. Jan opens his eyes. They are moving inexorably towards the sheer drop. He and Rössel, bound together in a macabre embrace. They are both panting, breathing in time with one another.

‘Your turn, my friend!’ Rössel shouts.

Jan is losing the battle, he is on the point of being hurled out into the void. And there is nothing to hold on to. Only Ivan Rössel.

He turns to look for help. Leo has gone, and there is just one lone figure by the pine tree. Hanna is standing motionless in the undergrowth, watching them. She is frozen to the spot; she can do nothing.

But Leo got away. He fled from the predator, out of the forest. He is strong, he will make it.

Jan is happy with that victory.

He feels the edge of the solid ground beneath his feet, but he does not hesitate. Just one small step backwards into the darkness.

One step, and he takes Rössel with him over the edge.

‘Is everyone feeling all right?’ Marie-Louise asks.

No one responds to her gentle query.

Hanna is as quiet as her colleagues this morning. She has no words. She has come back to work and is trying to look calm, even though she can hardly breathe. So much has gone wrong. She feels as if she is sitting in the middle of a storm, with no idea of when it will pass.

It is Wednesday now. The Dell has remained closed since the chaotic fire drill, and meanwhile the rumours about St Patricia’s have been growing. There have been newspaper articles about what happened, reports on the radio, and the TV news has shown pictures of the closed hospital gates.

Marie-Louise doesn’t ask any more questions. She turns her head. ‘Dr Högsmed is here today to give us an update and fill in one or two gaps. I think we all need some kind of...’ She falls silent, unable to find the right words. ‘Doctor,’ she says.

‘Thank you, Marie-Louise.’

Högsmed has been sitting at the table with his head bowed, as if he has hardly slept over the past few days. But now he straightens his back and begins to speak: ‘So... We had rather a dramatic start to the weekend. Dramatic and tragic. As you know we had scheduled a major fire drill for Friday night, but it became rather more complicated than we had intended. This was because a real fire was discovered on the fourth floor, just before the actual drill was due to begin.’

The doctor pauses. There is absolute silence around the table. Hanna looks out of the window at St Psycho’s.

‘As a consequence of this fire,’ Högsmed goes on, ‘a certain amount of confusion arose with regard to the dividing line between the actual emergency and the drill. This meant that we had very poor control over some areas, and the patients were able to wander around freely. Possibly as a result of this chaos there was a fatal attack on one of the security guards on the fourth floor, followed by the escape of the man who started the fire. One of our most dangerous patients.’

Ivan, Hanna thinks. Was he dangerous? Yes. But he was also loving and considerate. She sits quietly at the staffroom table with Andreas. They are the only two who have turned up today. The chairs on either side of Hanna are empty.

One of them is Lilian’s, of course, but she has been signed off due to ill health.

The other chair was Jan Hauger’s.

Thanks to Kajsa Asklöf, Roger Barrett, Katarina Ehnmark Lundquist, Ann Heberlein, Rikard Hedlund, Kari Jacobsen, Cherstin Juhlin, Anders Parsmo, Ann Rule, Åsa Selling and Bengt Witte, who directly or indirectly helped with this novel.