Skirts.

Tops.

Sandals.

A photograph album.

Malin's life in a big heap on the hall floor when she went into the flat.

Bags and boxes full of her clothes, shoes, books and things. Neatly piled up, and when Malin realised what was in front of her in the flat she felt like crying, and she sat down on the hall floor, but however much she tried to squeeze out some tears, none came.

My things, the person I am. No, not the person I am, more like a receipt for the pointless person I've become.

Janne had turned up with her things from the house during the day, using her spare key to get in, then dropping it through the letterbox afterwards. She would have liked to pick up her things herself, would have liked them to be at home when she went, him and Tove, and they would have asked her to sit down at a ready-laid table and would offer her some hot stew that would take the edge off all the chill and rawness, the thirst and confusion.

Now, instead, this pile of life. In this shitty-fucking-tiny-musty-raw-damp-lonely flat.

Did Tove help Janne? Have they turned against me in tandem?

But what can I expect? I hit him. In front of Tove. How the hell could I? Am I any better than the father and brother in that honour killing?

God, how I miss you both. I miss you so much it crosses every boundary and you disintegrate and are replaced by something else.

But why isn't Tove here? Tove, where are you? Your things? You could have brought it all at once, couldn't you?

Malin sits with her back to the front door.

She has a bottle of tequila in her hand, but isn't drinking. Instead she's pulled out the files about the Maria Murvall case from the bags Janne left.

She reads.

Sees Maria Murvall sitting on the floor, like her, in another room. Alone, excluded, shut off, numb to the point of nothingness, maybe scared beyond the bounds of what the rest of us call fear.

Malin twists and turns all the facts in the case, as she's done hundreds of times before.

What happened in the forest, Maria?

What were you doing there?

Who could hurt anyone the way he or she or it hurt you, where does that malice come from? Where do the sharp, living branches that ate their way into your genitals come from? The electrically charged spiders? The cockroaches with sharpened jaws that ate their way up your legs?

Evil is like a torrent, Malin thinks. Like tons of clay sliding down a hillside in a merciless autumn storm. A flood of death and violence wiping out every living thing in its path, leaving a desolate landscape behind it, ash lying in heaps on the ground, and we, the survivors, are forced to eat each other to survive.

Wrath summoned back. Set free.

Malin gets up, leaving the files and things in the hall. She goes into Tove's room, sees the unmade bed, wishes Tove were lying there again, and she starts to cry when she realises that that bed, in many ways, is empty for good now, that she may never pick Tove up from the sofa in front of the television and carry her to bed, that the child Tove was has vanished, replaced by the young woman who measures everything around her, who evaluates and tries to stay as far as possible from any obvious pain. A person who doesn't sleep a sleep of innocence.

In Malin's dream, damp and darkness and cold become one and the same. They merge into a black light, and in the centre of that light is a secret, or possibly several secrets.

I loved, says a voice. Search in love. I hit, says the same voice. Search in the blows, another voice says in the dream. Young snakes, chopped to pieces by lawnmower blades move before her eyes, crawling out of the sewers in streets whose names she doesn't know.

Then the voices fall silent, the mutilated young snakes vanish.

29.

Malin.

This house is associated with you, Janne thinks as he stands in his kitchen sipping a glass of cold milk and eating slices of salami. Outside, the night is its own master, full of all the demons he has encountered in his life.

Malin, Janne thinks. It's lonely out here in the forest without you, but these old wooden walls can't contain the pair of us. The bed with my mother's crocheted bedspread isn't wide enough.

The house smells of damp and nascent mould, spores sent out in the night like silent malaria mosquitoes.

Muteness.

Like a soundless animal, that's what it's like, our love. That's what you're like, Malin, and I can't handle it any more.

You've always accused me of running, and I certainly have, I've taken refuge in the care of others, people who needed me in Rwanda and Bosnia, and most recently in the borderlands of Ethiopia and Sudan. I was there last winter.

They called me again last week, the Rescue Services Agency, but I turned them down, I've done my bit, I'm going to stay and deal with my life, the way it looks right here, right now.

You're the one who can't deal with it, Malin, and as long as you aren't prepared to look inside yourself, I can't help you. Tove can't help you. No one can help you.

But that's over now, Malin. It doesn't matter that you hit me. Nor that you did it in front of Tove. She'll survive. She's stronger than us. Smarter. That's not what this is about.

I'm here in my house, and you're welcome to visit, but not to move back in. It's time for us to cut the chains of this love, and the still, soft desire that we've been tumbling around in for so long.

What is there beyond that love?

I don't know, Malin. And that fills me with comfort and fear.

Tove.

It got confusing for Tove in the end.

You want me to call you, don't you? If only to shout at you. It would never occur to you to call me. You're too proud for that, though I don't think you realise it. But we're beyond phone calls now. I promise to watch over you as best I can, but now that you seem to have made up your mind to follow the path straight down into the darkness, there isn't much I can do, is there?

Your boss, Sven, he called me today. I told him we've split up again, said that I was worried about you, just like him, and he said he might not have realised just how much you'd been drinking earlier this year, that he's thinking of sending you on a short trip so that you can clear your thoughts. That's a good idea, I told him. Because I can't reach you, I said. You just get angry if I try. And he understood, and I told him our relationship is over, that it was easier to be straight with him than with you, that I probably couldn't say it like that to you, to your face. That I should probably keep my distance.

And do you know what he said, Malin?

He said: 'I promise to keep an eye on her. Trust me,' he said, and he's the sort of man you're happy to entrust with the things you care about most.

I can live with the fact that you raised your hand against me. With the pain and sorrow of that. But not Tove's look of confusion. She needs security now, Malin, confidence that this world is good, and means us human beings well, because even if she can look after herself it's our duty to spare her from evil, to give her faith in goodness. That's what this is about.

And I can hear you snort.

But that's how it is. You don't have to have any faith yourself, you just have to convey the idea of faith.

I don't know how many nights I've lain awake and sweating in a soaking wet bed after dreams about people's cruelty to one another. I've had thousands of nights like that, Malin, but I still haven't lost my faith.

But I know when it's time to move on.

I know when the darkness of night threatens to become the only thing that exists.

That's why I came over with your things today, Malin. I knew you wouldn't be at home. I carried the boxes upstairs on my own, I took my jacket off and laid it over your things so they wouldn't get wet in the rain on the way from the car.

So that you would understand what I could never say.

Dad! Dad!

Tove knows she's screaming in the dream. This is the dream she most often has, and in the chat rooms the others have tried to persuade her not to be scared of the dream but to welcome it as a chance to learn to live with what happened last summer.

The masked figure above her.

She herself immobile.

Dad's and Mum's voices close, yet still too far away, as the woman approached her with darkness and violence and a desire that everything should end so that everything could begin.

Together with the others she had tried to understand the woman who wanted to kill her. Tried to understand where her anger and evil had come from, and when Tove felt she understood, the fear had vanished and she learned to accept the dream.

Dad! Dad!

And he comes, saves her from deep inside the darkness together with Mum. Light streams into the room, and if her screams were to reach her lips in this dream he would rush the ten metres from his bed to hers. He'd wake me up, save me from the fear.

Mum.

You're in the dream too.

You're standing back.

It looks like you're in pain.

How can I help you? I see your torment, maybe I even understand it. Is it because you think you've lost me? Is that why you've turned away?

Because you have become your own pain.

Your own fear.

Karim Akbar has got out of bed, taking deep breaths in the empty, dark room, and all he can smell is himself. The house lacks other smells these days. It feels inadequate, with its sensible, early eighties architecture, like a wine that has matured poorly, and its bad sides have taken over. Edginess, rawness.

He's thought of selling the house. Getting a flat in the city, but he hasn't been able to summon up the energy.

His wife gone.

His son gone.

In Malmo. With her new man, the one she met on that council course for social workers in Vaxjo.

Karim had thought he was about to kill her when she told him, but she was sensible, took him out for lunch, and even then, when she had asked him to have lunch with her, he had known what was coming.

It was two years since his wife had met him, the pure-blood Swede, in the same line of work as her.

Karim's own career is in the balance.

Today he had a call from a head-hunter in Gothenburg.

A job at the Immigration Authority in Norrkoping, just one down from the very top of the tree, but he's not sure.

Do I want to be responsible for sending people back to the hellholes of the world? They want me as a figurehead. An immigrant face to appear in the media. To unsettle them.

But something new has to happen.

The case they're working on at the moment.

Jerry Petersson. Fgelsjo. Goldman.

All these privileged people who can't get along, can't live alongside each other with their tasteless wealth. But maybe, Karim thinks, the violence comes from somewhere else? The tenant farmers? Who knew what resentments they might harbour towards their landlord? Differences in wealth always lead to violence sooner or later. As history demonstrates.

Someone mentioned in the will, if we ever find one? Anything is possible.

Shame.

Shame is always involved.

According to a lot of people with his background, his wife had committed the ultimate sin and he should have had her killed.

And that's what his instinct told him.

At first.

He can admit that to himself. But is there anything more loathsome than that father and brother they picked up in that latest so-called honour killing, who killed their own daughter and sister?

I'm not that primitive, Karim thinks.

He took a step back, gave up there and then in the restaurant, let her go, taking the boy with her, never discussed any other possibility, and gave her what she wanted for her share of the house. He convinced himself that was what he wanted, to be broad-minded and magnanimous in the midst of betrayal.

Karim goes over to the window and sees that the rain has stopped. But for how long?

He shouts out in the house.