“THE BOTTLE,” Morelius said.

The boy in the woolly hat put his hand inside his baggy top and produced a bottle. Bartram held it up in the glow from one of the streetlights.

“There’s no label,” he said.

“Er… no.”

“What is it?” asked Bartram, as they all heard the sirens from an approaching ambulance. “What kind of piss is this? Is it moonshine?”

“Yes… I think so,” said the boy. “I bought it off a friend.” He looked as if he were about to burst into tears. “He said it was completely okay.”

“Well, it’s not okay,” Morelius said. “He could feel the girl’s weight increase on his arm. She was about to pass out again. ”Where’s that damn ambulance?“

They were in the ER waiting room. The girl had been taken for treatment. Twenty minutes later a doctor appeared. Morelius could see from his face that she was all right.

A young boy was shuffling nervously in the waiting room. Morelius recognized him. Maybe he’d been one of those outside Focus. How had he got here?

“Alcohol in a young body, well… not a good combination.”

“How is she?”

“Not too bad, under the circumstances. She’ll have to stay here overnight, though.”

“So the stuff she drank was… okay?” Bartram asked.

The doctor gave him an odd look. “You mean the moonshine? Is that ever okay?”

“You know what I mean, for fuck’s sake.”

The doctor eyed him up and down.

“There’s no need to lose your temper,” he said. He stroked his hand over his white coat as if to brush off Bartram’s outburst. “No need at all.”

“I’m sorry” Bartram said. “It’s just that we care about the girl. Some of us police officers are like that.”

“We just want to know if she’s… done any other damage to herself, apart from the usual, whether the stuff was more dangerous than liquor normally is,” Morelius said.

The doctor looked at them doubtfully, as if he thought they were putting him on.

“Everything seems to be normal at the moment,” he said. “But we leave nothing to chance here. Has her family been contacted, by the way?”