If only you had managed to hold on just a bit longer.

Then he got into the car and drove back across Lidingö Bridge on his way to see Bengt Nordwall, who now lived in Eriksberg, some twenty-odd kilometres south of the city. Ewert was driving far too fast and suddenly saw himself, as he often did, behind the wheel of another kind of car. The police van he had been in charge of twenty-five years ago.

He had spotted Lang on the pavement, just ahead of the van; he knew that he was wanted, so he did what they had done so many times before, drove up alongside the running man while Bengt pulled the door back and Anni, who was sitting nearest the door, grabbed hold of Lang and shouted that he was under arrest, as she was supposed to do.

She was sitting in that seat, nearest the door.

That was why Jochum Lang had been able to drag her out.

Ewert blinked and swung off the road for a moment, away from the queue of stressed morning commuters. He switched off the engine and sat very still until the pictures faded from his mind. In recent years, the same thing happened every time he visited her, the memory pounding inside his head, making it hard to breathe. He stayed where he was for a while, ignoring the idiots with their horns, just waited until he was ready.

A quarter of an hour later he pulled up outside his friend’s home.

They met in the narrow suburban street, stood together and got wet while staring up at the sky.

Neither of them smiled very often; it could be their age, or maybe they had always been the kind who rarely smile. But the impenetrable greyness and the wind and the pouring rain were too much; you had to smile because there was nothing else you could do.

‘What do you think about all this, then?’