He stood in front of the doors and kept scratching at the red, dripping wound on his nose. His pale, emaciated face was spotted with blood and crusty with drying sweat. Some kind of smell hung around him.

At the Central Station he took the up-escalator. It was hardly raining at all when he emerged from the underground. Maybe it hadn’t rained all morning. He looked around; he was still sweating inside his buttoned raincoat, his back soaking. He crossed Klaraberg Street and the pavement on the other side, then slipped in between the houses near the Ferlin statue and through the gate to St Klara Cemetery.

Empty, just as empty as he had hoped.

On the grass, a bit away, some guy who was off his head, but nobody else.

He walked past the large Bellman statue, to the bench behind it, under a tree he thought might be an elm.

He took the weight off his legs, humming to himself. Felt with his hand inside the right coat pocket. There it was. Bag full of washing powder. He sifted it between his fingers.

He put his other hand in the left pocket and pulled out the pack of twenty-five small plastic stamp envelopes, eight by six centimetres, each containing a little amphetamine, which was barely enough to cover the bottom. Hilding topped up all the bags with washing powder.

He needed cash and would have it soon.

It was evening. Her working day was at an end. No more customers.

Lydia walked slowly through the flat, which was pleasantly dark, lit only by a few table lamps. It was quite big, with four rooms. Probably the largest she’d been in since she came here.

She stopped in the hall.

She had no idea why she kept looking for something hidden in the wallpaper pattern, somewhere behind the fine stippling of lines filling the barren surfaces between floor and ceiling. She often stood there, forgetting everything else; she realised that the wallpaper reminded her of something she had seen on another wall, in another room, long ago.