‘The swine!’

She threw herself on the bed, close to Alena’s nakedness, crying now more than screaming.

‘The stinking, rotten swine!’

Alena waited. There was no point in talking; she had to let Lydia cry, as she herself had cried not long before.

She held her friend tight.

‘I’ll read it for you.’ Alena knew Swedish quite well. Lydia couldn’t understand how she could bear to learn the language.

She and Alena had been in this country for just as long as each other and met just as many men, but that wasn’t the point. Lydia had decided to shut it out, never to listen, never to learn the language in which she was raped.

‘Do you want me to read?’

Lydia did not want her to. Didn’t. Didn’t.

‘Yes.’

She huddled closer to Alena’s naked skin, borrowing her warmth. She was always so warm. Lydia felt frozen most of the time.

The picture was dull. It showed a middle-aged man leaning against a wall. He was tall and slim, with blond, smooth hair and a moustache. He looked pleased with himself, like someone who has just been praised. Pointing to him, Alena read out the headline, first in Swedish and then in Russian. Lydia lay still, listening, not daring to move. The article was badly written, in a rush, a drama that had been resolved early that morning, just before the paper went to print. The man leaning against the wall was a policeman who had managed to get a small-time crook, who had in a panic taken five people hostage and held them locked up in a bank vault, to enter negotiations. In the end, the hostage-taker had been talked round by the policeman and all his captives were freed.

It wasn’t a very exciting story. Routine police work, see page seven. Tomorrow, another page, another policeman.