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Ann shook her head.

Görel went home shortly before midnight. Ann returned to the couch, stared at the half-full glass of wine but didn’t touch it, got to her feet, and decided to try to sleep. She was not drunk, but intoxicated enough to stumble and knock over the standing lamp in the hall. The green glass cover shattered and the bulb went out.

She stared at the remains of the heirloom lamp that her grandmother had bought sometime in the twenties. For the first time she realized that she was perhaps not going to be able to manage, with work, with her loneliness, with being a good mother to Erik.

Without having removed her makeup or brushed her teeth she collapsed into bed with a feeling of regret.

Thirty

Laura stopped at the point where all the paths came together. Granted, the sun was shining, but a sharp northerly wind that howled down the slopes of the Alps, sweeping past Lake Garda and striking the Valpolicella district in the back of the head, and the little village in the stomach, forced her to take shelter behind some jutting cliffs.

She was not equipped for a hike in challenging terrain; it felt particularly difficult when the wind grew in force.

She curled up there like an infantry soldier coming under fire. If she had had an axe or at least a knife, and for that matter something to kindle it, she would have gathered up some twigs and made a fire.

She searched the skies to see if the rain clouds were piling up the way they often did this time of day if the winds changed direction from the southwest to the north, but the sky was still an almost metallic blue and that calmed her somewhat.

Suddenly the wind carried a waft of fish. Laura sniffed and looked around. It was an improbability, it had to be at least twenty, thirty kilometers to Lake Garda as the crow flies, but the fact was that the stench was growing stronger. It smelled like the fish market in Venice that she had been to many times.

How could I go so wrong? was the question that she kept turning over in her mind. They had stopped in the village, Ulrik wanted to have a bite to eat and rest a little. Driving on the steep roads outside Fumene had taken its toll and he had become more and more cranky.

Laura had nothing against stopping but did not go with him into the small restaurant that lay very close to the road. She decided to take a walk instead. It felt good to get out of the car and even better to leave her father’s muttering behind.

Now she was lost. She curled up in order to escape the wind, but also to gather her strength. She was convinced that Ulrik would be done eating by now. Maybe he would take a short nap in the car but he would wake up soon and wonder where she was.

He wouldn’t leave the car but simply get more and more angry over her tardiness.

When she had sat sheltered for ten minutes she thought the wind was starting to die down and she braced herself to go out on the path again.

At once the stench returned and this time it was even stronger. After a curve in the trail that rounded a thicket of honeysuckle tangled up with iron oak, she made a horrible discovery. Lying on his back in the middle of the path, covered by a swarm of flies, there was a man. His mouth was wide open, his arms outstretched as if crucified, and his pants pulled down around his knees.

He must have been there for a while because his body was in an advanced state of decomposition. The open mouth was what still lent the face a somewhat human impression. It looked as if he was giving a shout of great surprise, or was it pain?

The knees were eaten down to the kneecaps and the thighs were badly mauled, probably by foxes, and a knife had been sunk all the way down to the hilt in his lower abdomen.

Laura turned and ran. Where her energy came from she didn’t know but she ran at breakneck speed down the mountain, crawled on all fours up a ravine, and once she was up on the crest she saw the village. She could even see the car.

What had happened? Laura did not know. Perhaps it was a nightmare?