An hour later the large entrance door is being pushed open, then it falls shut again, and Kenny storms into the room.

  Faith does not move, sitting on a chair between two windows about three meters from the table with the bodies. She watches her husband walk up to the table, sees the emotions race across his face, from hope to incredulous fear, to despair she has not thought him capable of. He calls out Liv’s name, touches her face, even kisses her, and he cries. His hands are shaking violently. Faith has never seen or heard him behave so tenderly, certainly not towards herself, not even during their first days together.

  When he gently strokes his dead baby’s hair, she says, “It’s a boy.”

  He had not been aware of her presence, for he starts up and turns on her with a wildness she has not been expecting. “Shut your fucking face, you bitch!”, he shouts. “This is all your fault.”

  She hides her shock and says calmly, “My fault?”

  “We could have been here on time.”

  She laughs, bitterly. “You are such a poor, deluded little kid.”

  “You have no idea”, he says, his voice full of hatred.

  “Why not snort a line or two, just to make sure that it is really everybody else’s fault?”

  “Watch out, bitch. I’ll kill you if you say another word.”

  Faith just stares at him. She is not frightened, just infinitely amazed.

  “You ought to lie here. You, not her. I never loved you. Nobody could ever love you like I loved her.” He turns back to the corpse and murmurs tender words and kisses her face.

  Should she not feel something now? But there is nothing there. Eventually she says, “The police need your statement. Even you will understand that, I hope. Please try to bring this to a somewhat dignified close.”

  She rises from her chair and looks straight into her husband’s cold eyes. “You are going to be sorry. I will make you bleed for this, slut. You are going to curse this day forever, just you wait.”

  “I’m cursing many days in my life already, but this one won’t be one of them”, she replies.

  He turns away and leaves the room. Outside, he rages on. “If you ever fuck that bitch, you’ll regret it. You do want to fuck her, right? If you ever do, you need to go down on her so hard before she even gets wet, that frigid piece of shit. Enjoy!”

  Then the great door slams shut. The silence is broken by an engine starting and a car racing away.

  Kenny’s last words have hit home cruelly. Her hands are shaking when she extinguishes one of the candles and takes the other one out of the room. She locks the door again and hands the key to Ben.

  “Good night”, she says to Ben, Nicholas and Tom, who are looking at her without speaking. Then she carries the flickering candle up the stairs and into her room, where she puts it down on her bedside table. Then she looks at herself in the full-length mirror, trying to figure out what to do next, feels suddenly dizzy and collapses in a heap of exhausted mind and body on the carpet.

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  She must have woken up at some point during the night, managed to get out of her clothes, and crawled into bed. When she wakes up again, it is not dark any more. She showers, gets dressed and goes downstairs, where Nicholas and Ben are already up.

  The undertaker has been there and taken away the bodies. Ben has removed the trash bags, the room looks like nothing has ever happened. Kenny had not come back.

  Faith thanks the two men. She assumes that Nicholas has ensured that the undertaker would not be talking; she does not care how much it is going to cost her.

  When Tom comes down, he looks tired, too. They do not speak about what has gone down. Or what Kenny had said before he left.

  She calls Kenny’s phone, but it appears to be switched off. Then she tells the police that her husband is missing. She describes the car he had taken. The police promise to keep her informed.

  They call shortly before noon. The car has been found, abandoned in Oban’s harbour area. They have secured his smartphone and some papers, but there is no trace of her husband.

  They have, however, found out that there had been a large sum of money transferred to his account from an anonymous Swiss account on Saturday, one hundred thousand pounds. He had withdrawn ten thousand on Sunday. Faith has no explanation for the money. The fact that he had been commanding this kind of funding points further towards the hypothesis that he had wanted to run off with Liv.

  A trash worker in Craigan has found a large pool of blood behind the pub. This information clarifies Liv’s journey some more. Faith is once again horrified by the suffering the woman must have gone through. She does not think of her as a rival; no, she is another victim of Kenny’s recklessness.

  In the afternoon, she informs Nicholas and Tom. She asks Nicholas to give a substantial sum of money to the pension fund for Scottish police officers, anonymously, of course. If this story does not make headlines, she will not have God to thank for it.

  She can still hear Kenny’s vow to revenge himself on her. He is not going to do it by dragging Liv’s story out into the open, though, of that she is certain. When Liv and the child will have been buried, there is an actual chance that nobody outside the small circle of people she knows and trusts will ever learn about this unhappy story.

  Nicholas is being sent on a break for a couple of days. Tom wants to stay, but she cannot bear the sight of him and sends him away, too. They are going to meet up again in a week’s time and travel to Brazil; that is soon enough. She needs to be alone.

  The police do not put a high priority on finding Kenny. He is not involved in a crime. Faith would like this to be different, but she is a beggar once more, and she has no say in the matter.

  She cannot find out anything about Liv’s Swedish family. The woman and her child are interred in the graveyard at Craigan. Faith does not attend the funeral but visits the grave on the next day.

  The rest of her days she spends alone, and the thing that bothers her most is what Kenny had said to Tom before he had left Wake Hall. She is not really frigid. At least she has never seen herself as such. She also had not had the impression that Kenny had suffered, either. He had probably just wanted to be cruel. But the words bothered her because he had said them to Tom.

  Her relationship with Tom is difficult enough, has been so from the start. They have had so many estrangements and sudden reconciliations, often without talking about anything, that she cannot count them any more. She unfailingly enjoys their good days. She hates how she has made things complicated with her note to Mori. If only they could start over, no baggage, no strings, no overlapping loyalties! And then he will treat her like a child and be patronizing and not understand her at all, and she can hardly bear the sight of him.

  And all this has been going on before Kenny had said what he said. His words make her feel ashamed. Does he think of her like this at all? After all these years? And herself? Does she think of him like this? They would have to face up at some point, but now Kenny has put the thing on the table in a way that makes it almost impossible to address.

  Their good bye had been clumsy, embarrassed, helpless.