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‘And that’s helping?’

‘It’ll take a few days – he’s still got a high fever and there’s a risk of septic embolisms,’ she says, opening a door and ushering him through before following him into the patient’s room.

Daylight is passing through the bag on the drip-stand, making it glow. A thin, very pale man is lying on the bed with his eyes closed, muttering manically:

‘No, no, no … no, no, no, no …’

His chin is trembling and the beads of sweat on his brow merge and trickle down his face. A nurse is sitting beside him, holding his left hand and carefully removing tiny splinters of glass from a wound.

‘Has he said anything?’ Joona asks.

‘He’s been delirious, and it isn’t easy to understand what he’s saying,’ the nurse replies, taping a compress over the wound on his hand.

She leaves the room and Joona carefully approaches the patient. He looks at his emaciated features, and has no difficulty discerning the child’s face he has studied in photographs so many times. The neat mouth with the pouting top lip, the long, dark eyelashes. Joona thinks back to the most recent picture of Mikael. He was ten years old, sitting in front of a computer with his fringe over his eyes, an amused smile on his lips.