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to sleep.’
    ‘That’s perfectly normal; it’s a shock reaction. It’ll last for some time, but it’ll pass eventually.’
    ‘I can’t stop wondering why the man was lying there. Why did I have to go that way? Why was I listening to music?’
    ‘Gabi, calm down. It looks as though this was all an accident. You weren’t speeding, there was no alcohol in your blood, no drugs. You haven’t done anything wrong; you just had some bad luck. If you hadn’t run over that man, someone else would have done it.’
    ‘There was nobody else on that road. Nobody.’
    ‘Then he would have frozen to death.’
    ‘What if he was already dead?’
    ‘Gabi, we’ve already talked about this. If he had some sort of heart attack, we’ll find out in the autopsy.’
    ‘Who was he?’
    ‘We don’t know.’
    ‘You still don’t know!’ Gabriella cried.
    ‘It’s been one day. Sometimes investigations like this take weeks.’
    For a moment Gabriella said nothing. Anna heard the rush of background noise, a child’s voice, then a man’s voice somewhere further off.
    ‘Listen, could we meet up?’ said Gabriella suddenly.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Off the record. They gave me numbers for a crisis counsellor and an interpreter, but I’d rather talk to you about it. Besides, you already know the facts of the case; it would be easier.’
    Anna hesitated. It didn’t feel like a good idea to get mixed up in the life of someone currently under investigation; more to the point it was probably prohibited. On the other hand she understood Gabriella. If she had been in her situation, she would probably have done the same thing. She wanted to help this girl who, though not exactly a compatriot, was something along those lines. They arranged to meet at the Irish Corner Bar at nine o’clock that evening.
    After ending the call, she asked Sari for a list of phone numbers for the health centres and hospitals in the city and called them one by one. It took a surprisingly long time; there were a lot of numbers and she never got the information she needed from the person who first answered the phone. None of them had treated a stabbing victim in the last week. Someone must have killed an animal out in Ketoniemi, thought Anna, maybe put down their dog because they couldn’t afford to take it to the vet. She looked up at the clock on her office wall. Another hour and she would be free for the weekend.
     
    Sammy woke with a start in the pitch dark. Amazingly he’d managed to sleep for a moment, though now he felt anything but alert. The wind had whipped up last night. It had blown in from the northeast, making the icy temperatures feel even colder. The surface of the road had frozen over, and was now more slippery than before, but hidden in amongst the newspapers he had felt surprisingly warm. A windproof plastic covering and a thick layer of paper to insulate him. That’s where Sammy slept whenever he was unable to find anywhere else. And that’s what he’d done last night too. Paper recycling bins were warm but unsafe. You couldn’t spend many nights in the same place. He was afraid that someone would notice him and call the police. A few times someone had come along, opened the lid and thrown their newspapers inside and shrieked when they noticed a young man curled inside the bin. In situations like that Sammy had tried to look as friendly as possible. Sorry, sorry , he repeated before running off. Two months now, nothing but running. His whole, hellish life had been nothing but running – running from the police, running from normal people, from the withdrawal symptoms, from radical Islamists. Sammy didn’t know what to do. There was no one he could ask for help. Surely nobody could spend their whole life in hiding? Not in a country this cold at any rate. He felt trapped without any chance of escape, like a fox caught in the grip of an iron snare. But even that was better than the certain death that awaited him back home.
    Sammy hadn’t eaten