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sleeping town, investing all their pride in never being discovered. Cautious shadows in the beginning, they develop a less and less restrained audacity. They slip through hedges and broken fences, listen at open windows, climb up on each other’s shoulders and press their faces against the windows where the few night-time lamps in the town are still burning. They see drunken men in filthy underwear sleeping in musty flats; on one golden but sadly never repeated occasion they witness a railway worker cavorting with Oscaria the shoe salesgirl in her bed.
    They rule the deserted streets and courtyards.
    One night in July they commit a ritual break-in. They enter the bicycle shop near the chemist’s, the Monarch Specialist, and move some bicycles around in the display window. Then they hastily leave the shop without taking anything. It’s the break-in itself that tempts them, pulling off a bewildering mystery. Wiberg the bicycle dealer will never figure out what happened.
    But they steal things too, of course. One night, from an unlocked car outside the Tourist Hotel, they snatch an unopened bottle of booze and ramble through their first bout of drunkenness, sitting on the boulder down by the river.
    They follow each other, first one leading, then the other. They never fight, but they don’t share all their secrets. For Hans it’s a constant source of humiliation that Sture has so much money. When the feeling of subordination grows too strong, Hans decides that his own father is a good-for-nothing who never had enough sense to secure himself a real income.
    For Sture the secret is the reverse. In Hans he sees a capable warrior, but he’s also thankful that he doesn’t have to be him.
    Perhaps they both have an inkling that their friendship is an impossibility. How long can the camaraderie be stretched before it snaps? The abyss is there, they both sense how close it is, but neither wants to confront the catastrophe.
    A streak of malice develops in their friendship. Where it comes from neither of them knows; suddenly it’s just there. And it’s towards the Noseless One in Ulvkälla that they direct their dark weapons.
    In her youth the Noseless One was struck by a thyroid fever which necessitated an operation on her nose. But the accident and emergency surgeon at the time, Dr Stierna, was having a bad day. The woman’s nose disappeared completely under his knife and fumbling fingers, and she had to return home with a hole between her eyes. She was seventeen at the time and twice tried to drown herself, but both times she floated to shore. She lived alone with her mother, a seamstress, who died less than a year after the disastrous operation.
    If Pastor Harry Persson of the Free Church, nicknamed Hurrapelle, hadn’t taken pity on her, she would certainly have succeeded in taking her own life. But Hurrapelle brought her to the wooden pews in the Baptist church, which lay between the town’s two dominant dens of iniquity, the beer café and the People’s Hall. At the church she was surrounded by a community she hadn’t known existed. In the congregation there were two elderly nurses who weren’t scared off by the Noseless One andher hole between the eyes, into which she stuck a handkerchief. They had served as missionaries in Africa for many years, mostly in the basin of the Belgian Congo, and there they experienced horrors far worse than a missing nose. They bore with them the memories of bodies rotted with leprosy and the grotesquely swollen scrotums of elephantiasis. For them the Noseless One was a grateful reminder that Christian mercy could work wonders even in such a godless land as Sweden.
    Hurrapelle sent the Noseless One out on endless door-to-door rounds with the congregation’s magazines in her hand, and no one refused to buy what she had to sell. Soon she had become a goldmine for Hurrapelle, and within six months he could even afford to trade in his rusty old Vauxhall on a brand-new Ford.
    The Noseless One