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productivity. It was her own turn of phrase. It said something about her, both personally and politically.
    Her sneakers didn’t look quite right, given the rest of her outfit. But with a broken toe, her options were limited, and fortunately the TV producers hadn’t cut the part in the talk show where she commented on her own klutziness, flirtatiously saying that she was, after all, only twenty-six. And that she’d broken her toe while playing with her nephew. Not quite true, but white lies were allowed every now and then, when it was nothing serious. The studio audience had laughed and warmed to her. Victoria Heinerback smiled to herself as she struggled to get her key in the front door.
    It had been a good week.
    Politically. Personally. In every way.
    Despite the pain in her toe.
    It was annoyingly dark. She looked up. The outside light was not working, and she could just make out that the bulb had been broken. That made her a bit anxious, and she looked over her shoulder. The light by the gate was broken as well. She tried to keep all her weight on her good foot as she held her keys up to see if she’d found the wrong one.
    She never did manage to find out.
    The next morning, Victoria Heinerback was found by her boyfriend, who had wound his weary way home from his brother’s bachelor party by bus and taxi.
    She was sitting in bed. She was naked. Her hands were nailed to the wall above the head of the bed. Her legs were splayed, and it looked as if someone had tried to stuff something up her vagina.
    Victoria Heinerback’s boyfriend didn’t see this detail at first. He tore her hands free, threw up violently all over the place, and then pulled the body out onto the floor, as if it was the bed itself that had attacked her so brutally. It wasn’t until half an hour later that he came to his senses and called the police.
    Then he discovered the green book that was still stuck between Victoria Heinerback’s thighs.
    The ensuing investigation would establish that it was a leather-bound copy of the Koran.

Four
    T he woman in seat 16A seemed nice. She was reading the British papers and was obviously in need of a coffee. The flight attendant found it difficult to guess where she was from. Most of the passengers were Swedish, though everyone was being disturbed by a noisy Danish family with small children in the second to last row. He had also registered several Norwegians. It was by no means the high season, but lots of people were more than happy to get on a direct flight to Nice when the prices were so ridiculously low.
    He should really stop working as a flight attendant. His weight had always been a problem, and now his colleagues had begun to make comments. No matter how hard he tried or how little he ate, the bathroom scales threatened to tip past 220 pounds at any moment.
    It was good to have people like the lady in 16A on flights like this.
    She was darker than most Scandinavians. Her eyes were brown and she had no reason to be happy about her weight either. She was big and heavy, but the first impression was one of strength. Powerful, he thought after a while. She was an Amazon.
    And she certainly liked her coffee.
    What’s more, she didn’t have any children, thank goodness, and didn’t complain about anything.
    The body was still warm.
    The attendant at the Galleria multistory parking lot figured that it couldn’t be more than a couple of hours since the prostitute had said her good-byes. Maybe he was wrong. He was no expert, he had to admit, though it was the second time in under three months that he’d had to call the police because some poor woman had chosen to inject what would be her last hit somewhere sheltered from the biting wind that whipped through the winter streets of Stockholm, forcing everyone to dress like polar explorers. As it was quite warm in the stairwell, it was difficult to say.
    But she couldn’t have been lying there long.
    If you can’t see forward and you can’t look