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kicked up such a fuss, I reckoned I’d better stay away for a few weeks.”
    “You’d think your mother would be used to you by now!” Sophie said.
    “Yes, it’s strange, isn’t it? I can never see why she’s so upset. It’s not like I’ve ever actually killed anybody, or even put anyone in hospital—”
    “You sound sorry for that!”
    Mikael laughed. “Actually,” he said, “though the car episode was entirely my fault, it’s not what’s got her so riled up. For once it’s my brother, not me, who’s in really hot water.”
    “Your brother? But I thought he was a kind of saint.”
    Mikael’s brother was ten years older and had left home to go to university when Mikael was still quite young. Sophie had never met him, but he was by all accounts (and to Mikael’s chagrin) a complete paragon of all the virtues.
    “This time my perfect older brother seems to have done something heinous beyond belief. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but he hasn’t written home for months, and I think my mum’s convinced she’s lost him permanently.”
    “How odd,” Sophie said, her own worries receding a little as the puzzle claimed her attention. It was hard to think what Mikael’s brother could have done to upset their mother so much.
    “At any rate,” Mikael continued, “when the police telephoned her about my little escapade, she well and truly flew off the handle.”
    “What do you think your brother did, then?” Sophie asked.
    “Yes, it’s quite a mystery, isn’t it?” Mikael said blithely, sounding not at all disturbed by his brother’s departure from the straight and narrow. “I’ll see if I can winkle the real story out of Aunt Solvej. It’s probably nothing much, and Mum’s simply making a mountain out of a molehill.”
    They gazed out over the city, Sophie uncomfortably aware of how close they were sitting to each other.
    “Sophie, what about you?” Mikael asked, putting his hand on her knee in a way that made her jump. “How areyou? I have to say, you looked terribly worried the other day. Everything all right?”
    After a pause, a string of incoherent phrases poured out of Sophie: the horror of the bombings, the sense they all had at school of waiting passively for their future to be decided, the impossibility of getting along with the others, her dread of war.
    When Sophie fell quiet, Mikael rooted around in his pockets and dug out a waxed-paper packet of sandwiches.
    “Cheese-and-tomato or fish paste?” he asked.
    “Cheese-and-tomato, please,” Sophie said.
    In silence they ate the sandwiches, which were squashed and soggy but extremely satisfying.
    “Sophie,” Mikael said, when they had folded up the wrappers and tucked them into Sophie’s bag for later disposal, “you’re obviously leaving something out, something big. All that stuff you’ve been talking about, none of it’s much good, but it’s not enough by itself to have put you into such a state. No, not even the bombings,” he added.
    Sophie squirmed on her seat, the words lodged like lumps of suet in her throat.
    “It was a séance,” she said, steeling herself. “There was this awful medium and she had a peculiar message for me—for me personally, I mean, a sort of warning—and before that, I saw something that looked like a ghost in the mirror—”
    “Hold on a minute,” Mikael said, putting up his hands.
    Sophie braced herself for ridicule.
    “Slow down, can’t you? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Start from the beginning and tell me the whole story.”
    Sophie told him everything that had happened, her voice growing stronger as she saw his intent expression.
    By the time she finished, he looked quite worried.
    “Those mediums are really wicked,” he said, “preying on people’s weak side like that. It should be illegal to pretend to be able to contact the dead. Outright frauds, the whole lot of them.”
    “It was the creepiest thing you’ve ever seen,” Sophie said. She would like