Frozen Moment (53 page)

    'At
one point, just before they finally left, the angry one called one of the
others by his full name, the way you do when you want to make a point. He
called him Thomas Edell -
Thomas Edell, will you shift your fucking arse
- and several people must have heard, but as far as I know nobody mentioned it
to the police. Earlier on he had just called him Fox… or maybe it was Wolf. I
don't know why I remember that. In the end they had to more or less carry Edell
into the truck, him and his mate.'

    Tell
suddenly realised he had been holding his breath.

    'Seja,
listen to me. Would you recognise this mate, if you saw him now?'

    She
stared at him in surprise. Only then did it dawn on her that her confession
could have more direct consequences than the relief she felt at unburdening
herself.

    She
thought for a little while,
then
said, 'I think so. I
mean, it's a long time ago, but I knew straight away it wasn't Thomas Edell
lying there on the gravel, even though there was so much blood and… I don't
think I could have got it wrong. Even if I haven't been conscious of it, his
face has been imprinted in my memory for over ten years.'

    
The
subscriber is not available.
It was almost eighteen months since they had
received the telephone number, written on the back of a photograph of that
woman's two children. Dagny had insisted on displaying it on the piano as if
they were Sven's kids, something to be proud of.

    He
had transferred the number into his black book, which was now lying in front of
him on the telephone table. The only phone in the house was in the downstairs
hallway. He therefore had to wait until Dagny had gone for a nap or retired for
the night before he could call. But every time he was greeted by that
impersonal female voice claiming that his son, or rather the subscriber, was
not available.

    It
was of course possible that his son had given them a false number to avoid
having to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. The risk of being
called by his mother and father when he was least expecting it had to be set
against the alternative: being totally honest and refusing to give it to them
at all.

    Bertil
Molin was a realist, far more so than his wife. He would never lower himself to
pretend he had a good relationship with his son - unlike Dagny, who clung
desperately to half-truths in order not to feel like such a bloody failure. But
women were different. They were cut from a different cloth.

    It
was also a family trait. There was, according to Bertil Molin's way of seeing
things,
a strength
in having the courage to look the
truth in the eye. To recognise that you have lived a life that has not
completely fulfilled expectations. It was good to pre-empt the wave of grief
that could otherwise overwhelm you when you were least expecting it. It was
different with Dagny: she always made a big thing of their son. As soon as
anyone walked through the door she was boasting about that Chinese woman, or
Thai, or whatever she was.

    He
snorted at the thought. They had never met the woman their son had married five
years ago; they didn't even know her name. Sven had presumably mentioned it at
some point in one of his telephone calls, which were few and far between. Or
maybe he hadn't. Bertil Molin was smart enough to realise that, when it came to
his son, the disappointment he felt was mutual. If Sven
had
mentioned
his wife's name, it had disappeared from Bertil's memory.

    What
he did know was that his son had flown to one of the world's less developed
countries with a grubby picture from a catalogue in his suitcase, in order to
buy a wife in a place where people were so poor that everything was for sale.
That was all he needed to know about her. He knew she had nothing to offer Sven
apart from a lack of pride, which must have come in handy when she allowed
herself to be dragged halfway around the world like an animal, along with her
two bastards, to become a kept woman in the small community of Molnebo, where
Sven lived. No doubt everybody stared at her. And she had destroyed a man's
reputation into the bargain. Not that he knew much about Sven's reputation.

    The
subscriber was still not available. He replaced the receiver carefully so the
sound would not wake Dagny. She had turned her face towards the back of the
sofa, and her heavy breathing had turned into snores. She would sleep for a
while longer. This meant he could wait a quarter of an hour then try again.

    Deep
down he sensed that if he didn't get hold of Sven very soon, there would come a
day when he would bitterly regret the fact that he hadn't done more. That he
hadn't ignored his unreliable heart and the flickering before his eyes and
driven up to Molnebo to talk to his son face to face.
To tell
him about the article in the newspaper and the goings-on at the farm next door.
To warn him.

    He
padded over to the window and moved the lace curtain a fraction to one side,
gazing over the roof of the old Renault and across the meadow towards the Edell
place. There was a light on upstairs. Lise- Lott had come home.

    1999

    Afterwards
it would be difficult to give an account of the course of events. If someone
had asked Solveig six months after Sebastian had started sleeping on the sofa
and Caroline had moved into his room, she would have answered evasively,
something along the lines of
She was just standing there on the landing one
day, with her hat and coat on, and she stayed.
Planted
herself
in the dark three-room apartment with its dusty corners with the intention of
staying around. In fact this corresponded with Caroline's own words that first
evening in the dressing room, which had become the memory room:
I'll stay
around. I'm not the kind of person who just walks away.
This was after
Solveig had presumably said something like
Don't
go. Don't leave us here with nothing to think about but this crippling grief.
She had allowed this stranger to lick her wounds.

    The
fact that she had stayed felt like a blessing. First of all it was a kind of
break, a period when Solveig and Sebastian no longer had to try to find a way
to relate to one another in the shadow of the crime. Later she realised that
Caroline was helping to save Maya's life from the oblivion Solveig most feared.
She already felt the danger was imminent: she would forget Maya's precise
expressions and features, replacing them with her own, and in the end she
wouldn't know what belonged to whom.

    Caroline
had also loved Maya with the kind of love that Maya deserved - pure, elevated
and irreproachable - just as her own love for her daughter had emerged after
her death. It made Solveig feel noble in a way. Earlier in her life she had
often been prey to devastating attacks of jealousy when her children's love was
directed at someone else. She also managed to explain away the sexual
relationship Caroline had presumably had with her daughter, just as she had
become an expert at suppressing other unpleasant truths over the years. There
was
a hardness
about Caroline, and in her eyes Solveig
sensed a cold concentrated rage.
The tip of an iceberg.
She would never go against Caroline. In times of need you had to choose your
battles, she reasoned; you had to prioritise what would bring the greatest
gain. Right now Caroline was helping her to survive by filtering her grief. She
talked about Maya and listened to Solveig when she talked about Maya.

    Caroline
was aware of every one of Maya's characteristics that up to now Solveig had
thought only a mother would notice. How she put the tips of her fingers over
her lips when she laughed. How she often tilted her head to one side when she
was nervous. How she seemed to know a whole raft of stupid expressions that
didn't match her personality at all and looked slightly embarrassed when one of
these expressions slipped out by accident.

    Maya
was the hub of their relationship, the memory room, the central point from
which all forms of looking back or forward had their origin. Particularly since
the counsellors, psychologists and doctors had begun to close their ears to
Solveig's grief, saying,
Now, Solveig, it's been nearly three years. You
really have to try to move on, bury your daughter and start looking to the
future.
By that stage the common platform she had found with Caroline had
become so stable that Solveig was more indifferent than ever to the advice of
the professionals.

    She
and Caroline withdrew from the world, became self-reliant. Out of the blame
that Solveig had at first placed firmly around Sebastian's neck grew a
conviction that something terrible must have happened to Maya.
That her final moments in life had consisted of sheer terror.
And however much Sebastian still bore responsibility for the fact that she had
faced her murderer alone, it wasn't actually Sebastian who had driven that
sharp stone into her head. But someone had done it, and that person had yet to
receive his punishment.

    'I'm
going to find out who did it,' said Caroline, holding Solveig's head between
her palms. 'Trust me. But I need Sebastian's help.'

    'Sebastian?'
asked Solveig in confusion.

    At
that moment she would have agreed to anything at all. A faint current of
electricity was running from Caroline's hands into Solveig's face, which had
been frozen but was now slowly beginning to thaw. In the dark irises of
Caroline's eyes she had caught sight of Maya, Maya moving inside Caroline's
eyes.

    'I
need him for his local knowledge.'

    The
same evening Solveig blessed Caroline's project to find out what had really
happened that December night, they found Sebastian on the bathroom floor. Both of
his wrists were slashed.

    He
was unconscious, and even though it turned out a few hours later at the
hospital in Borås that the wounds were not particularly deep, they decided to
keep him in for observation.

    Evidently
an interview with a counsellor was compulsory in cases of attempted suicide.

    'Sebastian?
Your girlfriend is here.'

    The
nurse who stuck her head around the door gave him an exaggerated wink.

    'My
girlfriend?' said Sebastian in a voice that wasn't quite steady yet.

    'Yes!
She's…' The irritatingly cheerful girl searched for the right expression. She
settled on 'awe-inspiring'.

    Sebastian
realised it must be Caroline waiting for permission to enter the secure unit.
His stomach turned over. As it had so many times before, it struck him that he
knew nothing about her. She only ever talked about herself in short often
contradictory bursts; that way she had no life story, no contours. When he
tried to visualise her face in his mind's eye he often saw only a diffuse image
that could be just about anybody, like a face from a dream that has already
begun to fade. At those times he doubted whether she actually existed. Was she
perhaps merely the product of
his own
imagination and
that of his mother?

    In
a Bruce Willis film he had seen the room grew cold when a ghost made its
entrance. Before she made herself known, Sebastian could always sense
Caroline's presence by the chill wind on the back of his neck. He told himself
he was being ridiculous, and yet he still tried to avoid being alone with her.

    She
was constantly changing her appearance, and not in the usual ways, with a new
haircut or a change of clothes. No, the most confusing thing about Caroline was
her ability to slough off her skin and take on a completely new guise. From one
day to the next he would meet a different person in the kitchen; even the pitch
of her voice, her accent, the shape of the face changed. She could be as tender
as the mother Solveig had never been. She could be bleached blonde and stooping,
anxiously sorry for herself in contrast to the dominance she usually displayed.
But Sebastian was not fooled: he never doubted for a second that Caroline could
kill him with a glance.

    Solveig
never seemed to question Caroline's changeable personality; perhaps she didn't
even notice it. He had never thought he would miss the old Solveig. But he was
missing her now. She was moving further and further away from him, deeper into
Caroline's web. Trapped in its centre, she seemed to have been robbed of the ability
to see, and he was convinced that she would never be able to free herself while
she lived. He mourned Solveig, just as he mourned himself and the fact that he
was an outsider. He had rarely felt so lonely in all his life.

    No
visits were permitted without the patient's agreement, but he had never dared
deny Caroline anything.