Frozen Moment (57 page)

    'No.
Let me tell them.'

    She
pulled the dressing gown more tightly around her shoulders and clasped her
hands against her chest to stop them shaking.

    'He
was beside himself when he got home that night. I didn't usually wait up for
him -1 mean he'd been an adult for a long time; he had a flat of his own down
in the basement - but that night he went into the living room. I was having a
sleepless night and was sitting in the.
kitchen
, and
when I went to see how he was, he'd thrown up on the floor.'

    She
wiped the tears from beneath her eyes with her thumb.

    'When
he saw me he ran towards the basement steps, but he slipped on the mat in the
hallway and fell. Then he just started crying, there on the floor, and the
noise woke Bertil and he came downstairs…'

    Her
voice was shaking and she had to catch her breath before she could go on.

    'Sven
was all muddy and wet and he might have had blood on his clothes as well, or
perhaps that's just the way I'm remembering it… I tried to get him to talk to
us, but he just kept crying. Eventually he fell asleep on the sofa.'

    
'And the next morning?'

    'He
closed up like a clam. He refused to talk about what had happened. But it was a
long time before he was himself again. I would almost say that in a way he was
never himself again. It was like a yoke that weighed him down, stopped him
laughing.'

    'But
you must have wondered,' said Beckman.

    Dagny
Molin nodded sadly.

    'Even
if I convinced myself that it was down to the drink - he stank of alcohol when
he got home that night - I didn't really succeed in calming my fears, because…
well, it was just so… primitive.'

    
'It?'

    'Yes,
the fear.
The grief.
He was screaming like a child.'

    Beckman
found a packet of tissues in her bag, which Dagny Molin, with an anxious glance
at her husband, gratefully accepted.

    'How
did you find out?' said Tell.

    She
nodded, after noisily blowing her nose.

    'Somebody
got in touch with us, much later. Several years after the event we got a
letter. It was addressed to Sven, but I opened it because… well, Sven didn't
live here any more. Anyway, the letter said that… Sven, along with Thomas Edell
and Olof Pilgren, had…'

    She
sniffled into the tissue for a while before continuing.

    'The
writing was strange, I remember. Childish, with capital letters and small
letters all mixed up, and spelling mistakes. I might not have taken any notice
of
it,
I might have thought it was just a tasteless
joke, if I hadn't seen Sven's eyes that night.
The fear in
them.
I realised it was true.'

    'Why
do you think someone sent the letter?'

    'To
force him to go to the police, I think. That's what it said in the letter, that
he ought to take his
punishment,
otherwise he would
have to… pay. Perhaps the person who sent it was after money.'

    'Have
you still got the letter?'

    This
time it was Bertil Molin who responded, shaking his head.

    'No.
We threw it away.'

    He
looked down at his slippers; their frayed edges had absorbed moisture from the
grass, and they had turned dark grey.

    'It
was such a long time ago. We thought… we got the impression that the person who
wrote it wasn't quite…'

    'Who
wrote the letter?' said Beckman.

    Dagny
Molin met her eyes. 'I have no idea. We have no idea.' She straightened her
back and looked at Beckman with an expression of defiance. 'Unfortunately we
know next to nothing about Sven's life these days. We really don't have any
contact with him at all.'

    Her
defiance collapsed as the sobs welled up from her stomach. Beckman placed a
hand on her back and felt the knobbly spine trembling beneath her fingers.

    Seja
allowed her upper body to slump back as she sat on the sofa. A broad crack
running across the ceiling had branched out into thinner cracks, forming the
shape of a spindly tree. She followed the crack steadily with her eyes. Yellowish-brown
patches bulged between the ceiling and the edge of the window, caused by a leak
she hadn't noticed before. It was easy to follow the progress of the water
underneath the wallpaper.

    She
realised the ceiling would have to be redone. Maybe it would need to be taken
down and replaced? What if there was mould up there in the loft? What if the
dampness from years of melting snow had run down the walls and damaged the
wood? An icy chill passed through her body at the thought that the entire house
might be rotten.

    'The
cottage smells exactly like my aunt's summer cottage on Gotland,' she had
whispered to Martin with starry-eyed enthusiasm as they went on the brief tour
of the house with old man Gren just before they jumped in and bought the place.
At that time nobody had lit a fire in the grate for months and it looked as if
the most obvious common denominator between her aunt's rarely visited summer
cottage and this charming but oh-so-neglected little house was that the chill
of the outdoors had eaten its way into the walls, or as Tove Jansson wrote,
'the rain and storms had moved into the rooms'. The whole place was probably on
the point of falling down, she realised. And there she was: a lonely town
mouse, and a girl into the bargain - no reason to insist on equality when there
was no one to be equal with.

    She
sniffed the air tentatively, hating the idea that the smell of Christian Tell
still lingered in the curtains and covers, that mixture of cigarette smoke and
some unfashionable aftershave like Old Spice or Palmolive.
And
sometimes, at close quarters, a sweetish hint of fresh sweat beneath his
jacket.
Tears of self-pity welled up and threatened to spill over at the
thought of the betrayal, the loneliness, the cottage and the stable and the
many, many hours of time and money it would take to make a decent home for
herself
and Lukas - far more than she could afford with her
student loan. Perhaps you could borrow books on doing up houses from the
library?
Home Improvement for Dummies.

    She
needed to get herself off the sofa, sit at her desk and start writing; go out
to the stable and give Lukas his evening feed; go across to the shed and fetch
more wood so that she could build up the fire, which was slowly going out.
Bring some warmth to these little rooms, and into her soul. Get up off the sofa
and open the windows wide to let in the evening air, ridding the place both of
the smell of damp and of Christian Tell and his old-fashioned scent and
unfulfilled promises.

    Since
he had left she had felt hollowed out, caught up in her own life story.
Admittedly his bitterness had been replaced by a desire to understand during
the course of the evening. For a moment she had also imagined he was groping
for the closeness they had lost, until she realised it was the case he wanted
to understand, not her. When he finally left, the distance between them was
tangible.

    There
was a slight draught coming up between the floorboards. The fingers of her hand
dangling over the arm of the sofa were gradually going numb, and that finally
decided the matter: she had definitely made a fool of herself once more. Fallen
in love and allowed
herself
to hope for a future that
would never happen. But this was her home, mouldy or
not,
and there was no reason to freeze.

    Before
she went out on to the steps she turned off the light above the porch and stood
there with only the light from the kitchen behind her, until her eyes grew
accustomed to the dark.

    For
some reason, when she had to go to the stable or the shed after dark, she often
found the limited pool of light from the outside lamp more frightening. Having
to step over that border between what was illuminated and what was hidden, out
into the blue-black unknown and its brooding dangers, just waiting for her to
take that step.

    He
had thought about opening the cage doors wide and letting the revolting little
animals run away. That way he could fool the local police into thinking that
Molin's death was the result of a raid by the Committed Militant Vegans, or
whatever they were called, those rabid fanatics dressed in black. It would give
him a head start of a day or two. Not that the forests of Dalsland were home to
any murder investigation teams worthy of the name, of course - it was more
Keystone Kops than CSI.

    Since
before Christmas Caroline had bought and read every single newspaper that was
available. Sebastian knew perfectly well she was looking for something about
the murders. He didn't know how she had realised it was him. It was strange,
both of them knowing something they could not mention. She gave him her
support, her silent collusion. He interpreted her looks: We're
in this
together. We have to keep going to the end of the road.

    He
established later, shut in the memory room with burning cheeks, that there had
been only a couple of brief articles, a short unemotional item on the local
television news, but nothing else. He felt a certain disappointment, despite
the fact that he was intelligent enough to realise that the ignorance of the
media served their purpose.

    It
was an unfamiliar feeling, but he was proud of the fact that everything had
gone according to plan. That he had succeeded in something that demanded
greater courage than most people would be required to summon during their
lives: he had killed two men, no, two miserable bastards,
whose
very existence was an insult to the surface of the earth and the air they
breathed. The fact that he had succeeded gave him the sense that he was slowly
approaching the point at which he would receive Caroline's love, and in the
long term his mother's
love,
and he would actually
deserve that love. Because that was what this was all about, after all - being
worthy of love.

    This
time he was driving a different make of car, hired down in the Varberg area to
be on the safe side. He had wanted to stay for a while on the shore at Skrea,
resting in the sand dunes and listening to the wind blowing through the tall
dry grass, and the sound of the sea rolling in. Instead he had allowed himself
to drive slowly along the promenade. For a few minutes he switched off the
engine and gazed out along the blue-grey horizon, just visible between the
beach huts and the luxurious houses with their burglar alarms.

    Closely
linked to this seascape was his only clear memory from childhood; the rest
remained only as blurred fragments of things he was at best indifferent to, or
in many cases had chosen to forget.

    He
hadn't been very old when he and Maya were sent to stay with a family in
Falkenberg for the summer. He ought not to be able to remember anything at all,
yet the pictures were surprisingly sharp, with a clear band of colour around
them, like in a catalogue. In Skrea the water was clear blue, the beach blissfully
sunny, the sand the colour of hot chocolate with cream. The swimming trunks
bought before the
trip were
bright red.

    They
were meant to go back the following summer and the one after that, perhaps
during the Christmas holiday too; instead Solveig had withdrawn her application
for support after only a week. Presumably being without the children hadn't
been as pleasant as she had expected, so there were no more trips to Skrea for
Sebastian. No more azure sea until now, when he had finally decided to take his
life into his own hands.

    He
decided to leave the mink in their cages. There was no reason to cause mayhem
and put the isolated farm on the police radar before it was necessary.

    At
the distant sound of an engine, he raised his binoculars. A cloud of dust
surrounded the dirty grey truck coming round the bend in the track. Molin was
on his way back; it was exactly two hours since he had moved the Asian woman
and the children out, his expression grim. Sebastian realised this meant that Molin
had found out about the fate of his former friends and smelled a rat. Now it
seemed as if he was planning to go to ground as well. Earlier in the day he had
thrown a sleeping bag and a bulging supermarket carrier bag into the truck. His
gaze had roamed over the field in front of the house and in among the trees
behind it.