Midwinter Sacrifice (16 page)

A middle-aged woman at the till, plump, with blonde, tightly permed hair.

Rebecka?

Zeke’s voice: ‘Excuse me, we’re looking for Rebecka Stenlundh.’

‘The boss. Try over at the butcher’s counter. She’s marking up the meat.’

Over at the butcher’s counter a thin woman is crouched down, her dark hair in a net, her back bowed under a white coat with the red ICA logo.

It looks like she’s hiding behind that coat, Malin thinks, as if someone’s going to attack her from behind, as if the whole world wishes her ill and you can never be too careful.

‘Rebecka Stenlundh?’

The woman spins round on her wooden sandals. A pleasant face: gentle features, brown eyes with a thousand friendly nuances, cheeks with skin that radiates health and a light suntan.

Rebecka Stenlundh looks at them.

Then one of her eyebrows twitches, and her eyes shine bright and clear.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ she says.

22

‘Do you think he’s expecting us?’

Johan Jakobsson leaves the words hanging limply in the air as they pull into the drive.

‘Bound to be,’ Börje Svärd says, flaring his nostrils in a way that makes the brown hairs of his moustache vibrate. ‘He knows we’re coming.’

Three grey stone buildings in the middle of the Östgöta plain, a few kilometres outside a sleepy Maspelösa. The buildings seem almost suffocated by the snow piled in drifts against the already inadequate windows. The thatched roofs are pressed down by the weight of all the white. There are lights in the building to the left. A newly built garage, with shrubs planted all round it, has been squeezed in between two large oaks.

Only one problem: Maspelösa never wakes up, Johan thinks.

A few farms, some detached houses built in the fifties, a few council houses scattered across the open landscape: one of those settlements on the plain that life seems to have left behind.

They stop, get out, knock.

From the building opposite comes the sound of mooing. Then the sound of something banging on metal. Börje turns round.

The low, crooked door opens.

A head almost entirely covered in hair peers out of the darkness inside.

‘And who the hell are you?’

The beard shaggy, seeming to cover the whole of his face. But his blue eyes are as sharp as his nose.

‘Johan Jakobsson and Börje Svärd, Linköping Police. Can we come in? I presume you’re Rickard Skoglöf.’

The man nods. ‘ID first.’

They hunt through their pockets, have to take off their gloves and undo their coats to find their ID.

‘Happy now?’ Börje asks.

Rickard Skoglöf gestures with one hand as he pushes the door open with the other.

‘We’re born with the gift. It arrives in our flesh the moment we arrive in this dimension.’ Rickard Skoglöf’s voice is as clear as ice.

Johan rubs his eyes and looks round the kitchen. Low ceiling. The draining-board full of dirty plates, pizza boxes. Pictures of Stonehenge on the walls, Old Norse symbols, rune-stones. And Skoglöf’s clothes: obviously home-made trousers of black-dyed canvas and an even blacker kaftan-like affair hanging loosely over a fat stomach.

‘Gift?’

Johan can hear how sceptical Börje sounds.

‘Yes, the power to see, to influence.’

‘Soothsaying?’

The house is cold. An old eighteenth-century farmhouse that Rickard Skoglöf has renovated himself: ‘Got it cheap, but it’s bloody draughty.’

‘Soothsaying is the word for it. But you have to be careful about using the power. It takes as much life as it gives.’

‘So why a website about your sooth?’

‘My soothsaying. In our culture we’ve lost track of our roots. But I have comrades.’

Rickard Skoglöf crouches down and goes into the next room. They follow him.

A worn sofa against one wall, and a huge computer screen, switched off, set up on a shiny desk with a glass top, two whirring hard drives on the floor, a modern black leather office chair behind the desk.

‘Comrades?’

‘Some people who are interested in soothsaying and in our Old Norse forebears.’

‘And you have meetings?’

‘A few times a year. Most of the time we communicate on discussion forums and by email.’

‘How many of you are there?’

Rickard Skoglöf sighs. He stops and looks at them. ‘If you want to carry on talking you’ll have to come out to the barn with me. I have to feed Sæhrimnir and the others.’

Cackling hens run to and fro in an even colder space with badly plastered walls. There is a pair of new cross-country skis leaning in one corner.

‘You like skiing?’ Johan asks.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘But you’ve got a new pair of skis.’

Rickard Skoglöf doesn’t reply, just carries on towards the animals.

‘Bloody hell, it’s below freezing in here,’ Börje says. ‘Your livestock could freeze to death.’

‘No chance,’ Rickard Skoglöf says as he scatters food for the hens from a bucket.

Two pens along one wall.

A fat black pig in one, a brown and white cow in the other. They are both eating, the pig grunting happily at the winter apples he has just been given.

‘If you think I’m going to give you the names of the comrades who usually come to our meetings, you’re mistaken. You’ll have to find them yourselves. But it won’t do you any good.’

‘How do you know that?’ Johan asks.

‘Only harmless kids and old folk with no lives of their own are interested in this sort of thing.’

‘What about you? Haven’t you got a life of your own?’

Rickard Skoglöf gestures towards the animals. ‘The farm and these beasts are probably more of a life than most people have.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I’ve got the gift,’ Rickard Skoglöf says.

‘So what is this gift, Rickard? In purely concrete terms?’ Börje is staring intently at the canvas-clad figure in front of them.

Rickard Skoglöf puts down the bucket of feed. When he looks up at them his face is contorted with derision. He waves the question away with his hand.

‘So the power of soothsaying gives and takes life,’ Johan says. ‘Is that why you make sacrifices?’

The look in Rickard Skoglöf’s eyes gets even more weary.

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘You think I’m the one who strung up Bengt Andersson in a tree. Not even that journalist who was here before you thought that.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘If I make sacrifices? Yes, I do. But not like you think.’

‘And what do we think?’

‘That I kill animals. And maybe people. But it’s the gesture that matters. The willingness to give. Time, labour. The unity of bodies.’

‘The unity of bodies?’

‘Yes, the act can be a sacrifice. If one is open.’

Like my wife and I do every third week? Johan thinks. Is that what you mean? Instead he asks, ‘And what were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’

‘You’ll have to ask my girlfriend,’ Rickard Skoglöf says. ‘Right, the animals will be okay for a while now. They can stand a bit of cold. They’re not as feeble as other creatures.’

When they come out into the yard a young woman is standing barefoot in the snow with her arms raised away from her body. The cold doesn’t seem to bother her, she’s wearing just pants and a vest, and she has her eyes closed, her head raised to the sky, her black hair a long shadow down the white skin of her back.

‘This is Valkyria,’ Rickard Skoglöf says. ‘Valkyria Karlsson. Morning meditation.’

Johan can see Börje losing his temper.

‘Valkyria,’ he yells. ‘Valkyria. Time to stop the mumbo-jumbo. We want to talk to you.’

‘Börje, for God’s sake.’

‘Oh, shout away,’ Rickard Skoglöf says. ‘It won’t help. She’ll be done in ten minutes. There’s no point trying to disturb her. We can wait in the kitchen.’

They walk past Valkyria.

Her brown eyes are open. But they see nothing. She’s millions of miles away, Johan thinks. Then he thinks about the act, of opening yourself to someone else, something else.

Valkyria Karlsson’s skin is pink with cold, her fingers somehow crystal clear. She is holding a cup of hot tea in front of her nose, inhaling the aroma.

Rickard Skoglöf is sitting at the table, grinning happily, evidently pleased that he is making things difficult for them.

‘What were you doing yesterday evening?’ Börje asks.

‘We went to the cinema,’ Rickard Skoglöf says.

Valkyria Karlsson puts down her cup.

‘The new Harry Potter,’ she says in a soft voice. ‘Entertaining nonsense.’

‘Did either of you know Bengt Andersson?’

Valkyria shakes her head, then looks at Rickard.

‘I’d never heard of him until I read about him in the paper. I have a gift. That’s all.’

‘What about last Wednesday evening? What were you doing then?’

‘We made a sacrifice.’

‘We opened ourselves at home,’ Valkyria whispers, and Johan looks at her breasts, heavy and light at the same time, breaking the law of gravity, floating under her vest.

‘So you don’t know of anyone in your circles who could have done this?’ Börje asks. ‘For heathen reasons, so to speak.’

Rickard Skoglöf laughs. ‘I think it’s time for you to leave now.’

23

The canteen of the ICA shop is pleasantly decorated, gently lit by an orange Bumling lamp. A smell of freshly brewed coffee permeates the room, while the almond tart is sticking to their teeth in a very pleasant way.

Rebecka Stenlundh is sitting opposite Malin and Zeke, on the other side of a grey laminate table.

In this light she looks older than she is, Malin thinks. Somehow the light and shadows emphasise her age, revealing almost invisible wrinkles. But everything she has been through has to show somewhere. No one escapes unblemished from that sort of experience.

‘This isn’t my shop,’ Rebecka says. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking. But the owner lets me do what I like. We’re the most profitable shop of this size in the whole of Sweden.’

‘Retail is detail,’ Zeke says in English.

‘Exactly,’ Rebecka agrees, and Malin looks down at the table.

Then Rebecka pauses.

You’re gathering your strength, Malin thinks. You’re taking a deep breath, in it goes, helping to prepare you to talk.

Then she starts to speak again: ‘I decided to leave everything to do with Mum and Dad and my brother Bengt behind. I decided I was bigger than that. Even if I hated my father in a lot of ways, I realised eventually, just after I turned twenty-two, that he couldn’t own me, that he had no right to my life. In those days I was hanging out with the wrong guys, I smoked, drank, sniffed glue, ate too much, all the while exercising so hard that my body could hardly take it. I dare say I would have started shooting up heroin if I hadn’t made that decision. I couldn’t be angry and scared and sad any longer. It would have killed me.’

‘You decided. Just like that?’ Malin is taken aback at how the words come out, almost angry, jealous.

Rebecka starts.

‘Sorry,’ Malin says. ‘I didn’t mean to sound aggressive.’

Rebecka clenches her jaw before going on. ‘I don’t think there’s any other way of doing it. I made up my mind, Officer. If you ask me, that’s the only way.’

‘And your adoptive parents?’ Zeke wonders.

‘I stopped seeing them. They were part of my old life.’

Wherever this case takes us, Malin thinks, it will be tied up with the warped logic of emotions; the sort of logic that makes someone torture another person and hang them up in a tree in the middle of a frozen plain.

Rebecka clenches her jaw again, then her face relaxes.

‘Unfair, I know. Of course it was. There was nothing wrong with them, but this was a matter of life and death, and I had to move on.’

Just like that, Malin thinks. What was it T.S. Eliot wrote?

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

‘Do you have family?’ Right question, Malin thinks. But I’m asking it for the wrong reason.

‘A son. A long time passed before I had a child. He’s eight now, he’s the reason I’m here. Have you got children?’

Malin nods. ‘A daughter.’

‘Then you know. Whatever happens, you want to be there for their sake.’

‘And the father?’

‘We’re divorced. He hit me once, by mistake really, I think, a hand flying out one night after a crayfish party, but that was enough.’

‘Did you have any contact with Bengt?’

‘With my brother? No, none at all.’

‘Did he ever try to contact you?’

‘Yes, he phoned once. But I hung up when I realised who it was. There was a before, and a now, and I was never, ever going to let them meet. Ridiculous, isn’t it?’

‘Not really,’ Malin says.

‘A week or so after he rang I had a call from some social worker. Maria, I think her name was. She asked me to talk to Bengt, even if I wouldn’t meet him. She told me how depressed he was, how lonely; she genuinely seemed to care, you know?’

‘So?’

‘I asked her never to call me again.’

‘One question, and it’s a harsh one,’ Malin says. ‘Did your father or Bengt ever abuse you sexually?’

Rebecka Stenlundh is remarkably calm.

‘No, nothing like that, ever. Sometimes I wonder if I’m suppressing something, but no, never.’

Then a long silence.

‘But what do I know?’

Zeke bites his lip. ‘Do you know if Bengt had any enemies, anything we ought to know?’

Rebecka Stenlundh shakes her head. ‘I saw the picture in the paper. It felt like everything printed there was about me, whether I liked it or not. You can’t escape, can you? Whatever you do, your past always catches up with you, don’t you think? It’s like you’re tethered to a post with a rope. You can move about, but you can’t get away.’

‘You seem to be managing very well,’ Malin says.

‘He was my brother. You should have heard his voice when he called. He sounded like the loneliest person on the planet. And I shut the door.’

A voice over the Tannoy: ‘Rebecka to the till, Rebecka to the till.’

‘What were you doing on Wednesday evening last week?’

‘I was with my son in Egypt. Hurghada.’

Hence the suntan, Malin thinks.