The Farm (16 page)

‘The police?’

‘It’s so hard to be sure.’

I added:

‘My dad’s flying over. He changed his mind. His plane lands very soon.’

‘Will he come here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure you want me to leave?’

‘She won’t talk with you in the apartment. Not freely, not like she has been.’

Mark considered:

‘All right. I’ll go. But here’s what I’ll do. I’ll sit in the coffee shop round the corner. I can read, do some work. I’m two minutes away. You call me when anything changes.’

Mark opened the door:

‘Get this right.’

I expected to find my mum eavesdropping. But the hallway was empty. I returned upstairs to find her at the window where I joined her. She took hold of my hand, pronouncing his name as though trying the sound for the first time:

‘Mark.’

And then, as though the idea had just popped into her head:

‘Why don’t you talk for a bit?’

Unsure of my emotions, I squeezed her hand. She understood, because she responded:

‘I remember one holiday we spent on the south coast. You were very young. Six years old. The weather was hot. There was a blue sky. Driving to the beach at Littlehampton, we were certain it was going to be a perfect day. When we arrived, we discovered a bitter sea wind. Rather than give up, we took refuge in a sand dune, a sheltered dimple at the back of the beach. As long as the three of us remained completely flat we couldn’t feel the wind. The sun was warm, and the sand too. We lay there for a long time, dozing, sunbathing. In the end I said, “We can’t stay here forever,” and you looked at me and asked, “Why not?”’

I said:

‘Mum, we can talk about my life another time.’

My mum’s voice was as sad as I’d heard it all day:

‘Not another time, today. When I finish, once we’ve gone to the police, I want you to talk. I want to listen. We used to tell each other everything.’

‘We will again.’

‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘We’ll be close again?’

‘We’ll be close again.’

My mum asked:

‘Ready to hear the rest?’

‘I’m ready.’

We all make mistakes. Some we can forgive. Some we can’t. I made one unforgivable lapse of judgment during this summer. For a brief moment I doubted my own conviction that Mia was in danger.

Once a week, I’d cycle down to the beach – not the tourist beach, a beach further north. It was rugged, with dunes and clumps of bracken backed by deep forests, not a holiday beach. No tourists ever came. I’d take my regular run along the sand. One evening I’d been running for about thirty minutes and I was about to turn back when I saw movement up ahead in the forest. It was bright white, like the sail of a small ship passing among the trunks of pine trees. Normally these beaches and forests were empty. Emerging from among the trees, Mia stepped out onto the beach, dressed like a bride with flowers in her hair and flowers in her hands. She was wearing a midsommar dress, ready to dance around the maypole. I hid behind a bracken bush to see what she was going to do next. She continued up the beach until she reached an abandoned lighthouse. She hung her flowers on the door and went inside.

It was as if I’d witnessed a ghost story except the girl was real and the footprints clear in the sand. Mia was waiting for someone. The flowers were a signal to an observer that she was inside the lighthouse. I was determined to see who was going to meet Mia. The longer I waited the more confused I became, and part of me wondered if the other person had seen me. Maybe they were hiding in the forest and wouldn’t appear until I was gone. After almost an hour I questioned myself. Clearly Mia was not distressed. She’d walked to this lighthouse freely, out of her own volition. I was curious but I was also cold. Afraid I’d fall ill before the town’s midsommar festival, I decided to leave.

I’ll never forgive myself for that lapse in judgment. It’s my belief that the man who eventually arrived was Mia’s killer.

• • •

A
LTHOUGH TEMPTED TO ASK FOR
more information, I sensed that my mum was no longer avoiding specifics but building towards an explanation of the events around and including Mia’s murder. She hadn’t sat down and showed no signs of being willing to do so. With the satchel still hanging around her shoulder, she opened the bag, pulling out a midsommar invitation.

Each year the town organises two separate midsommar celebrations, one for tourists holidaying in the area and a more prestigious celebration exclusively for residents. This is an open invitation to the first party, handed out on the beaches and at the hotels. Though it’s decorated with images of young children dancing round the maypole, flowers in their golden hair, promising a festival pure of heart, it’s a moneymaking exercise. The festivities are executed on the cheap. How do I know? I worked there. Mia stopped by the farm and told me about the opportunity of paid work. She must have known we were short of money. She was trying to help us. I contacted the organisers, and they gave me a job in the beer and schnapps tent.

On the day of the party I arrived at the fields, owned by Håkan, early in the morning, imagining a team of people motivated to host a great event. A responsibility was on our shoulders. This festival is about a love of our land, dating back to a celebration of harvests, expressing our deep affection for Sweden itself. What I witnessed that day was depressing. The white canvas tent where food was served was clammy and old. There were bins everywhere. There were hand-painted signs bossing people about. Don’t do that. You must do this. A long line of plastic portable toilets was more prominent than the maypole itself. The price of a ticket was inclusive of food and non-alcoholic drink. When you consider it’s only two hundred krona, or about twenty pounds, that seems reasonable. However, the food is prepared in bulk with a clear cost-cutting strategy. You recall how Håkan asked me to bring potato salad to his party. I saw first-hand how lowly the potato salad was considered, prepared in buckets, slopped out using giant ladles, a food fit for tourists. That’s why Håkan had asked me to bring it to his party, tourist-grade food, because that’s how he saw me, a tourist in Sweden.

In the alcohol tent we were serving beer and spirits with more staff than the entire food tent, where the queues would stretch out for hundreds of metres. That was a deliberate tactic to stop people coming back for second helpings. Needless to say, the men in particular quickly turned to the beer tent. We were full from the beginning. No matter what I thought of the setup, people were having fun. The weather was warm and the guests were inclined to have a good time.

During my lunch break, I ventured to the maypole to watch the midsommar performance. Students dressed in traditional costume were dancing. While I was watching, someone tapped me on the shoulder and I turned to see Mia, not dressed in white with flowers in her hair, as she had been on the beach, but holding a plastic refuse bag, picking up rubbish. She told me she’d specifically requested the job since she had no desire to dress up and be stared at. Even at the time that struck me as a disturbing comment. Why was this young woman so fearful of being watched? Mia told me about last year’s Santa Lucia festival, the celebration of light on the darkest day of the year. The church decided to stage a specially commissioned play about the process of choosing the right girl to take on the role of Santa Lucia – the saint with candles in her hair. In this fictional play, there was the character of a bigoted choirmaster who selects the girl based on a stereotypical model of Swedish beauty. The girl he selects is a bully, but she’s beautiful and blonde. The character Mia played was overlooked because she was black, even though she was the most pure of heart. During the ceremony, the bully girl at the front of the procession stumbles and her hair catches on fire because she uses so much hairspray. Mia’s character puts out the flames, risking her own safety. It sounded like a peculiar play to me. Even more bizarre, after this play, about a fake Santa Lucia procession, they proceeded with the real Santa Lucia procession in which Mia was given the lead. Mia said the whole affair was excruciating. Since that embarrassment she’d vowed never to perform in front of an audience again.

During our conversation Mia reacted powerfully to the sight of someone behind me. I turned around and saw Håkan marching into the food tent. Mia ran after him. I followed and discovered, inside the tent, a great commotion. Håkan had a young man by the scruff of the neck, a handsome man in his early twenties, with long blond hair and a stud in his ear. Though the young man was tall and athletic, physically he was no match for Håkan, who pressed him up against the canvas, angrily accusing him of messing about with his daughter. Mia ran forward, grabbing Håkan’s arm and telling him that she didn’t even know this man. Håkan wasn’t convinced, wanting an answer from the young man, who looked at Mia and started to laugh, saying if Håkan was talking about this girl he was crazy, because he didn’t like black girls. In fact, the young man used an inexcusable racial slur which I will not repeat. Everyone in that tent must have despised him for it except for one person, Håkan, because he immediately calmed down, realising this young man was a racist. Whatever information Håkan had garnered from his spies was wrong. He visibly relaxed. As I’ve already said to you, nothing’s more important to him than the concept of ownership. Instead of rebuking this young man for the ugliness of his remark Håkan apologised for falsely accusing him.

Mia was upset by this public confrontation. She ran out of the tent, dropping her bag of rubbish. I walked up to Håkan and suggested that he chase after her. Håkan stared at me with such hatred. He told me to mind my own business. As he passed me in that crowd, keeping his arms by his side, he clenched one hand into a fist and pressed it hard against my cunt, pushing his knuckles through my cotton dress, causing me to gasp, before moving off as if the gesture had been an accident. If I screamed he’d deny it. He’d call me a liar. Or he’d say the tent was crowded and he’d merely brushed past me. Back in the beer tent, I could still feel his knuckles on me as if I were made of dough and their impression would last forever.

• • •

I
WONDERED IF MY MUM
had used that word – cunt – in order that I might feel some of the shock she’d felt, simulating the lasting impression his knuckles had made on her. If so, she’d succeeded, since I’d never heard her say it before. Was there a secondary calculation? Perhaps she’d thought I’d become too comfortable. After the kindness and intimacy we’d just shared, she was warning me not to expect any protection from the truth, reminding me that, according to her, we were dealing with violence and darkness that she’d expose without censoring.

From her journal she pulled out a second invitation, expensively produced, placing the two contrasting invitations side by side on the table so that I might examine them.

This is the invitation to the exclusive second midsommar party. I don’t need to point out the difference in quality. Notice my handwritten name in elegant black calligraphy. They’ve included my middle name – Elin – but not Chris’s middle name, strange because how did they obtain that information and why the inconsistency? I’d never shared it with anyone. It’s not a secret, but it can’t have been a thoughtless slip. It can only be interpreted as an implicit threat that they can unearth private information about me. This was Håkan’s way of telling me that the investigative process cut both ways and if I was coming up against him I’d better be ready for the fight of my life.

• • •

I
COULDN’T UNDERSTAND THE NATURE
of the threat:

‘Mum, what’s there to find out about you?’

They could find out about Freja! If they did I’d be ruined. Those rumours had forced me from my home before. In the eyes of my parents I’d killed my best friend. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. Håkan would whisper those stories to his wife over dinner, certain she’d whisper it to her friends over coffee. Soon there’d be a hundred people whispering at the same time. There’d be looks and glances. I couldn’t live among those lies, not again, anything except those lies. I’d try to be strong, I’d try to ignore them, but in the end, you can’t shut out the world. I’d have no choice but to sell our farm.

Until those stories about Freja were uncovered my investigation would continue. I would not live in fear, and this midsommar party offered an opportunity to observe the community interacting. Though I expected the celebrations to be cautious at first, soon the drink would flow, tongues would loosen, indiscretions would surface, and I’d be ready to take note of what happened next. Unlike my stumbling appearance at Håkan’s summer grill, where I was concerned with how I was being perceived, this time round I’d be the observer. I wouldn’t waste a thought on my own reputation. I couldn’t care less whether they liked me or not. My objective was to see which men latched on to Mia.

I promised not to waste time on description unless it was necessary. If I tell you that the sky threatened with a storm it will help you understand why that day was the most disturbing midsommar of my life. Any minute I expected the heavens to open, and consequently, there was a sense of apprehension. Moreover, in the hearts of many attending, there was a lingering feeling of resentment. The previous day the tourist party had been gifted the most perfect summer weather, splendid sun and bright blue skies. Revellers had drunk beer until late in the evening and dozed on the grass. On this day there was a chill in the air and bursts of blustery wind. Every element that the organisers could control was superior except the weather, a fact that fouled the mood.