Gradually a picture began to emerge of two young women, each one at a fork in the road. Seja was one of them; the other had been a passing acquaintance. Seja talked about a bitterly cold December night at a bikers' club in the middle of nowhere. She had met the other woman briefly around midnight. They talked about travelling back into town together, but Seja decided to stay on. Deep inside she had had a bad feeling - at least that was how she remembered it now.
She stopped as if she were gathering strength.
Later there had been talk among her circle of acquaintances that a woman had been found dead in the forest around the club. It was in the paper. There were suspicious circumstances, but no one was ever caught. Some people said the woman had been raped; others that she was drunk and had passed out and hit her head on a rock. No one knew for sure.
'I pretended I wasn't really bothered. I remember saying to the boy who first told me - it was at a party - that I didn't know the woman who had died out there in the forest. And it was true. I convinced myself it had nothing to do with me.'
The police had contacted a number of people who had been at the club and issued an appeal for all those who were not on the list supplied
by the organisers to get in touch. Seja had never come forward.
Why not? Tell wanted to ask, but she pre-empted him. For the same reason she hadn't been able to tell him earlier about what she had heard and seen that night: she just wasn't sure. As long as she wasn't backed into a corner and forced to give an answer, she could avoid making a decision about her own reliability, or about the fact that she had done nothing to intervene.
Before she knew it the drama was over. The investigation had probably been put to one side due to lack of evidence, and life went on.
'I saw the way he looked at her, his expression. Like a mixture of rage and desire. I saw him watch her leave. And for some reason I noticed him and his friends leave just after she did. I noticed that she was on her own, that it was so bloody dark, and that gang of lads left just after her. I stood there in the yard for a long time, on my own. I couldn't bring myself to go back inside.'
The tears began to pour down her cheeks, and she made no effort to wipe them away.
'I know it sounds ridiculous, but I could feel evil in the air, Christian. I sensed something, but I didn't know what it was or what I could do to prevent it. So I just stood there, and I remember it started to snow and I was absolutely frozen. I could hear the band playing upstairs, song after song, and nobody else came out while I was standing there, nobody apart from those three. She should have made it up to the main road during that time. Do you understand what I'm saying?'
He nodded. He understood. Tentatively he reached out and wiped the tears from her cheek. She jerked back as he touched her, gazing at him with her tear-drenched eyes. He thought she was looking at him with an air of surprise. As if she had suddenly returned to reality and was wondering what he was doing there, with part of her life story on his knee. It was obvious she wasn't proud of it.
'Whatever happened that night, you couldn't have prevented it,' he said gently. 'Even if you believe now that you felt something, you have to realise that's just the way it seems after the event. How could you have known? And even if you had known, what could you have done? You said it yourself - you were seventeen, eighteen years old, barely an adult. When a crime is committed it isn't unusual for feelings of guilt to spill over on to people who just happened to be nearby, but it's wrong. You have nothing to feel guilty about. All the blame lies with those three men. You did say there were three of them, didn't you?'
As he spoke he was feverishly trying to link everything together. Even if he suspected he knew the answer, he had to ask the questions.
'That's just it: I remember everything, down to the last detail. One of them was furious. He wanted to get going and was moaning at the others to get a move on.'
She let her hands drop to her knees, as she finally told him what had been torturing her over the past few days.
'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.'
* * *
Chapter 49
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 care
fully 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.
* * *
Chapter 50
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 likeDon'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.
'It's OK,' he said, waving vaguely in the direction of the door. Like another Godfather, even if a patriarch was the last thing he felt like, lying there in his bed. He didn't even understand why he was still in bed, a
s if a washed-out sheet stamped with the county logo could take the sting out of the sordid reason why he had been brought in.
What he remembered after cutting himself was the crap between the floor tiles, the yellow layers of shed skin smeared right next to his face as he lay in the corner thinking about the expressionThe life seeped out of him. It was like falling asleep: your body grows heavier and lighter at the same time. He was sucked into a vortex of vivid colours, spinning faster and faster until he lost all sense of time and space and it became fascinating and solemn before everything went black and he just had time to think, I'm dying now.
According to the doctor, the association with sleep was likely to have been correct: he had presumably fallen asleep there on the floor. Since the blood in the wounds had coagulated, his life had never been in any danger.
He wished there was a way to stop Solveig and Caroline finding out that he hadn't even managed to create the tiniest risk of dying, despite the fact that that had been the whole point of the project. Instead he had woken up in an ambulance with its siren wailing, a male nurse on one side of him and Solveig on the other.
Oddly enough, he couldn't remember what he had been thinking beforehand, whether he had really wanted to die or not. Therefore he felt neither relief nor disappointment, just a comprehensive indifference. In order to avoid showing any form of reaction, he had kept his eyes closed and allowed his hand to be squeezed by his mother's cold, damp one.
He heard a sound from the corridor before the door opened with a sigh.
'Hi there.'
He had subconsciously focused on the door ever since the nurse told him he had a visitor, so it wasn't the sound of her voice that surprised him. Nor was it the way she looked, even though Caroline's appearance had transformed once more over the past few days. It was the way she was looking at him. He noticed that she was wearing a lot of eye make-up - blue and green and sparkly. Her lipstick smelled of fat and stickiness, like sweets.
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