The hammering in her chest is almost painful, and before she gets to grips with the lid she has to stop and rest her hands on her knees for a few moments to quell a wave of nausea. When she straightens up again she spots something on the ground beside the concrete base. The remains of a sturdy padlock, presumably originally used to fasten the two eyes on top of the chest. She picks it up. The lock has been severed cleanly, which would have required a serious pair of bolt-cutters. The cut surface is as rusty as the rest of the lock, though, so it must have been lying on the ground for years.
She stands up, takes some deep breaths, then grabs the handle and tries to lift the lid. It’s heavy, at least ten centimetres thick, but after a couple of attempts the lid starts to move, and swings open on dry, creaking hinges.
The chest is almost empty, which makes her relax a little. The inside is lined with wood. Along one side there’s a partition and a shelf. On the shelf is a aerosol can that she recognises, Skyttens gun-oil.
She understands at once what that means. This was where Rooth and Sailor stored the guns they used for poaching. Rifles with silencers that they didn’t have licences for, and which they didn’t dare keep at home.
There’s something glinting at the bottom of the chest. A brass cartridge stuck between the planks lining the base. She leans over the side and reaches one arm down as far as she can. She manages to pull the cartridge out, along with one of the planks next to it.
There’s another compartment underneath. She can make out something dark and rectangular, and leans over a bit further. Her feet are dangling in the air and for a moment she almost falls head first into the chest. But she regains her balance, moves more of the planks out of the way and reaches down for the object. A green tin box, about the size of a thick book. She snatches at it, then pushes herself up out of the chest.
The box is light and when she turns it over she discovers that it’s unlocked. She opens it. Empty, as she had already feared. She’s so frustrated that she almost throws it into the bushes. Then she discovers that there’s something stuck in the bottom of the box. A small scrap of paper which she carefully teases out. It’s been folded double, and resembles a triangular pocket. When she tries to open it she sees that there’s something stuck inside it. Something so fine and so pale that it’s almost invisible, but it’s enough to drive open the crack in the ice inside her chest.
Three short strands of blond hair.
Chapter 41
I
t’s almost seven o’clock in the evening by the time she gets back to the logging track where she left the car. Her clothes and shoes are still damp and stink of the mine water, but the climb out of the valley and the hike back through the forest have warmed her up.
She’s holding the box in a way she imagines might not destroy any potential fingerprints, and she’s so immersed in thought that she doesn’t see the other vehicle before she’s almost reached it. A green pick-up with the Aronsson Farming logo on it.
The driver is leaning against her bonnet. Aviator sunglasses, a green trucker’s cap, dark workman’s trousers. A flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
He’s got a mobile phone pressed to his ear as he turns towards her when she emerges from the forest. ‘She’s just shown up. I’ll call you back,’ she hears him say before he ends the call.
It’s Patrik, the guy she passed yesterday on her way to the farm. Patrik Brink, she remembers now. The son of Uncle Harald’s foreman, as well as Cecilia’s cousin.
The memory she tried to suppress before bubbles up to the surface. It’s 1986, and she’s about to turn sixteen. Mum’s been dead three years, Abba have been disbanded for the same length of time, and Mattias lives in Stockholm. A party in someone’s house. The lights are out, the air is thick with expectation and the CD player is stuck on ‘Take My Breath Away’. The tongue inside her mouth tastes of tobacco and beer. A hand fumbles under her top, unbuttons her fly. She hurriedly suppresses the rest of the memory.
Patrik Brink belonged to the cool gang in those days. The guys with driving licences whose lives had probably already reached their high point, somewhere between sixteen and twenty. He’s put on ten kilos of what looks like mostly muscle, and his moustache has been replaced by a neat goatee, but apart from that he looks much the same. His self-confidence seems undiminished and he has a weather-beaten look that isn’t altogether unattractive. Maybe he’s one of the few whose star has continued to rise, in spite of everything. He takes off the sunglasses and grins at her.
‘What the hell have you been up to, Vera?’
She sees her reflection in one of the car windows and realises that it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Her clothes are stained with clinker, blood and mud. Her face is streaked and filthy, her hair hanging in dank clumps.
‘I fell over,’ she says.
‘Where? And what the fuck are you doing out here anyway?’
She shrugs her shoulders. Skips the first question and moves straight on to the second. ‘I was looking for an old den we had when I was little. But I got lost.’
Patrik looks at her suspiciously, unless he just thinks she’s a bit weird.
‘Did you find it? The den?’
‘Mm.’ She’s already bored with the conversation, and feels in her trouser pocket for the car key as she turns towards the door.
‘What’s that?’ He nods towards the tin box.
‘Just something I found.’
‘In the den?’
She pulls the key out, unlocks the door and quickly puts the box down in the passenger footwell. When she turns round he’s moved, and is standing on the other side of the open door, far too close. She’s seen that smile on his face before. The look in his eyes too.
‘Everyone’s looking for you, Vera. People are worried.’
‘My uncle, you mean. I presume that’s who you were talking to on the phone?’
He pulls a face which neither confirms nor denies what she said. Then he smiles again.
‘How long have you been working for him?’ she says, mostly to wipe the grin off his face.
‘Off and on since I was fifteen. With breaks for national service and agricultural college. He paid for everything while I was a student, he’s my mentor, I took over as foreman when Dad retired. But you know all that already.’
Both this claim and his tone of voice annoy her. As if Patrik Brink is so incredibly important that she’s bound to have heard all about him six hundred kilometres away. She hasn’t spared him a single thought for years.
‘So you do whatever he says, just like that? Following orders.’ She finds herself instinctively mimicking his tone of voice. It works better than she would have imagined.
‘I’m Harald’s foreman, not some fucking dogsbody. Aronsson Farming wouldn’t last a day without me.’
‘Really? I wonder if Uncle Harald agrees with you about that.’
Patrik leans closer. The car door is between them, but his proximity still feels invasive. He looks away from her eyes, down her body. Then he looks back up again.
‘You haven’t changed, Vera.’ His self-confidence is back. ‘Just as pretty as before, but with a few more curves. More experienced than last time. You remember Jocke’s party, don’t you?’
She feels a sudden urge to grab the door and slam it into his chest, then yank him by the hair while he’s gasping for air and beat his head against the doorframe until that smug smile disappears. She knows she shouldn’t think like that, slightly-too-tall Bengt is right when he says that sort of anger never leads to anything good. So instead she shrugs, slips into the driver’s seat and starts the car.
‘The only thing I remember about that is that you’ve got a tiny fucking cock,’ she says before slamming the door on him.
*
Exhaustion catches up with her in the car on the way home and she opens the window so the breeze will help keep her awake. Her body is protesting against its exertions and the adrenalin rush earlier, and she knows she has to fight against it
. Even so, she can feel her thoughts start to wander, and her head fills with drifting fog, the same colour as the dusk light outside the car.
Her eyelids droop, then her head, and even though she’s aware of what’s happening on some level, she can’t stop it. The car swerves across the road and hits the left-hand verge. The tyres make a crunching sound in warning as they roll across the gravel on the hard shoulder. But in her head ‘Take My Breath Away’ is playing, and Mum’s dead, Billy’s missing and Mattias has abandoned her. The car crosses the road again, sliding off onto the other hard shoulder, and weirdly enough she watches it happen, even though her eyes are almost closed. She realises she’s about to drive into the steep ditch and prepares herself for the impact without doing anything to stop it.
Something appears in front of the car. Two glinting dots reflecting the light of the headlamps. Eyes staring at the car as it rushes towards them.
And suddenly her ability to react kicks into action. Her foot hits the brake so hard that her joints creak, her hands spin the wheel like mad and she manages to stop the car leaving the road at the last moment. The brakes shriek, accompanied by the squeal of the tyres and the crunch of tarmac. The steering wheel judders, then everything is quiet and still.
She sits for a while with her heart racing, her arms shaking. A smell of rubber and warm asbestos is coming through the open window, turning her stomach. She swallows hard and opens the door, then gets out to see what kind of animal she hit. In the field to the right of the car three wind turbines stand out against the sky, winking at her with their red eyes. The blades are turning slowly in the weak evening breeze, making a dull, pulsating sound.
Her stomach lurches again. She leans on the bonnet, then slowly walks round to the front of the car, preparing herself for the worst. She’s seen accidents like this before. She recalls Uncle Harald muttering about sissies who didn’t have the guts to kill injured animals and left them screaming to die in agony. She knows that sound. Desperate, terrified, almost human.
But the only sound as she moves round the car are the crickets and the heartbeat of the wind giants. The headlights are both intact, and there’s no blood or fur, or any dents in the bodywork. Nor any blood on the tarmac around the car. She stumbles away and throws up into the ditch.
Chapter 42
I
t’s starting to get dark by the time she pulls into the farmyard. The lights are on inside the house, and there are two cars parked next to Dad’s. One of them is Mattias’s, the other a big, shiny Land Rover. She hesitates for a few moments, then decides not to take the tin inside with her.
When she cautiously opens the front door she hears a number of voices that she manages to identify fairly easily. Apart from Dad she can hear Mattias, Cecilia and their three girls. Uncle Harald, his wife Tess.
She creeps through the house to the utility room, where she washes off the worst of the blood and dirt in the large sink. She pulls her hair up into a ponytail. She finds a stack of old clothes in the far cupboard. Some jogging bottoms which must once have been hers, and one of Mattias’s tops, far too big but at least it covers the scar on her arm. She pulls the clothes on, then checks her reflection in the window before she steels herself to go in and meet the others.
They’re sitting in the dining room, and all of them seem pleased to see her, even though she’s late. Mattias and the girls seem genuinely happy, but Cecilia’s delight is as fake as her own.
Tess and Uncle Harald have one son, Timothy. The last time Veronica saw him he was tiny. Now he’s five or six. He seems shy, wants to climb onto his dad’s lap and hide his face from her. Uncle Harald holds him gently, as if he were a baby bird. His face glows with pride and even if the boy has dark hair and looks more like his Thai mother, Veronica finds herself thinking of Billy. She glances at her father, and can see from his face that she isn’t alone in that. Especially when Tess calls the boy Timmy.
Uncle Harald is the same as usual, just a bit greyer and maybe a little heavier. Her grandfather’s sharp nose and thick eyebrows are still very prominent. His eyes haven’t changed. Hard, watchful. Except when they look at Timothy, when they soften and almost make him look like a different person.
‘Now say hello to your cousin Vera,’ he says, winking at her over the boy’s head. ‘She’s been out having an adventure today, you know. She’s been all over the place. Even underground, by the sound of it.’
*
Over dinner Veronica tries to make eye contact with Mattias. But he’s fully occupied playing the role of good husband, father and son.
She studies her brother, trying to figure out what’s going on with him and Cecilia. If they’re just pretending for the children’s sake. If that’s true, then they’re succeeding pretty well. She even spots Mattias holding Cecilia’s hand at one point, a gesture that surprises her almost as much as Uncle Harald being such a proud father. But what surprises her most about dinner is that it’s actually rather pleasant. They’re all talking at the same time, filling the usually quiet room with chatter and laughter. Even Dad looks more cheerful, bustling between the big dining table and the kitchen to fetch more wine and refill the dishes. He smiles modestly when everyone praises his cooking effusively. Not even Uncle Harald’s predictable anecdote about America bores her. Maybe it’s something to do with the wine, but for a short while everything feels the way it should. Almost normal. Then she finds herself thinking about the tin box out in the car. The folded piece of paper and the strands of blond hair inside it.
Timothy thaws out during the meal, and even sits on her lap when she reads a story from one of the dog-eared Disney annuals in the bookcase. His chubby little hands are sticky from the sweets his mother keeps giving him, even though he had a double helping of dessert. When he leans his head back against her chest she can’t help smelling his hair, inhaling the sweet scent small children have, which makes the ice in her chest start to creak and rumble again. The boy reaches out a chubby finger to point at one of the pictures in the book. A character with red fur and a cunning smile on its lips.
‘A fox,’ the boy says. ‘Daddy shoots foxes. Don’t you?’
Uncle Harald turns to them and pats the boy on the head.
‘Absolutely. All hunters shoot foxes whenever they get the chance, Tim.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there’s only room for one hunter in the forest.’ He winks at Veronica over his cognac glass as if to let her know that he’s joking. For some reason she isn’t entirely sure about that.
*
When it’s time for everyone to leave she goes out into the yard with them. It’s almost eleven o’clock, the youngest children have fallen asleep and need to be carried out. She’s drunk three cups of coffee and finds herself in that odd state when her body is utterly exhausted but her brain is wide awake.
When they’re outside she finally manages to get Mattias on his own. ‘I’ve got something I want to show you,’ she whispers. ‘Something I found up in the forest. I think it could be to do with Billy.’
‘What?’ His voice is wary, tense.
Before she has time to say more, Uncle Harald appears out of nowhere.
‘It’s good to have you back home, Vera,’ he says, and sounds as if he means it. ‘It’s nice to have the whole family together.’
She nods, unsure of how to reply.
‘No one can manage without family. Not in the long run. What do you say, Mattias?’
He slaps Mattias on the back and she notices a slightly uncomfortable look in her brother’s eyes.
‘By the way, have you had a chance to talk to Ebbe? There’s no funny business. He just needs to sign, and we’ll do the rest.’
‘Sign what?’ she says, a little too quickly.
Several seconds of silence follow. Neither of the men seems to want to say anything.
‘What does Dad have to sign?’ she repeats.
Before either of them can speak, Tess blows the car horn.
‘Time to go,’ Un
cle Harald says. ‘Like I said, good to see you, Vera. Hope it won’t be so long until next time.’ He turns to Mattias and slaps him on the back again. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow. And don’t forget to talk to your dad.’
‘What was all that about?’ she says as they wave Uncle Harald off.
‘He wants to build more wind turbines. Twice as tall. Replace the old ones out there.’ Mattias gestures towards the darkness on the far side of the house. ‘Dad needs to sign to say he agrees to their construction.’
‘But surely he doesn’t? Those turbines will block the view from the back of the house. And there’ll be no way of escaping the noise anywhere in the garden.’
Mattias shrugs.
‘Yes, it’ll be a nuisance for you to have to put up with that when you come home once every five years.’
He doesn’t sound aggressive, just matter-of-fact, and possibly a little drunk. It still makes her sad, though.
‘Are you coming, Mattias?’ Cecilia calls from the car.
‘I need to go.’ He seems remorseful now, as if he’s realised he went too far. ‘Pop into the station tomorrow, around nine, and we’ll talk more then.’
She nods. She stands and watches the car drive off, and wonders about packing her things and setting off in her car like she’d planned, leaving all this behind. She quickly dismisses the idea. She needs to show Mattias the tin box, so he can help her piece the puzzle together. She lights a cigarette and smokes it in silence.
Somewhere far off in the darkness the solitary nightingale is singing.
Chapter 43
V
eronica wakes up because she’s cold. The window is open and the nocturnal damp has crept into the bedroom. She gets out of bed and closes it. Her body feels battered and bruised and her hands ache. Her knuckles and fingers are still black with ingrained dirt from the mine. The cut above her eye stings. She’s slept a deep and dreamless sleep, but still doesn’t feel rested.
Outside, the garden is almost still. There’s a faint breeze making the trees sway slightly, a southerly breeze. Still no sign of autumn, even though August will soon be over.
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