End of Summer

by Anders de la Motte

  She emerges at the end of the cowshed. She runs her hand over the wall and finds a metal box and a switch. She clicks it, and an uneven sequence of fluorescent lights flicker into life in the roof. The cold air in here still smells sweet from the cows. The floor and walls are made of whitewashed brick, and on both sides of the central gangway low walls divide the room into stalls. The double door leading to the yard, through which they brought her in, is also bolted and locked from the outside, and the windows are all nailed shut from the inside. The overlapping planks look solid, and would be impossible to shift without a sturdy crowbar. There’s one hanging in the workshop, right next to the bolt-cutters, but she thinks she knows a better way of getting out.

  At the far end of the shed is a sliding door that she and Mattias used to use when they were playing hide-and-seek, and which can only be opened from the inside. She starts to jog along the central gangway. The stalls she passes are all empty except for the largest one closest to the door. There’s something large and rectangular inside it, carefully covered by green tarpaulins. She guesses it’s a stack of boxes or something and hurries past, but when she reaches the door she turns back. She suddenly remembers what Isak said about the cowshed just before they split up.

  I found something there, something that worried me.

  She looks for a gap in the green canvas. She catches a glimpse of red metal, and loosens some of the bungee straps holding the tarpaulin in place and lifts it up.

  Underneath is an old red Volvo Amazon estate with dark rear windows. She realises immediately whose car it is. And all of a sudden she understands what’s going on.

  *

  Mattias isn’t answering his mobile. She isn’t really surprised. She wonders if he knows it was Patrik who set fire to her car and took the opportunity to ransack their rooms. Because that’s what must have happened, she realises that now. The fact that he just happened to be passing and recognised her burned-out car suddenly feels so extraordinarily far-fetched that she can’t understand why she didn’t see through it at once. They wanted to keep her and Isak there, and find out who he was, once and for all.

  The real question isn’t how much Mattias knows, but how much he wants to avoid finding out about. A lot, judging by the fact that his mobile is switched off.

  She washes her face in the kitchen sink. Lets her hair down and tries to rinse the grit and grease from it. She doesn’t bother to tie it up again. Her dress is soaked, filthy and torn to shreds, and on top of that she’s got nothing on her feet. She hunts through the utility room for more discarded clothes but there’s nothing left that will fit her, so she runs upstairs and opens her mum’s wardrobe and grabs the first thing she sees. A red dress that fits almost perfectly.

  She hurries back downstairs and takes the shotgun from its hiding place under the stairs. As she passes the hall mirror she can’t help stopping in surprise. She looks almost exactly like her mum. The loose hair, the clothes, but above all one other thing: the look of fury in her eyes.

  She hears noises from the yard and walks towards the front door. Opens it. Her dad is standing right outside, and stares at her as if he’s seen a ghost.

  ‘Where did they bury him?’ she says with hard-won calm.

  He goes on staring. He seems completely paralysed. She takes a step forward and touches his arm.

  ‘Tommy Rooth,’ she says. ‘Where did they bury him, Dad?’

  Chapter 65

  T

  he rain has arrived. Heavy drops pattering on the car roof, forcing the windscreen-wipers to work harder.

  It’s hard to see anything in the darkness and rain, but they’re almost there now. The wind giants are looming all around them, and up ahead in the little turning circle the cars are parked in a ring with their headlamps on. The dogs are barking in cages on the back of Patrik’s pick-up. Their noise keeps getting swallowed by rumbles of thunder.

  Dad hits the brakes and Veronica is out of the car before the wheels have stopped. Her dress is drenched after just five metres. The rain is tipping down, millions of streaks slashing at the world. The Strid brothers and Sören the grocer walk towards her but she jerks the shotgun up to her shoulder.

  ‘Out of the way!’ she yells.

  The men stare at her, then the gun, then back away. Behind them, in the centre of the light from the parked cars, she can see Uncle Harald and Patrik. Isak is sitting huddled up on the ground below them with his head bowed. Uncle Harald is holding a rifle, and appears to be loading a cartridge into the chamber.

  ‘Isak!’ she shouts, and they all turn in her direction.

  A flash of lightning, then a clap of thunder so close she can taste it. For a moment she’s convinced that Uncle Harald has fired, that she’s arrived too late, that Isak is dead. Then, to her relief, she sees him move. Uncle Harald and Patrik have stopped and are looking at her, and in an instant Isak is on his feet. In his hand he’s clutching a rock that he swings at Uncle Harald’s head at the same time as he tries to grab the rifle. She hears a cry and sees the rifle fly out of the circle of light. Then a flurry of bodies, arms and legs flailing wildly as the three men end up in a heap on the ground. Fists rising and falling, the sound of blows, groans and grunts of pain.

  She runs into the circle and points the shotgun at them. ‘Stop it!’ she cries. She hardly recognises her own voice. ‘STOP IT!’

  The tumult dies down. Uncle Harald is the first to get up. His shirt is filthy, there’s dirt on his face and blood running from a cut on his forehead, only to be washed away by the rain. He stares incredulously at her as if she were a ghost. And when he opens his mouth she realises that that’s exactly what she is. A ghost standing in the rain, wearing a dead woman’s dress and holding her gun.

  ‘M-Magdalena . . .’ Uncle Harald stammers. ‘How . . . ?’

  ‘Tommy Rooth,’ she says. ‘You killed him, didn’t you?’

  Uncle Harald goes on staring at her. His mouth opens and closes several times without him managing to get a word out.

  ‘All he had to do was confess. Tell us what he did with Billy. But Tommy just kept mocking us, said we’d never get anything out of him. That we could go to hell. Suddenly he just stopped breathing. That was never the intention, we’re not murderers.’

  ‘Yet you’re still thinking of doing it again.’ She nods towards Isak, who’s lying motionless on the ground.

  ‘He knows what we did to Tommy. He’s here to get revenge. We have to protect ourselves. We haven’t got a choice.’

  Blood is running into his eyes and he tries to wipe it away with his sleeve. His glassy stare changes and he suddenly looks even more confused.

  ‘I’ve already told you all this, Magdalena,’ he says. ‘At the home. When I visited you. Don’t you remember?’

  Veronica doesn’t hear her dad approaching, doesn’t have time to react when he rushes past her and punches Uncle Harald square in the face with his clenched fist.

  Uncle Harald falls to the ground and Dad stands astride him, grabs him by the collar and roars in his face.

  ‘You told her! You told Magdalena about Rooth, even though you promised not to. You killed her, Harald. Don’t you get that? You killed her!’

  Patrik has got to his feet and pulls her dad away. She turns the shotgun towards him, but Patrik has already let go. Her dad sinks to his knees in a puddle. Rain is running down his face, washing away the sound of his sobbing.

  She tries to make sense of what just happened. What it means. But before she has time to fit the pieces together she sees the other three men approaching out of the corner of her eye. She takes a few steps to the right so she can cover them all with the shotgun.

  ‘Stand still,’ she says. The men obey instantly. Uncle Harald slowly gets to his feet. His eyes have regained their usual sharpness.

  ‘Vera,’ he says drily, and spits out some blood from his split lip. ‘My beloved niece.’

  He straightens up and casts a contemptuous glance at her dad, who’s sitting hunched on
the ground, sobbing quietly.

  ‘Yes, I told her, Ebbe. Someone had to. Magdalena had the right to know that the monster who took her little lad was dead. That he wasn’t going to hurt anyone else. She’d been in that damn home for months and wasn’t showing any signs of getting better, so I figured it was time she knew.’

  ‘She was starting to get better,’ her dad mumbles. His voice is so weak that it’s all but impossible to hear what he’s saying. Even so, it fires an icicle straight into her heart.

  Uncle Harald shakes his head and looks at her. ‘Your father is weak, Vera. He plants roses and potters about in his garden. I do what needs to be done to protect the family.’

  ‘Yes, so I can see.’ She gestures towards Isak with the gun. He’s lying on his back, his face and clothes covered with blood and mud. He looks lifeless, but she can see his chest slowly rising and falling.

  Uncle Harald clears his throat and spits again.

  ‘He broke into the cowshed a month or so ago and found Rooth’s Volvo. He told us just before you showed up. Ebbe swore he’d got rid of that fucking car years ago, but instead it’s been sitting in there all the time. I should have known better.’ Uncle Harald shakes his head. ‘Thanks to you and Ebbe, Rooth junior here has figured out what happened to his father. And as usual I’m the one who has to clear up after the rest of you. Do what has to be done.’

  She tries in vain to think of a response. Her dad is still sitting with his head bowed. He’s always known what happened, that they killed Tommy Rooth.

  Uncle Harald straightens up, then walks off into the darkness. The rest of his gang look at each other, unsure of what to do. The rain has calmed down and is falling in a steady shower. Good rain, soft rain, harvest rain. The sort of rain that’s good for quenching rage.

  Uncle Harald comes back into the light. He’s holding his rifle in his hands.

  ‘The best thing for all of us is if Isak here disappears the same way as Tommy. I can’t think of any other solution. There’s an open shaft just below the ridge there. They’ll be filling it with cement for the foundations on Monday. That way he’ll end up lying pretty much next to his father.’ He nods towards the nearest wind giant, cocks the rifle and feeds a cartridge into the chamber. ‘Kind of appropriate, don’t you think? And within sight of the place where it all started. Like father, like son.’

  He takes a couple of steps closer to Isak. The heartbeat of the wind giant is suddenly audible. A low, pulsing rhythm. She doesn’t like that sound. Never has.

  ‘You’re forgetting something, uncle dearest,’ she says. She tries to mimic his sardonic tone of voice as she raises the shotgun. She releases the safety catch with her right thumb without taking her eye off the target, just as he taught her. ‘You’re not the only person with a gun.’

  Uncle Harald stops and stares at her. The look in his eyes is wary, slightly less self-assured than just now. He seems to be trying to work out if she’s serious. The distance between them is only five or six metres. It would be impossible to miss, even for someone who’s not used to firing a gun.

  She crooks her finger around the trigger. Her breathing is shallow, and she can feel her heartbeat through her entire body, mirroring the rhythm of the wind giants around them.

  Neither of them moves.

  ‘Go ahead and fire, then,’ he says. ‘Shoot me, because that’s the only way you’ll stop me.’

  Uncle Harald grins, raises his rifle and takes aim at Isak. He staggers backwards when she squeezes the trigger just as he taught her and shoots him in the middle of the chest.

  Chapter 66

  T

  he recoil isn’t as severe as Veronica was expecting. The blast from the gun also sounds odd, and there’s a cloud of white smoke coming from the barrel. She knows why, and hopes it’s enough, but when Uncle Harald doesn’t collapse and merely drops his rifle, she realises that her hopes have been in vain.

  His face and upper body are covered by a thin layer of white powder. He spits, coughs and rubs his eyes.

  ‘Salt!’ He lets out a loud laugh. Blinks hard and tries to focus on her, without succeeding. The whites of his eyes are blood red, they look terrible. ‘You shot me with one of Father’s homemade cartridges!’

  He spits out more salt crystals. Tears are streaming down his face, but he goes on laughing. His laughter gets louder, more shrill, more deranged.

  The other men are looking nervously at each other. Patrik mutters something. Uncle Harald turns towards him, he still doesn’t seem to be able to focus properly. Isak has come round and is laboriously trying to get up off the ground. His body doesn’t seem to want to obey him.

  ‘Well, what are you idiots waiting for? Grab the rifle and finish the job,’ Uncle Harald says. ‘I can’t see well enough to fire, so one of you will have to do it.’

  Veronica raises the shotgun again and takes aim at the men. None of them moves.

  ‘Shoot him, I said.’ Uncle Harald points at Isak, who has somehow managed to get to his knees. ‘We can’t let him go, you know that.’

  The men shuffle but still show no sign of stepping forward.

  ‘Don’t you understand that we’ll lose everything?’ Uncle Harald shrieks. ‘Everything we’ve built up round here. All the sacrifices, all our hard work will have been in vain. Our families will get dragged into the mud.’

  Veronica raises the shotgun a little higher and takes aim at Sören, who’s standing in the middle. She’s well aware that she only has one shot left.

  ‘You’re not frightened of a girl armed with a shotgun loaded with salt, are you?’ Uncle Harald bellows, but none of the men reacts. ‘Bloody idiots, I’ll do it myself.’ He blinks hard, then takes a few tentative steps. He seems to be scanning the ground for the dropped rifle.

  Suddenly Patrik walks over to him. He calmly bends down, picks up the rifle and puts it to his shoulder. He ignores the fact that Veronica is aiming the shotgun at him.

  ‘Good, Patrik,’ Uncle Harald says. ‘Finally, someone who understands. Someone who has the guts to do what needs doing.’

  Patrik looks like he’s about to say something, but the sound of an engine stops him. A police car, approaching at speed along the gravel track, followed by a second one. Their flashing lights refract off the rain, forming tiny sparks of lightning in the air.

  ‘Fire!’ Uncle Harald says, slapping Patrik on the shoulder. ‘Do it! He attacked you, you had no choice. Our word against hers. Four against one . . .’

  Patrik raises the rifle a bit more, looks at Uncle Harald, then at Isak, kneeling at his feet. Then, finally, at Veronica. She’s got her finger on the trigger, and is aiming at Patrik’s face. The rhythm of the wind giants gets louder, becoming a roar that echoes through her body.

  A siren starts to blare, and then is interrupted by a voice through a loudspeaker, a voice she recognises at once. Mattias.

  Patrik is still staring at her, but she doesn’t look away.

  ‘Fire, Patrik!’ Uncle Harald roars. ‘FIIIIRE!’

  The word turns into a gurgling scream when Patrik lowers the rifle and throws it away into the darkness.

  Chapter 67

  W

  hen the sun comes up she’s sitting in the rose garden with her dad. The ambulances have long since taken Isak and Uncle Harald away. Mattias and his officers have taken care of the rest of the men. That leaves just her and her dad, sitting close together in the little summerhouse with the Magdalena rose arching its branches above them.

  ‘When did you realise they’d murdered Tommy Rooth?’ she asks.

  ‘A week or so after he disappeared.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘Your uncle and I have known each other since we were young. I know how Harald thinks. He can never keep anything secret from me for long. He’s not a particularly bad man. He thought he was doing the right thing. One of the women who worked at the police station called him to let him know that Rooth was going to be released. They were waiting for him near his fa
rm. The rest you know.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the police and tell them what they’d done?’

  Her dad sighs. ‘Harald and your mum were very close. Magdalena was incredibly fragile, she’d already lost a child, and if her big brother were to end up in prison on top of that . . .’ He makes a resigned gesture. ‘So Harald and I came to an agreement. I kept his secret in return for him not telling Magdalena what happened to Tommy Rooth. Him asking me to take care of the car was his way of making sure I kept my word. It didn’t really bother me.’

  ‘But Uncle Harald broke his promise. And told Mum what he’d done a week before she was due to be discharged.’

  ‘Yes, apparently so. The way he saw it, he’d made amends for the family.’

  ‘But Mum didn’t agree. She realised her brother was a murderer. That he’d taken another person’s life for her sake.’

  She can see her mum in front of her. Filling the pockets of her winter coat with heavy stones, then slowly walking off. Feeling the cold of the ice and the water beneath it. Even so, there’s still something that doesn’t quite make sense.

  ‘So, after Mum . . . Why didn’t you go to the police then?’

  Her dad shrugs his shoulders. ‘By then there wasn’t really any point. Harald loved Magdalena as much as I did. Her death was a harsh punishment, and I couldn’t see any good reason to make things even worse. Besides, Harald had made me an accomplice.’

  ‘What about the Rooth family, didn’t you ever think about them? Nilla, and Isak and his sister, having to grow up without their dad. Never knowing what happened.’

  ‘Not a day passes without me thinking about them.’

  He bows his head. They sit in silence for a while. It’s stopped raining now, but water is still dripping from the leaves. One of the drops lands on her cheek. Her dad sits up and wipes it away with his finger.

  ‘My little girl . . .’ he says. ‘You’ve had so much to deal with.’

  She swallows a lump in her throat, leans her head against his shoulder. A gust of wind makes its way over the wall, making the windchime start to tinkle, and she shivers.