She and Steph are the polar opposites of each other in many ways. Steph is open and extrovert, she’s built up her own business from scratch. Laura took over her father’s company. Handed everything on a plate, as her mother points out on a regular basis.
Steph must have felt Laura’s eyes on her; she looks in her direction and nods meaningfully. Laura gets the message. Pull yourself together and give the guy a chance.
She sighs and turns back to Niklas. Tries to avoid fixating on the stain on his tie.
‘Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.’
Niklas blushes.
‘I was just wondering if you worked in investment too?’
‘No, my speciality is risk management. Mainly the soft sector.’
Niklas looks puzzled, and she realises she needs to expand on her answer.
‘We assess people – to see if they’re suitable to be taken on, or promoted. You might have heard of screening?’
‘You mean you find out if they have a criminal record, that kind of thing?’
She can hear from his tone of voice that he doesn’t understand, which is hardly surprising. Her area is narrow, to say the least.
‘That’s just a small part of what we do. We aim to form a more comprehensive picture of the person. Look into their finances, family relationships, talk to their former teachers, employers, colleagues. We carry out over a hundred different checks, and sometimes we even conduct in-depth interviews.’
She doesn’t mention that this is in fact her own area of expertise; no point in scaring him unnecessarily. She’s already worked out most things about Niklas – mainly that she has absolutely no intention of seeing him again, whatever Steph says.
‘Who are your clients?’
A good question, she has to give him that. If this were an interview she would have made a little squiggle in the margin of her assessment form to indicate that he was brighter than he looked.
‘Usually recruitment firms, but also companies, agencies or government bodies that are considering internal promotion to the leadership team or other key posts. Sometimes it’s investors who want to know who they’re dealing with.’
‘Like Stephanie?’
‘Exactly.’
Just as Laura is about to return the favour and ask Niklas about his job, the alpha male opposite breaks into their conversation. He must be fifty, and she doesn’t need to look at his place card to know his name.
‘Did you say you worked as a head-hunter?’
He already has the attention of everyone around the table, which means they are now focused on her.
‘No,’ Laura says curtly, because she already knows where he’s going with this.
However, he’s not so easily dismissed.
‘I’m actually looking for a new challenge.’
Laura shakes her head. ‘As I said, that’s not what I do.’
He’s not listening. ‘I usually increase turnover by at least ten percent in the first twelve months,’ he informs her. ‘There was an article about me in Industry Today the other week – did you see it?’
Laura demonstratively turns to Niklas, but the alpha male still doesn’t get it.
‘The head-hunters call me once a week, if not more often,’ he boasts. ‘You wouldn’t believe the salary they offer – but I need the right kind of challenge. What company did you say you worked for, Lena?’
Steph intervenes before Laura bites his head off.
‘Laura runs her own business, Tobias. She assesses people like you, searches out their weaknesses. The skeletons in your closet. You need to watch yourself.’
There are odd bursts of laughter, and if Tobias had any sense he would drop the whole thing. Instead, he leans across the table.
‘Do I, indeed? So how would you assess me, Laura? What are my weaknesses?’
He beams at her, showing his recently whitened teeth, and she can see that a number of the guests are on his side. Steph is giving her a look, and Laura knows she ought to keep her mouth shut, but alpha-Tobias is wearing the smug expression favoured by only a certain kind of man. He really is asking for this.
Steph shakes her head almost imperceptibly, but to no effect.
‘I’ve met so many people like you,’ Tobias goes on. ‘Cod psychologists who think they can judge someone by getting them to fill in a fucking form. Can you list your three greatest weaknesses? What colour do you associate with your personality? If you were a car, what make would you be? Bullshit, pure and simple.’
He laughs loudly, and once again several of the other guests – mainly male – join in. Buoyed up by their support, he leans even further forward and extends an index finger with a faint sticky film covering the nail.
‘Go on, Laura – give me your best shot!’
‘OK, but remember this was your idea.’
She takes a sip of her wine, puts down the glass while observing Tobias closely. Follows the tell-tale redness at his hairline, down over his upper body, his hands. You could hear a pin drop around the table.
‘You’re married,’ she begins. ‘But that’s not your wife.’
She nods in the direction of his companion, who is at least twenty years his junior.
‘You drove here because you wanted to show her your expensive car. It could be an Italian make, but it takes time to learn to drive them properly, and you don’t have the patience, so I’ll go for a slightly more easy-to-handle Porsche.’
Tobias’s eyes are darting from side to side.
‘You’ve already drunk too much, but you’re still intending to drive home, because you don’t want to leave your precious toy parked on the street. Which means you don’t really care about risks or consequences for yourself or others. Since you came by car, you don’t live in town, but in Lidingö or Djursholm. Judging by the exaggerated way you pronounce the letter i, I’d go for the former, but the cadence of your sentences suggests that you were born and grew up somewhere on the west coast.’
She pauses, leaving him to squirm for a few seconds. She avoids catching Steph’s eye. This is too easy. And so much fun.
‘Your suit is Brioni, your watch Rolex, your tie Fendi. Red, of course, because you read in someone’s autobiography that it’s a power colour. Autobiographies are all you read, by the way. And you recently had a hair transplant.’
She leans back, trying not to look smug.
‘To summarise, Tobias: you’re a walking, talking, risk-taking, middle-age crisis. What do you think of my assessment?’
No one speaks. Tobias is gasping for air, as if he’s about to explode.
Suddenly Steph begins to laugh, a loud, infectious belly laugh that draws everyone in, and the atmosphere lightens.
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ she says as the laughter gives way to an amused hum of conversation. ‘Laura’s fucking lethal.’
Tobias knocks back the contents of his wine glass.
‘How the fuck did you know all that?’ He sounds annoyed, but reluctantly impressed.
‘Do you really want to know?’ Laura says.
The conversation dies away. She gazes steadily at him.
‘I read the article about you in Industry Today. It told me where you come from, where you live, and that you’ve been married for many years. But your companion this evening isn’t wearing a wedding ring.’ Once again she nods in the direction of the young woman, whose hands are clearly visible. ‘Plus, you had a much higher forehead in the photograph in the magazine.’
And there’s something sticky on your fingers which I’m guessing is Regaine, just in case the transplant doesn’t succeed, because you can’t think of anything worse than going bald. She decides to keep that little snippet to herself. There are limits, after all.
Tobias’s face is bright red. He has got over the shock and surprise, and now he’s furious, humiliated. He’s probably wondering whether to call her a bitch and storm out, or pretend to turn the other cheek and be a good loser. She thinks he’ll go for the latter option; anything e
lse would be stupid.
‘And the car?’ the man next to her asks. ‘How did you know he drives a Porsche?’
Laura shrugs.
‘He arrived just after me and parked by the door. I saw them getting out of the car as I was walking in.’
Another burst of laughter. Tobias grins, looking embarrassed but doing his best to join in the merriment. A wise decision.
One of the women is laughing so much she can hardly breathe. She reaches for her glass of water and knocks it over. When she leans forward to retrieve it, one of her curls gets too close to a candle.
Laura can see what is about to happen and opens her mouth to warn the woman, but it’s too late. A flash of fire, then a scream.
It’s over in a second. The hiss of burning, the flame is extinguished. All that remains are agitated voices and the acrid smell of burned hair.
Everyone’s attention is on the woman, so no one notices when Laura gets up and hurries out of the room. Her stomach contracts, she can feel the sweat on the back of her neck.
She just manages to lock the toilet cubicle door, turn on the cold tap and sweep her hair out of the way before she throws up in the hand basin. She swills out her mouth, blows her nose several times to try to get the smell of burned hair out of her nose, but somehow it is still there.
She looks in the mirror. Notes that she is even paler than usual, if that’s possible.
‘Calm down,’ she murmurs. ‘Just calm down.’
After a while she feels better. The voices in the dining room have died down. A slight draught indicates that someone has opened a window.
With hindsight, she realises it wasn’t a good idea to take Tobias down like that. If she hadn’t been showing off, the woman wouldn’t have set fire to her hair, and she wouldn’t be standing here throwing up in Steph’s marble hand basin.
Her headache has gotten worse, and all she wants to do is go home, close the door, and not see anyone. But she can’t let Steph down.
She takes out her phone. One text message, two missed calls. The first is from a contact called Andreas ex-husband/stalker.
One of Steph’s little jokes that she hasn’t had the energy to correct. It’s her own fault for leaving her phone unattended for a few seconds. Plus, it’s not entirely untrue.
A year after the divorce, Andreas still calls her almost every day. Over the last few weeks, he’s been calling even more frequently. She ought to ask him to stop, of course. Explain that they both need to move on. And yet she hasn’t done it.
The other missed call is from a number she doesn’t recognise. A landline with an area code that looks vaguely familiar.
She opens a search app. The number belongs to a firm of lawyers called Håkansson in Ängelholm, and as soon as she sees the name of the place, a faint warning bell begins to ring in the back of her mind. She makes the call before she has time to think, not really expecting anyone to answer at eight o’clock on a Friday evening.
‘Håkansson.’
The man on the other end of the line speaks with a rough Skåne accent.
‘Hi – my name is Laura Aulin. I think you tried to contact me about an hour ago?’
‘I did, thank you so much for getting back to me.’
She hears the rustle of papers.
‘It’s about your aunt. Hedda, Hedda Aulin. Have you spoken to her recently?’
The warning bell is louder now, and the nausea comes flooding back.
‘We . . . We’re not in touch.’
‘No?’
‘No, we haven’t been for many years. Has something happened to her?’
The brief silence answers her question. She swallows hard.
‘I’m very sorry, but your aunt has passed away.’
‘When?’
‘At some point during the early hours of Monday morning, we think.’
Without warning the skin on her back begins to crawl, a painful mixture of heat and cold that she hasn’t felt for many years. At least not while she was awake.
‘So anyway . . .’ Håkansson goes on. ‘Your aunt spoke to me not long ago. She wanted to make a will. You’re her only heir.’
He falls silent, waiting for Laura to say something, but she is lost for words.
‘As I’m sure you understand, there are a number of practical decisions that will have to be made concerning her estate,’ he continues.
‘I . . . I understand,’ she manages to say. ‘Can I call you back tomorrow?’
‘Monday will be fine – there’s no hurry. Once again, my condolences. Your aunt was . . .’ He pauses, searching for the right words. ‘A very special woman.’
He ends the call, and Laura stands there with the phone pressed to her ear. The skin on her back is burning like fire, drops of sweat are trickling down towards the waistband of her trousers. The rest of her body is ice-cold.
RITES OF SPRING
Skåne, 1986: On the night of Walpurgis, the eve of May Day, where bonfires are lit to ward off evil spirits and preparations are made to celebrate the renewal of spring, a sixteen-year-old girl is ritualistically murdered in the woods beside a castle. Her stepbrother is convicted of the terrible deed and shortly after, the entire family vanishes without a trace.
Spring, 2019: Dr Thea Lind moves into the castle. After making a strange discovery in an ancient oak tree on the grounds, her fascination with the old tragedy deepens. As she uncovers more and more similarities between her own troubled past and the murdered girl, she begins to believe that the real truth of the killing was never uncovered.
What if the spring of 1986 claimed more than one victim?
Available now in paperback and ebook
Originally published in Sweden by Bokförlaget Forum in 2016
First published in the UK in 2021 by Zaffre
This ebook edition published in 2021 by
ZAFFRE
An imprint of Bonnier Books UK
80–81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE
Owned by Bonnier Books
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden
Copyright © Anders de la Motte, 2016
Cover design by Bonnier Books UK
Cover photographs © Trevillion Images
The moral right of Anders de la Motte to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78576-820-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78576-823-1
This book was typeset by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd
This ebook was created by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd
Zaffre is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
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