The Preacher

by Camilla Lackberg

  ‘I wonder whether you could tell me a little about Siv. I’ve just been to visit Albert Thernblad, Mona’s father, and he showed me some photos from her childhood. Would it be possible to see a few pictures of your daughter?’

  Unlike Albert, who had brightened up at the prospect of talking about the apple of his eye, Gun squirmed self-consciously on the sofa.

  ‘Well, I don’t really see what purpose that would serve. The police asked lots of questions about Siv when she disappeared. All that stuff is probably in the police archives …’

  ‘I know, but I was thinking a little more on the personal level. What sort of girl she was, what kind of things she liked, what she wanted to be, and so on.’

  ‘Wanted to be? That really wasn’t an issue. She got knocked up by that German boy when she was seventeen. After that I saw to it that she didn’t waste time on studies any more. By then it was too late anyway, and I certainly had no intention of taking care of her baby myself, that’s for sure.’

  Her tone was scornful. Patrik saw Lars look at his wife, and he thought to himself that no matter what the man’s picture of Gun had been when they first married, there was not much left of his illusions. There was a weariness and resignation in Lars’s face, which was also marked by disappointment. It was obvious that the marriage had reached a point where Gun no longer made much effort to hide her true character. Lars may have felt that it was true love to begin with, but Patrik suspected that the attraction for Gun had been all those beautiful millions in Lars Struwer’s bank account.

  ‘What about Siv’s daughter? Where is she now?’ Patrik leaned forward, curious as to the answer.

  Once again, crocodile tears. ‘After Siv disappeared I couldn’t take care of her by myself. I wanted to, of course, but times were a bit tough, and taking care of a little girl was simply out of the question. So I made the best of the situation and sent her to Germany, to her father. Well, he wasn’t very happy to have a kid descend on him out of the blue, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was the girl’s father, after all, and I had papers to prove it.’

  ‘So she lives in Germany today?’ A glimmer of an idea appeared in Patrik’s mind. Could it be that … ? No, that would be hard to believe.

  ‘No, she’s dead.’

  The idea vanished as quickly as it had come. ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yes, in a car crash when she was five. But the German didn’t bother to ring me with the news. I got a letter telling me that Malin had been killed. I wasn’t even invited to the funeral, can you imagine? My own granddaughter and I couldn’t go to her funeral.’ Her voice quavered with indignation.

  ‘He never answered the letters I wrote to him when the girl was alive. Don’t you think he should have helped out the grandmother of his poor motherless child a little? I was the one who saw to it that his kid had food on the table and clothes on her back the first two years of her life. Don’t you think I had the right to some compensation?’

  Gun had now worked herself into a rage over the in justices she thought she’d been subjected to, and she didn’t calm down until Lars put a hand on her shoulder. He gave her a kind but firm squeeze, which was his way of admonishing her.

  Patrik refrained from answering. He knew that any reply he made would not be appreciated by Gun Struwer. Why in the world did she think the child’s father should send her money? Couldn’t she see how unreasonable she was being? Apparently not. He saw her suntanned, leathery cheeks turn crimson with wrath, despite the fact that her daughter had now been dead for more than twenty years.

  He made one last attempt to find out something personal about Siv. ‘Might there be some photographs?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t take that many pictures of her, but I should be able to find something.’

  Gun left the room, leaving Patrik alone in the living room with Lars. They sat in silence for a few moments. Then Lars said something, but in a voice so low that Gun wouldn’t be able to hear it.

  ‘She’s not as cold-hearted as she seems. Gun has some very fine qualities.’

  Yeah right, Patrik thought. He would call that statement a fool’s defence. But Lars was probably doing what he could to justify his choice of a wife. Patrik estimated that Lars was about twenty years older than Gun, and it wasn’t too farfetched to surmise that his choice had been made with a part of his body other than his head. Although Patrik had to admit that perhaps his profession was making him a bit cynical. Maybe it really was true love. How would he know?

  Gun returned, not with a thick photo album like Albert had produced, but with a single little black-and-white photo which she morosely handed to Patrik. It showed a sullen teenaged Siv holding her newborn daughter in her lap. Unlike the pictures of Mona, in this photo there was no joy in the girl’s expression.

  ‘Well, we must get busy straightening up the house. We’ve just returned from Provence, where Lars’s daughter lives.’ From the way Gun said the word ‘daughter’ Patrik could hear that there was no love lost between her and her stepdaughter.

  He also realized when his presence was no longer desired, so he thanked them for their help.

  ‘And thank you for lending me the photo. I promise to return it in good condition.’

  Gun waved her hand dismissively. Then she remembered her role and contorted her face into a grimace.

  ‘Please let me know as soon as you’re positive. I would so dearly like to be able to bury my little Siv.’

  ‘I’ll come back as soon as I hear anything.’

  Patrik’s tone was unnecessarily curt, but he had found the entire histrionic show quite distasteful.

  When he was back out on Norra Hamngatan, the skies opened up. He stood still for a moment and let the downpour rinse away the cloying feeling he had from his visit with the Struwers. He needed to get home and hug Erica and feel the life pulsing inside when he put his hand on her belly. He needed to feel that the world wasn’t as cruel and evil as it sometimes seemed. It simply couldn’t be.

  5

  SUMMER 1979

  It felt as if months had passed. But she knew that it couldn’t possibly be that long. And yet each hour down here in the dark was like a lifetime.

  There was far too much time to think. Far too much time to feel how the pain was twisting every nerve. Time to ponder everything she had lost. Or would lose.

  By now she knew that she would never get out of here. No one could escape such pain. And yet she had never felt softer hands than his. No hands had ever caressed her with such love, and it made her hunger for more of that touch. Not the horrible or painful touch, but the soft touch that came afterwards. If she had ever felt such a touch before, everything would have been different, she knew that now. The feeling when he ran his hands over her body was so pure, so innocent, that it reached all the way to that hard core inside her, the one no one before had been able to reach.

  In the darkness he had become her everything. No words had been spoken, but she fantasized about how his voice would sound. Fatherly, warm. But when the pain came she hated him. Then she wanted to kill him. If only she could.

  alt

  Robert found him out in the shed. They knew each other so well, and he knew that’s where Stefan went when he was worried about something. When he saw that the house was empty he went directly to the shed, and quite rightly found his brother there, sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped tightly round his legs.

  The two of them were so different that Robert found it hard to believe they were brothers. He himself was proud that he never spent a minute of his life pondering anything or trying to predict the consequences. He simply acted and let things turn out as they may. Whoever survives will see what happens – that was his motto, and he saw no reason to worry about things he couldn’t control. Life blew you one way or another, that was simply the way things were.

  Stefan, on the other hand, thought far too much for his own good. For a brief moment Robert felt a pang of regret that his little brother had cho
sen to follow in his crooked footsteps, but maybe it was for the best. Otherwise Stefan would have felt disappointed. They were the sons of Johannes Hult, and it was as though a curse had settled on their whole bloody branch of the family. There was no chance that any of them would succeed at anything they attempted, so why even try?

  He would never admit it, even under torture, but he loved his brother more than anything in the world. It pained him to see Stefan’s silhouette in the gloom of the shed. His brother’s thoughts seemed to be miles away, and there was a sadness about him that Robert occasionally glimpsed. A cloud of melancholy seemed to hover over Stefan’s psyche, forcing him into a dark, ugly place for weeks at a time. Robert hadn’t seen any sign of it all summer, but now he felt its physical presence as soon as he stepped through the door.

  ‘Stefan?’

  He got no reply. Robert quietly walked further into the darkness. He squatted down beside his brother and put his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Stefan, are you sitting in here again?’

  His younger brother only nodded. When Stefan turned his face Robert saw to his surprise that it was swollen from crying. That’s not what usually happened during one of Stefan’s moods. Robert felt suddenly uneasy.

  ‘What is it, Stefan? What’s happened?’

  ‘Pappa.’

  The rest of the sentence was drowned in sobs, and Robert strained to hear what he was saying.

  ‘What are you saying about Pappa, Stefan?’

  Stefan took a couple of deep breaths to calm himself down and then said, ‘Everyone’s going to realize now that Pappa was innocent. That he didn’t make those girls disappear. Don’t you see? People will finally know that it wasn’t him!’

  ‘What are you raving about?’ Robert shook him, but could feel his heart skipping a beat.

  ‘Mamma was in town and heard that they’d found a girl murdered, and along with her they found the girls who disappeared. Don’t you see? A girl was murdered now. So nobody can claim that it was Pappa who did it, right?’

  Stefan laughed. He sounded slightly hysterical. Robert still couldn’t fully take in what he was saying. Ever since he had found his father on the floor of the barn with a noose around his neck he had dreamed and fantasized about hearing the words that Stefan was now spouting out.

  ‘You’re not screwing with me, are you? Because you’ll have hell to pay if you are.’

  Robert clenched his fist, but Stefan merely kept laughing hysterically, and the tears ran down his face. Robert now understood they were tears of joy. Stefan turned and hugged his brother so hard that he could hardly breathe. When it dawned on Robert that his brother was speaking the truth, he hugged him back as hard as he could.

  Finally their father would be vindicated. Finally they, and Mamma too, would be able to hold their heads high without hearing the whispers behind their backs and without seeing the fingers pointing in their direction when people didn’t think they were looking. Now all those people would be sorry for everything, those damned gossipmongers. For twenty-four years the town had discredited their family, but now everyone else would feel the shame.

  ‘Where’s Mamma?’

  Robert pulled away from his brother and gave him an enquiring look. Stefan began to giggle uncontrollably. He said something incoherent as he laughed.

  ‘What did you say? Calm down and speak up. I asked you where Mamma is.’

  ‘She’s with Uncle Gabriel.’

  Robert’s face clouded over. ‘What the hell is she doing with that old bastard?’

  ‘Telling him the truth, I think. I’ve never seen Mamma as mad as when she came back and told me what she’d heard. She went right up to the farm to give Gabriel a piece of her mind. That probably kicked some life into him. You really should have seen her. With her hair sticking straight up and smoke practically coming out of her ears.’

  The image of their mother with her hair sticking straight up and puffs of smoke coming out her ears now made Robert snicker too. She had been a shambling, mumbling shadow as long as he could remember, so it was hard to imagine her as a raging fury.

  ‘I would have loved to see Gabriel’s face when she came storming in. And can you imagine Aunt Laine?’

  Stefan did a spot-on imitation of her worried expression as she wrung her hands. In a shrill voice he declaimed, ‘But Solveig, really! My dear Solveig, you shouldn’t use such language!’

  Both brothers collapsed in convulsions of laughter on the floor.

  ‘Do you ever think about Pappa?’ asked Stefan. His question drew them back to seriousness again, and Robert was quiet for a moment before he replied.

  ‘Yes, of course I do. Although I have a hard time thinking of anything but the way he looked the day he died. You should be glad you didn’t have to see him. What about you, do you think about him?’

  ‘Sure, all the time. But it feels like I’m watching a film, if you know what I mean. I remember how he was always happy and the way he used to joke around and dance and swing me up in the air. But I see everything from a distance, just like in a film.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  They lay side by side staring up at the ceiling while the rain hammered on the sheet-metal above them.

  Stefan said quietly, ‘He loved us, didn’t he, Robert?’

  Robert replied just as quietly, ‘He certainly did, Stefan, he certainly did.’

  * * *

  Erica heard Patrik shaking out his umbrella on the front steps and heaved herself up from the sofa to meet him at the door.

  ‘Hello?’ he said in surprise as he looked around. Apparently he wasn’t expecting everything to be calm and quiet. Actually she should have been a bit annoyed with him because he hadn’t called her all day, but she was too glad to see him at home to be annoyed. She also knew that he was never more than a mobile phone call away, and she had no doubt that he thought about her a thousand times a day. She felt a great sense of security when she thought about their relationship. It was very comforting.

  ‘Where are Conny and the bandits?’ he whispered, still not sure whether they had left or not.

  ‘I dumped a bowl of macaroni and Falun sausage on Britta’s head, so they didn’t want to stay around any longer. Such ungrateful guests.’

  Erica was amused at Patrik’s shocked expression.

  ‘I simply blew up. You have to draw the line somewhere. It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any invitations from that side of the family for the next century, but it’s not anything I regret. Do you?’

  ‘Good Lord, no.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Did you really do that? Dump a whole plate of food on her head?’

  ‘Swear to God. All my good upbringing went straight out the window. Now I’ll probably never get to Heaven.’

  ‘Mmm, you’re a little bit of heaven yourself, so you don’t have to …’

  He nibbled at her neck, right where he knew she was ticklish. She shoved him away with a laugh.

  ‘I’ll fix myself some hot chocolate, and then you have to tell me all about the Big Row.’ Patrik took her hand and led her into the kitchen, where he helped her lower herself onto a chair.

  ‘You look tired,’ she said. ‘How are things going?’

  He sighed as he whipped some O’Boy into a pan of milk.

  ‘Well, the case was going okay, but not any more. It was lucky that the techs finished going over the crime scene before this weather arrived. If we’d found the bodies today rather than day before yesterday, there wouldn’t have been a thing left to search for. Thanks for that information you looked up for me, by the way. It turned out to be really useful.’

  He sat down facing her while he waited for the chocolate to heat up.

  ‘And what about you, how are you doing? Everything all right with the baby?’

  ‘Everything’s fine with us. Our future little football star has been running riot as usual, but I had a lovely day after Conny and Britta left. That was just what I needed. I was finally able to relax and read for a while. All
it took was a visit from a bunch of crazy relatives.’

  ‘That’s great. So I don’t have to worry about you two?’

  ‘No, not a bit.’

  ‘Do you want me to try and stay home tomorrow? Maybe I could do a little work from here – at least I’d be nearby.’

  ‘That’s sweet of you, but I’m doing fine, really. I think it’s more important that you concentrate on finding the murderer before the trail goes cold. I’ll be demanding your presence soon enough.’ She smiled and patted him on the hand. Then she went on, ‘Besides, a general sense of hysteria seems to be brewing. I’ve received a number of calls today from people trying to pump me about how much the police know. Naturally I wouldn’t say a word, even if I did know anything, which I don’t.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘And the tourist bureau isn’t the only place getting a lot of cancell ations from people who don’t dare come here. A lot of the sailboat traffic has headed for other harbours. So if you haven’t yet heard from the local tourism industry, you might as well prepare yourself.’

  Patrik nodded. He’d been afraid that this would happen. The hysteria was going to spread and get worse until they had someone to put behind bars. For a town like Fjällbacka that lived off the tourist trade, the homicides spelled disaster. He recalled a summer a couple of years ago when a rapist had committed four rapes during the month of July before he was finally apprehended. The town’s businesses had taken a beating, because tourists had gone elsewhere, to nearby communities such as Grebbestad and Strömstad. A murder would create an even worse situation. Fortunately it was the chief’s job to handle such matters. He was glad to let Mellberg deal with those types of issues.

  Patrik rubbed the bridge of his nose. He could feel a bad headache coming on. He was about to take a pain tablet when he suddenly realized that he hadn’t had a thing to eat all day. Food was normally one of the indulgences he permitted himself in life, and an incipient bulge around his waist bore witness to that fact. He couldn’t remember when he’d last missed a couple of meals, or even one. He was too tired to cook. Instead he made a couple of open-faced sandwiches with cheese and caviar, which he dipped in his hot chocolate. As usual Erica gave him a slightly disgusted look at the sight of this gastronomically repulsive combination, but for Patrik it was sheer ambrosia. Three sandwiches later, his headache was only a memory, and he felt a new spurt of energy.