Page 107 of The Living and the Dead

“I’d rather not.”

“Just for a second.”

The results had come in less than fifteen minutes ago. The fresh blood on the spade belonged to Filip Söderström. The older blood had come from his brother, Mikael.

“They were killed with the same tool,” Adrian said.

Siri said something in Vidar’s ear, but he couldn’t hear what. Adrian cleared his throat.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That we don’t have much time.”

Adrian folded the paper in half. “Why is that?”

Exhaustion crept through Vidar’s head, making his thoughts sluggish.

“Filip spent time at Rasmusgården, I saw somewhere in the files. Get in touch with them and see if they’ll give you any material. When he was there, for how long, what he got up to, staff notes, all that.” He went back to his phone call. “Siri?”

But she had hungup.

—

A scenario: Jakob kills Mikael with the spade, likely for some reason connected to the fight at the party, or maybe the burglary that happened later that night. Maybe both. Filip knows, and tries to confront Jakob after Sten’s funeral. Jakob kills Filip to suppress the secret. Or maybe not? The spade is found at Filip’s place. How long had it been there?

Or maybe: Filip kills his brother. After the funeral years later, he’s the one who is confronted by Jakob, not the other way around. Filipreacts as before, with violence, and Jakob is forced to defend himself. He kills Filip and thinks he needs to lie about it afterward.

Yes, that could beit.

But something chafed.

And then there was Isidor Enoksson. Why was Siri hiding the fact that he’d visited her? Because Vidar hadn’t been mistaken, right? No, he’d seen the priest at her place. Hadn’the?

There was still so much he didn’t know.

And the storm cloud hovering above it all: if Vidar was right, Killian Persson was perfectly innocent.

79

Word had it that the Lord had revealed to them a spade. Isidor Enoksson didn’t doubt for a second that this was so. Strange things, really, spades. No matter how deep man digs, God’s works are always greater. Isidor had spoken these words during a service once, but he no longer recalled the context. It slipped away like so many things did.

Seeing the miracle in the individual.

Sometimes it was very simple; other times, very hard.

What had happened once upon a time out there in Skavböke, were there visible traces? Perhaps in the people, yes, but not in the land. The land had healed. The young trees reached for the sky in groves and the fields were arable again. New farms had arisen where the old ones had collapsed.

Even so, it was as though the community, at least part of it, wanted the truth to come out. That spade was probably the clearest sign.

Things seemed to emerge from the land. At first you didn’t even know what you were looking at. You thought it might be a piece of trash, or an object someone had dropped. Then you realized: Didn’t that belong to…? Didn’t that used to be hanging on the wall at…?

Tools, construction material, old junk, the kind of stuff it was common to run across out in the countryside, but unusual objects as well: a dish wand, unused coffee filters, a hockey stick, a headband. Artifacts or clues. Years later, and it could still happen; you’d bewalking by a grove of trees or cut across a field, and there they were. As if the earth were spitting back out what it had once swallowed.

Some objects found were recognized.

Not all of them, but some.

One of the found objects was, yes, a spade, and the one who discovered it was Frans Ljunggren. He didn’t recognize it. According to Frans, it had been peeking up out of Östholm’s old field like a rusty metal tongue one morning. Frans had pulled it out and looked around, unsure whether anyone had noticed him.