Page 142 of The Living and the Dead

As he sped through Oskarström, he heard the voices of officers who’d beat him to the scene coming over the police radio: it was over. One dead, no other serious injuries. The ambulance, which was a mile ahead of Adrian, could stand down.

Adrian slowed down, too, as he saw a lone figure staggering through the rain. He was walking along the county road up toward Skavböke. A drunk?

Adrian stopped the car and got out.

“Hello,” Adrian said gently. “How are we doing here?”

“I’m the one who says that stuff,” the old man barked, swaying on his feet. “I’m the priest here, dammit.”

The heavy stench of alcohol rose off him.

“But what are you doing out here in the rain?”

“My bicycle was broken, what else was I supposed to do?”

Adrian raised an eyebrow.

“Where are you going?”

The old man nodded sadly into the dark, toward the flashing blue lights in the distance.

“To the emergency.”

109

“Is this all of it?”

Vidar weighed the binder in his hand.

“All but the medications list,” said Adrian, who was in the passenger seat next to him. “But it doesn’t really matter now. The shirt’s in the bag, there. It’s like you thought.” Adrian nodded at the house, which was teeming with intense activity around Killian Persson’s body. “It’s his.”

Vidar paged through the binder. Intake paperwork, attachments from social services, notes for the medical record, a visitor log, some sort of diary describing his progress, a calendar of activities.

“Good, Adrian. Thanks. But no. It doesn’t matter now.”

The emergency lights had attracted a small flock of onlookers from the village, those who lived nearby and had come out in the rain to see what had happened. Vidar saw Jakob Lindell among them.

“Interesting that he’s here,” Adrian commented.

“Very,” Vidar muttered, his focus on the binder.

The diary entries weren’t comprehensive, just undated pages from a plain old notebook, covered in Filip’s scrawling, uneven handwriting. They were about the staff at Rasmusgården, his medication, how he felt. Vidar paged on and soon stopped at the visitor log.

Most were friends of Filip’s, it seemed, but the visits were increasingly infrequent. His father had come once, his mother, too, alongwith two personal-care assistants. A couple of social workers, the occasional police officer. And then a name that showed up over and over, many times, every week.

“Hey, what was that you said before about Filip Söderström’s planner?”

“What part?”

“Something about the number one?”

“Oh yeah, that he seemed to have had a relapse and marked his first day sober again. They do that a lot.”

“Do you remember what it looked like? The way he wrote the number one.”

“Sure, I guess.”

Vidar tapped the page.