Page 16 of The Living and the Dead

“So I said to Bill, I said,” he explained in the police interview,“we’ll have to check that out. So we climbed over the fence and approached the car. And I looked into the back, of course, because the dog was leaping around something awful and I had to see what it was. Then I screamed and ran home as fast as my legs would carry me and called it in.”

—

Gerd Pettersson was leaning against the wall outside an apartment on Odengatan in Oskarström, fervently wishing that the new colleague from the city she’d been promised had been scheduled to start their first shift at midnight. This kind of call was so exhausting and took forever to get through alone.

“Well, help me!” she heard from inside the apartment. “Don’t just stand there.”

The order was followed by thuds and bangs.

“Hasse, I want you to unlock the door and take a few steps back into the hall. Can you do that?”

Gerd’s words became round and tinny in the cramped stairwell.

“I can’t,” Hasse bellowed.

“You’re upsetting the neighbors, you know.”

“I don’t give a damn! Go get the machine.”

“What machine?”

“The computer machine.”

“What would we do with one of those?”

“On New Year’s Eve all the machines are going to explode in midair. They know all about it. If you put out a computer machine they won’t dare to radiate you anymore.”

It was almost five thirty in the morning. One of the neighbors had called to complain about old Hasse Ek, who lived on the top floor. He’d been on a roll since midnight, the caller reported, shouting and ranting, banging on walls and doors and keeping the whole buildingup.

“Can’t you help me?” Hasse howled.

It’s so odd,Gerd thought.The tinfoil-hatters always manage to sound both enraged and pitiful.

You’d never know it now, but Hasse had once been one of the most promising harness-racing drivers in the county of Halland. Gerd herself had cheered him on at the Halmstad racetrack one summer when he took the Sprintermästare title. Everyone was there, even Isidor Enoksson, the village priest. Everyone placed bets, the priest included, and after a beer or two up in the stands they got him to confess what he really believed in: Hasse Ek. And God. Two entities which were, at that particular moment—according to Isidor—one and the same.

Maybe the priest should have believed in liquor as well, because it was stronger than Hasse and as the years went by, it slowly conquered him. After a few stints at the rehab clinic, the old man sobered up, but the hard life had taken its toll and he began to rant about electromagnetic rays. He did have children, two of them, but they’d flown the nest long ago. They didn’t have the energy to deal with him. His ex-wife lived with a banker in Halmstad.

“Hasse,” Gerd pleaded.

The microphone on her uniform crackled to life and the call echoed off the walls.

“What was that you said? Skavböke? Now?”

11

The police station in Oskarström was on Brogatan, right next to the Nissan River. Once upon a time it had housed no fewer than five valiant officers of the law. Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, reallocation of resources and the centralization of authority had reduced these representatives to two, and, on this particular late-December morning, one. One single police officer for five thousand residents. When the new day dawned, there would be two once more, doubling the manpower, according to those math whizzes in Halmstad. The newcomer was called Siri, and she had some common last name. Karlsson, Bäck, something like that. She was coming from the city.

But for a little while longer, Gerd Pettersson was on her own. Some in the area were afraid of her, but lots of people liked the tall woman with frizzy hair that fell past her shoulders, and her gruff, loud laugh. She was approaching sixty and had been a police officer for her entire adult life.

Gerd started the car, crossed the bridge over the Nissan, and headed out of Oskarström and up to Skavböke, in the dark.

Kjell’s farm was quiet, the night thick as oil. Bill began to bark as she stepped out of the car, and a white light blinded her.

Kjell was sitting on a chair at the base of the steps, his dog and shotgun next to him, a flashlight in hand.

“Do you have a license for that, Kjell?” Gerd asked.

“Damn straight I do.”