Page 17 of The Living and the Dead

It took a moment for him to get to his feet. He had been waiting for almost an hour, hadn’t dared to do anything else in the meantime. You couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. Not these days. The world was changing too fast. Everything said “Made in China,” little punks stole diesel and equipment from honest, hardworking folks, and people were saying that in a week, on New Year’s Eve, all the clocks would stop. And now this—a night that seemed to be twisting its dark claws around him. The scene that awaited down on the road.

He took in the sight of Gerd in the sharp beam of the flashlight, as if she were a disappointment.

“Did you lose everyone else along the way?”

“I’m the only officer on duty right now.”

“I guess I’ll hold on to the gun, then.”

“Sure, but Kjell, that light.” Gerd squinted. “Aim it at the ground, would you?”

She blinked and saw white spots.

As they crossed the frozen field, Bill walked loyally and silently at Kjell’s side, as though he’d known him for years. He could probably tell that something was wrong. They climbed over the fence and there, on the road that formed the border between Kjell’s land and Söderström’s, was the Volvo. Gerd turned on her own flashlight and told Kjell to stay back.

She approached the trunk to peer inside and lingered there for quite some time.

“Well,” she said when she returned. “I think I’m gonna have to call this in.”

12

The light over the fields and meadows was pale and chilly as quicksilver that morning. It gradually gathered strength and people woke with a strange feeling in their bodies, somethingkymig—uneasy, eerie. As though the whole village had dreamed the same uncanny dream during the night.

Blue-and-white police tape fluttered around the Volvo. A large van had pulled up there, and people in uniforms and dark-blue coveralls went back and forth from its open back doors. Hands covered in lavender vinyl gloves held cameras, notepads, pens. The activity proceeded solemnly, quietly; any discoveries were disclosed with great discretion.

Kjell stood outside the tape with Bill, who was visible, and recognizable, from a distance thanks to his pale coat. Many people noticed the dog first. Next, presumably, they noticed the stranger. That was how she was described, Gerd Pettersson’s new colleague, who had the bad luck of starting her new position at the Oskarström police station on that particular morning.

Siri Bengtsson had arrived early and seemed unbothered by the fierce cold. According to her contract, she wasn’t due to start until Monday, but she had personally contacted Gerd at the Oskarström office to suggest she come by over the weekend to become familiar with her new workplace.

If she regretted that choice, she didn’t show it. She was skinny as a young birch tree, everyone thought, not least Gerd. She barely filled out her uniform, and she wasn’t much older than such a tree either, with aloof features and intense brown eyes that seemed bottomless. Most people assumed she had roots in China or maybe Thailand.

—

Gerd tried to make up her mind about what she was seeing. It looked like an accident, yet something was off. The Grenbergs’ Volvo had crashed into a tree down on the road that ran between the Östholm and Söderström properties. The back gate of the car was open.

There were visible tire tracks in the slush behind the car, as though the Volvo had skidded and yawed before the driver lost control and sailed right into one of the big old trees that lined the road. If you walked around and stood by the driver’s-side door, you could see blood on the steering wheel, and there were more dark-red stains, alongside some footprints left by large, rugged shoes.

And there, in the cargo area, a boy. Two blows to the head, it looked like. One at his temple and one on the back of his neck. Blows from what? Gerd and Siri leaned over the body of Mikael Söderström. No smell yet. That was because of the cold, according to the medical examiner on duty, who had been summoned to Skavböke. He was of the sullen, cautious sort and didn’t say much more. The fatal blows to the head, though—anyone could see those.

“And,” the medical examiner said after a great deal of observing, “last night, sometime.”

“What’s that?”

“The time of death.”

“Right, we knew that. Could you be a little more specific?”

“Not really. Not yet.”

Gerd glanced wearily at Siri. “Okay. But if you had to guess?”

“I don’t like guessing.”

“For Christ’s sake. One o’clock? Three o’clock?”

He shrugged and looked at the body. “Sometime between one and two.”

“So, one thirty?”