Page 26 of The Living and the Dead

“They left the party around one.”

Gerd made a face and stretched. “I’m too old for this, being out in the cold all day, oof. But that’s a good start. Well done. Anything else?”

Siri’s cheeks were warm as she turned the page of her notepad and readMadeleine Grenberg. Notes:husband deceased. trouble making ends meet. works on Söderströms’ farm, lives in a house on the property. one daughter, Felicia 18, who knows the others but wasn’t at the party. car stolen bysp?

Gerd glanced at Siri’s notes.

“ ‘SP’?”

“Just an abbreviation for suspect.”

“Is that the kind of stuff they teach you at the academy nowadays?”

“Among other things.”

“Madeleine and Felicia do indeed live in a house on the property, just as you note. But that property is huge,” she corrected, “so it might not be the way you’re picturing it—the houses aren’t exactly right next door. Have you been there?”

“It got to be too late, I wanted to be considerate. Thought I’d start with that first thing tomorrow.”

Gerd nodded in understanding. “And what about you?”

Siri raised an eyebrow. “Me?”

“Yeah, how’s your living situation?”

Siri gave a curt laugh and tidied a stack of papers.

“Fantastic,” she said.

“No husband or anything?”

“Not that I’m aware of, no.”

In the winter of 1999, all she had in her apartment was furniture.Everything else would have to come later, if at all. Lots of people she’d graduated with a decade ago had children now; they had bought houses and gotten married. Sometimes, when Siri thought about it or ran into one of them in town, pushing a stroller or carrying bags of groceries, she felt a pang of envy in her chest, but that happened less and less often these days.

“How about you?” Siri asked.

Gerd shook her head.

“Just the memories,” she said. “Shall we move on?”

Just the memories. Siri wondered what was hiding behind those words, but she didn’t ask.

“That blood on the wheel,” Gerd said. “A blood sample from Killian Persson would be just the ticket. That would nail it down.”

“We can’t get one, though.”

They would need a warrant from the prosecutor, and there wasn’t sufficient evidence. Killian Persson was eighteen. Of legal age, sure, but barely.

“Yet,” Gerd said. “We can’t get oneyet.”

Instead they turned to the crime scene techs’ photographs from the house where the party had taken place. These photos had been taken just a few hours ago. Today’s technology meant that everything moved at astonishing speeds.

Unfortunately for the investigators, Pierre Bäck, host of the party, had cleaned up before passing out on the floor. He’d hung up what had fallen down and fixed what had broken, or at least he had tried his best. He’d gotten the big wall clock in the hall going again just before he fell asleep, but all he could do for the framed picture that had crashed down during Mikael and Jakob’s scuffle was to piece it back together with duct tape, and Pierre was still pretty smashed when he did it, so the results were worse than they otherwise might have been.

When Saturday rolled around, his parents woke him up close to lunchtime. They had just returned from Friday’s fiftieth-birthday celebration and wondered what on earth was going on in the village,with all these cops and journalists all over the place. A few hours later, a tech was meticulously documenting every nook and cranny of their home while Siri and Gerd interviewed the parents.

“I was thinking,” Siri said. “The telephone line at the Bäcks’ place.”