Page 33 of The Living and the Dead

“I don’t know. Two, maybe.”

“I once ate almost one and a half, all but the marzipan. I bet youcould eat three, if you really wanted to. At least three, because you’re so big.”

“Yeah, I probably could,” Killian said, “but I’ve never had more than one piece.”

They passed a shop that sold women’s underwear and stopped in front of it. For a long time afterward, they didn’t say anything.

“That was weird,” said Killian.

“Yeah,” Sander agreed.

Soon they took the bus back up to Oskarström. They went their separate ways in Skavböke, at the fork in the road.

Sander suspected that his new friend didn’t have an easy life. Maybe that was why he was so big, Killian, so he could protect himself. The same way lizards grow a protective layer of scales against the world, Killian had grown husky and tall.

Sander walked home, and soon he was sitting at the table with Mom and Dad, eating spaghetti and meat sauce, the same dish he had read on the menu outside one of the restaurants in town just a few hours ago. He and Killian, the two valiant soldiers, had been there. They had visited the toy store Lekcenter, had stood outside the department store Åhléns, had gone to the shoe store and the bakery. And Mom and Dad had no idea.

It was almost scary, how crafty he was.

That evening, he lay in bed and closed his eyes, tried to stitch the many images in his memory into a whole, like a movie he could watch over and over.

He couldn’t quite put it into words at the time, but a sort of undercurrent had formed, a promise and a question: How could he leave this life behind for something greater?

25

Mikael Söderström’s autopsy was performed on the morning of Sunday, December 19, and the results were clear but, given the situation, hardly illuminating. At around one thirty on Saturday morning, he had died outdoors as a result of blunt trauma to his temple and the back of his head. Then he had been tossed into the cargo area of Madeleine Grenberg’s car and left there.

They could not be sure of the scene of the crime. Nor of the murder weapon, but it was probably a large tool, such as a shovel. And presumably an old one—flakes of rust were found in Mikael’s hair. There had been alcohol in his blood, but not very much. Whatever good that information might do—after all, he’d just been at a party.

Mikael Söderström, eighteen. Just a boy, his whole life ahead of him. His father had been led out of the chapel during the Advent service, an incident Siri and Gerd documented after the fact and included in the investigation materials. That was the easy part—discerning what it meant was a different matter. They had tried to interview the family again, especially Karl-Henrik, but all they got out of them was information they already knew.

“He was so much like me,” Karl-Henrik said, over and over. “He was so much like me.”

As though a part of his very being had been torn from the world, and wasn’t that the truth?

“He addressed Felicia Grenberg in the chapel,” Siri said now that she and Gerd were alone in the office. “She’s the one he targeted, as if she and Mikael were together somehow. Is that so, do you know? Did they have a relationship?”

Gerd shook her head. “I’ve heard rumors, of course, but nothing that concrete.”

“Rumors about what?”

Gerd made a face. “That he forced himself on her at some party, I think. But there was never any proof, and we’re not a gossip mill. We’re no Majken Gustafsson. The hairdresser,” Gerd clarified when Siri raised an eyebrow. “Before she closed down her salon a few years ago. She used to sing in the choir, by the way, you know—the one that sang today. So didI.”

“You did?” Siri couldn’t disguise her amazement.

“Yes, back in the day. I thought it was nice around Christmastime. I like to sing, but not by myself.”

Siri examined a note in front of her. It had to do with the fight between Jakob Lindell and Mikael. It seemed money was the root of the argument.

“They could have been fighting about Felicia as well,” she mused.

At that moment, a visitor turned up on their doorstep. They feared it was somebody from the Violent Crimes Unit in Halmstad, or worse, journalists, but no: it was Bengt and Inga-Lill Lindell. Between them stood none other than their son Jakob.

“We need to report a theft,” Bengt said.

They went out together, Siri and Gerd, and given the circumstances they performed a thorough investigation of the scene. Gerd photographed the broken glass on the stained parquet, and the bench where Bengt had secreted the family’s savings. Siri noted half an impression of a shoe on the floor just inside the door. Presumably the perpetrator had taken off their shoes after leaving that print.

She studied the impression at close range.