Page 42 of The Living and the Dead

Mikael didn’t say anything. To Sander, the mossy ridge of Felicia’s roof appeared tempting, lovely and warm.

“I try to be a nice guy, but, you know, we have a farm to run here. We’re not in the business of handouts. And they have trouble making rent.” Karl-Henrik’s gaze wandered over the tree trunks again, where the wild boar should be. “But Mikael likes Felicia, anyway. Don’t you?”

Mikael blushed.

“No, I don’t,” he mumbled.

“Do too.”

“Dad, stop it.”

Another rustle, farther away. Sander and Killian slowly raised their shotguns.

A big, black creature emerged. It rooted at the ground. Sander and Killian took a breath, but a meaty arm came down over their barrels. Karl-Henrik silently gestured at them to wait, and he nodded at Mikael, who closed one eye, aimed, and pressed his finger to the trigger.

Mikael took a deep breath. The boar stopped and looked at them with deep black eyes.

Mikael fired. The beast leapt and ran off.

He fired again, frantic now. The boar’s large backside vanished into the grove, while Mikael, trembling, tried to grab more cartridges from the box on the ground.

“Don’t bother,” Karl-Henrik thundered. “It’s too late. You missed. He’s gone.” And he slapped Mikael on the back of the head with an open palm. “You’re worthless. Almost worse than your brother.”

The contempt in Karl-Henrik’s voice made Sander wish he could do something, maybe touch Mikael, who suddenly looked so alone. But he couldn’t do that, so he did nothing.

31

It was Wednesday, two days before Christmas Eve, and Siri and Gerd were leaning toward the speakerphone to hear what the prosecutor in Halmstad had to say. He had finished delivering his formal report, but he had one last holiday message to convey:

“Okay, so, I’m going home now. Try to let Halmstad handle this until Monday. I’ll be back in then. And please stop bothering the people at Telia. I know you want those phone records, but it’s Christmas.”

Siri took a bite of a gingerbread cookie and shot a questioning look at Gerd.

“Absolutely,” Gerd said grimly.

Seconds of silence on the other end. “Merry Chr—”

Gerd slammed the receiver home and stood up. “Stay there, I’m going to grab something.”

Siri looked at the phone, which still seemed to be recovering from its harsh treatment. She would have liked to do the same thing to it. Instead, she turned to the report from Telia they had printed out. After a call from Gerd earlier today, the phone company had moved their request to the top of their to-do list.

The local phone towers had crackled to life at seventeen minutes past eleven on the night of December 17, when a call was placed from one of the telephones in Pierre Bäck’s house in the middle of the party.

Someone had called Madeleine and Felicia’s house. Whether the call was subsequently answered was not evident.

Could Jakob Lindell have made the call? If he had, did that make him their suspect? Siri thought of the blood on the steering wheel in the car, of Killian Persson and the gash on his nose. They really did need to get a blood sample.

Jakob had a motive of sorts, but there was nothing to put him at the scene of the crime. Killian might have had a link to the scene, but he had no motive. Were both Jakob and Killian lying? Or was neither of them involved?

She couldn’t make it make sense.

Instead, Siri studied the results of the database search that glowed on the screen.

There was a computer in the office, but Gerd said she never used it. If she needed to find information, she did it in the real world instead. Siri found the real world unnecessarily tiresome and liked new technology, so she tried to start up the old dinosaur. It beeped, hummed, and sputtered for a good long time, but after that it was usable.

She had noticed something just before the prosecutor called, a report that had been filed with the Halmstad police one evening last autumn. It had to do with an assault at one of the bars on Brogatan. The bar owner himself called it in. He wanted to advise law enforcement of a fistfight, that two men had flown at one another until one was knocked out by a punch and the other stormed off. Names were included: Killian Persson’s father, Sten, and Mikael Söderström’s father, Karl-Henrik. Both from Skavböke.

Siri tried to follow up on the matter, but there wasn’t much to find beyond the initial interview with the bar owner and an attempt to get both Sten and Karl-Henrik to account for what had happened. When neither of them wanted to talk, much less pursue any action, the matter was left to wilt away and that was that.