Page 84 of The Living and the Dead

“What was that?”

“Oh, I was just saying, Filip too now. Almost makes you wonder who’s next. Or maybe you don’t think that way? Like it’s not actually over yet?”

Sander turned to face him. “Are you afraid?”

Jakob looked down. “I’m thinking about Alice and the children and so on. I’m not afraid, but…well, I guess I am a little. Aren’t you?”

He had survived once. Those few times an invisible hand had been about to suffocate him, he’d gasped for air and tried to make it look like he was breathing normally.

Survival: the most basic instinct. To think that it could bring about such a deep sense of guilt.

64

As the evening and night wore on, the picture began to take shape. A certain Sten Persson had been buried earlier that day, Vidar learned. Killian Persson’s father.

Filip had attended both the service in the chapel and a portion of the reception at the village hall. Then he left to go to work. But he never turned up there. Instead, it seemed, he had stopped his company van along the road where his childhood home used to be, stepped into the young, green foliage, and was beaten to death.

Vidar clicked his pen, crossing out names of witnesses and tipsters. Some had nothing of value to share, while others he hadn’t been able to reach yet because it had gotten too late.

He yawned as he sat in the car. He bought new washer fluid and a to-go cup of coffee from the twenty-four-hour gas station in Sånnarp. The digital clock in his car said it was seven minutes past one in the morning. Eighteen degrees Celsius outside. He watched cars pull into and out of the station. Men and women climbed out, filled up, purchased midnight snacks.

He leaned against the headrest and drank his coffee, closed his eyes. He’d been thirty years old back then, in 1999, still in uniform as a patrol officer. He remembered the landslide—he’d been there as a small cog in the great relief effort over the following days. It looked asif a bomb had gone off, he recalled. All that was left of the area was a crater. Now the main suspect, Sten Persson, was deceased.

He thought about Filip Söderström and the rap sheet he’d read through this evening: assault and intimidation, possession and larceny, often all at once; the most recent was from five years ago. Filip was kicked out of Billiards & Bowling in town any number of times, drunk and irate after a fight not even the instigators could come up with a reason for. He drove under the influence, crashed, was taken to the station in a patrol car. He threatened his father, tried to steal cash from his mother, fell asleep on a park bench and had to be woken by a security guard at dawn. He had spent time renting a room from a known addict on Maratonvägen and later lived with women considerably older or alarmingly younger than him. Eventually he gained firsthand experience of several prisons in southern Sweden, then spent a long time at Rasmusgården, a rehab facility outside Falkenberg. The signs were crystal clear: he was going downhill fast.

But then, clearly, something changed. For the last few years his record was a blank where you expected to see another page or two. Change took time, but there must have been a catalyst somewhere. Vidar underlined Rasmusgården and added a question mark next toit.

Four years ago, Filip was listed as “gainfully employed,” and the house in Skavböke became his official address last winter. Often there was a woman to thank when a man suddenly shaped up, but Vidar didn’t see anything to indicate he had a partner; there was nothing about that in his interviews or the database. No signs in his home, either, according to the initial report from the officers on scene there.

They should be getting in touch again soon, incidentally. Unless they decided to wait until morning.

Vidar opened his eyes, bolted down the rest of the piping-hot coffee, and brought his phone to his ear.

“I’m calling about an old case,” he said when someone picked up. “A homicide in Skavböke, 1999.”

The detective on duty yawned and hit some keys. “Okay, here it is.”

“Can you give me the names of the investigators?”

The man on the other end muttered and clicked at his computer. “There were quite a few, both out in Oskarström and here in town.”

“Who was it in Oskarström?”

“Gerd Pettersson, she died a few years ago. And Siri Bengtsson.”

Vidar jotted down the names. “No perpetrator apprehended,” he said, “if I recall correctly.”

“Suspect deceased, it says here.” He clicked again. “Killian Persson. But it seems to be an open case, still.”

“Can you check if it’s been digitized?”

A pause. An old American car rumbled into the station. The driver, a young man, got out to adjust the tire pressure. A couple was entwined in the back seat; Vidar could see their silhouettes in the glow of the station lights.

“No, it hasn’t. It’s still in the boxes.”

Boxes,Vidar thought.Dusty old boxes, yet again. “Can you have them sent up?”

“Consider it done.”