Page 87 of The Living and the Dead

“I read in the paper that it was supposed to be an evening of poetry.”

“Nice,” Vidar said, as though he didn’t understand what that entailed.

“Not a poetry fan?” Sander said.

“Oh, I am.” Vidar smiled. “I’m just not so sure poetry likes me back.”

“Same here. My wife is the one who got me to appreciate it. It took a while.”

“I had actually been planning to get in touch with you tomorrow. But this is fine, too, of course. I heard from my colleague that you wanted to talk to us.”

Sander looked at his hands like something might be written there, some instructions.

“My family’s in Kivik on vacation, and I was supposed to head back there right after the funeral service. I only came here for the day. But then I ended up stuck in the house for a bit. And then Jakob Lindell dropped by. You guys had talked to him.”

“He came to see you in Skavböke?”

“No, in Snöstorp. That’s where I live. And I…I don’t know, he brought this shirt with him. Did he give it to you?”

“Why would he give us a shirt?”

“Because I told him he should.”

“No, he didn’t. What about it?”

Vidar posed the question as though it were no big deal, but Sander’s face was pale and when he opened his mouth to speak, he didn’t seem to know what words might come out.

“I thought maybe you knew.”

As best he could, Sander recounted what Jakob had told him about the night of Christmas Eve in 1999: the wood in the stove, the figure running by, and the shirt he’d found in the dark. According to Jakob it had belonged to Filip, and a scrap of it had been recovered from a dead dog’s mouth. This last detail rang a bell for Vidar. He remembered that. He remembered the rubble, and standing downthere with two officers from Oskarström, helping them pry open the dog’s jaws. The cracking sound as they gave way.

Beyond that, Sander’s story jumped back and forth in fragments, and Vidar had a hard time piecing them into a whole.

By now Sander had his elbows propped on his knees, like he was trying to control an increasing wave of nausea.

That’s when Vidar realized what was plaguing Sander. He should have waited for Sander to say it himself, but the long workday and its many conversations had worn down his patience. He slipped:

“You don’t believe it’s entirely true. What Jakob Lindell claims.”

“No, I think he’s lying.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know how much you know about what happened that Christmas.”

“Not much, so far,” Vidar admitted. “I know people say Sten Persson caused the landslide, but the police never had the evidence. He’d been at odds with Karl-Henrik Söderström.”

“There were rumors about Filip too,” Sander said.

“Right, some sort of threatening letter?”

“He was sixteen and he had just lost his brother. He was in crisis. It wasn’t a threatening letter, not really, and teenagers write all sorts of shit anyway. I should know—I’m a teacher. For one thing, Filip was at a party on the other side of our community when it happened. The only reason to think Jakob saw Filip is that Jakob himself is so sure it was him. No one else saw Filip at all that night. For another thing, Jakob said he found the shirt when he tripped over it. But how the hell do you trip over a shirt? It just falls to the ground. You don’t trip over a shirt, you step on it. Besides, why didn’t he hand the shirt over to the police? He must have known it was significant. And another thing—Iknew Filip back then. He never wore a flannel like that, only T-shirts and hoodies. I don’t even know if he owned that kind of shirt. Jakob, on the other hand,” he continued, “wore flannels a lot.”

Vidar began to ask some gently probing questions: So Jakob had brought the shirt with him to Sander’s house? How was he storing it?What did it look like? What did he do with it after showing it to Sander?

The kids up by the rotunda were starting to trickle back home. One of them seemed to have fallen asleep, to the others’ annoyance. They tried to wake him up by aiming the stage lights in his face, but it didn’t work. They ended up throwing the banner over him like a blanket, until he began to squirm and bat his hands in irritation.

“So,” Vidar said, having finally arrived at the simplest yet perhaps most important question of all, “what do you think? Why did Jakob tell you this, if it was all lies? And why now?”