Page 89 of The Living and the Dead

He smiled back and took her hand.

“Yeah, maybe. But I don’t really feel like it.” He took a good look at his wife, who was stretched out in a bikini and sunglasses, bearing an astonishing likeness to her twenty-five-year-old self. “You look outrageously hot.”

“I know. I love you too.”

“I love vacation,” Vidar muttered, bending over her for anotherkiss before he took off with exhaustion hanging like shadows under his eyes.

—

When Vidar pulled into the farmyard, it was lunchtime. Someone, maybe a customer, was just taking off in an old Volvo station wagon with rusty spots all over its grille and hood. At the wheel, a glimpse of an elderly man with a furrowed face; Vidar thought for a moment he looked familiar, but the context escaped him.

The house was in Nydala, near the nature reserve in Fäberga. It was a two-story building made of weatherbeaten wood that had turned gray over the years. Vidar passed a black mailbox and parked next to a big white Mercedes SUV. A gravel path led to a small studio in a remodeled old barn, where, according to her minimalist website, the woman he was looking for did all her work. The barn was trimmed with white and the double doors were heavy and black but currently open. In one corner of the vast yard was a swing set, and colorful outdoor toys were scattered on the lawn.

The sun burned the back of his neck, warmed the ground. Gravel crunched beneath his shoes. He yawned and heard dull thuds coming from the studio, rhythmic and somehow pleasant. A radio blared summery music. All manner of wooden furniture crowded alongside raw materials and workbenches inside.

Vidar stepped into the studio. Patches of sun on the concrete floor led him to a tiny woman crouching in front of a bureau. In her hand was a hammer the size of her forearm, and she turned her head when she noticed him. Vidar had expected her to be alarmed, or at least surprised, but she simply put down the hammer and came to greet him with a cool distance, as though Vidar were just another customer, one she didn’t really have time to deal with.

“I apologize for showing up unannounced,” he said, offering his free hand. “I’m Vidar Jörgensson.”

Her eyes dropped quickly to the binder in Vidar’s other hand before she accepted the greeting.

“Siri Bengtsson,” she said, gazing steadily at him with clear brown eyes.

She was about his age, he knew that much. They’d met in the rubble out in Skavböke. Her thick, dark hair was streaked with gray these days, and time had left its mark at the corners of her eyes, but that was all. She was tough and tenacious, he could tell from her shoulders and arms. She was wearing a sleeveless top and work overalls, clogs.

“Nice studio. Did he buy anything?”

“Who?”

“The man who was just here.”

“Oh. No, he was just looking. Most of them are.”

She went back to the bureau, bent down, and gently ran her hand over the wood as if to examineit.

“Studio,” she echoed. “That’s a nice way of putting it. But it’s really just a barn.”

The ceiling was open to the roof and the walls were lined with well-maintained tools that Vidar recognized from the barns of his childhood in Marbäck.

“I don’t have a barn, but my dad did. I have to say, it didn’t look like this. Aside from the tools. You’re a cop, right?”

“Definitely not.”

He could tell that Siri Bengtsson had guessed from the start that he had come to talk about that portion of her life.

“But you used to be.”

“A long time ago, and it was a very short stint. I’m betting you want to talk about Filip Söderström. I’ll warn you right now that I’ve forgotten most of the details.”

Vidar gave her a long stare. “We haven’t released his name to the public.”

“What you did release was plenty.”

They’d tried to anonymize the information, but it was hard. Modern media was a lot faster than the old kind. A middle-aged man, originally from the area in which he had been found, background ofpetty crime and drug abuse. And Skavböke. His name and photo had already popped up in the murkier corners of the internet, alongside details of the misfortunes that had befallen his family once upon a time and wild speculation about what was going on now.

“Actually, it’s Filip’s brother I most want to talk to you about. Or hear you talk about, rather.”

Something new appeared in Siri’s gaze, what was it, pain of some kind? A distasteful memory returning back to her? Maybe he was seeing things. It disappeared just as swiftly, a spark of something he couldn’t identify.