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  At first the newspapers said Magnus had been kidnapped, but a couple of days later they weren’t so sure.

  Magnus’s mother, Mona Brodin, insisted that a giant had come out of the forest and taken her child, and despite the fact that the Falun police inspectors found proof that oddly enough appeared to support her statements – footprints of an unprecedented size and depth had been found in the vicinity of the cabin – no particular importance was attached to the unlikely details of her testimony. People preferred to think that the boy had been kidnapped by a taller-than-average man who, in the eyes of the terrified mother, had grown to incredible proportions. A man who had then melted back into the pitch-black fir trees from which he had so threateningly materialised that July evening.

  Or had the trail come from someone not connected with the case? And if so, what had happened to the boy?

  Mona Brodin’s credibility was reduced to practically zero as a result of two things: the prescription for Librium in her handbag and the fact that she continually spoke about the forest animals. She insisted she had seen a hare and a fox showing no indication of their natural enmity on the same day the boy disappeared. It was as demented as it was irrelevant. It didn’t appear in the newspaper.

  Could medication have caused a hallucination? Was there no kidnapper? Could she have taken the boy’s life herself? These questions, especially the latter, lay like a repulsive slime over the story. The dreadful event became merely a tragedy, and when the newspapers ceased to write about Magnus it was almost as if he had disappeared for a second time.

  The newspaper clippings have been cut out neatly, if not to say obsessively so. It could have been Sven holding the scissors, but I think it was Barbro. After sitting hunched over the newspaper cuttings for goodness knows how many hours I hardly dare say anything about my recollection of Magnus Brodin’s disappearance, which, in the beginning at least, caused such a sensation in the press and on radio and TV. The media, as we call it now. A jigsaw puzzle of yellowing strips of paper with columns of text and grainy photographs of helicopters, policemen and desolate forest roads has eclipsed the almost transparently vague memories I once had.

  Going back step by step in my mind just won’t work. It’s like trying to scrape one layer of paint off another. His face is there like a blurred stain. I know I thought the whole story was particularly nasty. First, that a kid could be abducted like that by an unknown person in Sweden, and then it didn’t make it any less nasty when it appeared his mother might have killed him.

  There is no end to the times I have dug for premonitions.

  Premonitions of evil.

  That summer I was carrying Susso, and even if I have no particular memory of it, I’m sure that on occasions I must have cupped my hands over my stomach when I saw Magnus’s face in the newspaper. Shouldn’t I have felt then that my unborn child’s destiny was linked to that boy’s? Shouldn’t I have felt a shudder go through my body?

  SUNDAY 12 DECEMBER 2004

  She drove through intervals of snow, particles streaming fast in the beams of the headlights, sputtering against the windscreen in waves. At times they came in such a mass that she had to lean over the steering wheel, wrinkling her eyebrows. The wipers squealed at full speed but made little difference.

  Even when there was a break in the snow showers Susso could not relax. Billows of snow whipped across the road, whirling ceaselessly from one side to the other, and threatened to swirl up and blind her at any moment. If she met an oncoming truck or was overtaken, she became enclosed in a white chamber for one, two, possibly three seconds at the worst. In those moments she held her breath, clenched her hands on the steering wheel and exhaled abrupt obscenities from between her clenched teeth.

  But at least it was still light.

  She picked up her mobile from the seat and checked the time.

  Surely she would be there soon? She tried to think when she had last seen a road sign.

  *

  Just before Jokkmokk she turned off to the right and onto a road that wound alongside the lakes which led away towards Kvikkjokk and the horizon with its undulating fells. Under its streaks of frost a brown sign indicated that this was the way to Sarek National Park. The only way. An ancient route, she knew that. Linnaeus had walked it once. Or had he ridden along it?

  She soon saw the name, surrounded by a tangle of birch branches. White lettering on a blue background: VAIKIJAUR. On top of the sign an undulating ridge of snow. Between the trees she saw the white sphere of the lake.

  She slowed down, put the car into second gear and leaned over the wheel, letting her gaze wander between the houses scattered on either side of the road.

  Advent stars in the windows, light strings spiralling around naked branches. Council rubbish bins of green plastic frozen solid in snow drifts. Grey satellite dishes on gable walls. Snow-clearing tools lined up on porches: scrapers, shovels, long-handled brushes. Every household had the same collection.

  Someone had hung out a claret-red blouse on a coat hanger that moved in the wind. That was the closest thing to a human being she saw.

  She zigzagged slowly down the road so that she could read what was written on the letter boxes. Åke and Maud Kvickström. Thomas …

  She drove on like that, squinting her eyes to read. Many boxes were covered in snow, but she thought she might strike lucky, and fairly soon she spotted the name, written by hand on an old metal lid. Mickelsson.

  The house looked weighed down by the snow clinging to the roof in bulging drifts. The land around it sloped down towards a lake, and on the far side it was just possible to discern spinneys of stunted birches in a grainy mist. Was it snowing over there?

  She pulled up behind the car that was parked in the driveway and switched off the engine, but sat where she was for a while, looking at the house. She felt paralysed by sudden doubt brought on by the silence.

  On the kitchen windowsill, seven glowing lights of an Advent candleholder, shining in a pointed arch. A ladder of flimsy metal leaning against the roof, on every rung a lip of snow.

  To announce her arrival she slammed the car door shut. With her eyes on her mobile she walked towards the house up the narrow pathway cleared of snow. A wreath decorated with bows hung on the door, which opened before she had time to knock. Raising her eyebrows in surprise she took a step backwards, grabbing hold of the handrail.

  In the hall stood a thin woman. Her light-grey hair was abruptly cut just below her ears. Underneath her long knitted waistcoat she wore a blouse with meandering embroidery around the neck. She was pressing her left hand to her chest. It looked as if she was in pain.

  ‘Are you Edit?’

  The old woman nodded.

  ‘Susso Myrén,’ said Susso, reaching out her hand.

  After they had greeted each other Edit backed into the hall. Susso took off her boots but kept her jacket on. She might be leaving very soon. That usually became obvious pretty quickly. The only lighting in the kitchen came from the electric Advent candles, so it was quite dark, and chilly as well. The refrigerator hummed loudly, on its last legs by the sound of it. Stuck on the door were vouchers, a handwritten receipt and a lottery scratch card. On the wall a collection of trays hung in a wide embroidered band. There were crocheted Christmas decorations, small paintings in various shapes and sizes, a calendar with notes written in neat lettering. Standing in the sink was a fuchsia in its plastic flowerpot and on the table was a newspaper, Norrbottens-Kuriren.

  ‘Do you live here alone?’ asked Susso, pulling up her belt and straightening her jeans.

  Edit had clamped her mouth together so tightly that her pink lips had disappeared.

  ‘It’s lovely here,’ said Susso, pulling aside the cotton curtain and looking up the road. ‘In the village.’

  A sharp, vertical line appeared between Edit’s eyes, as if someone had struck her with a chisel. She was troubled and had no time for small talk. That was perfectly obvious.

  ‘How …’ she said in a thin voic
e that faded away. She placed her hand on one of the copper discs covering the hotplates on the stove. It slipped sideways and she moved it back into place.

  Susso drew out a chair and sat down at the table. She pushed aside the newspaper and took her notepad and a ballpoint pen from her jacket pocket, not because she wanted to write anything in particular but mainly to get straight to the point. There was a click when she pressed the pen but it would not work. It had probably frozen solid. Looking around she found a pencil lying on the table and picked it up.

  She looked encouragingly at Edit, who was fiddling with a button on the sleeve of her blouse. The lines on each side of the old woman’s mouth were deeply etched, as if it required deep concentration to fiddle with that button.

  ‘Shall I show you where it was? Where I saw him?’

  It had been snowing all morning. It fell and fell in thick masses, and Seved sat at the kitchen table seeing nothing else. The slopes of the stubbly pine-covered mountain had faded into white and the wire netting of the dog enclosure was so clogged up that it was impossible to see what was going on in there. The dogs usually sat staring silently ahead when the nights had been long.

  He leaned across and widened the opening in the curtains so that he could see the upturned Volvo 240 out in the yard. The snow had covered the undercarriage in such a thick layer that it was hard to see any of the components apart from the hump of the silencer.

  As soon as he had drunk his coffee he would go out and try to turn the car upright. Make an attempt, at least. Most of the damage had already been done so there was no immediate hurry, but he did not like it being upside down. Although Ejvor did not seem to mind. From time to time a sticky little sound came from her direction as she licked the tip of her index finger and thumb and turned the pages of the newspaper. Apart from that the only sound was the hum of the heater.

  Above the double doors of the barn, beside a row of reindeer antlers growing out of the wall, a huge lamp was mounted on a curved metal pole. Many years ago he and Börje had plundered a lamp from a pole brought down by the wind along the road to Nalovardo. Börje made sure the lamp was switched off during the day because it drew a lot of power. But it was on now. That said something about how stressed Börje must have been when he set off. Snowflakes lit up as they floated past the lamp, and Seved was staring at these slowly descending sparks when Ejvor put down the newspaper.

  ‘Don’t I get a cup?’ she asked.

  ‘I didn’t think you wanted one,’ he said, and pushed back his chair.

  ‘I could have a small one.’

  He took down a cup and saucer from the cupboard above the draining board, placed it in front of her on the table and poured. From the shiny silver spout came coffee and spiralling steam.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she said, raising her hand.

  He sat down and cradled his cup.

  Now was a good time to talk to her. It seemed she was not in too much of a bad mood.

  In a confused memory from the early-morning hours he remembered hearing a diesel engine idling for what seemed like an eternity. Car doors slamming. Börje’s loud commands, Signe’s muttering. A dog barking.

  There was a clock on the wall above the Christmas decoration with little dancing elves that Ejvor had put up, and when he looked he saw it was getting on for eleven.

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘When did they go?’

  Ejvor sipped her coffee, then put her cup down gently on the saucer, like she always did, so there was no sound.

  ‘Yes, when was it? They went for the Isuzu too,’ she said. ‘Not upside down but on its side, so I think it must have been about seven by the time they left.’

  ‘They made a hell of a noise. It was about three, I think.’

  She turned the pages of the paper and then put it down on the table, looking at him.

  ‘And one of the dogs,’ she said. ‘That small bitch. They had fun with her, throwing her up onto the barn roof. She just stood there, barking and barking, and couldn’t get down, and Börje and I were too frightened to go outside, so she was up there for at least a couple of hours, poor little mite. She was scared out of her wits.’

  Seved leaned forwards to look at the far end of the barn roof. Naturally there was no trace left of the dog, at least nothing that could be seen from this distance.

  ‘They’ve never done that before, have they? Had a go at the dogs?’

  Ejvor licked her finger and turned a page before answering.

  ‘Once, in the seventies,’ she said. ‘They got into the enclosure and killed every single dog. Tore them to shreds, as if they wanted to find out how many pieces you can split a dog into. It looked like a slaughterhouse when I came out in the morning. Eleven dogs, and three of them pups. I cried like a baby when I saw it.’

  It took a while for Seved to absorb what she had told him – she had told him! – and he felt his mouth go dry.

  ‘You never said.’

  ‘Well, it’s so unusual.’

  She did not want to say more. Sharp lines had stitched her lips together. But even so he tried.

  ‘Why? What caused it?’

  ‘It was all four of them that time. They got each other worked up. We had to separate them after that.’

  ‘Because of what happened with the dogs?’

  Her eyes scanned the pages.

  ‘Among other things.’

  Seved pushed the chair aside and leaned against the window, pulling aside the light-blue viscose curtain that reached all the way to the floor.

  Directly opposite the barn was the building they called Hybblet. It looked like an old toilet block, and that is what it was, in a way. It had white fibre cement cladding, and with the roof covered in snow the place seemed to dissolve and recede until the only clear features were the door and the dark window frames, and the plastic pipes protruding like yellow elephant trunks taped to the base of the drainpipe. On the gable end was a satellite dish, but of course there was no television – Börje had attached it there to make the house look like any other house. Presumably that had been Lennart’s idea.

  On the front porch stood a pile of empty blue plastic storage boxes beside a row of black sacks, filled to the top. Flattened cardboard boxes poked out of one. The snow had blown in and settled in the folds of the sacks.

  ‘Have you been cleaning up?’

  When there was no answer he turned round and looked at Ejvor’s face. It showed no expression. That meant it was her.

  ‘When did you do it?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘But we weren’t supposed to clean up. We were meant to wait.’

  She put down the paper. She even stood up.

  ‘Well, it won’t make things any better if it’s filthy in there, that’s for sure!’

  She spat out the words without looking at him, as if they had sprung from a suppressed rage, and Seved accepted them in silence. He knew she was not angry with him, but that was not the point. If he continued, if he reminded her once again what Lennart had said, then she would take her anger out on him, and he wanted to avoid that at all costs.

  But it was already too late because she had gone out into the hall. The outer door opened and he heard her swear. He knew one of the hares was taking the brunt.

  Seved finished his coffee, which by now was cold. He felt incredibly tired. His eyes fastened on the back page of the newspaper, a copy of Västerbottens-Kuriren that had to be at least a week old. There was an advertisement in red letters, which to him appeared as meaningless shapes.

  You sleep well after a beating, Börje usually said.

  At night he could only lie there, glancing every few minutes at the clock radio, because he knew when it usually kicked off. As soon as he thought he heard something he would hold his breath. That was the worst thing. Waiting for it to start. Because some nights nothing happened.

  They plodded through snow a metre deep. Susso glanced towards the ice. The bottom of a boat, pulled up on the shore, stood o
ut like a sky-blue sliver against a field of white so flat it was impossible to distinguish the shoreline. In the distance she could make out a mountain, but it could just as easily have been a patch of dark sky. A cold wind was blowing up from the lake and it stung her cheeks.

  Edit pointed towards some leaning birch trees.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘At the edge. That’s where he stood.’

  Susso continued walking until she reached the trees Edit had pointed out. It was such a struggle to walk through the deep snow that she had to swing her arms to keep her balance.

  ‘Here?’ she asked, turning round, one hand on her hat.

  Edit nodded. Susso leaned forwards slightly and peered in among the sparse pine trees. The neighbours’ house, a white single-storey building painted blue around the windows, was visible through the trunks only a hundred metres away. She took a step sideways to keep her balance, but it was difficult and she had to put her hand down on the snow for support.

  ‘Is that all he did? Stand there?’ she shouted.

  ‘Yes,’ said Edit. ‘Grinning.’

  She rearranged her shawl and with her head bowed stepped into the track Susso had made. Her long waistcoat trailed behind her.

  ‘Perhaps he was only making a face,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t easy to see what he looked like. But I think he was laughing, because that’s what Mattias said he was doing.’

  ‘How old is Mattias?’ asked Susso.

  ‘Four,’ said Edit, pulling the shawl and the collar of her blouse tighter around her. She looked cold, but it was probably only a shudder going through her because then she said, almost in a whisper:

  ‘You see, I was standing in the kitchen and then I heard the boy. He was talking to someone. Out here. “Why are you laughing?” he said.’ Edit had altered her voice to sound like her grandchild. ‘I thought he was playing a game, but then he said it again: “Why are you laughing?” He sounded almost angry, I thought, as if he was getting impatient. I was curious, of course, because he doesn’t have any friends. There are no other children in the village.’