The Man from Beijing

1

Frozen snow, severe frost. Midwinter.

Early in January 2006 a lone wolf crosses the unmarked border and enters Sweden from Vauldalen in Norway. A man on a snowmobile thinks he might have glimpsed it just outside Fjällnäs, but the wolf vanishes into the trees heading east before he is able to pinpoint it. In the remote Norwegian Österdalarna Mountains it had discovered a lump of frozen moose carcass, with remnants of meat still clinging to the bones. But that was more than two days ago. It is beginning to feel the pain of hunger and is desperately searching for food.

The wolf is a young male that has set out to find a territory of his own. He continues his way eastward. At Nävjarna, north of Linsell, he finds another moose carcass. For a whole day he stays and eats his fill before resuming his trek east. When he comes to Kårböle he trots over the frozen Ljusnan and then follows the river along its winding route towards the sea. One moonless night he lopes silently over the bridge at Järvsö, then heads into the vast forests that stretch to the coast.

In the early morning of 13 January the wolf reaches Hesjövallen, a tiny village south of Hansesjön Lake in Hälsingland. He pauses and sniffs the air. He detects the smell of blood. He looks around. There are people living in the houses but no smoke rising from the chimneys. His sharp ears can’t detect the slightest sound.

But the wolf is in no doubt about the blood. He skulks at the edge of the forest, nose in the air. Then he moves forward, silently, through the snow. The smell comes from one of the houses at the far end of the hamlet. He is vigilant now — with humans around it’s essential to be both careful and patient. He pauses again. The smell originates from the back of the house. He waits. Then eventually starts moving once more. When he gets there he finds another carcass. He drags his large meal back to the trees. He has not been discovered, not even the village dogs have stirred. The silence is total this freezing cold morning.

The wolf starts eating when he comes to the edge of the trees. It is easy, as the flesh has not yet frozen. He is very hungry now. Having pulled off a leather shoe, he starts gnawing away at an ankle.

It snowed during the night but stopped before dawn. As the wolf eats his fill, snowflakes once again start dancing down towards the frozen ground.

2

When Karsten Höglin woke up he remembered dreaming about a photograph. He lay motionless in bed and felt the image returning slowly, as if the negative of his dream were sending a copy into his conscious mind. He recognised the picture. It was black and white and depicted a man sitting on an old iron bed, with a hunting rifle hanging on the wall and a chamber pot at his feet. When he saw it for the first time, he had been gripped by the old man’s wistful smile. There was something timorous and evasive about him. Much later Karsten had discovered the background. A few years earlier the man had accidentally shot and killed his only son while hunting seabirds. From then on the rifle had never come down from the wall, and the man had become a hermit.

Höglin thought that of all the thousands of photographs and negatives he had seen, this was the one he would never forget. He wished he had taken it himself.

The clock on his bedside table read half past seven. Höglin usually woke up very early, but he had slept badly that night, the bed and its mattress were uncomfortable. He made up his mind to complain about them when he checked out of the hotel.

It was the ninth and final day of his journey. It had been made possible by a scholarship enabling him to study deserted villages and other small settlements that were being depopulated. He had come as far as Hudiksvall and had one hamlet left to photograph. He had chosen this particular one because an old man who lived there had read about his project and sent him a letter. Höglin had been impressed by the letter and decided that this was the place for him to conclude his study.

He got up and opened the curtains. It had snowed during the night and was still grey, the sun not yet risen. A bundled-up woman was cycling past in the street below. Karsten considered her and wondered how cold it was. Minus five degrees Celsius, possibly minus seven.

He dressed and took the slow-moving lift down to reception. He had parked his car in the enclosed courtyard behind the hotel. It was safe there. Even so, he had taken all his photographic equipment up to his room, as was his practice. His worst nightmare was to come to his car one day and find that all his cameras had vanished.

The receptionist was a young girl, barely out of her teens. He noticed that her make-up was slapdash and gave up on the idea of complaining about the bed. After all, he had no intention of ever returning to the hotel.

In the breakfast room a few guests were absorbed in their morning papers. For a fleeting moment he was tempted to get a camera and take a shot. It gave him the feeling that Sweden had always been exactly like this. Silent people, poring over their newspapers with a cup of coffee, absorbed in their own thoughts, their own fates.

But he resisted the temptation, served himself coffee, buttered two slices of bread and tucked into a soft-boiled egg. Without a newspaper, he ate quickly. He hated being at a meal on his own without anything to read.

It was colder than he expected when he emerged from the hotel. He stood on tiptoe to read the thermometer in the reception window. Minus eleven degrees. And falling, he suspected. This winter has been far too warm. Here comes the cold spell we’ve been expecting. He put his cases on the back seat, started the engine and began scraping ice off the windscreen. There was a map on the passenger seat. The previous day, after taking pictures of a village not far from Lake Hassela, he had worked out how to get to his final port of call: take the main road southward, turn off towards Sörforsa near Iggesund, then follow either the east or the west shore of the lake called Storsjön in some parts and Långsjön in others. The guy at the petrol station on the way into Hudiksvall had warned him that the east road was bad, but he decided to take it anyway. It would be quicker. And the light was so lovely this winter morning. He could already envisage the smoke rising straight up to the sky from the chimneys.

It took him forty minutes to get there. By then he had already made a wrong turn, a road leading southward to Näcksjö.

Hesjövallen was situated in a little valley by a lake whose name he couldn’t recall. Hesjön, maybe? The dense forests extended all the way to the hamlet, on both sides of the narrow road leading up towards Härjedalen.

Karsten stopped at the edge of the tiny village and got out of the car. There were breaks in the clouds now. The light would become more difficult to capture, perhaps not so expressive. He looked around. Everything was very still. The houses gave the impression of having been there since time immemorial. In the distance he could hear the faint noise of traffic on the main road.

He suddenly felt uneasy. He held his breath, as he always did when confronted with something he didn’t really understand.

Then it dawned on him — the chimneys, they were cold. There was no sign of smoke, which would have been an effective feature of the photographs he hoped to take. His gaze moved slowly from house to house. Somebody’s cleared the snow already, he thought. But not lit a single fire? He remembered the letter he’d received from the man who had told him about the village. He had referred to the chimneys and how the houses seemed, in a childish sort of way, to be sending smoke signals to one another.

He sighed. People don’t write the truth, but what they think you want to read. Now should I take pictures with cold chimneys or abandon the whole business? Nobody was forcing him to take photographs of Hesjövallen and its inhabitants. He already had plenty of pictures of the Sweden that was fading away: the derelict farms, the remote villages whose only hope of survival was that Danes and Germans would buy up the houses and turn them into summer cottages. He decided to leave and returned to his car. But he didn’t start the engine. He had come this far; the least he could do was to try to create some portrait of the local inhabitants — he wanted faces. As the years passed, Karsten Höglin had become increasingly fascinated by elderly people. He wanted to compile an album: pictures that would describe the beauty found only in the faces of very old women, their lives and hardships etched into their skin like the sediment in a cliff wall.

He got out of his car again, pulled his fur hat down over his ears, picked out a Leica M6 he’d been using for the past ten years, and made for the nearest of the group of houses. There were ten in all, most of them timber and painted red, some with added stoops. He could see only one modern house. If it could still be called modern, that is — a 1950s detached house. When he came to the gate, he paused and raised his camera. The nameplate indicated that the Andrén family lived there. He took a few shots, varying the aperture setting and exposure time, trying out several angles, though it was clear that there wasn’t enough light yet and he would get only an indistinct blur. But you never know. Photographers sometimes expose unexpected secrets.

Höglin was intuitive with his work. Not that he didn’t bother to measure light levels when required, but sometimes he’d pull off surprising results without paying attention to carefully calculated exposure times. Improvisation went with the territory.

The gate was stiff. He had to push hard in order to open it. There were no footprints in the newly fallen snow. Still not a sound, not even a dog. It’s deserted, he thought. This isn’t a village; it’s a Flying Dutchman.

He knocked on the front door, waited, then knocked again. Nothing. He began to wonder what was going on. Something was amiss. He knocked again, harder and longer. Then he tried the door handle. Locked. Old people scare easily, he thought. They lock their doors and worry that all the things they read about in the papers are going to happen to them.

He banged on the door. Nothing. He concluded there must not be anybody at home.

He went back through the gate and moved on to the next house. It was starting to get lighter now. The house was painted yellow. The putty around the windows was coming off — it must be very draughty inside. Before knocking he tried the door handle. Locked again. He knocked hard, then began banging away even before anybody could possibly have had time to answer. Once again, empty.

If he went back to his car now, he would be at home in Piteå by early afternoon. That would please his wife. She was convinced that he was too old to be embarking on all these trips, despite the fact that he was only sixty-three. But he had been diagnosed with symptoms of imminent angina. The doctor had advised him to watch what he ate and try to get as much exercise as possible.

One last try. He went round to the back of the house and tried a door that seemed to lead to a utility room behind the kitchen. That was also locked. He went to the nearest window, stood on tiptoe and looked in. He could see through a gap in the curtains into a room with a television set. He continued to the next window. It was the same room, and he could still see the TV. A tapestry hanging on the wall informed him that JESUS IS YOUR BEST FRIEND. He was about to move on to the next window when something on the floor attracted his attention. At first he thought it was a ball of wool just lying there. Then he saw that it was a woolly sock, and that the sock was on a foot. He stepped back from the window. His heart was pounding. Was that really a foot? He went back to the first window, but he couldn’t see as far into the room from there. He went on to the second window. Now he was certain. It really was a foot. A motionless foot. He couldn’t be sure if it was a man’s or a woman’s. The owner of the foot might be sitting in a chair. It was hard to make out — but if so why hadn’t the person stirred?

He knocked on the window as hard as he dared, but there was no response. He took out his mobile phone and dialled the emergency number. No signal. He ran to the third house and banged on the door. Nothing. He felt like he was in the middle of a nightmare. He picked up a foot scraper, smashed the door lock and forced his way in. He had to find a telephone. There was an old woman lying on the kitchen floor. Her head was almost totally severed from her neck. Beside her lay the carcass of a dog, cut in two.

Höglin screamed and turned to flee. As he ran through the hall he saw the body of a man sprawled on the floor of the living room, between the table and a red sofa with a white throw. The old man was naked. His back was covered in blood.

Höglin raced out of the house. He couldn’t get away fast enough. He dropped his camera when he reached the road but didn’t stop to pick it up. He was convinced that somebody or something he couldn’t see was about to stab him in the back. He turned his car and sped away.

He stopped when he reached the main road, then dialled the emergency number, his hands shaking uncontrollably. As he raised the phone to his ear, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. It was as if somebody had caught up with him and stabbed him.

He could hear someone speaking to him on the phone, but he was incapable of answering. The pain was so intense that all he could manage was a faint hiss.

‘I can’t hear you,’ said a woman’s voice.

He tried again. Once more nothing but a faint hiss. He was dying.

‘Can you speak a bit louder?’ asked the woman. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

He made a supreme effort and produced a few words.

‘I’m dying,’ he gasped. ‘For God’s sake, I’m dying. Help me.’

‘Where are you?’

But the woman received no reply. Karsten Höglin was on his way into the endless darkness. In a desperate attempt to escape from the excruciating pain, like a drowning man trying in vain to rise to the surface, he stepped on the accelerator. The car shot over to the wrong side of the road. A truck on the way to Hudiksvall carrying office furniture had no chance to avoid a head-on collision. The truck driver jumped down from his cab to check on the driver of the car he had crashed into. Höglin was prostrate over the steering wheel.

The truck driver, from Bosnia, spoke little Swedish.

‘How is you?’ he asked.

‘The village,’ mumbled Karsten Höglin. ‘Hesjövallen.’

Those were his final words. By the time the police and the ambulance arrived, Karsten Höglin had succumbed to a massive heart attack.

It was not at all clear what had happened. Nobody could possibly have guessed the reason for the sudden heart attack suffered by the man behind the wheel of the dark blue Volvo. It wasn’t until Karsten Höglin’s body had been taken away and tow trucks were trying to extricate the badly damaged furniture van that a police officer bothered to listen to the Bosnian driver. The officer’s name was Erik Huddén, and he didn’t like talking to people who spoke bad Swedish unless he was forced to. It was as if their stories were less important if they were unable to articulate them properly. Naturally, the officer began with a breathalyser. But the driver was sober, and his driver’s licence seemed to be in order.

‘He tried saying something,’ said the truck driver.

‘What?’ Huddén asked dismissively.

‘Something about Herö. A place, perhaps?’

Huddén was a local, and shook his head impatiently.

‘There’s nowhere around here called Herö.’

‘Maybe I hear wrong? Maybe it was something with an s? Maybe Hersjö?’

‘Hesjövallen?’

The driver nodded. ‘Yes, he said that.’

‘And what did he mean?’

‘I don’t know. He died.’

Huddén put his notebook away. He hadn’t written down what the driver said. Half an hour later, when the tow trucks had driven off and another police car had taken the Bosnian driver to the station for more questioning, Huddén got into his car, ready to return to Hudiksvall. He was accompanied by his colleague, Leif Ytterström, who was driving.

‘Let’s go via Hesjövallen,’ said Huddén out of the blue.

‘Why? Has there been an emergency call?’

‘I just want to check up on something.’

Erik Huddén was the older of the two officers. He was known for being both uncommunicative and stubborn. Ytterström turned off onto the road to Sörforsa. When they came to Hesjövallen Huddén asked him to drive slowly through the village. He still hadn’t explained to his colleague why they had made this detour.

‘It looks deserted,’ said Ytterström as they slowly passed house after house.

‘Hang on. Go back,’ said Huddén. ‘Slowly.’

Then he told Ytterström to stop. Something lying in the snow by one of the houses had attracted his attention. He got out of the car and went to investigate. He suddenly stopped dead and drew his gun. Ytterström leaped out of the car and drew his own gun.

‘What’s going on?’

Huddén didn’t reply. He moved cautiously forward. Then he paused again and bent over as if he had suddenly been afflicted by chest pains. When he came back to the car Erik Huddén was white in the face.

‘There’s a dead man lying there,’ he said. ‘He’s been beaten to death. And there’s something missing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘One of his legs.’

They stood staring at each other without speaking. Then Huddén got into the car and picked up the radio and asked for Vivi Sundberg, who he knew was on duty that day. She responded immediately.

‘Erik here. I’m out at Hesjövallen.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I don’t know. But there’s a man lying dead in the snow.’

‘Say that again.’

‘A dead man. In the snow. It looks as if he’s been beaten to death. One of his legs is missing.’

They knew each other well. Sundberg knew that Erik Huddén would never exaggerate, no matter how incredible what he said seemed to be.

‘We’ll be there,’ said Sundberg.

‘Get the forensic guys from Gävle.’

‘Who’s with you?’

‘Ytterström.’

She thought for a moment.

‘Is there any plausible explanation for what’s happened?’

‘I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

He knew she would understand. He had been a police officer for so long that there was no real limit to the suffering and violence he was forced to face up to.

It was thirty-five minutes before they heard sirens approaching in the distance. Huddén had tried to persuade Ytterström to accompany him to the nearest house so that they could talk to the neighbours, but his colleague refused to move until reinforcements arrived. As Huddén was reluctant to enter the house alone, they stayed by the car. They said nothing while they waited.

Vivi Sundberg got out of the first car to pull up beside them. She was a powerfully built woman in her fifties. Those who knew her were well aware that, despite her cumbersome body, she was very mobile and possessed considerable stamina. Only a few months earlier she had chased and caught two burglars in their twenties. They had laughed at her as they started to run off. They were no longer laughing when she arrested the pair of them after a chase of a few hundred yards.

Vivi Sundberg had red hair. Four times a year she visited her daughter’s hairdressing salon and had the redness reinforced.

She was born on a farm just outside of Harmånger and had looked after her parents until they grew old and eventually died. Then she began educating herself, and after a few years applied to the police college. She was amazed to be accepted. Nobody could explain why she had got in, given the size of her body; but nobody asked any questions, and she said nothing.

Vivi Sundberg was a diligent, hard-working police officer. She was persistent, and outstanding when it came to analysing and following up on the slightest lead.

She ran a hand through her hair and looked hard at Erik Huddén.

‘Well, are you going to show me?’

They walked over to the dead body. Sundberg pulled a face and squatted down. ‘Has the doctor arrived?’

‘She’s on her way.’

‘She?’

‘Hugo has a sub. He’s going to be operated on. A tumour.’

Vivi Sundberg momentarily lost interest in the body lying in the snow. ‘Is he ill?’

‘He has cancer. Didn’t you know?’

‘No. Where?’

‘In his stomach. Apparently it hasn’t spread. Anyway, he has a sub from Uppsala. Valentina Miir’s her name. If I’ve pronounced it right.’

Huddén shouted to Ytterström, who was drinking coffee by one of the cars. He confirmed that the police doctor would be here at any moment.

Sundberg started examining the body closely. Every time she was confronted by a corpse, she was overcome by the same feeling of pointless-ness. She was unable to awaken the dead, the best she could do was to expose the reasons for the crime and send the killer to a prison cell or to an asylum for the mentally ill.

‘Somebody has gone berserk,’ she said. ‘With a long knife. Or a bayonet. Possibly a sword. I can see at least ten wounds, nearly all of them potentially fatal. But I don’t understand the missing leg. Do we know who the man is?’

‘Not yet. All the houses appear to be empty.’

Sundberg stood up and looked around the village. The houses seemed to return her attentive gaze.

‘Have you been knocking on doors?’

‘I thought I should wait. Whoever did this might still be around.’

‘You’re right.’

She beckoned to Ytterström, who threw his empty cardboard cup into the snow.

‘Let’s go in,’ she said. ‘There must be people around. This isn’t a ghost town.’

‘There’s been no sign of anybody.’

Sundberg looked again at the houses, the snowed-over gardens, the road. She drew her pistol and set off towards the nearest house; the two men followed. It was a few minutes past eleven.

What the three police officers discovered was unprecedented in the annals of Swedish crime and would become a part of Swedish legal history. There were bodies in every house. Dogs and cats had been stabbed to death, even a parrot had had its head cut off. They found a total of nineteen dead people, all of them elderly except for a boy who must have been about twelve. Some had been killed while asleep in bed; others were lying on the floor or sitting on chairs at the kitchen table. An old woman had died with a comb in her hand, a man by a stove with an overturned coffee pot by his side. In one house they found two people locked in an embrace and tied together. All had been subjected to frenzied violence. It was as if a blood-laden hurricane had stormed through the village just as the old people who lived there were getting up. As the elderly in the country tend to rise early, Sundberg assumed the murders had taken place close to sunrise.

Vivi Sundberg felt as if her whole head was being submerged in blood. She shook off her outrage, but felt very cold. It was as if she were viewing the dead disfigured bodies through a telescope, which meant that she didn’t need to approach too closely.

And then there was the smell. Although the bodies had barely turned cold, they were already giving off a smell that was both sweet and sour. While inside the houses, Sundberg tried to breathe through her mouth. The moment she stepped outside, she filled her lungs with fresh air. Crossing the threshold of the next house was like preparing to face something almost unbearable.

Everything she saw, one body after another, bore witness to the same frenzy and the same wounds caused by a very sharp weapon. The list she made later that day, which she never revealed to anybody, comprised brief notes on exactly what she had seen:

House number one. Dead elderly man, half naked, ragged pyjamas, slippers, half lying on the staircase. Head almost severed from body, the thumb of the left hand three feet away. Dead elderly woman, nightgown, stomach split open, intestines hanging out, false teeth smashed to pieces.

House number two. Dead man and dead woman, both at least eighty. Bodies found in a double bed on the first floor. The woman might have been killed in her sleep with a slash from her left shoulder and through her breast towards her right hip. The man tried to defend himself with a hammer, but one arm severed, throat cut. Remarkably, the bodies have been tied together. Gives the impression that the man was alive when bound but the woman dead. No proof, of course, just an immediate reaction. Young boy dead in a small bedroom. Might have been asleep when killed.

House number three. Lone woman, dead on the kitchen floor. A dog of unknown pedigree stabbed to death by her side. The woman’s spine appears to be broken in more than one place.

House number four. Man dead in the hall. Wearing trousers, shirt; barefoot. Probably tried to resist. Body almost cut in two through the stomach. Elderly woman sitting dead in the kitchen. Two, possibly three wounds in the top of her head.

House number seven. Two elderly women and an elderly man dead in their beds upstairs. Impression: they were awake, conscious, but had no time to react. Cat stabbed to death in the kitchen.

House number eight. Elderly man lying dead outside, one leg missing. Two dogs beheaded. Woman dead on the stairs, hacked to pieces.

House number nine. Four people dead in the living room on the first floor. Half dressed, with cups of coffee, radio on, station one. Three elderly women, an elderly man. All with their heads on their knees.

House number ten. Two very old people, a man and a woman, dead in their beds. Impossible to say if they were aware of what was happening.

Towards the end of her list she no longer had the mental strength to record all the details. Nevertheless, what she had seen was unforgettable, a vision of hell itself.

She numbered the houses according to the discovery of the bodies. That was not the same order as their locations along the road. When they came to the fifth house during their macabre inspection, they found signs of life. They could hear music coming from inside the house. Ytterström thought it sounded like Jimi Hendrix.

Before going inside they called in two other officers as backup. They approached the front door — pistols drawn. Huddén banged hard on it. It was opened by a half-naked, long-haired man. He drew back in horror on seeing all the guns. Vivi Sundberg lowered her pistol when she saw he was unarmed.

‘Are you alone in the house?’

‘My wife’s here as well,’ said the man, his voice shaking.

‘Nobody else?’

‘No. What’s going on?’

Sundberg holstered her pistol and gestured to the others to do the same.

‘Let’s go inside,’ she said to the half-naked man, who was shivering with cold. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Tom.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Hansson.’

‘Come on, Tom Hansson, let’s go inside. Out of the cold.’

The music was at full volume. Sundberg had the impression there were speakers in every room. She followed the man into a cluttered living room where a woman in a nightdress was curled up on a sofa. He turned down the music and put on a pair of trousers that had been hanging over a chair back. Hansson and the woman on the sofa were about sixty.

‘What’s happened?’ asked the woman who, clearly scared, spoke with a broad Stockholm accent. Probably they were hippies left over from the sixties. Sundberg decided not to beat about the bush; there was no time to waste — it was possible that whoever had been responsible for this outrage might be on the way to carry out another massacre.

‘Many of your neighbours are dead,’ Sundberg said. ‘Horrendous crimes have taken place in this little village overnight. It’s important that you answer our questions. What’s your name?’

‘Ninni,’ said the woman. ‘Are Herman and Hilda dead?’

‘Where do they live?’

‘In the house to the left.’

Sundberg nodded.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. They’ve been murdered. But they’re not the only ones.’

‘If this is your idea of a joke, it’s not a very good one,’ said Tom Hansson.

Sundberg lost her composure briefly.

‘I’m sorry, but we only have time for you to answer my questions. I can understand that you think what I’m telling you seems incredible, but it’s true — horrific, but true. Did you hear anything last night?’

The man sat down on the sofa beside the woman.

‘We were asleep.’

‘Did you hear anything this morning?’

They both shook their heads.

‘Haven’t you even noticed that the place is crawling with police officers?’

‘When we play music loudly, we don’t hear anything.’

‘When did you last see your neighbours?’

‘If you mean Herman and Hilda, yesterday,’ said Ninni. ‘We usually run into each other when we go out with the dogs.’

‘Do you have a dog?’

Tom Hansson nodded in the direction of the kitchen.

‘He’s pretty old and lazy. He doesn’t even bother to get up when we have visitors.’

‘Didn’t he bark during the night?’

‘He never barks.’

‘What time did you see your neighbours?’

‘At about three o’clock yesterday afternoon. But only Hilda.’

‘Did everything seem to be as usual?’

‘She had back pains. Herman was probably in the kitchen, solving crosswords. I didn’t see him.’

‘What about the rest of the people in the village?’

‘Everything was the same as it always is. Only old people live here. They stay indoors when it’s cold. We see them more often in spring and summer.’

‘There aren’t any children here, then?’

‘None at all.’

Sundberg paused, thinking about the dead boy.

‘Is it really true?’ asked the woman on the sofa. She was frightened.

‘Yes,’ Sundberg said. ‘It could well be that everybody in this village is dead. Apart from you.’

Huddén was standing by the window.

‘Not quite everybody,’ he said slowly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not quite everybody’s dead. There’s somebody out there on the road.’

Sundberg hurried over to the window and saw a woman standing in the road outside. She was old, wearing a bathrobe and black rubber boots. Her hands were clasped in prayer.

Sundberg held her breath. The woman was motionless.

3

Tom Hansson came up to the window and stood beside Vivi Sundberg.

‘It’s only Julia,’ he said. ‘We sometimes find her outside in the cold without a coat on. Hilda and Herman usually keep an eye on her when the home help isn’t here.’

‘Where does she live?’ asked Sundberg.

He pointed at the house next to the last one at the edge of the village.

‘When we moved here,’ he said, ‘Julia was married. Her husband, Rune, used to drive forestry vehicles, until he burst an artery and died in the cab of his truck. She went a bit odd after that — wandering around with her hands clenched in her pockets, if you see what I mean. I suppose we’ve always thought she should be able to die here. She has two children who come to see her once a year. They’re just waiting for their little inheritance and couldn’t care less about her.’

Sundberg and Huddén went outside. The woman looked up when Sundberg paused in front of her, but she said nothing. Nor did she protest when Huddén helped to lead her back home. The house was neat and tidy. On one wall were photographs of her dead husband and the two children who didn’t care about her.

Sundberg took out her notebook for the first time. Huddén examined a document with official stamps that was lying on the kitchen table.

‘Julia Holmgren,’ he said. ‘She’s eighty-seven.’

‘Make sure somebody phones the home-help service. I don’t care what time they normally come to see to her, get them here right now.’

The old woman sat at the kitchen table, looking out of the window. Clouds were hanging heavily over the landscape.

‘Should we try asking her a few questions?’

Sundberg shook her head.

‘There’s no point. What could she possibly tell us?’

She nodded at Huddén, indicating that he should leave them alone. He went out to the yard. Sundberg went into the living room, stood in the middle of the floor and closed her eyes. She tried to come to terms with what had happened.

There was something about the old woman that set bells ringing faintly in the back of Sundberg’s mind. But she was unable to pin the thought down. She continued standing there, opened her eyes and tried to think. What had actually happened that January morning? A number of people murdered in a tiny remote village. Plus several dead pets. Everything pointed towards a wild frenzy. Could a single attacker really have done all this? Had several killers turned up in the middle of the night, then disappeared again after carrying out their brutal massacre? It was too soon to say. Sundberg had no answers, only a set of circumstances and many dead bodies. She had a couple still alive who had withdrawn to this place in the middle of nowhere from Stockholm, years ago. And a senile old woman in the habit of standing in the road wearing only a nightdress.

But there was a starting point, it seemed. Not everybody in the village was dead. At least three people had survived. Why? Coincidence, or did it have some meaning?

Sundberg stood motionless for a few more minutes. She could see through the window that the forensic team from Gävle had arrived, along with a woman she assumed was the police doctor. She took a deep breath. She was still the one in charge — for the time being, at any rate, but she needed help from Stockholm today.

She pulled out her mobile phone and called Robertsson, the district prosecutor, to explain the situation.

Sundberg wondered how he would react. None of us has ever seen anything like this before, she thought.

She went outside where the two forensic officers and the police doctor were waiting.

‘You need to see this for yourselves. We’ll start with the man lying outside in the snow. Then we’ll go through the houses one by one. You can decide if you’ll need extra assistance. It’s a very big crime scene.’

Sundberg parried their questions. They had to see it all with their own eyes. She led the procession from one macabre scene to the next. When they came to the third house, Lönngren, the senior forensic officer, said he needed to call for reinforcements right now. At the fourth house, the police doctor said the same thing. Calls were made. They continued through the remaining houses and gathered once more on the road. By then the first journalist had arrived. Sundberg told Ytterström to make sure nobody spoke to him. She would do it herself as soon as she had time.

The people standing around her on the snow-covered road were pale and silent. None of them could grasp the implications of what they had just seen.

‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ said Sundberg. ‘Our collective experience and abilities are going to be put to the test. This investigation is going to dominate the mass media, and not only in Sweden. We’re going to be under enormous pressure to produce results by tomorrow. At the latest. Let’s hope that whoever is responsible for all this has left traces that we can follow to catch him or them pronto. We need to try to remain calm and get help whenever necessary. District Prosecutor Robertsson is on his way here. I want him to see everything for himself, and to take charge of the investigation. Any questions? If not, we need to get down to work.’

‘I think I have a question,’ said Lönngren.

He was a short, thin guy. Sundberg considered him a very efficient technician. But his weakness was that he tended to work too slowly for those desperate for answers by yesterday.

‘Shoot.’

‘Is there a risk that this maniac, if that’s what he is, might strike again?’

‘Yes,’ said Sundberg. ‘As we know nothing at all, we have to assume that anything might happen.’

‘There’s going to be panic out there,’ said Lönngren. ‘For once I’m relieved to live in town.’

The group split up just as Sten Robertsson arrived. The reporter who’d been hovering outside the taped-off area immediately closed in on Robertsson as he got out of his car.

‘Not now,’ shouted Sundberg. ‘You’ll have to wait.’

‘Oh, come on, Vivi! Can’t you say anything at all? You’re not usually impossible.’

‘Right now I am.’

She disliked the reporter, who worked for Hudiksvalls Tidning. He often wrote articles criticising the way the police worked. What probably irritated her most was that he was often right to criticise.

Robertsson was feeling the cold — his jacket was far too thin. He’s vain, was Sundberg’s immediate thought.

‘So, let’s hear all about it,’ said Robertsson.

‘No. Come with me.’

For the third time that morning Vivi Sundberg went through the entire crime scene. On two occasions Robertsson was forced to go outside, on the point of throwing up. She waited patiently for him. She wasn’t sure he was up to the task. But she also knew that he was the best of the prosecutors currently available.

When they finally arrived back at the road, she suggested that they sit in her car. She had managed to grab a Thermos of coffee before leaving the police station.

Robertsson was rattled. His hand holding the mug of coffee was shaking noticeably.

‘Have you ever seen anything like that before?’ he asked.

‘Never.’

‘Surely nobody but a lunatic could have done this?’

‘Who knows? I’ve asked the forensic guys to call up whatever extra resources they think are appropriate. And the doctor as well.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘A sub. This is probably her first crime scene. She’s called for help.’

‘And what about you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you need?’

‘First and foremost an indication from you if there’s anything in particular we should concentrate on. And then we have to bring in the National Investigation Department, of course.’

‘What should we be concentrating on?’

‘You’re the one in charge of the investigation, not me.’

‘All that matters is that we find the bastard who’s responsible for this.’

‘Or bastards. We can’t exclude the possibility that there’s more than one of them.’

‘Lunatics don’t usually work in teams.’

‘But we can’t exclude the possibility.’

‘Is there anything we can exclude?’

‘No. Nothing. Not even the possibility of it happening again.’

Robertsson nodded. They sat lost in thought. People were moving on the road and between the houses. There was an occasional flash from a camera. A tent had been raised over the body discovered in the snow. Several photographers and reporters had arrived. And the first television crew.

‘I want you to participate in the first press conference,’ she said. ‘I can’t cope on my own. And we’ll have to hold it today. Later this afternoon.’

‘Have you spoken to Ludde?’

Tobias Ludwig was the chief of police in Hudiksvall. He was young and had never been a beat cop. He’d studied law, then followed that with a course for future chiefs of police. Neither Sten Robertsson nor Vivi Sundberg liked him. He had little idea of what practical police work entailed and spent most of his time worrying about internal police administration.

‘No, I haven’t spoken to him,’ she said. ‘All he’ll do is urge us to be extra careful filling out the paperwork.’

‘He’s not that bad,’ said Robertsson.

‘No, he’s worse,’ said Sundberg. ‘But I’ll call him.’

‘Do it now.’

She called the police station in Hudiksvall, but Tobias Ludwig was on official business in Stockholm. She asked the switchboard to contact him on his mobile phone.

Robertsson was busy talking to the newly arrived forensic officers from Gävle. Sundberg was left standing beside Tom and Ninni Hansson in their garden. The Hanssons had donned their army-issue fur coats and were observing what was happening with interest. Start with those still alive, Vivi Sundberg thought. Tom and Ninni Hansson might have seen something without realising it.

A killer who decides to eliminate a whole village must have some kind of plan for how to go about it, even if he’s totally crazy.

She walked over to the road and looked around. The frozen lake, the forest, the distant mountains with all their peaks and valleys. Where had he come from? she asked herself. I think I can be certain that whoever did this was not a woman. But he, or they, must have come from somewhere, and they must have gone somewhere.

She was just about to go back in through the gate when a car pulled up with one of the dog patrols they had sent for.

‘Only one?’ she asked, without trying to conceal her irritation.

‘Bonzo’s not feeling well,’ said the officer.

‘Are you telling me that police dogs can be off sick?’

‘Evidently. Where do you want me to start? What’s happened?’

‘Talk to Huddén.’

The officer was about to ask her something else, but she turned her back on him and took Tom and Ninni Hansson back into their house. As they sat down, her mobile phone rang.

‘I hear you’ve been trying to contact me,’ said Tobias Ludwig. ‘You know I don’t like being disturbed when I’m at meetings of the National Police Board.’

‘I’m afraid that can’t be helped on this occasion.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘We have several dead bodies in Hesjövallen.’

She described the situation briefly. Ludwig didn’t say a word. She waited.

‘I understand. I’ll set off as soon as I can.’

Vivi Sundberg glanced at her watch.

‘We need to call a press conference,’ she said. ‘We’ll time it for six o’clock. Until then I’ll just say that there’s been a murder. I won’t reveal how many victims. Come as fast as you can. But don’t crash the car.’

‘I’ll see if I can get an emergency car to take me.’

‘Preferably a helicopter. We’re talking about nineteen murdered people, Tobias.’

They hung up. The Hanssons had heard every word she said. She could see the disbelief in their faces.

The nightmare was expanding all the time. Reality was a long way off.

She sat down in a chair, having shooed away a sleeping cat.

‘Everybody in the village is dead. You two and Julia are the only ones still alive. Even people’s pets have been killed. I can understand that you are shocked. We all are. But I have to ask you some questions. Please try to answer as accurately as possible. I also want you to try and think of things I don’t ask you about. Even the smallest thing you can remember might be important. Do you understand?’

The response was silent, worried-looking nods. Sundberg decided to tread carefully. She started talking about that morning. When had they woken up? Had they heard anything? What about during the night? Had anything happened? Had anything been different from usual? She asked them to ransack their memories.

They took turns replying. One filled in when the other broke off. It was obvious that they were doing their very best to be helpful.

She went backwards, a sort of wintry retracing of steps through an unknown landscape. Had anything special happened the previous evening? Nothing. ‘Everything was the same as usual’ were the words recurring in almost every answer they gave her.

They were interrupted by Erik Huddén. What should he do with the journalists? More kept arriving, and they were getting restless.

‘Hang on a bit longer,’ she said. ‘I’ll be with you shortly. Tell them there’ll be a press conference in Hudiksvall at six o’clock this evening.’

‘Will we be ready in time?’

‘We have to be.’

Huddén left. Sundberg resumed her questioning. Another step backwards, to yesterday morning and afternoon. This time it was Ninni who answered.

‘Everything was as usual yesterday,’ said Ninni. ‘I had a bit of a cold. Tom spent all day chopping wood.’

‘Did you speak to any of your neighbours?’

‘Tom exchanged a few words with Hilda, but we’ve already told you that.’

‘Did you see any of the others?’

‘Yes, I suppose I must have. It was snowing. People always come out to shovel and keep the paths clear. Yes, I saw several of them without really noticing.’

‘Did you see anybody else?’

‘What do you mean,“anybody else”?’

‘Somebody who doesn’t live here? Or maybe a car you didn’t recognise?’

‘No, nobody at all.’

‘What about the previous day?’

‘I suppose it was more or less the same. Nothing much ever happens here.’

‘Nothing unusual?’

‘Nothing at all.’

Vivi took out her notebook and a pencil.

‘Now I’m afraid I have to ask you something difficult,’ she said. ‘I must ask you for the names of all your neighbours.’

She ripped out a sheet of paper and placed it on the table.

‘Draw a map of the village,’ she said. ‘Your house and all the rest. Then we’ll give each one a number. Your house is number one. I want to know the names of everybody who lived in each of the houses.’

The woman stood up and fetched a bigger sheet of paper. She sketched out the village. Sundberg could see that she was used to drawing.

‘How do you earn your living?’ Sundberg asked.

‘We’re day traders — stocks and shares.’

It occurred to Vivi Sundberg that nothing ought to surprise her any more. Why shouldn’t a pair of ageing hippies in a village in Hälsingland deal in stocks and shares?

‘And we talk a lot,’ Ninni added. ‘We tell each other stories. People don’t usually do that nowadays.’

Sundberg felt the conversation was drifting away from the point.

‘The names, please,’ she said. ‘Preferably ages as well. Take your time so that you get it right.’

She watched the pair of them huddled over the piece of paper, muttering to each other. The thought crossed her mind — maybe one of the villagers was responsible for the massacre.

Fifteen minutes later, she had the list in her hand. The number didn’t tally. They were a name short. That must be the boy. She stood by the window and read through the list. There seemed to be basically three families in the village: the Anderssons, the Andréns and two people by the name of Magnusson. As she stood there with the list in her hand, she considered all the children and grandchildren who had moved away, who a few hours from now would be hit by this terrible news. Many, many people would be affected, and the resources required would be considerable.

All the first names flitted through her mind: Elna, Sara, Brita, August, Herman, Hilda, Johannes, Erik, Gertrud, Vendela... She tried to picture their faces in her mind’s eye, but they were blurred.

Then a thought suddenly struck her, something she had overlooked entirely. She went outside and shouted for Erik Huddén, who was talking to one of the forensic officers.

‘Erik, who was it that discovered all this?’

‘Some guy called us — had a heart attack and crashed into a truck with a Bosnian driver.’

‘Could he be the one responsible for all this?’

‘Maybe. His car was full of cameras. Probably a photographer.’

‘Find out what you can about him. Then we need to set up some kind of HQ in that house over there. We have to go through the list of names and find their next of kin. What happened to the truck driver?’

‘He was breathalysed, but he was sober. He spoke such poor Swedish they took him to Hudiksvall instead of interrogating him in the middle of the road. But he didn’t seem to know anything.’

Huddén left. As she was going back indoors she noticed a police officer running along the road towards the village. She went to the gate and waited for him.

‘We’ve found the leg,’ he said, clearly shaken. ‘The dog uncovered it about fifteen yards in among the trees.’

He pointed towards the edge of the forest. There was more, judging from his expression.

‘Was that all?’

‘I think it’s best if you take a look yourself,’ he said.

Then he turned away and threw up. She left him to it and hurried towards the trees. She slipped and fell twice.

When she arrived she could see what had upset the officer. In places the flesh had been gnawed off the leg to the bone. The foot had been bitten off completely.

She looked at Ytterström and the dog handler who were standing next to the find.

‘A cannibal,’ said Ytterström. ‘Is that what we’re looking for? Did we arrive and spoil his meal?’

Something touched Sundberg’s hand. She gave a start. But it was only a snowflake, which soon melted.

‘A tent,’ she said. ‘We need a tent here. I don’t want the footprints obliterated.’

She closed her eyes and suddenly saw a blue sea and white houses climbing up a warm hillside. Then she went back to the day traders’ house and sat down in their kitchen with the list of names.

There must be something somewhere I haven’t noticed, she thought.

She started to work her way slowly through the list. It was like walking through a minefield.

4

Vivi Sundberg had the feeling that she was studying a memorial to the victims of a major catastrophe, a plane crash or a sunken ship. But who would raise a memorial for the people of Hesjövallen who had been murdered one night in January 2006?

She slid the list of names to one side and stared at her trembling hands. She was unable to keep them still.

She shuddered, and picked up the list once again.

Eighteen names, three families. She stood up and went into the room where the Hanssons were sitting on the sofa, whispering to each other. They stopped when she entered.

‘You said there weren’t any children in this village? Is that right?’

They both nodded.

‘And you haven’t seen any children during the last few days?’

‘When sons or daughters of the old folk come to visit, they sometimes bring their own children with them. But that doesn’t happen often.’

Sundberg hesitated before continuing.

‘Unfortunately there is a young boy among the dead,’ she said.

She pointed at one of the houses. The woman stared at her, eyes wide open.

‘You mean he’s dead as well?’

‘Yes, he’s dead. If what you’ve written is accurate, he was in the house with Hans-Evert and Elsa Andersson. Are you sure you don’t know who he is?’

They turned to look at each other, then shook their heads. Sundberg went back to the kitchen. He’s the odd one out, she thought. Him and the couple living in this house, and Julia who suffers from dementia and has no conception of this catastrophe. But somehow or other, it’s the boy that doesn’t fit in.

She folded up the sheet of paper, put it in her pocket and went out. A few snowflakes were drifting down. All around her was silence. Disturbed only by an occasional voice, a door being closed, the clicking of a forensic tool. Erik Huddén came towards her. He was very pale. Everybody was pale.

‘Where’s the doctor?’ she asked.

‘Examining the leg.’

‘How’s she doing?’

‘She’s shocked. The first thing she did was to disappear into a toilet. Then she burst out crying. But there are more doctors on the way. What shall we do about the reporters?’

‘I’ll speak to them.’

She took the list of names from her pocket.

‘The boy doesn’t have a name. We must find out who he is. Make sure this list is copied, but don’t hand it out.’

‘This is beyond belief,’ said Huddén. ‘Eighteen people.’

‘Nineteen. The boy’s not on there.’

She produced a pen and added ‘unidentified boy’ to the bottom of the list.

Then she gathered the freezing cold and mystified reporters into a semicircle on the road.

‘I’ll give you a brief statement,’ she said. ‘You can ask questions, but we don’t have any answers at the moment. There’ll be a press conference later today in Hudiksvall. Provisionally at six o’clock. All I can say for now is that several very serious crimes were committed here during the night. I can’t give you any more details.’

A young girl, her face covered in freckles, held up her hand.

‘But surely you can tell us a bit more? It’s obvious that something terrible has happened when you cordon off the whole village.’

Sundberg didn’t recognise the girl, but the logo on her jacket was the name of a big national newspaper.

‘You can ask as many questions as you like, but I’m afraid that for technical reasons connected with the investigation, I can’t tell you any more for the moment.’

One of the television reporters thrust a microphone under her nose. She had met him many times before.

‘Can you repeat what you’ve just said?’

She did so, but when he tried to ask a follow-up question she turned her back on him and left. She didn’t stop walking until she came to the last of the tents that had been pitched. She suddenly felt very ill. She stepped to one side, took a few deep breaths, and only when she no longer felt the need to throw up did she approach the tent.

Once, during one of her first years as a police officer, she had fainted when she and a colleague had entered a house and found a man hanging there. She would prefer not to have that happen again.

The woman squatting down at the side of the leg looked up when Sundberg entered. A powerful spotlight made it very warm inside the tent. Sundberg introduced herself.

‘What can you tell me?’

Valentina Miir, probably in her forties, spoke with a pronounced foreign accent. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ she said. ‘You come across limbs that have been pulled off or severed, but this one...’

‘Has somebody been trying to eat it?’

‘The probability is that it’s an animal, of course. But there are aspects that worry me.’

‘Such as?’

‘Animals eat and gnaw at bones in a particular way. You can usually be more or less sure which particular animal has been involved. I suspect it was a wolf in this case. But there’s something else you ought to see.’

She reached for a transparent plastic bag. It contained a leather boot.

‘We can assume that it was on the foot,’ she said. ‘Obviously, an animal can have pulled it off in order to get at the foot itself. But what worries me is that the shoelaces were undone.’

Sundberg recalled that the other boot was tightly tied and on the man’s other foot. The leg belonged to Lars Andrén.

‘Is there anything else you’ve established?’

‘Not yet, it’s too soon.’

‘Can you come with me? I need your help.’

They left the tent and went to the house where the unknown boy was lying with two other persons who were probably Hans-Evert and Elsa Andersson. The silence inside was deafening.

The boy was lying in bed, on his stomach. The room was small, with a sloping roof. Sundberg gritted her teeth in order not to burst out crying. His life had barely begun, but before he could take another breath it had ended.

They stood there in silence.

‘I don’t understand how anybody can commit such a horrendous attack on a small child,’ said Valentina eventually.

‘Can you see how many stab wounds he has?’ said Sundberg.

The doctor leaned forward and directed the bedside lamp at the body. It was several minutes before she answered.

‘It seems that he has only one wound. And it killed him instantly.’

‘Can you explain further?’

‘It would have been quick. His spine has been cut in two.’

‘Have you had time to examine the other bodies?’

‘As I’ve said, I’m waiting for backup.’

‘But can you say off the top of your head how many of the other victims died from a single blow?’

At first Valentina didn’t seem to understand the question. Then she tried to recall what she had seen.

‘None of them, I think,’ she said slowly. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, all the others were stabbed repeatedly.’

‘And no single wound would have been fatal?’

‘It’s too soon to say for sure, but probably not.’

‘Many thanks.’

The doctor left. Sundberg searched through the room and the boy’s clothes in the hope of finding something to indicate who he was. But found nothing, not even a bus pass. She went downstairs and out into the garden to the rear of the house overlooking the frozen lake. She tried to work out the significance of what she had discovered. The boy had died from a single blow, but all the rest had been subjected to more systematic violence. What could that mean? She could think of only one plausible explanation: whoever killed the boy hadn’t wanted him to suffer. Everyone else had been subjected to violence that was a sort of extended torture.

She gazed at the distant mountains, veiled in mist beyond the lake. He wanted to torture them, she thought. Whoever wielded that sword or knife wanted them to know that they were going to die.

Why? She had no idea. She was distracted by the sound of rotor blades approaching and went to the front of the house. A helicopter was descending over the wooded hillsides and soon landed in a field, whipping up a cloud of snow. Tobias Ludwig jumped out, and the helicopter set off again immediately, heading south.

Sundberg went to meet him. Ludwig was wearing city shoes, and as he trudged through the snow it came well over his ankles. He looked to Vivi like a confused insect stuck in the snow and flapping violently with its wings.

They met on the road as Ludwig was brushing himself down.

‘I’m trying to get my head around it,’ he said. ‘What you told me, that is.’

‘You have to see them. Sten Robertsson is here. I’ve done as much as I can in the way of resources. But now it’s up to you to make sure we get all the help we need.’

‘I still can’t get my head around it. Lots of dead old people?’

‘There’s a boy who’s the odd one out. He’s young.’

She went through the houses for the fourth time that day. Ludwig kept groaning as he accompanied her from crime scene to crime scene and came to the tent where the leg was. The doctor was nowhere to be seen. Ludwig shook his head helplessly.

‘What on earth has happened? Surely only a madman could have done anything like this.’

‘We don’t know if it was just one. There could have been several of them.’

‘Madmen?’

‘Nobody knows.’

He looked hard at her.

‘Do we know anything at all?’

‘Not really.’

‘This is too big for us. We need help.’

Robertsson came walking along the road towards them.

‘This is horrendous, horrific,’ said Ludwig. ‘I doubt anything like this has ever happened before in Sweden.’

Robertsson shook his head. Sundberg eyed the two men. The feeling that this was urgent, that something even worse might happen if they didn’t act quickly enough, became even stronger.

‘Get going on those names,’ she said to Tobias Ludwig. ‘I really need your help.’

Then she took Robertsson by the arm and led him off along the road.

‘What do you think?’

‘I’m scared. Aren’t you?’

‘I don’t have time to think about it.’

Sten Robertsson screwed up his eyes.

‘But you’re onto something, aren’t you? You always are.’

‘Not this time. There could have been ten of them, we just don’t know at the moment. We have absolutely nothing to go on. You’ll have to be present at the press conference, by the way.’

‘I hate talking to journalists.’

‘Too bad.’

Robertsson left. She was about to go and sit down in her car when she noticed that Huddén was waving to her. He was approaching and had something in his hand. He must have found the murder weapon, she thought. That would be a stroke of luck.

But Huddén was not carrying a weapon. He handed over a plastic bag. Inside it was a thin red ribbon.

‘The dog found it. In the forest. About thirty yards from the leg.’

‘Any footprints?’

‘They’re looking — but when the dog found the ribbon, he showed no sign of wanting to follow a trail.’

She lifted the bag and peered closely at it.

‘It’s thin,’ she said. ‘It seems to be silk. Did you find anything else?’

‘No, that’s all. It seemed to sparkle in the snow.’

She handed back the bag.

‘Well, we have something at least,’ she said. ‘At the press conference we can announce that we have nineteen dead bodies and a clue in the form of a red silk ribbon.’

‘Maybe we’ll find something else.’

When Huddén had left she sat in her car to think. Through the windscreen she could see Julia being led away by a woman from the home-help service. Ignorance is bliss, thought Sundberg.

She closed her eyes and let the list of names scroll through her mind. She still couldn’t connect the various names to the faces she had now seen on four different occasions. Where did it start? she wondered. One house must have been the first, another one the last. The killer, whether or not he was alone, must have known what he was doing. He didn’t pick the houses haphazardly, he made no attempt to break into the day traders’ house, or that of the senile woman.

She opened her eyes and gazed out through the windscreen. It was planned, she thought. It must have been. But can a madman really prepare for that kind of deed? Surely it doesn’t add up.

She poured out the last few drops of coffee from her Thermos. The motive, she thought. Even a lunatic must have a motive. Perhaps inner voices urge him to kill everybody who crosses his path. But would those voices point him to Hesjövallen of all places? If so, why? How big a role was played by coincidence in this drama?

The boy may be the key, she thought. He doesn’t live in the village. But he dies even so. Two people who have lived here for twenty years are still alive. Then it dawned on her — something Erik Huddén had said. Did she remember correctly? What was Julia’s surname?

Julia’s house wasn’t locked. She went in and read the document that Huddén had found on the kitchen table. The answer she found to her question made her heart start beating faster. She sat down and tried to marshal her thoughts.

The conclusion she reached was improbable, but it might be correct anyway. She dialled Huddén’s number. He answered immediately.

‘I’m sitting in Julia’s kitchen. The woman standing on the road in her nightdress. Come here right away.’

‘Will do.’

Huddén sat opposite her at the table. Then stood up again and looked down at the chair seat. Sniffed at it, then changed to another chair. She stared at him in bafflement.

‘Urine,’ he said. ‘The old lady must have peed herself. What did you want to say?’

‘I want to try out a thought on you. It seems implausible, but is somehow rational nevertheless. I have the feeling that there’s a sort of underlying logic to what happened here last night. I want you to listen, and then tell me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

‘It’s to do with names,’ she began. ‘We still don’t know the boy’s name, but if I’m right he’s related to the Andersson family who lived and died in the house where we found them. A key to everything that happened here last night is the names. Families. People in this village seem to have been called Andersson, Andrén or Magnusson. Julia’s surname is Holmgren. Julia Holmgren. She’s still alive. And then we have Tom and Ninni Hansson. They’re also still alive, and have a different surname. It should be possible to draw a conclusion from that.’

‘That whoever did this, for some reason or other, was out to get people with those names,’ said Huddén.

‘Think another step ahead! This is a tiny little hamlet. People probably haven’t moved. Most likely there has been intermarriage between the families. I’m not talking about incest, just that there is good reason to believe that we’re not looking at three families, but perhaps two. Or maybe even only one. That may explain why Julia Holmgren and the Hanssons are still alive.’

Sundberg paused for Huddén’s reaction. She didn’t consider him particularly intelligent, but she respected his ability to use his intuition.

‘If that is true, it must mean that whoever did this knew these people very well. Who would do that?’

‘Possibly a relative?’

‘A mad relative? Why would he want to do anything like this?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘How do you explain the severed leg?’

‘I can’t. But I think we have a start. That and a red silk ribbon are all we have.

‘I want you to go back to Hudiksvall,’ she said. ‘Tobias is supposed to be delegating officers to search for next of kin. Make sure that happens. And look for links between these three families. But keep it between you and me for the time being.’

Shortly before half past five, some of the senior police officers gathered in Tobias Ludwig’s office to discuss the press conference. It was decided not to issue a list of names of the dead, but they would say how many people had been killed and admit that, so far, the police had no clues. Any information the general public could supply would be appreciated.

Ludwig would give preliminary details, and then Sundberg would take over.

Before entering the room crammed with reporters, she shut herself away in a toilet. She examined her face in a mirror. If only I could wake up, she thought. And find that this whole business had gone away.

She went out, slammed her fist hard into the corridor wall several times, then went into the room chock-full of people and far too hot. She walked up to the little podium and sat down next to Tobias Ludwig.

He looked at her. She nodded. He could begin.

The Judge

5

A moth detached itself from the darkness and fluttered restlessly around the desk lamp. Birgitta Roslin put down her pen, leaned back in her chair and watched the moth’s vain attempt to force its way through the porcelain shade. The noise of its fluttering wings reminded her of something from her childhood, but she couldn’t pin it down.

Her memory was always especially creative when she was tired, as she was now. Just as when she was asleep, inaccessible memories from long ago might crop up out of nowhere.

Like the moth.

She closed her eyes and massaged her temples with her fingertips. It was a few minutes past midnight. She had heard the night security officers passing through the echoing halls of the court building as they made their rounds twice. She liked working late at night, when the place was empty. Years ago, when she had been an articled clerk in Värnamo, she had often gone into the empty courtroom late in the evening, switched on a few lights, sat down and listened to the silence. She would imagine she was in an empty theatre. There were echoes in the walls, whispering voices still living on after all the drama of past trials. Murderers had been sentenced there, violent criminals, thieves. And men had sworn their innocence in a never-ending stream of depressing paternity cases. Others had been declared innocent and reinstated as honourable men.

When Birgitta Roslin had completed her probationary period and been offered a post as an articled clerk in Värnamo, her intention had been to become a prosecuting counsel. But during her clerkship she changed course and began to specialise in what was to become her eventual career. To a large extent this was due to Anker, the old district judge, who made an indelible impression on her. He displayed exactly the same patience as he listened to young men who told obvious lie after lie in an attempt to avoid responsibility in paternity cases as he did when faced with hard-boiled men of violence who showed no remorse for their brutal misdeeds. It was as if the old judge had instilled in her a new degree of respect for the judicial system she had previously taken for granted. Now she actually experienced it, not just in word, but in deed. Justice meant action. By the time she left Värnamo, she had made up her mind to become a judge.

She stood up and walked over to the window. Down below in the street a man was peeing against the wall. It had been snowing in Helsingborg during the day, a thin layer of powdery snow that was now whirling along the street. As she watched the man nonchalantly, her mind was working overtime on the judgement she was busy preparing. She had allowed herself until the following day, but it had to be ready by then.

The man down below moved on. Roslin returned to her desk and picked up her pencil. She always worked with pencil until she’d finalised her work.

She leaned over the messy pages with all their alterations and additions. It was a simple case and the evidence against the accused was overwhelming; nevertheless, she was having problems making her judgment.

She wanted to impose sanctions, but was unable to.

A man and a woman had met in one of Helsingborg’s dance restaurants. The woman was young, barely twenty, and had drunk too much. The man was in his forties and had volunteered to see her home, then was invited into the flat for a glass of water. The woman had fallen asleep on the sofa. The man had raped her, without waking her up, then left. The next morning the woman had only a vague memory of what had happened on the sofa. She contacted the hospital, was examined, and it was established that she had had intercourse. The man was charged. The case came to court a full year after the incident had taken place. Birgitta Roslin had presided over the trial and observed the young woman. She had read in the preliminary case notes that the woman earned her living by working as a temporary cashier in various supermarkets. It was clear from a personal statement that the woman was in the habit of drinking too much. She had also been found guilty of petty theft and was once sacked for neglecting her duties.

In many respects the accused was her opposite. He worked as an estate agent, specialising in business premises. Everyone gave him good references. He was unmarried and earned a high salary. He did not appear in police records, but Birgitta Roslin felt that she could see through him as he sat before her in his expensive and well-pressed suit. She had no doubt that he had raped the woman as she lay asleep on the sofa. DNA tests had established beyond doubt that intercourse had taken place, but he denied rape. She had been a willing partner, he maintained, as did his counsel, a lawyer from Malmö whom Roslin had come across before. It was one person’s word against another’s, an irreproachable property broker versus a drunken checkout girl who had invited him into her flat in the middle of the night.

Roslin was upset about not being able to convict him. She couldn’t shake the feeling that on this occasion a guilty man would go free. There was nothing to be done.

What would that wise old bird Anker have done? What advice would he have given her? He would certainly have shared my concern, Roslin thought. A guilty man is going to be set free. Old Anker would have been just as upset as I am. And he would have had as little to say as I do. There’s the rub as far as judges are concerned: we have to obey the law in the knowledge that we are releasing a criminal without punishment. The woman may not have been an angel, but she would have to live with that outrageous injustice for the rest of her life.

She left her desk chair and went to lie down on the sofa. She had paid for it herself and put it in her office instead of the uncomfortable armchair provided by the National Courts Administration. She had learned from Anker to hold a bunch of keys in her hand and close her eyes. When she dropped the keys, it was time to get up. But she needed a short rest. Then she would finish writing her judgement, go home to bed and produce a clean copy the next day. She had worked through everything there was to work through and confirmed that there was no question of a guilty verdict.

She dozed off and dreamed about her father, of whom she had no personal memories. He had been a ship’s engineeer. During a severe storm in the middle of January 1949 the steamship Runskär had sunk in the Gävlebukten, with all hands on board. His body had never been found. Birgitta Roslin had been four months old at the time. The image she had of her father came from the photographs in her home. The picture she remembered best was of him standing by the rail of a ship, smiling, his hair ruffled and his shirtsleeves rolled up. Her mother had told her it was a ship’s mate holding the camera, but Birgitta Roslin had always imagined that he was actually smiling at her, despite the fact that the photograph was taken before she was born. He kept reappearing in her dreams. Now he was smiling at her, just as he did in the photograph, but then he vanished as if swallowed up by fog.

She woke with a start. She realised immediately that she had slept for far too long. The keyring trick hadn’t worked. She had dropped it without noticing. She sat up and checked the clock: it was already six. She had slept for more than five hours. I’m shattered, she thought. Like most other people, I don’t get enough sleep. There’s too much going on in my life that worries me.

She called her husband, who had begun to wonder where she was. It was not unusual for her to spend the night on the sofa in her office after they’d quarreled, but this was not the case now.

Staffan Roslin had been a year ahead of her at Lund, where they both studied law. Their first meeting was at a party given by mutual friends. Immediately Birgitta knew he was the man for her, swept off her feet by his eyes, his height, his large hands and his inability to stop blushing.

But, after completing his studies, Staffan did not take to the law. He decided to retrain as a railway conductor, and one morning he appeared in the living room dressed in a blue-and-red uniform and announced that at 12.19, he would be responsible for departure 212 from Malmö to Alvesta, and then on to Växjö and Kalmar.

He became a much happier person. By the time he chose to abandon his legal career, they already had four children: first a son, then a daughter and finally twins, both girls. The children had arrived in rapid succession, and she was amazed when she thought back to those days. How had they managed it? Four children within six years. They had left Malmö and moved to Helsingborg, where she was appointed a district judge.

The children were grown up now. The twins had flown the nest the previous year, to Lund where they shared a flat. But she was pleased that they were not studying the same subject and that neither of them had ambitions to become a lawyer. Siv, who was nineteen minutes older than her sister Louise, had eventually decided, after much hesitation, to become a vet. Louise, who had a more impetuous temperament than her twin sister, had tried her hand at several things, sold clothes in a men’s shop, and in the end decided to study political science and religious studies at university. Birgitta had often tried to coax out of her what she wanted to do with her life, but she was the most withdrawn of the four children and rarely said anything about her innermost thoughts. Birgitta suspected that Louise was the daughter most like herself. Her son, David, who worked for a big pharmaceutical company, was like his father in almost every way. The eldest daughter, Anna, had astonished her parents by embarking on long journeys in Asia, about which they knew very little.

My family, Birgitta thought. Big worries but a lot of pleasure. Without it, most of my life would have been wasted.

There was a large mirror in the corridor outside her office. She examined her face and her body. Her close-cropped dark hair had started to grow grey at the temples. Her habit of pursing her lips tended to give her face a negative expression. But what really worried her was the fact that she had put on weight over the last few years. Three, four kilos, no more. But enough to be noticeable.

She didn’t like what she saw. She knew she was basically an attractive woman. But she was beginning to lose her charm. And she was not making any attempt to resist.

She left a note on her secretary’s desk, saying that she would be in later in the day. It had become a little warmer, and the snow had already started to melt. She started walking to her car, which was parked on a side street.

But then she changed her mind. What she really needed above all else was not sleep. It was more important to give her mind a rest and think about something else. She turned and headed for the harbour. There was not a breath of wind. The overcast sky from the previous day had begun to open up. She went to the quay where the ferries departed for Elsinore. The crossing took only a few minutes. But she liked to sit on board with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, watching her fellow passengers going through the bags of cheap spirits they had bought in Denmark. She sat down at a corner table that was very sticky. Annoyance flared up inside her, and she shouted to the girl who was clearing the tables.

‘I really have to complain,’ she said. ‘This table has been cleared, but it hasn’t been wiped. It’s very sticky.’

The girl shrugged and wiped it clean. Birgitta Roslin gazed in disgust at the filthy rag the girl had used, but she didn’t say anything. Somehow the girl reminded her of the young woman who had been raped. She didn’t know why. Perhaps it was her lack of enthusiasm for her work? Or maybe it was a kind of helplessness she couldn’t put a finger on?

The ferry started to vibrate. It gave her a feeling of well-being. She remembered the first time she had gone abroad. She had been nineteen. She had travelled to England with a friend to take a language course. The trip had started on a ferry, from Gothenburg to London. Birgitta Roslin would never forget the feeling of standing on deck, knowing she was on her way to somewhere liberating and unknown.

That same feeling of freedom would often come over her when she sailed back and forth over the narrow strait between Sweden and Denmark. Today, all thoughts about the unfortunate judgement she would have to make disappeared from her mind.

I’m no longer even in the middle of my life, she thought. I’ve passed the point that one doesn’t even realise is being passed. There won’t be that many difficult decisions left for me to make. But I shall remain a judge until I retire. With luck I should be able to enjoy my grandchildren before it’s all over.

Her thoughts drifted to her husband, and her mood changed. Her marriage was beginning to shrivel and die. They were still good friends and could give each other the necessary feeling of security. But love, the sensual pleasure of being in each other’s vicinity, had completely vanished.

Four days from now it wouldbeawhole year since they had last caressed each other and made love before going to sleep. The closer that anniversary came, the more impotent she felt. And now it was almost upon her. Over and over again she had tried to speak to Staffan about how lonely she was. But he wasn’t prepared to talk, withdrew into his shell, tried to postpone the discussion he nevertheless knew was important. He insisted that he was not attracted to anybody else, they were just missing a particular feeling that would no doubt soon return. All they needed to do was be patient.

She regretted losing the feeling of togetherness she had shared with her husband, the imposing-looking chief conductor with the big hands and the propensity for blushing. But she had no intention of giving up. She didn’t yet want their relationship to be an intimate friendship and nothing more.

She went to the counter to refill her cup and moved to another, less sticky table. A group of young men who were already noticeably drunk despite the early hour were discussing whether it was Hamlet or Macbeth who had been imprisoned in Kronborg Castle, skulking on its cliff just outside Elsinore. She listened to the discussion with amused interest and felt tempted to join in.

A group of boys was sitting at another table. They couldn’t have been older than fourteen or fifteen and were probably playing hooky. And why not, when nobody seemed to care whether or not they showed up at school? She had absolutely no nostalgic feelings about the authoritarian school she had attended. But she recalled an incident from the previous year. Something that had driven her crazy about the state of Swedish justice and made her long more than ever for the advice of her mentor Judge Anker, who had now been dead for thirty years.

On a housing estate outside Helsingborg an old woman just short of her eightieth birthday had suffered an acute heart attack and collapsed on a public footpath. A couple of young boys, one of them aged thirteen, the other fourteen, had come by. Instead of helping the old woman, without a second thought they had first stolen her bag and then tried to rape her. If it hadn’t been for a man walking his dog, they would probably have succeeded in their attempt. The police traced and arrested the two boys, but as they were underage, they were allowed to go free.

Birgitta Roslin heard about the incident from a public prosecutor, who had in turn been informed by a police officer. She had been furious and tried to find out why the crime hadn’t been reported to social services. It then dawned on her that maybe a hundred or so underage children committed crimes in the Helsingborg area every year with absolutely no follow-up. Nobody told their parents, nobody informed social services. It was not merely the occasional case of petty pilfering but also robbery and grievous bodily harm, which could easily have ended up as murder.

She began to despair over the Swedish judicial system. Whose servant was she in fact? Was she a servant of the law, or of indifference? And what would the consequences be if more and more children were allowed to commit crimes without anybody bothering to react? How had things been allowed to lapse to such an extent that the very basis of democracy was being threatened by a lame judicial system?

She drank her coffee and contemplated the fact that she would probably need to work for another ten years. Would she have the strength? Was it possible to be a good and fair judge if you began to doubt the country’s legal structure?

In order to shake off questions she couldn’t answer, she went back over the strait one more time. When she disembarked on the Swedish side, it was nine o’clock. She crossed the wide main street that carved its way through the centre of Helsingborg. As she turned off, she happened to notice a billboard with headlines from one of the national evening newspapers: they were just being posted. The large letters in bold print caught her attention. She paused and read: MASS MURDER IN HÄLSINGLAND. HORRIFIC CRIME. NO LEADS FOR POLICE. NUMBER OF DEAD UNKNOWN. MASS MURDER.

She continued walking to her car. She seldom if ever bought the evening papers. She was put off, and sometimes offended, by the papers’ frequent attacks on the police. Even if she agreed with quite a lot of what was alleged, she had little sympathy with the sensationalising. What reporters wrote often harmed genuine criticism, even if the intentions were honourable.

Birgitta Roslin lived in Kjellstorp, an upmarket residential area on the northern edge of Helsingborg. On the way home she stopped at a little shop. It was owned by a Pakistani immigrant who always greeted her with a broad smile. He knew she was a district judge and was very respectful towards her. She wondered if there were any female judges in Pakistan, but had never got around to asking him.

When she arrived home she had a bath before going to bed. She woke up at one o’clock and at last felt fully rested. After a couple of sandwiches and a cup of coffee, she returned to her work. A few hours later she printed out her judgement that acquitted the guilty man, drove back to court and left it on her secretary’s desk. Her secretary was evidently attending some kind of in-service training course: Birgitta Roslin hadn’t been informed or, more likely, had forgotten all about it. When she arrived back home she heated up some leftover chicken stew from yesterday’s dinner and left the rest in the fridge for Staffan.

She settled down on the sofa with a cup of coffee and switched on teletext. She was reminded of the headlines she had seen earlier in the day. The police had no clues to follow up and declined to reveal how many people had been killed or their names, since the next of kin had not yet been contacted.

A madman, she concluded, who either had a persecution complex or considered himself to have been badly treated by the world.

Her years as a judge had taught her that there were many different forms of madness that could drive people to commit horrendous crimes. But she had also learned that forensic psychiatrists did not always succeed in exposing criminals who merely pretended to be mentally ill.

She switched off the television and went down to the basement, where she had created a little cellar of red wines complete with several wine lists and order forms from a number of importers. Only a few years ago it had dawned on her that, thanks to her children moving out, the family finances had changed fundamentally. She now felt she could afford to spend money on something special and had decided to buy a few bottles of red wine every month. She enjoyed studying the lists and picking out new wines to try. Paying five hundred kronor or so for a bottle seemed to her an almost forbidden pleasure.

It was cool in the cellar. She checked that the temperature was fourteen degrees Celsius, then sat down on a stool between the racks. Down there, among all the bottles, she could feel at peace with the world. Given the alternative of soaking in a warm pool, she would have preferred to sit in her cellar surrounded on this particular day by one hundred and fourteen bottles lying in their racks.

But then again, was the peace she could experience in her cellar really genuine? When she was a young woman, if anybody had suggested to her that one day she would become a wine collector, she would never have believed her ears. She wouldn’t merely have denied any such possibility, she would have been upset. As a student in Lund she had been in sympathy with the left-wing radicals who, in the late 1960s, had questioned the validity of university education and the very foundations of the society in which she would eventually work. In those days, collecting wine would have been regarded as a waste of time and effort, a typically middle-class and hence objectionable hobby.

She was still sitting there lost in thought when she heard Staffan moving around on the floor above. She put the wine lists away and went back upstairs. He had just taken the chicken stew out of the fridge. On the table were a couple of evening newspapers he had brought with him from the train.

‘Have you seen this?’

‘I gather something awful’s happened in Hälsingland.’

‘Nineteen people have been killed.’

‘Teletext said that the number of dead wasn’t yet known.’

‘These are the latest editions. They’ve killed practically the whole population of a hamlet up there. It’s incredible. How did it go with the judgement you were working on?’

‘It’s finished. I acquitted him. I didn’t have any choice.’

‘The papers are all abuzz.’

‘Thank God for that.’

‘You’re going to come in for some stick.’

‘No doubt. But I can suggest that the reporters might like to check what the law says, and then decide if they’d prefer us to go over to lynch law in Sweden.’

‘These mass murders are going to detract attention from your case.’

‘Of course. What’s a petty little rape compared with a brutal mass murder?’

They went to bed early that night. He would be in charge of an early train the following morning, and she had failed to find anything of interest on the television. She had also decided which wine she was going to buy. A case of Barolo Arione 2002, at 252 kronor per bottle.

She woke up with a start at midnight. Staffan was sleeping soundly by her side. She was fairly frequently woken up by pangs of hunger in the middle of the night. She put on her dressing gown, went downstairs to the kitchen, made herself a cup of weak tea and a couple of sandwiches.

The evening papers were still lying on the kitchen table. She leafed absent-mindedly through one of them — it was hard to form a clear picture of what had happened in that little village in Hälsingland. But there was no doubt that a large number of people had been brutally murdered.

She was just going to put the paper to one side when she gave a start. Among the dead were several people called Andrén. She read the text carefully, then checked in the other paper. The same there.

She stared hard at the page in front of her. Could this really be true? Or did she remember wrongly? She went to her study and took out from a desk cupboard a folder of documents wrapped in a red ribbon. She switched on the desk lamp and opened the folder. As she hadn’t brought her glasses down with her, she borrowed a pair of Staffan’s. They were not as strong as hers, but they were usable.

The folder contained all the documents connected with her parents. Her mother had been dead for more than fifteen years. She had been diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas and died within three months.

She eventually found the photograph she had been looking for in a brown envelope. She took out her magnifying glass and examined the picture. It depicted a group of people in old-fashioned clothes standing in front of a house.

She took the photograph with her to the kitchen. In one of the newspapers there was a general view of the village where this major tragedy had taken place. She examined the picture carefully through her magnifying glass. She paused at the third house and began comparing the two photographs.

She had remembered rightly. This hamlet that had been struck down by unannounced evil was not just any old place. It was the village in which her mother had grown up. Everything fitted — it was true that her mother’s surname had been Lööf as a child, but as her parents had both been alcoholics, she had been placed with a family called Andrén. Birgitta’s mother had rarely mentioned those days. She had been well looked after, but had always longed to be acquainted with her real parents. However, they had both died before she was fifteen, and so she had to stay in the village until she was considered old enough to find work and look after herself. When she met Birgitta’s father, the names Lööf and Andrén disappeared from the scene. But now one of them had returned with a bang.

The photograph lying among her mother’s papers had been taken in front of one of the houses in the village where the mass murders had been perpetrated. The facade of the house, the ornamental carving around the windows, was exactly the same in the old photograph as in the newspaper.

There was no doubt about it. A couple of nights previously, people had been murdered in the house where her mother grew up. Could it be her mother’s foster-parents who had been killed? The newspapers wrote that most of the dead were old people.

Her mother’s foster-parents would be more than ninety years of age now. Perhaps.

She shuddered at the thought. She seldom if ever thought about her parents. She even found it difficult to recall what her mother looked like. But now the past came unexpectedly rushing towards her.

Staffan entered the kitchen. As always, he made hardly a sound.

‘You make me jump when I don’t know you’re coming,’ she said.

‘Why are you up?’

‘I felt hungry.’

He looked at the papers lying on the table. She told him about the conclusion she’d reached and was becoming more and more convinced that what she suspected was in fact the truth.

‘But it’s pretty remote,’ he said when she’d finished. ‘It’s a very thin thread connecting you to that little village.’

‘Thin, but remarkable. You have to admit that.’

‘Maybe. But you have to get some sleep.’

She lay awake for ages before dozing off. That thin thread became stretched almost to the breaking point. She slept fitfully, and her sleep was broken by thoughts about her mother. She still found it hard to see traces of herself in her mother.

She dropped off to sleep eventually and woke up to find Staffan standing at the foot of the bed, hair damp from the shower, putting on his uniform. I’m your general, he used to tell her. Without a weapon in my hand, only a pen to cancel tickets.

She pretended to be still asleep and waited until the door closed behind him. Then she jumped up and switched on the computer in her study. She went through several search engines, looking for as much information as she could find. The events that had taken place in Hälsingland still seemed to be shrouded in uncertainty. The only thing that appeared clear was that the weapon used was probably a large knife or something similar.

I want to know more about this, she thought. At least I want to know if my mother’s foster-parents were among those murdered the other night. She searched until eight o’clock, when she put all thoughts about the mass murders aside to consider the day’s trial concerning two Iraqi citizens accused of smuggling people.

It was a further two hours before she had gathered together her papers, glanced through the preliminary investigation notes and taken her seat in court. Help me now, dear old Anker, to get through this day as well, she pleaded. Then she tapped her hammer lightly on the desk in front of her and asked the prosecuting counsel to open the proceedings.

There were high windows behind her back.

Just before she sat down, she had noticed that the sun was beginning to break through the thick clouds that had moved in over Sweden during the night.

6

By the time the trial was over two days later, Birgitta Roslin knew what her verdict would be. They were guilty, and the elder of the two men, Abdul ibn Yamed, who was the ringleader, would be sentenced to three years and two months in prison. His assistant, the younger man, Yassir al-Habi, would get one year. Both men would be deported on release.

The sentences given were similar to what had gone before. Many of the individuals smuggled into Sweden had been threatened and assaulted when it transpired that they were unable to pay what they owed for the forged immigration papers and the long journey. She had taken a particular dislike to the elder of the two men. He had appealed to her and the prosecutor with sentimental arguments, claiming that he never retained any of the money paid by the refugees but donated it all to charities in his homeland. During a break in proceedings the prosecuting counsel had stopped by for a cup of coffee and mentioned in passing that Abdul ibn Yamed drove around in a Mercedes worth almost a million kronor.

The trial had been strenuous. The days had been long, and she had no time to do more than eat and sleep and study her notes prior to returning to the bench. Her twin daughters phoned and invited her to Lund, but she didn’t have time. As soon as the case was over, she was faced with a complicated one involving Romanian credit card swindlers.

She had no time to keep abreast of what was happening in the little village in Hälsingland, missing the morning newspapers and the evening TV news bulletins.

The morning Roslin was due to start preparing for the trial of the swindlers from Romania, she discovered that she had a note in her diary about an appointment with her doctor for a routine annual check-up. She considered postponing it for a few weeks. Apart from feeling tired, being out of shape and occasionally suffering anxiety attacks, she couldn’t imagine there being anything wrong with her. She was a healthy person who led an unadventurous life and hardly ever even had a cold. But she didn’t cancel the appointment.

The doctor’s office was not far from the municipal theatre. She left her car on the side street where it was parked and walked to the surgery from the court. It was cold, fine weather with no wind at all. The snow that had fallen a few days earlier had melted away. She stopped by a shop window and contemplated a dress. But the price tag gave her a shock, and she moved on.

In the waiting room was a newspaper whose front page was laden with news about the mass murders in Hälsingland. She had barely got as far as picking it up when she was summoned by the doctor. He was an elderly man who reminded her of Judge Anker. Roslin had been his patient for ten years. He had been recommended by one of her legal colleagues. He asked her how she felt, if she’d had any pains, and having noted her responses he passed her on to a nurse who took a blood sample from one of Roslin’s fingertips. She then sat in the waiting room. Another patient had claimed the newspaper. Roslin closed her eyes and waited. She thought about her family, what each of them was doing, or at least where they were, at that very moment. Staffan was on a train heading for Hallsberg, he wouldn’t be home until late. David was working in AstraZeneca’s laboratory just outside Gothenburg. It was less certain where Anna was: the last time she had been in touch was a month ago, from Nepal. The twins were in Lund and wanted their mother to visit them. She dozed off and was woken up by the nurse shaking her by the shoulder.

‘You can go in to the doctor now.’

Surely I’m not so exhausted that I need to drop off in a doctor’s waiting room, Roslin thought as she returned to the doctor’s office and sat down.

Ten minutes later Birgitta Roslin was standing in the street outside, trying to come to terms with the fact that she wouldn’t be working for the next two weeks. The doctor had introduced sudden and unexpected disorder into her life. Her blood pressure was far too high, and coupled with her anxiety attacks caused the doctor to insist on two weeks’ leave from work.

She walked back to the court and spoke to Hans Mattsson, a chief judge and her immediate superior. They managed to work out between them a way of dealing with the two cases she was currently embroiled in. She spoke to her secretary, posted a few letters she had written, called at the chemist’s to pick up her new medication, then drove home. The lack of anything to do was paralysing.

She made lunch, then flopped down on the sofa with the newspaper. Not all the bodies in Hesjövallen had been named publicly. A detective by the name of Sundberg made a statement and urged the general public to contact the police with any information. There were still no leads, but the police were sure, no matter how hard it might be to believe, that they were looking for only the one killer.

On another page a public prosecutor called Robertsson claimed that the investigation was progressing on a very large scale totally without prejudice. The police in Hudiksvall had received the assistance that they had requested from the central authorities.

Robertsson seemed to be confident of success: ‘We shall catch whoever did this deed. We shall not give up.’

An article on the next page was about the unrest that had spread throughout the Hälsingland forests. Many villages in the area had few inhabitants. There was talk of people acquiring guns, of dogs, alarms and barricaded doors.

Birgitta Roslin slid the newspaper to one side. The house was empty, silent. Her sudden and unwanted free time had come out of the blue. She went down to the basement and fetched one of the wine lists. She decided to order the case of Barolo Arione online. It was really too expensive, but she felt the urge to treat herself. She thought about doing some cleaning, an activity that was almost always neglected in her household. But she changed her mind just as she was about to bring out the vacuum cleaner. She sat down at the kitchen table and tried to assess her situation. She was on sick leave, although she wasn’t really ill. Is having high blood pressure really being ill? Maybe she really was close to burning herself out, and perhaps it could affect her judgement in court?

She looked at the newspaper in front of her on the table and thought again about her mother and her childhood in Hälsingland. An idea struck her. She picked up the telephone, rang the local police station and asked to speak to Detective Chief Inspector Hugo Malmberg. They had known each other for many years. At one time he had tried to teach her and Staffan to play bridge, without arousing much enthusiasm.

She heard Malmberg’s gentle voice at the other end of the line. Most people imagine police officers sound gruff; Hugo would convince them otherwise. He sounded more like a cuddly pensioner sitting on a park bench feeding the birds.

She asked how he was and wondered if he had time to see her. He agreed. She’d walk.

An hour later, Birgitta Roslin entered Hugo Malmberg’s office with its neat and tidy desk. Malmberg was on the phone, but he gestured, inviting her to sit down. The call concerned an assault that had happened the previous day.

Malmberg hung up and smiled at her. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

‘I’d rather not, thank you.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘The police station’s coffee is just as bad as the brew they serve up in the district court.’

He stood.

‘Let’s go to the conference room,’ he said. ‘This telephone rings nonstop. It’s a feeling I share with every other decent Swedish police officer — that I’m the only one who’s really working hard.’

They sat down at the oval table, cluttered with empty coffee mugs and water bottles. Malmberg shook his head disapprovingly.

‘People never clean up after themselves. They have their meetings, and when they’ve finished they disappear and leave all their rubbish behind. How can I help? Have you changed your mind about those bridge lessons?’

She told him about what she’d discovered, about her connection to the mass murders.

‘I’m curious,’ she said. ‘All I can gather from what’s in the papers and the news bulletins is that many people are dead, and the police don’t have any leads.’

‘I don’t mind admitting that I’m glad I don’t work in that district right now. They must be going through sheer hell. I’ve never heard of anything like it. In its way it’s just as sensational as the Palme murder.’

‘What do you know that isn’t in the newspapers?’

‘There isn’t a single police officer the length and breadth of the country who isn’t wondering what happened. Everybody has a theory. It’s a myth that police officers are rational and lack imagination. We start speculating about what might have happened right away.’

‘What do you think happened?’

He shrugged and thought for a moment before answering.

‘I know no more than you do. There are a lot of bodies, and it was brutal. But nothing was stolen, if I understand things correctly. The probability is that some sick individual was responsible. What lies behind it, goodness only knows. I assume the police up there are lining up known violent criminals with psychological problems. They’ve doubtless been in touch already with Interpol and Europol in the hope of finding a clue that way, but such things take time. That’s all I know.’

‘You know police officers all over Sweden. Do you have a contact up in Hälsingland? Somebody I could perhaps phone?’

‘I’ve met their chief of police,’ said Malmberg. ‘A man by the name of Ludwig. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t all that impressed by him. As you know, I don’t have much time for police officers who’ve never been out in the real world. But I can call him and see what he has to say.’

‘I promise not to disturb them unnecessarily. I just want to know if it was my mother’s foster-parents who died. Or if it was their children. Or if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick altogether.’

‘That’s a fair-enough reason for calling them. I’ll see what I can do. But I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me now. I have an unpleasant interview with a very nasty violent man coming up.’

That evening she told Staffan what had happened. His immediate reaction was that the doctor had done the right thing, and he suggested that she should take a trip to the south and the sun. His lack of interest irritated her. But she didn’t say anything.

Shortly before lunch the following day, when she was sitting in front of her computer and surveying holiday offers, her telephone rang.

‘I’ve got a name for you,’ said Hugo Malmberg. ‘There’s a woman police officer called Sundberg.’

‘I’ve seen that name in the papers, but I didn’t know it was a woman.’

‘Her first name’s Vivian, but she’s known as Vivi. Ludwig will pass your name on to her, so that she knows who you are when you call her. I’ve got a phone number.’

‘Thanks for your help. Incidentally, I might go south for a few days. Have you ever been to Tenerife?’

‘Never. Good luck.’

Roslin immediately dialled the number she’d been given. An answering machine invited her to leave a message.

Once again she took out the vacuum cleaner, but couldn’t bring herself to use it. Instead she returned to the computer and within an hour or so had decided on a trip to Tenerife departing from Copenhagen two days later. She dug out an old school atlas and began dreaming of warm water and Spanish wines.

Maybe it’s just what I need, she thought. A week without Staffan, without trials, without the daily grind. I’m not exactly experienced in confronting my emotions or indeed my life. But at my age I ought to be able to look at myself objectively and face up to my weaknesses and to change things if necessary. Once upon a time, when I was young, I used to dream of becoming the first woman to sail around the world single-handed. It never happened. But nevertheless, maybe I could do with a few days sailing out to Denmark, or strolling along a beach in Tenerife. Either will work out if old age is already catching up with me, or if I can scramble out of the hole I’m sinking into. I managed menopause pretty well, but I’m not really sure what’s happening to me now. What I must establish first of all is whether my high blood pressure and panic attacks have anything to do with Staffan. I must understand that we will never feel content unless we lift ourselves out of our current dispirited state.

She started planning her trip without further ado. There was a glitch that prevented her from finalising her booking online, so she emailed her name and telephone number, and specified the package she was interested in. She had an immediate reply, saying she would be contacted within an hour.

Almost an hour later the telephone rang. But it wasn’t the travel agency.

‘Vivi Sundberg here. I’d like to speak to Birgitta Roslin.’

‘Speaking.’

‘Ah. I’ve been informed who you are, but I’m not sure what you want. As you can probably understand, we’re under a lot of pressure right now. Am I right in thinking that you are a judge?’

‘Yes, I am. I don’t want to make too much of a fuss about this, but my mother — who died several years ago — was adopted by a family called Andrén. I’ve seen photographs that suggest she lived in one of the houses in Hesjövallen.’

‘Contacting the next of kin is not my responsibility. I suggest you speak to Erik Huddén.’

‘But am I right in thinking that some of the victims were in fact called Andrén?’

‘Since you ask I can tell you that the Andrén family was the largest one in the village.’

‘And are all of them dead?’

‘I can’t tell you that. Do you have the first names of your mother’s foster-parents?’

She had the file on the desk in front of her; she untied the ribbon and leafed through the papers.

‘I’m afraid I don’t have time to wait,’ said Vivi Sundberg. ‘Call me when you’ve found the names.’

‘I have them here. Brita and August Andrén. They must be over ninety, possibly even ninety-five.’

There was a pause before Sundberg responded. Roslin could hear the sound of papers rustling. Then Sundberg picked up the phone again.

‘They are on the list. I’m afraid they are both dead, and the oldest was ninety-six. Please don’t pass that information on to any newspaper.’

‘Why in God’s name would I want to do that?’

‘You’re a judge. I’m sure you know what can happen, and why I’m asking you to keep the details to yourself.’

Birgitta Roslin knew exactly what was meant, although she had occasionally discussed with her colleagues how they were seldom if ever buttonholed by journalists — reporters hardly thought that judges would release information that ought to be kept secret.

‘I’m obviously interested in how the investigation is going.’

‘Neither I nor any of my colleagues has time to release specific information. We are besieged by the mass media here. I recommend that you talk to Erik Huddén if you phone Hudiksvall.’

Vivi Sundberg sounded impatient and irritated.

‘Many thanks for calling. I won’t disturb you any longer.’

Birgitta Roslin hung up and thought over what had been said. At least she was now quite certain that her mother’s foster-parents were among the dead. Like everybody else, she would have to remain patient while the police went about their work.

She considered phoning police HQ in Hudiksvall and talking to this Erik Huddén. But what would he be able to add? She decided not to. Instead, she started reading more carefully the papers inside the file devoted to her parents. It was many years since she had last opened it. She realised that, in fact, she had never read some of the documents before.

She sorted the contents of the thick file into three piles. The first one comprised the life history of her father, whose body was lying on the seabed in Gävlebukten. The water in the Baltic Sea was so salty that skeletons did not corrode especially quickly. Somewhere in the silt were his bones and cranium. The second pile dealt with the shared life of her mother and father, and she featured in there herself, both before and after she was born. The third pile was the largest and contained papers relevant to Gerda Lööf, her mother, who became an Andrén. She read slowly through everything, especially when she came to the documents referring to the time when her mother had been fostered by the Andrén family. Many of them were faded and difficult to read, despite the fact that she used a magnifying glass.

She slid over a notepad and wrote down names and ages. She herself had been born in the spring of 1949. Her mother was then seventeen, having been born in 1931. She also found the birth dates of August and Brita Andrén: she was born in August 1909, and he in December 1910. So they had been twenty-two and twenty-one respectively when Gerda was born, and under thirty when she came to join them in Hesjövallen.

She found nothing to indicate that Hesjövallen was the place where they lived, but the photograph that she now checked again with the picture in the newspaper convinced her. There could be no mistake.

She started to examine the people standing upright and stiff in the ancient photograph. There were two younger people in it, a man and a woman standing a little to one side of the elderly couple at the centre of the picture. Could they be Brita and August? There was no date, nothing written on the back of the picture. She tried to work out when it might have been taken. What did the clothes indicate? The people in the photograph had obviously dressed up for it, but they were rural people for whom a suit could last for a whole lifetime.

She pushed the photos to one side and turned to the other documents and letters. In 1942 Brita had suffered from some stomach problem and been treated in the hospital in Hudiksvall. Gerda writes her a card and hopes she will soon be better. She is eleven at the time, and her handwriting is awkward. Some words are misspelled, and she has drawn a flower with irregular petals on one side of the card.

Birgitta was quite touched on reading this card and surprised that she hadn’t noticed it before. It had been lying inside another letter. But why had she never opened it? Was it because of the pain she felt when Gerda died, which meant that she didn’t want to touch anything that would remind her of her mother?

She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She had her mother to thank for everything. Gerda didn’t even finish school, but she had always urged her daughter to continue her studies. It’s our turn now, she’d said. Now it’s time for daughters of the working classes to get themselves an education. And that is precisely what Birgitta Roslin had done. During the 1960s, when no longer only middle-class children flocked to universities, it had been only natural for her to join radical left-wing groups. Life was not just a matter of understanding, but also of bringing about change.

She continued working her way methodically through the documents. She discovered another letter. The envelope was pale blue, and postmarked from America. The thin paper was filled with tiny handwriting. She focused the light from her desk lamp and with the aid of the magnifying glass tried to make out what the letter said. It was written in Swedish but contained a lot of English words. Somebody called Gustaf is describing his work as a pig farmer. A child called Emily has just died, and there is ‘stor sorrow’ in the household. He wonders how things are back home in Hälsingland, how the family’s doing, and the harvests and the animals. The letter was dated 19 June 1896. The address on the envelope was August Andrén, Hesjövallen, Sweden. But my maternal foster-grandfather wasn’t even born then, she thought. Presumably the letter must have been addressed to his father, since it had been kept by Gerda’s family. But why had it been passed down to her?

Right at the bottom, under the signature, was an address: Mr Gustaf Andrén, Minneapolis Post Office, Minnesota, United States of America.

She checked her old school atlas again. Minnesota is farming country. So one of the Andrén family in Hesjövallen had emigrated there more than a century ago.

But she found another letter that showed another member of the Andrén family had ended up in different parts of the United States. His name was Jan August, and he evidently worked on the railway that linked the East and West Coasts. His letter asked about relatives, living and dead, though large parts of the letter were illegible. The writing had become blurred.

Jan August’s address was: Reno Post Office, Nevada, United States of America.

She continued reading, but found nothing else in the piles that related to her mother’s connection with the Andrén family.

She put the documents back in the file, returned to the Internet and, without much hope of success, tried to find the postal address in Minneapolis that Gustaf Andrén had given. As expected, she came to a dead end. She tried the address in Nevada and was referred to a link to a newspaper called the Reno Gazette-Journal. Just then the phone rang: it was the travel agency. A friendly young man with a Danish accent ran through all the details of the package holiday with her and described the hotel. She didn’t hesitate. She made a preliminary booking and promised to confirm it the following morning at the latest.

She returned to the computer and called up the Reno Gazette-Journal again. She was just about to move on to another page when she recalled that her search was for Andrén, not merely the postal address. So there must be some reference to that name in a recent issue of the Reno Gazette-Journal. She started reading through the list of articles and subjects, clicking her way from one page to the next.

She gave a start when the relevant page eventually appeared. At first she read it without really grasping its implications. Then she read it again, more slowly, and began to wonder if she could believe her eyes. She stood up and backed away from the computer. But the text and the pictures didn’t disappear.

She printed them out and took them with her to the kitchen. She read everything once more, very slowly.

On January 4th a brutal murder took place in the little town of Ankersville, northeast of Reno. The proprietor of an engineering workshop and his whole family were found dead that morning by a neighbour, who had become suspicious when the workshop didn’t open as usual. The police have no leads as yet. But it is clear that the whole Andrén family — Jack, his wife, Connie, and their two children, Steven and Laura — had been murdered with some kind of knife or sword. There was nothing to indicate robbery or burglary. No obvious motive, the Andrén family was well liked and had no enemies. The police are now looking for a mentally unbalanced perpetrator, or perhaps a desperate drug addict, in connection with these horrific murders.

She sat there motionless. The sound of a rubbish truck drifted up from the street below.

For the first time, she felt fear creeping up on her. As if she were being observed unawares.

She went to check that the front door was locked. Then she returned to the computer and started to work her way backwards through the articles in the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The rubbish truck had moved on. It was starting to get dark.

7

Long afterwards, when the memory of everything that had taken place began to grow dim, she sometimes wondered what would have happened if she had in fact gone on that holiday to Tenerife, then come home and returned to work with her blood pressure lowered and her tiredness banished. But reality turned out differently. Early the next morning she called the travel agency and cancelled her holiday. As she had been sensible enough to take out an insurance policy, the cancellation cost her only a few hundred kronor.

Staffan came home late that evening, as the train he was working on had been stranded, thanks to an engine failure. He had been forced to spend two hours consoling disgruntled passengers, including an elderly lady who had taken ill. By the time he got home he was tired and irritated. She let him eat his evening meal in peace. But when he’d finished she told him about her discovery of what had happened in distant Nevada, and how in all probability it was linked to the mass murders in Hälsingland. She could see he was doubtful, but didn’t know if that was because he was tired or because he didn’t believe her theory. When he went to bed she returned to the computer and kept alternating between Hälsingland and Nevada. At midnight she made a few notes in a pad, just as she did when she was preparing a judgement. No matter how unlikely it might seem, she was convinced that there must be a connection between the two incidents. She was also well aware that, in a way, she was an Andrén too, even if her name was now Roslin.

Was she in danger? She sat for hours, hunched over her notepad. Then she went out into the clear January night and looked up at the stars. Her mother had once told her that her father had been a passionate stargazer. With long intervals in between, she used to receive letters from him describing how he would stand on deck at night in faraway places. Studying the stars and their various constellations. He had a strange belief that the dead were transformed into stars. Birgitta Roslin wondered what he had been thinking when the Runskär sank in Gävlebukten. The heavily laden ship had keeled over in the severe storm and sunk in less than a minute. Only one SOS signal had been sent out before the radio fell silent. Had he had time to realise that he was about to die? Or had the freezing water taken him so much by surprise that he had no time to think? Just sudden terror, then an icy chill, and death.

The sky seemed close; the stars shone brightly that night. I can see the surface, she thought. There is a connection, thin threads intertwining with one another. But what lay behind it all? What was the motive for killing nineteen people in a small village in the north of Sweden, and also putting an end to a family in the Nevada desert? Probably no more than the usual: revenge, greed, jealousy. But what injustice could require such drastic revenge? Who could gain financially by murdering a number of pensioners in a northern hamlet who were already well on their way to death? Who could possibly be jealous of them?

She went back indoors when she began to feel cold. She usually went to bed early because she always felt tired in the evening and hated to go to work the following morning without having had a good night’s sleep, especially when a trial was taking place. She lay down on the sofa and switched on some music, quite softly so as not to disturb Staffan. It was a cavalcade of modern Swedish ballads. Birgitta Roslin had secretly dreamed of writing a pop song that would be chosen to represent Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest. She was embarrassed about this desire but at the same time felt very positive about it. She even had several preliminary versions of songs locked away in her desk. Perhaps it was inappropriate for a practising judge to write pop songs; but as far as she knew there was no rule against it.

It was three o’clock by the time she went to bed, and she gave Staffan a shake, as he was snoring. When he had turned over and fallen silent, she fell asleep herself.

The following morning she recalled a dream she’d had during the night. She had seen her mother, who spoke to her without Birgitta being able to grasp what she’d said. It was like being behind a pane of glass. It seemed to go on forever, the mother becoming more and more upset because her daughter didn’t understand what she was saying, the daughter wondering what was keeping them apart.

Memory is like glass, she thought. A person who has died is still visible, very close. But we can no longer contact each other. Death is mute; it excludes conversations, only allows silence.

Birgitta Roslin got up. A thought was beginning to form inside her head. She fetched a road map of Sweden. When the children were small, every summer the family used to drive to various cottages they had rented, usually for a month. Very occasionally, such as the two summers they had spent on the island of Gotland, they had flown there. But they had never taken the train, and in those days it had never occurred to Staffan that one day he would exchange his lawyer’s existence for that of a train conductor.

She turned to a general map of Sweden. Hälsingland was further north than she had imagined. She couldn’t find Hesjövallen. It was such an insignificant little hamlet that it wasn’t even marked.

When she put the map down, she had made up her mind. She would take the car and drive up to Hudiksvall. Not primarily because she wanted to visit the crime scene, but in order to see the little village where her mother had grown up.

When she was younger she had dreamed of one day making a grand tour of Sweden. ‘The Journey Home’, she used to call it. She would go to Treriksröset in the far north, where the borders of Sweden, Norway and Finland converged, and then back south to the coast of Skåne, where she would be close to the Continent, with the rest of Sweden behind her back. On the way north she would follow the coast, but on the way back south she would take the inland route. However, that journey had never taken place. Whenever she had mentioned it to Staffan, he had displayed no interest. And it had not been possible when the children were at home.

But now she had the opportunity to make at least part of that journey.

When Staffan had finished his breakfast and was preparing to join the train to Alvesta, the last one before he was due for several days off, she told him her plan. He didn’t object, merely asked how long she would be away and if her doctor would be happy about the strain that such a long drive was bound to impose.

It was only when he was in the hall with his hand on the front-door handle that she became upset. They had said goodbye in the kitchen, but now she followed him and threw the morning paper angrily at him.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘Have you no interest at all in why I want to take this trip?’

‘But you’ve told me why.’

‘Doesn’t it occur to you that I might also need some time to think about our relationship?’

‘We can’t start in on that now. I’ll miss my train.’

‘There’s never a good time as far as you’re concerned! It’s no good in the evening, no good in the morning. Don’t you ever want to talk to me about our life?’

‘You know that I’m not as perturbed about it as you are.’

‘Perturbed? You call it being perturbed when I wonder why we haven’t made love for over a year?’

‘We can’t talk about that now. I don’t have time.’

‘You’ll soon have plenty of time.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Perhaps I’ve run out of patience.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘All I know is that we can’t keep going on like this. Go away, go to your damned train.’

She turned on her heel, headed for the kitchen and heard the front door slam. She felt relieved at having said at last what she’d been wanting to say for ages, but she was also anxious about how he would react.

He phoned that evening. Neither of them mentioned what had happened in the hall that morning. But she could tell by his voice that he was shaken. Perhaps it would be possible now, and not a moment too soon, for them to talk about what could no longer be suppressed?

The following day, early in the morning, she got into the car, ready to drive north from Helsingborg. Staffan, who had arrived home in the middle of the night, carried her bag out to the car and put it on the back seat.

‘Where are you going to stay?’

‘There’s a little hotel in Lindesberg. I’ll spend the night there. I promise to call you. Then I suppose I’ll find somewhere in Hudiksvall.’

He stroked her cheek gently and waved as she drove off.

A day later she found herself six or seven miles from Hudiksvall. If she turned off inland a bit further north, she would pass through Hesjövallen. She hesitated a moment, felt a bit like a hyena, but banished the thought. She had a good reason for going there, after all.

When she reached Iggesund she took a left, and went left again when she came to a fork in the road at Ölsund. She passed a police car travelling in the opposite direction, and then another. The trees suddenly gave way to a lake. A row of houses lined the road, all of them cut off by red-and-white police tape. Police officers were walking along the road.

She could see a tent erected at the edge of the trees, and a second one in the nearest garden. She scanned the village slowly through a pair of binoculars she’d brought with her. People in uniform or overalls were moving between the houses, smoking by the gates in groups. She sometimes visited crime scenes as part of her work and was familiar with the set-up — though not on such a scale. She knew that prosecuting counsels and other officers of the law were not especially welcome, as the police were often wary of criticism.

A uniformed police officer tapped on her windscreen and interrupted her thoughts.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I didn’t realise that I’d strayed inside the cordoned-off area.’

‘You haven’t. But we keep an eye on everybody who comes here. Especially if they have binoculars. We hold our press conferences in Hudiksvall, in case you didn’t know.’

‘I’m not a reporter.’

The young police officer eyed her suspiciously.

‘What are you, then? A crime-scene junkie?’

‘Actually I’m a relative.’

The officer took out his notebook.

‘Of whom?’

‘Brita and August Andrén. I’m on my way to Hudiksvall, but I can’t remember the name of the person I’m supposed to see.’

‘Erik Huddén. He’s the one responsible for contacting relatives. Please accept my condolences.’

‘Thank you.’

The officer saluted; she felt like an idiot, turned round and drove off. When she got to Hudiksvall she realised that it wasn’t only the battalions of reporters that made finding a vacant hotel room impossible. A friendly receptionist at the First Hotel Statt told her that there was also a conference taking place that involved delegates from all over Sweden, ‘discussing forests’. She parked her car and wandered around the little town. She tried two hotels and a guest house, but everything was full.

She looked for somewhere to have lunch and found a little Chinese restaurant. It was quite full, but she got a small table next to a window. The room seemed to be exactly like every other Chinese restaurant she’d been to. The same vases, porcelain lions and lamps with coloured ribbons serving as shades.

A Chinese woman came with the menu. Birgitta Roslin ordered with difficulty; the young woman could speak practically no Swedish at all.

After her hasty lunch, she rang for a room and eventually got one at the Andbacken Hotel in Delsbo. There was a conference going on there as well, this one for an advertising company. Everyone in Sweden appeared to be tied up travelling between hotels and conference venues.

Andbacken turned out to be a large white building on the shore of a snow-covered lake. As she waited in the queue at reception, she read that the advertising folk would be busy that afternoon with group work. In the evening there would be a gala dinner at which prizes would be distributed. Please God, don’t let this be a noisy night with drunks running up and down the corridors and slamming doors, she thought.

Her room looked out over the frozen lake and the wooded hills. She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes for a short while, then got up, put on her jacket and drove to Hudiksvall. Reporters and TV crews thronged the police station. Eventually she found herself face to face with a young, exhausted receptionist and explained what she wanted.

‘Vivi Sundberg doesn’t have time.’

The dismissive response surprised her.

‘Aren’t you even going to ask me what I want to see her about?’

‘I take it you want to ask her questions, like everybody else. You’ll have to wait until the next press conference.’

‘I’m not a journalist. I’m a relative of one of the families in Hesjövallen.’

The woman behind the counter changed her attitude immediately.

‘I apologise. You need to speak to Eric Huddén.’

She dialled a number and told Eric that he had a visitor. It was evidently not necessary to say any more. ‘Visitor’ was a code word for ‘relative’.

‘He’ll come down and collect you. Wait over there by the glass doors.’

She found a young man standing by her side.

‘Unless I’m much mistaken, i think I heard you say that you were a relative of one of the murder victims. Can I ask you a few questions?’

Birgitta Roslin usually kept her claws tucked into her paws. But not now.

‘No. I’ve no idea who you are.’

‘I write.’

‘For whom?’

‘For everybody who’s interested.’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve nothing to say to you.’

‘Obviously, I’m very sorry about your sad loss.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not sorry at all. You are speaking softly in order not to attract attention — so others don’t realise you’ve found a relative.’

The glass doors were opened by a man with badge informing the world that he was Erik Huddén. They shook hands. A photographer’s flash was reflected in the glass doors as they closed again.

There were people everywhere. The tempo here was radically different from that in Hesjövallen. They went into a conference room where a table was covered in files and lists. This is where the dead are gathered together, Roslin thought. Huddén invited her to sit down and took a seat opposite her. She told the full story from the beginning, the two different name changes, and how she discovered that she was related to the victims. She could see that Huddén was disappointed when he realised that her presence was not going to help.

‘I appreciate that you no doubt need other information,’ she said. ‘I work in the law, and I’m not totally unaware of the procedures involved.’

‘Obviously, I’m grateful that you’ve come to see us.’

He put down his pen and squinted at her.

‘But have you really come all the way from Skåne to tell us this? You could have phoned.’

‘I have something to say that is relevant to the investigation. I’d like to speak to Vivi Sundberg.’

‘Can’t you tell me? She’s extremely busy.’

‘I’ve already spoken to her, and it would be useful to continue where we left off.’

He went out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. Roslin slid the file labelled BRITA AND AUGUST ANDRÉN towards her. What she saw horrified her. There were photographs, taken inside the house. It was only now that she realised the scale of the bloodbath. She stared at the pictures of the sliced and diced bodies. The woman was almost impossible to identify, as she had been slashed by a blow that almost cut her face in two. One of the man’s arms was hanging from just a couple of thin sinews.

She closed the file and pushed it away. But the images were still there; she wouldn’t be able to forget them. During her years in court she had often been forced to look at photographs of sadistic violence, but she had never seen anything to compare with what Erik Huddén had in his files.

He came back and beckoned her to follow him.

Vivi Sundberg was sitting at a desk laden with documents. Her pistol and mobile phone were lying on top of a file filled almost to the bursting point. She indicated a visitor’s chair.

‘You wanted to speak to me,’ said Sundberg. ‘If I understand it rightly, you’ve travelled all the way from Helsingborg. You must feel what you have to say is important.’

Her mobile phone rang. She switched it off and looked expectantly at her visitor.

Roslin told her story without getting bogged down in details. She had often sat on the bench and thought about how a prosecuting or defending counsel, an accused or a witness, ought to have expressed themselves. She was an expert in that particular skill.

‘Perhaps you already know about the Nevada incident,’ she said when she had finished.

‘It hasn’t come up at our briefings yet.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t think anything.’

‘It could mean that the murderer you are looking for is not a madman.’

‘I shall evaluate your information the same way I do every tip and suggestion. And believe me — there are masses of them here, phone calls, letters, emails. You name it, we got it. Who knows, something may turn up.’

She reached for a notepad and asked Birgitta Roslin to repeat her story. When she had finished making notes she stood up and escorted her visitor to the exit.

Just before they came to the glass doors, she paused.

‘Do you want to see the house where your mother grew up? Is that why you’ve come here?’

‘Is it possible?’

‘The bodies are gone. I can let you in, if you’d like to. I’ll be going there in half an hour. But you must promise me not to take anything away from the house. There are people who’d be only too pleased to rip up the cork tiles on which a murdered person has been lying.’

‘I’m not like that.’

‘If you wait in your car, you can follow me.’

Vivi Sundberg pressed a button, and the glass doors slid open. Birgitta Roslin hurried out into the street before any of the reporters who were still gathered in reception could get hold of her.

As she sat with her hand on the ignition key, it struck her that she had failed. Sundberg hadn’t taken her seriously. It was unlikely they’d look into the Nevada lead, and if they did it would be without much enthusiasm.

Who could blame them — the leap between Hesjövallen and Nevada was too great.

A black car with no police markings drew up beside her. Vivi Sundberg waved.

When they reached the village, Sundberg led her to the house.

‘I’ll leave you here, so that you can be alone for a while.’

Birgitta Roslin took a deep breath and stepped inside. All the lights were on.

It was like stepping from the wings onto a floodlit stage. And she was the only person in the play.

8

Birgitta Roslin stood in the hall and listened. There is a silence in empty houses that is unique, she thought. People have left and taken all the noise with them. There isn’t even a clock ticking anywhere.

She went into the living room. Old-fashioned smells abounded, from furniture, tapestries and pale porcelain vases crammed onto shelves and in between potted plants. She felt with a finger in one of the pots, then went to the kitchen, found a watering can and watered all the plants she could find. She sat down on a chair and looked around her. How much of all this had been here when her mother lived in this house? Most of it, she suspected. Everything here is old; furniture grows old with the people who use it.

The floor, where the bodies had been lying, was still covered in plastic sheeting. She went up the stairs. The bed in the master bedroom was unmade. There was a slipper lying halfway under the bed. She couldn’t find its mate. There were two other rooms on this upper floor. In the one facing west, the wallpaper was covered in childish images of animals. She had a vague memory of her mother having mentioned that wallpaper once. There was a bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a chair and a heap of rag rugs piled up against one of the walls. She opened the wardrobe: the shelves were lined with newspaper pages. One was dated 1969. By then her mother had been gone for more than twenty years.

She sat in the chair in front of the window. It was dark now, the wooded ridges on the other side of the lake were no longer visible. A police officer was moving around at the edge of the trees, lit up by a colleague’s torch. He kept stopping and bending down to examine the ground, as if he were looking for something.

Birgitta Roslin had the feeling that her mother was near. Her mother had sat in this very place long before Birgitta had ever been thought of. Here, in the same room at a different time. Somebody had carved squiggles into the white-painted window frame. Perhaps her mother. Perhaps every mark was an expression of a longing to get away, to find a new dawn.

She stood up and went back downstairs. Off the kitchen was a room with abed, some crutches leaning against a wall and an old-fashioned wheelchair. On the floor next to the bedside table was an enamel chamber pot. The room gave the impression of not having been used for a very long time.

She returned to the living room, tiptoeing around as if afraid of disturbing somebody. The drawers in a writing desk were half open. One was full of tablecloths and napkins, another of dark-coloured balls of wool. In the third drawer, the bottom one, were some bundles of letters and notebooks with brown covers. She took out one of the notebooks and opened it. There was no name in it. It was completely filled with tiny handwriting. She took out her glasses and tried to make sense of what looked to be a diary. The spelling was distinctly old-fashioned. The notes were about locomotives, coaches, railway tracks.

Then she noticed a word that gave her a start: Nevada. She stood stock-still and held her breath. Something had suddenly begun to change. This mute, empty house had sent her a message. She tried to decipher what followed, but she heard the front door opening. She replaced the diary and closed the drawer. Vivi Sundberg came into the room.

‘No doubt you’ve seen where the bodies were lying,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to show you.’

Birgitta Roslin nodded.

‘We lock the houses at night. You ought to leave now.’

‘Have you found any next of kin of the couple who lived here?’

‘That’s exactly what I came to tell you. It doesn’t seem like Brita and August had any children of their own, nor any other relatives apart from the ones living in the village who are also dead. The list of victims will be made public tomorrow.’

‘And then what will happen to them?’

‘Maybe that’s something you ought to think about, as you are related to them.’

‘I’m not actually related to them. But I do care about them.’

They left the house. Sundberg locked the door and hung the key on anail.

‘We don’t expect anybody to break in,’ she said. ‘Just now this village is as well guarded as the Swedish royal family.’

They said their goodbyes on the road. Powerful searchlights illuminated some of the houses. Once again, Birgitta Roslin had the feeling of being on a stage in a theatre.

‘Will you be going back home tomorrow?’ asked Vivi Sundberg.

‘I suppose so. Have you thought any more about what I told you?’

‘I shall pass on your information tomorrow when we have our morning meeting.’

‘But you must agree that it seems possible, not to say probable, that there is a connection.’

‘It’s too early to answer that question. But I think the best thing you can do now is to let it drop.’

Birgitta Roslin watched Vivi Sundberg get into her car and drive away. She doesn’t believe me, she said aloud to herself in the darkness. She doesn’t believe me — and, of course, I can understand that.

But then again, it annoyed her. If she had been a police officer, she would have given priority to information that suggested a link with a similar incident, even though it had taken place on another continent.

She decided to speak to the prosecutor who was in charge of the preliminary investigation.

She drove far too quickly to Delsbo and was still upset when she came to her hotel. The advertising executives’ ceremonial dinner was in full swing in the dining room, and she had to eat in the deserted bar. She ordered a glass of wine to accompany her meal. It was an Australian Shiraz, very tasty, but she couldn’t make up her mind if it had overtones of chocolate or liquorice, or perhaps both.

After her meal she went up to her room. Her indignation had subsided. She took one of her iron tablets and thought about the diary she had glanced at. She ought to have told Vivi Sundberg what she had discovered. But for whatever reason, she hadn’t. There was a risk that the diary would become yet another insignificant detail in a wide-ranging investigation overflowing with evidence.

Good police officers had a special gift for weeding out links in a mass of evidence that to others might seem haphazard and chaotic. What type of police officer was Vivi Sundberg? An overweight middle-aged woman who didn’t give the impression of being all that quick-witted.

She immediately withdrew that judgement. It was unfair. She knew nothing about Vivi Sundberg.

She lay down on the bed, switched on the television, and heard the vibrations from the double basses in the dining room.

Birgitta’s mobile phone rang and woke her up. She glanced at the clock and saw that she had been asleep for more than an hour. It was Staffan.

‘Where in the world are you? Where am I calling?’

‘Delsbo.’

‘I barely know where that is.’

‘Hudiksvall, just to the west. If my memory isn’t playing tricks on me, people in the old days used to talk about brutal knife fights featuring farmhands in Delsbo.’

She told him about her visit to Hesjövallen. She could hear jazz playing in the background. He most likely thinks it’s good to be on his own, she thought. He can listen as much as he wants to the jazz I don’t like at all.

‘What happens next?’ he asked when she had finished.

‘I’ll decide that tomorrow. You can go back to your music now.’

‘It’s Charlie Mingus.’

‘Who?’

‘You mean you’ve forgotten who Charlie Mingus is?’

‘I sometimes think all your jazz musicians have the same name.’

‘Now you’re offending me.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning that you have nothing but contempt for the music I like so much.’

‘Why should I?’

‘That’s a question only you can answer.’

The conversation came to an abrupt end. He slammed the phone down. That made her furious, so she rang him back, but he didn’t answer. She gave up. I’m not the only one who’s weary, she thought. He no doubt thinks I’m as cold and distant as I think he is.

She got ready for bed. It was some time before she could fall asleep. Early in the morning, while it was still dark, she was woken up by a door slamming somewhere. She remained lying there in the dark, recalling what she had dreamed. She’d been in Brita and August’s house. They had been talking to her, both of them sitting on the dark red sofa, while she was standing on the floor in front of them. She had suddenly noticed that she was naked. She tried to cover herself up and leave, but couldn’t. Her legs seemed to be paralysed. When she looked down she saw that her feet were enclosed by the floorboards.

That was the moment she had woken up. She listened to the darkness. Loud, drunken voices approached and faded away. She glanced at her watch. A quarter to five. Still a long time to go before dawn. She settled down to try and go back to sleep, but a thought struck her.

The key was hanging from a nail. She sat up in bed. Obviously, it was forbidden and preposterous. Going to get what was in the chest of drawers. Not waiting until some police officer might just possibly happen to take an interest in what was there.

She got out of bed and stood by the window. Still, deserted. I can do it, she thought. If I’m lucky I might be able to ensure that this investigation doesn’t get stuck in the mud like the worst case I’ve ever come across, the murder of our prime minister. But I’d be taking the law into my own hands, some zealous prosecutor might be able to convince a stupid judge that I was interfering in a criminal investigation.

Even worse was the wine she had drunk. It would be disastrous to be arrested for drink-driving. She worked out how many hours it was since she had dinner. The alcohol should be out of her system by now. But she wasn’t sure.

I shouldn’t do this, she thought. Even if the police on duty there are asleep. I can’t do it.

Then she dressed and left her room. The corridor was empty. She could hear noises from various rooms where after parties were still carrying on. She even thought she could hear a couple making love.

Reception was clear. She caught a glimpse of the back of a light-haired woman in the room behind the counter.

The cold hit her as she left the hotel. There was no wind; the sky was clear; it was much colder than the previous night.

Birgitta Roslin began to have second thoughts in the car. But the temptation was simply too great. She wanted to read more of that diary.

There was no other traffic on the road. At one point she braked hard when she thought she saw a moose by the piled-up snow at the side of the road, but it was only a tree stump.

When she came to the final hill before the descent into the village, she stopped and switched off the lights. She kept a torch in the glove compartment. She started walking carefully along the road. She kept stopping to listen. A slight breeze rustled through the invisible treetops. When she reached the crest of the hill, she saw that two searchlights were still shining, and there was a police car parked outside the house closest to the trees. She would be able to approach Brita and August’s house without being seen. She cupped her hand around the torch, went through the gate into the garden of the neighbouring house, then crept up to the front door from behind. Still no sign of life from the police car. She fumbled around until she found the key.

Once inside the house, Birgitta Roslin shuddered. She took a plastic carrier bag from her jacket pocket and cautiously opened the drawer.

The torch went out. She shook it, but couldn’t bring it back to life. Even so, she started to fill the bag with letters and the diaries. One of the bundles of letters slipped out of her hand, and she spent ages fumbling around on the cold floor until she found it.

Then she hurried away, back to her car. The receptionist stared at her in astonishment when she got back to the hotel.

She was tempted to start reading right away, but decided it would be best to get an hour or two of sleep. At nine o’clock she borrowed a magnifying glass from the front desk and sat down at the table, which she had moved to the window. The advertising crowd was saying its goodbyes before tumbling into cars and minibuses. She hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door handle, then turned her attention to the diary she had started reading. It was slow work — some words, and even some sentences, she couldn’t work out.

The author gave no name, only the initials JA. For some reason he never used the first person when referring to himself, but always the initials JA. She remembered the second letter she had found among her mother’s papers. Jan August Andrén. That must be him. A foreman on the railway construction moving slowly eastward through the Nevada desert, who described in great and meticulous detail his role in the venture. How he readily submitted to those above him in the hierarchy, who impressed him with the power they wielded. His illnesses, including a persistent fever that prevented him from working for a long time.

In places his handwriting would become shaky. JA described ‘a high temperature, and blood in the frequent and painful vomiting that afflicts me’. Birgitta Roslin could almost feel the fear of death that radiated from the pages of the diary. As JA didn’t date most of his entries, she was unable to judge how long he was ill. On one of the subsequent pages he wrote his last will and testament: ‘To my friend Herbert my best jackboots and other clothing, and to Mr Harrison my rifle and my revolver, and I beg him to inform my relatives in Sweden that I have passed on. Give money to the railway priest in order to enable him to arrange a decent burial with at least two hymns. I had not suspected that my life would be over so soon. May God help me.’

But JA didn’t die. Abruptly, with no evident transitional stage, he is fit and well again.

So JA appears to have been a foreman with the Central Pacific Company, which was building a railway from the Pacific Ocean to a point in the middle of the continent where it would meet up with the line from the East Coast. He sometimes complains that the workers ‘are exceeding lazy if he doesn’t keep a close watch over them. The ones who annoy him most are the Irish, because they drink heavily and are late starting work in the mornings. He calculates that he will be forced to dismiss one out of every four Irish labourers, which will create major problems. It is impossible to employ American Indians, as they refuse to work in the required way. Negroes are easier, but former slaves who have either been liberated or run away are unwilling to obey his orders. JA writes that ‘a workforce of decent Swedish peasants would have been much more preferable to all the unreliable Chinese labourers and drunken Irishmen.’

Birgitta Roslin was finding that interpreting the text was straining her eyes, and she frequently needed to lie down on her bed, close her eyes and rest. She turned to one of the three bundles of letters instead. Once again, it is JA. The same, barely legible handwriting. He writes to his parents and tells them how he’s getting on. There is a glaring difference between what JA notes down in his diary and what he writes in his letters home. If what’s in his diary is the truth, the letters are full of lies. He wrote in the diary that his monthly wage was eleven dollars. In one of the first letters he writes home, he says that his ‘bosses are so pleased with me that I’m now earning 25 dollars a month, which is about what an inspector of taxes earns back home’. He’s boasting, she thought.

Birgitta Roslin read more letters and discovered more lies, each one more astonishing than the last. He suddenly acquires a fiancée, a cook named Laura who comes from ‘a family well placed in high society in New York’. Judging from the date of the letter, this was when he was close to death and wrote his last will and testament. Perhaps Laura appeared in one of his delirious dreams.

The man Birgitta Roslin was trying to pin down was slippery, somebody who always managed to wriggle away. She started leafing through the letters and diaries all the more impatiently.

Between the diaries she found a document she assumed was a payslip. In April 1864 Jan August Andrén had been paid eleven dollars for his labours. Now she was certain that this was the same man who had written the letter she found among her mother’s papers.

She looked out of the window. A lone man was shovelling snow. Once upon a time a lone man named Jan August Andrén emigrated from Hesjövallen, she thought. He ended up in Nevada, working on the railway. He became a foreman and didn’t seem to have been too fond of those in his charge. The fiancée he invented might just have been one of the‘loose women who gravitate towards the railway construction sites’, as one entry detailed. Venereal disease was rife among the workforce. Whores who followed the railway were disruptive. It wasn’t just that VD-infected workers had to be fired: violent fights over women were a constant source of delay.

In one instance, JA describes how an Irishman named O’Connor had been sentenced to death for murdering a Scottish labourer. They had been drunk and ended up fighting over a woman. O’Connor was now dueto be hanged, and the judge who travelled to the camp in order to preside over the trial had agreed that the hanging didn’t need to take place in the nearest town, but could be carried out on a hill close to the point the railway track had reached. Jan August Andrén writes that‘I like the idea of everybody being able to see what drunkenness and violence can lead to’.

He describes the Irishman as young, with ‘barely more than down on his chin’.

The execution will take place early, just before the morning shift begins. Not even a hanging can result in a single sleeper car or even a single coach bolt being fitted behind schedule. The foreman has been instructed to make sure that everybody attends the execution. A strong wind is blowing. Jan August Andrén ties a bandanna over his nose and mouth as he goes around checking that his team has left its tents for the hill where the hanging will take place. The gallows is on a platform made of newly tarred sleepers. The moment O’Connor is dead the gallows will be dismantled and the sleepers carried back down to where the track is being laid. The condemned man arrives, surrounded by armed guards. There is also a priest present. Andrén describes the scene: ‘A growling dissent could be heard from the assembled men. For a moment one might suppose the grumbling was directed at the hangman, but then one realised that all present were relieved not to be the one about to have his neck broken. I could well imagine that many of them who hated the daily toil were now feeling blissful delight at the prospect of being able to carry iron rails, shovel gravel and lay sleepers today.’

Andrén writes like an early crime reporter, Birgitta Roslin thought. But was he writing for himself, or possibly for some unknown reader in the future? Otherwise why use terms like ‘blissful delight’?

O’Connor trudges along in his chains as if in a trance, but suddenly comes to life at the foot of the gallows and starts shouting and fighting for his life. The unease among the assembled men increases in volume, and Andrén writes that it is ‘terrible to watch this young man fighting for the life he knows he will soon lose. He is led kicking and screaming to the rope, and continues bellowing until the trapdoor opens and his neck is broken.’ At that moment the growling ceases, and according to Andrén it becomes ‘totally silent, as if all those present have been struck dumb, and felt their own necks breaking’.

He expresses himself well, Roslin thought. A man with emotions, who can write.

The gallows is dismantled, the body and the sleepers carried off in different directions. There is a fight between several Chinese who want the rope used to hang O’Connor.

The telephone rang. It was Sundberg.

‘Did I wake you up?’

‘No.’

‘Can you come down? I’m in reception.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Come down and I’ll tell you.’

Vivi Sundberg was waiting by the open fire.

‘Let’s sit down,’ she said, pointing to some chairs and a sofa around a table in the corner.

‘How did you know I was staying here?’

‘I made enquiries.’

Roslin began to suspect the worst. Sundberg was reserved, cool. She came straight to the point.

‘We are not entirely without eyes and ears, you know,’ she began. ‘Even if we are only provincial police officers. No doubt you know what I’m talking about.’

‘No.’

‘We are missing the contents of a chest of drawers in the house I was kind enough to let you into. I asked you not to touch anything. But you did. You must have gone back there at some time during the night. In the drawer you emptied were diaries and letters. I’ll wait here while you get them. Were there five or six diaries? How many bundles of letters? Bring them all down. When you do, I shall be kind enough to forget all about this. You can also be grateful that I went to the trouble of coming here.’

Birgitta Roslin could feel that she was blushing. She had been caught in flagrante, with her fingers in the jam jar. There was nothing she could do. The judge had been found out.

She stood up and went to her room. For a brief moment she was tempted to keep the diary she was reading just then, but she had no idea exactly how much Sundberg knew. Her seeming uncertainty about how many diaries there were was not necessarily significant — she could have been testing Roslin’s honesty. She carried everything she had taken down to reception. Vivi Sundberg had a paper bag into which she put all the diaries and letters.

‘Why did you do it?’ she asked.

‘I was curious. I can only apologise.’

‘Is there anything you haven’t told me?’

‘I have no hidden motives.’

Sundberg eyed her critically. Roslin could feel she was blushing again. Sundberg stood up. Despite being powerfully built and overweight, she moved daintily.

‘Let the police take care of this business,’ she said. ‘I won’t make a song and dance about you entering the house during the night. We’ll forget it. Go home now, and I’ll carry on working.’

‘I apologise.’

‘You have already.’

Sundberg left the hotel and got into the police car waiting outside. Birgitta Roslin watched it drive away in a cloud of snow. She went up to her room, fetched a jacket, and took a walk along the shore of the ice-covered lake. The wind came and went in chilly gusts. She bowed her head. She felt slightly ashamed.

She walked all the way round the lake and was warm and sweaty when she returned to the hotel. After a shower and a change of clothes, she thought about what had happened.

She had now seen her mother’s room and knew that it was her mother’s foster-parents who had been killed. It was time to go home.

She went down to reception and asked to keep the room for one more night. Then she drove into Hudiksvall, found a bookshop and bought a book about wines. She wondered whether to eat again at the Chinese restaurant she’d visited the previous day, but chose an Italian place instead. She lingered over her meal and read the newspapers without bothering to see what had been written about Hesjövallen.

She drove back to the hotel, read some pages of the book she had bought, went to bed early.

She was woken up by her phone ringing. It was pitch dark. When she answered nobody was there. There was no number on the display.

She suddenly felt uncomfortable. Who had called?

Before going back to sleep she checked to make sure the door was locked. Then she looked out of the window. There was no sign of anybody on the road to the hotel. She went back to bed, thinking that the next day she would do the only sensible thing.

She would go home.

9

She was in the breakfast room by seven o’clock. The windows looked out over the lake, and she could see that it had become windy. A man approached, pulling a sledge with two well-bundled children as passengers. She recalled the days when she had spent so much time and effort dragging her own children up slopes that they could sledge down. That had been one of the most remarkable periods of her life — playing with her children in the snow, and at the same time worrying about what judgement to pass in a complicated lawsuit. The children’s shouts and laughter contrasting with the frightening crime scenes.

She had once worked out that during the course of her career, she had sent three murderers and seven people guilty of manslaughter to prison. Not to mention several more sentenced for grievous bodily harm, who could count themselves lucky that their crimes had not resulted in murder.

The thought worried her. Measuring her activities and her best efforts in terms of people she had sent to prison — was that really the sum of her life’s work?

As she ate she avoided looking at the newspapers, which were naturally wallowing in the events at Hesjövallen. Instead she selected a business supplement and leafed through the stock market listings and discussons about the percentage of women represented on the boards of Swedish companies. There were not many people at breakfast. She refilled her coffee cup and wondered if it might be a good idea to take a different route home. A touch further west, perhaps, through the Värmland forests?

She was interrupted in her thoughts by somebody addressing her. A man sitting alone at a table several feet away.

‘Are you talking to me?’

‘I just wondered what Vivi Sundberg wanted.’

She didn’t recognise the man and didn’t really understand what he was asking about. Before she had a chance to reply, he stood up and walked over to her table. Pulled out a chair and sat down.

He was in his sixties, red-faced, overweight, and his breath was foul.

‘I’d like to eat my breakfast in peace.’

‘You’ve finished eating. I just want to ask you a few questions.’

‘I don’t even know who you are.’

‘Lars Emanuelsson. Freelance journalist. Not a reporter. I’m better than that lot. I’m not a hack. I do my homework and what I write is thoroughly researched and stylishly written.’

‘That doesn’t give you the right to prevent me from eating my breakfast in peace.’

Lars Emanuelsson stood up, and sat down on a chair at the next table.

‘Is that better?’

‘A bit. Whom do you write for?’

‘I haven’t made up my mind yet. First I need to get the story, then I’ll decide where to offer it. I don’t sell my work to just anybody.’

She was irritated by his self-importance. She was also repulsed by his smell — it must have been a very long time since he had last taken a shower. He came off as a caricature of an intrusive reporter.

‘I noticed that you had a chat with Vivi Sundberg yesterday. Not an especially cordial exchange of views, I would say. More like two cockerels, marking their territory. Am I right?’

‘You are wrong. I have nothing to say to you.’

‘But you can’t deny that you spoke with her?’

‘Of course I can’t.’

‘I wonder what a judge from another town is doing up here. You must have something to do with this investigation. Horrible things happen in a little hamlet up north, and Birgitta Roslin comes rushing up from Helsingborg.’

She became even more cautious.

‘What do you want? How do you know who I am?’

‘It all boils down to methods. We spend our whole lives searching for the best way of getting results. I take it that applies to judges as well. You have rules and regulations. But you choose your own methods. I don’t know how many criminal investigations I’ve reported on. I spent a full year — or, to be more precise, three hundred and sixty-six days — following the Palme investigation. I realised early on that the murderer would never be caught because the investigation ran aground before it had even been launched. It was obvious that the guilty party would never appear in court because the police and the prosecutors were not trying to solve the murder; they were more interested in appearing on prime-time television. Many people assumed then that the culprit was Christer Pettersson. Apart from some sane and sensible investigators who realised that this accusation was wrong, completely wrong. But nobody paid any attention to them. Me, I prefer to hover around the periphery, see things from the outside. That way I notice things that the others miss. For instance, a judge being visited by an investigating officer who can’t possibly have time for anything else but the case she’s busy with from morning till night. What was it that you handed over to her?’

‘I’m not going to answer that question.’

‘So I interpret that as meaning you are deeply involved in what has happened. I can see the headline now: “Scanian Judge Involved in the Hesjövallen Drama.” ’

She drank the rest of her coffee and stood up. He followed her into reception.

‘If you give me a tip, I can repay you in spades.’

‘I have absolutely nothing to say to you. Not because I have any secrets, but because I know nothing that could possibly be of any interest to a reporter.’

Lars Emanuelsson looked depressed. ‘Not a reporter, a freelance journalist. Let’s face it, I don’t call you a shyster.’

‘Was it you who called me last night?’

‘Eh?’

‘So it was. At least I know.’

‘You mean to say that your mobile phone rang? In the middle of the night? When you were asleep? Is that something I ought to follow up?’

She didn’t answer, but pressed the button to summon the lift.

‘There’s one thing you ought to know,’ said Lars Emanuelsson. ‘The police are suppressing an important detail. If you can call a person a detail.’

The lift doors opened; she stepped in.

‘It wasn’t only old people who died. There was a young boy in one of the houses.’

The doors closed. When she came to her floor, she pressed the down button again. He was waiting for her, hadn’t moved an inch. They sat down. Lars Emanuelsson lit a cigarette.

‘You’re not allowed to smoke in here.’

‘Tell me something else that I couldn’t care less about.’

There was a potted plant on the table that he used as an ashtray.

‘You always need to look for what the police don’t tell you. What they conceal can reveal the way they are thinking, where they think they might be able to pin down their perpetrator. In among all those dead people was a twelve-year-old boy. They know who his next of kin are, and why he was there in the village. But they aren’t telling the general public.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘That’s my secret. In an investigation like this there’s always a potential leak. It’s a question of identifying it, and then listening carefully.’

‘Who is this boy?’

‘At the moment he’s an unknown factor. I know his name, but I’m not going to say. He was visiting relatives. He really ought to have been at school, but he was convalescing after an eye operation. The poor kid had a lazy eye. But now his eye was in the right place, back in its slot, you might say. And then he was killed. Like the old folks he was staying with. But not quite the same.’

‘What was different?’

Emanuelsson leaned back in his chair. His stomach overflowed his waistband. Roslin found him totally repulsive. He was aware of that, but didn’t care.

‘Now it’s your turn. Vivi Sundberg, the books and letters.’

‘I’m a distant relative of some of the people who’ve been murdered. I gave Sundberg some material she’d asked for.’

He screwed up his eyes and peered at her. ‘Do you expect me to believe that?’

‘You can believe whatever you like.’

‘What books? What letters?’

‘They were about family circumstances.’

‘What family?’

‘Brita and August Andrén.’

He nodded thoughtfully, then stubbed out his cigarette with unexpected energy.

‘House number two or seven. The police have given every house a code. House number two is called two slash three — which obviously means that they found three dead bodies there.’

He continued watching her closely as he took a half-smoked cigarette from a crumpled pack.

‘That doesn’t explain why your exchanges were so cold in tone.’

‘She was in a hurry. What was different about the death of the boy?’

‘I haven’t managed to find out every detail. I have to admit that the Hudiksvall police and the ones they’ve called in from the CID in Stockholm are keeping their cards unusually close to their chest. But I think I’m right in saying that the boy wasn’t exposed to unwarranted violence.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What can it mean but that he was killed without first having to experience unnecessary suffering, torture and fear? You can draw various conclusions from that, each one more likely but probably more false than the next. But I’ll let you do that yourself. If you’re interested.’

He stood up, having first once again stubbed out his cigarette in the plant pot.

‘I’d better get back to circulating,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll bump into each other again. Who knows?’

She watched him go out through the door. A receptionist came past and paused when she smelled the smoke.

‘It wasn’t me,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘I smoked my last cigarette when I was thirty-two years old, which must be around about the time you were born.’

She went up to her room to pack her bag. But she paused by the window, watching the persistent father with his sledge and his children. What exactly had that unpleasant man said? And was he really as unpleasant as she thought? No doubt he was only doing his job. She hadn’t been particularly cooperative. If she’d treated him differently, he might have had more to tell her.

She sat down at the little desk and began making notes. As usual, she could think more clearly when she had a pen in her hand. She hadn’t read anywhere that a young boy had been murdered. He was the only young person to be killed, unless there were other victims the general public didn’t know about. What Lars Emanuelsson had said about excessive violence could only mean that the others in the house had been badly beaten, perhaps even tortured, before they were killed. Why had the boy been spared that? Could it simply be that he was young and the murderer had somehow taken that into account? Or was there some other reason?

There were no obvious answers. And anyway, it wasn’t her problem. She still felt ashamed of what had happened the previous day. Her conduct had been indefensible. She didn’t dare think about what would have happened if some journalist had found her out. Her return back home to Skåne would have been humiliating, to say the least.

She packed her bag and prepared to leave her room. But first she switched on the television to catch the weather forecast, which would help her make up her mind about which route to take. She stumbled on the broadcast of a press conference at police HQ in Hudiksvall. There were three people sitting on a little dais, and the only woman was Vivi Sundberg. Her heart skipped a beat — what if Sundberg was about to announce that a judge from Helsingborg had been exposed as a petty thief? She sat down on the edge of the bed and turned up the sound. The man in the middle, Tobias Ludwig, was speaking.

She gathered it was a live broadcast. When Tobias Ludwig had finished what he had to say, the third person — public prosecutor Robertsson — pulled the microphone towards him and said that the police badly needed any relevant information they could get from the general public. Nonlocal cars, strangers who had been noticed in the vicinity, anything that seemed unusual.

When the prosecutor had finished, it was Vivi Sundberg’s turn. She held up a plastic bag. The camera zoomed in on it. There was a red ribbon inside. Sundberg said the police would like to hear from anybody who recognised the ribbon.

Birgitta Roslin leaned towards the screen. Hadn’t she seen a silk ribbon like the one in the plastic bag? She knelt down in order to get a better view. The ribbon certainly reminded her of something. She racked her brains, but couldn’t place it.

The press conference proceeded to the stage where journalists started asking questions. The picture vanished from the screen. The room in police HQ was replaced by a weather map. Snow showers would drift into the east coast from the Gulf of Finland.

Birgitta Roslin decided to take the inland route. She paid at the front desk and told the girl on duty that she had enjoyed her stay. There was a bitterly cold wind as she made her way to the car. She placed her bag on the back seat, studied the map and decided to drive through the forest to Järvsö and continue south from there.

When she came out onto the main road, she pulled into the first parking bay. She couldn’t stop thinking about that red ribbon she had seen on television. She remembered having seen an identical ribbon, but couldn’t put her finger on when or where. She could almost identify it, but couldn’t take that final step. If I’ve come this far, surely I’ll be able to find out, she thought, and phoned police HQ. Timber trucks kept rumbling past, whipping up heavy clouds of snow that restricted her view. It was quite some time before the phone was answered. The operator who responded sounded harried. Roslin asked to speak to Erik Huddén.

‘It’s related to the investigation,’ she explained. ‘Hesjövallen.’

‘I think he’s busy. I’ll give him a buzz.’

By the time he came to the telephone, she was starting to have second thoughts. He also sounded impatient and under pressure.

‘Huddén.’

‘I don’t know if you remember me,’ she said. ‘I’m that judge who insisted on speaking to Vivi Sundberg.’

‘I remember.’

She wondered if Sundberg had said anything about what had happened that night. But she had the distinct impression that Huddén knew nothing about it. Perhaps Sundberg had in fact kept it to herself, as she’d promised? Perhaps I’m helped by the fact that she broke the rules by letting me into the house in the first place?

‘It’s about that red ribbon you showed on TV,’ she said.

‘Hmm, I’m afraid it seems to have been a big mistake to do that,’ said Huddén.

‘Why?’

‘Our switchboard has practically gone up in smoke thanks to all the people who claim to have seen it. Usually wrapped round Christmas presents.’

‘My memory tells me something quite different. I think I’ve seen it.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. But it has nothing to do with Christmas presents.’

He was breathing heavily at the other end of the line, and seemed to have trouble making up his mind.

‘I can show you the ribbon,’ he said eventually. ‘If you come right away.’

‘Within half an hour?’

‘You can have two minutes, no longer.’

He met her in reception, coughing and sneezing. The plastic bag with the red ribbon was on the desk in his office. He took it out of the bag and laid it on a piece of white paper.

‘It’s exactly seven and a half inches long,’ he said. ‘Just under half an inch wide. There’s a hole at one end suggesting that it’s been fastened to something. It’s made of cotton and polyester, but gives the impression of being made of silk. We found it in the snow. One of the dogs sniffed it out.’

She was certain she recognised it, but still couldn’t remember where from.

‘I’ve seen it,’ she said. ‘I can swear to that. Maybe not this particular one, but something identical.’

‘Where?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘If you’ve seen a similar one in Skåne, that’s hardly going to help us.’

‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘It was somewhere up here.’

She stared at the ribbon while Erik Huddén leaned against the wall, waiting.

‘Still can’t place it?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

He put the ribbon back into the plastic bag and accompanied her down to reception.

‘If your memory returns, you can call us,’ he said. ‘But if it turns out to be a ribbon round a Christmas present, don’t bother.’

Lars Emanuelsson was standing outside, waiting for her. He was wearing a threadbare fur hat pulled down over his forehead. He was annoyed when he realised she had unmasked him.

‘Why are you following me?’

‘I’m not. I’m circulating, as I said. I just happened to see you going into police HQ, and I thought I’d wait to see what developed. Right now I’m wondering what your very brief visit entailed.’

‘That’s something you’ll never know. Now leave me alone, before I get really annoyed.’

She turned on her heel and walked away, but heard him say behind her: ‘Don’t forget that I can write.’

She turned back angrily.

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Not at all.’

‘I’ve told you why I’m here. There’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to embroil me in what’s going on.’

‘The public reads what is written, whether it’s true or not.’

Now it was Lars Emanuelsson who turned on his heel and walked away. She looked on in disgust, and hoped she would never meet him again.

Birgitta Roslin returned to her car. She had only just settled down behind the wheel when the penny dropped, and she remembered where she had seen that red ribbon. It came out of the blue, without warning. Could she be mistaken? No, she could see everything in her mind’s eye, as clear as day.

She waited for two hours as the place she wanted to visit was closed. She killed time by wandering aimlessly around town, impatient because she couldn’t ascertain immediately what she thought she had discovered.

It was eleven o’clock when the Chinese restaurant opened. Birgitta Roslin went in and sat down in the same place as last time. She studied the lamps hanging over the tables. They were made of transparent material, thin plastic designed to give the impression of paper-covered lanterns. They were long and thin, cylinder-shaped. Four red ribbons hung down from the bottom.

After her visit to police HQ she knew that each of the ribbons was exactly seven and a half inches long. They were attached to the lampshade by a little hook that threaded in through a hole at the top of the ribbon.

The young woman who spoke bad Swedish came with the menu. She smiled when she recognised Birgitta Roslin. Roslin chose the buffet, despite the fact that she was not very hungry. The dishes laid out for her to choose from gave her the opportunity to scan the dining room. She soon found what she was looking for over a table for two in a corner at the back. The lamp hanging over the table was missing one of the red ribbons.

She stopped short and held her breath.

Somebody had been sitting there, she thought. At the back in the darkest corner. Then he had stood up, left the premises and made his way to Hesjövallen.

She looked around the restaurant. The young woman smiled. She could hear voices coming from the kitchen, speaking Chinese.

It struck her that neither she nor the police had the slightest idea what had happened. It was all much bigger, deeper and more mysterious than any of them could have imagined.

They knew absolutely nothing.