Dead of Winter

1

She hates the winter, has done ever since she was little – or almost. Once upon a time there was ice skating and sledging, camp fires, a flask of hot chocolate and friends to share it with. But that was a long time ago, before the Lucia Day fire.

Now there is only the cold.

‘So . . . Laura.’

Her table companion glances at the place card next to her wine glass for at least the third time. His name is Niklas, and so far he’s turned out to be both dull and nervous. He’s managed to spill something on his tie – or even worse, he chose to put on a tie with a stain already on it when he was dressing for dinner.

‘How do you know Stephanie?’

The question is almost laughably predictable.

‘We met through work a few years ago, but now we’re good friends.’

Laura is trying to be polite. She doesn’t say that Steph is her best friend, sadly perhaps her only friend. Except possibly Andreas.

Niklas asks her something else, but the loud alpha male opposite them, who has been holding court ever since he made his ostentatious entrance three-quarters of an hour ago, says something funny and the laughter from the other guests drowns out Niklas’s voice.

She should have turned down this invitation, explained that she has a headache and too much work to do, but she had promised Steph. Promised to behave herself and give nervous Niklas a chance.

‘It’s important for you to get back in the saddle, Laura. Find somebody new. Yeehaa!’

To be fair, Steph didn’t actually say ‘yeehaa’, that was Laura’s own addition. She takes a big gulp of her wine and decides she’s being unfair. Steph grew up in the USA, and tends to speak both Swedish and English at the same time. Sometimes Laura thinks she does it deliberately, exaggerating her use of Swenglish to make her stand out from the crowd, which really isn’t necessary.

She glances over at the head of the table. As always, Steph looks good in a dress that shows just the right amount of décolletage. Her blonde hair is perfectly styled, and she is sitting with her head tilted to one side in the way that makes every man in her vicinity want to be of service. Steph is two years older than Laura, but the cosmetic procedures she’s undergone are so discreet and professional that no one would think she’s a day over forty.

Laura, on the other hand, definitely looks forty-five. She has crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and a furrow in her brow that shows up particularly well on the kind of alabaster skin that only redheads have. She inherited her hair colour and skin tone from her father, but she alone is responsible for the grim set of her mouth.

She is wearing a long-sleeved shirt beneath a cashmere cardigan, and even though the warmth in the room has already prompted a few of the gentlemen to loosen their ties, her fingertips and the end of her nose are freezing cold. They always are, all year round, thanks to the winter fire. Or rather because of it. She feels no gratitude towards it whatsoever.

She and Steph are the polar opposites of each other in many ways. Steph is open and extrovert; she’s built up her own business from scratch. Laura took over her father’s company. Handed everything on a plate, as her mother points out on a regular basis.

Steph must have felt Laura’s eyes on her; she looks in her direction and nods meaningfully. Laura gets the message. Pull yourself together and give the guy a chance.

She sighs and turns back to Niklas. Tries to avoid fixating on the stain on his tie.

‘Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.’

Niklas blushes.

‘I was just wondering if you worked in investment too?’

‘No, my speciality is risk management. Mainly the soft sector.’

Niklas looks puzzled, and she realises she needs to expand on her answer.

‘We assess people – to see if they’re suitable to be taken on, or promoted. You might have heard of screening?’

‘You mean you find out if they have a criminal record, that kind of thing?’

She can hear from his tone of voice that he doesn’t understand, which is hardly surprising. Her area is narrow, to say the least.

‘That’s just a small part of what we do. We aim to form a more comprehensive picture of the person. Look into their finances, family relationships, talk to their former teachers, employers, colleagues. We carry out over a hundred different checks, and sometimes we even conduct in-depth interviews.’

She doesn’t mention that this is in fact her own area of expertise; no point in scaring him unnecessarily. She’s already worked out most things about Niklas – mainly that she has absolutely no intention of seeing him again, whatever Steph says.

‘Who are your clients?’

A good question, she has to give him that. If this were an interview she would have made a little squiggle in the margin of her assessment form to indicate that he was brighter than he looked.

‘Usually recruitment firms, but also companies, agencies or government bodies that are considering internal promotion to the leadership team or other key posts. Sometimes it’s investors who want to know who they’re dealing with.’

‘Like Stephanie?’

‘Exactly.’

Just as Laura is about to return the favour and ask Niklas about his job, the alpha male opposite breaks into their conversation. He must be fifty, and she doesn’t need to look at his place card to know his name.

‘Did you say you worked as a headhunter?’

He already has the attention of everyone around the table, which means they are now focused on her.

‘No,’ Laura says curtly, because she already knows where he’s going with this.

However, he’s not so easily dismissed.

‘I’m actually looking for a new challenge.’

Laura shakes her head. ‘As I said, that’s not what I do.’

He’s not listening. ‘I usually increase turnover by at least ten per cent in the first twelve months,’ he informs her. ‘There was an article about me in Industry Today the other week – did you see it?’

Laura demonstratively turns to Niklas, but the alpha male still doesn’t get it.

‘The headhunters call me once a week, if not more often,’ he boasts. ‘You wouldn’t believe the salary they offer – but I need the right kind of challenge. What company did you say you worked for, Lena?’

Steph intervenes before Laura bites his head off.

‘Laura runs her own business, Tobias. She assesses people like you, searches out their weaknesses. The skeletons in your closet. You need to watch yourself.’

There are odd bursts of laughter, and if Tobias had any sense he would drop the whole thing. Instead, he leans across the table.

‘Do I, indeed? So how would you assess me, Laura? What are my weaknesses?’

He beams at her, showing his recently whitened teeth, and she can see that a number of the guests are on his side. Steph is giving her a look, and Laura knows she ought to keep her mouth shut, but alpha-Tobias is wearing the smug expression favoured by only a certain kind of man. He really is asking for this.

Steph shakes her head almost imperceptibly, but to no effect.

‘I’ve met so many people like you,’ Tobias goes on. ‘Cod psychologists who think they can judge someone by getting them to fill in a fucking form. Can you list your three greatest weaknesses? What colour do you associate with your personality? If you were a car, what make would you be? Bullshit, pure and simple.’

He laughs loudly, and once again several of the other guests – mainly male – join in. Buoyed up by their support, he leans even further forward and extends an index finger with a faint sticky film covering the nail.

‘Go on, Laura – give me your best shot!’

‘OK, but remember this was your idea.’

She takes a sip of her wine, puts down the glass while observing Tobias closely. Follows the tell-tale redness at his hairline, down over his upper body, his hands. You could hear a pin drop around the table.

‘You’re married,’ she begins. ‘But that’s not your wife.’

She nods in the direction of his companion, who is at least twenty years his junior.

‘You drove here because you wanted to show her your expensive car. It could be an Italian make, but it takes time to learn to drive them properly, and you don’t have the patience, so I’ll go for a slightly more easy-to-handle Porsche.’

Tobias’s eyes are darting from side to side.

‘You’ve already drunk too much, but you’re still intending to drive home, because you don’t want to leave your precious toy parked on the street. Which means you don’t really care about risks or consequences for yourself or others. Since you came by car, you don’t live in town, but in Lidingö or Djursholm. Judging by the exaggerated way you pronounce the letter i, I’d go for the former, but the cadence of your sentences suggests that you were born and grew up somewhere on the west coast.’

She pauses, leaving him to squirm for a few seconds. She avoids catching Steph’s eye. This is too easy. And so much fun.

‘Your suit is Brioni, your watch Rolex, your tie Fendi. Red, of course, because you read in someone’s autobiography that it’s a power colour. Autobiographies are all you read, by the way. And you recently had a hair transplant.’

She leans back, trying not to look smug.

‘To summarise, Tobias: you’re a walking, talking, risk-taking, middle-age crisis. What do you think of my assessment?’

No one speaks. Tobias is gasping for air, as if he’s about to explode.

Suddenly Steph begins to laugh, a loud, infectious belly laugh that draws everyone in, and the atmosphere lightens.

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ she says as the laughter gives way to an amused hum of conversation. ‘Laura’s fucking lethal.’

Tobias knocks back the contents of his wine glass.

‘How the fuck did you know all that?’ He sounds annoyed, but reluctantly impressed.

‘Do you really want to know?’ Laura says.

The conversation dies away. She gazes steadily at him.

‘I read the article about you in Industry Today. It told me where you come from, where you live, and that you’ve been married for many years. But your companion this evening isn’t wearing a wedding ring.’ Once again she nods in the direction of the young woman, whose hands are clearly visible. ‘Plus, you had a much higher forehead in the photograph in the magazine.’

And there’s something sticky on your fingers which I’m guessing is Regaine, just in case the transplant doesn’t succeed, because you can’t think of anything worse than going bald. She decides to keep that little snippet to herself. There are limits, after all.

Tobias’s face is bright red. He has got over the shock and surprise, and now he’s furious, humiliated. He’s probably wondering whether to call her a bitch and storm out, or pretend to turn the other cheek and be a good loser. She thinks he’ll go for the latter option; anything else would be stupid.

‘And the car?’ the man next to her asks. ‘How did you know he drives a Porsche?’

Laura shrugs.

‘He arrived just after me and parked by the door. I saw them getting out of the car as I was walking in.’

Another burst of laughter. Tobias grins, looking embarrassed but doing his best to join in the merriment. A wise decision.

One of the women is laughing so much she can hardly breathe. She reaches for her glass of water and knocks it over. When she leans forward to retrieve it, one of her curls gets too close to a candle.

Laura can see what is about to happen and opens her mouth to warn the woman, but it’s too late. A flash of fire, then a scream.

It’s over in a second. The hiss of burning, the flame is extinguished. All that remains are agitated voices and the acrid smell of burned hair.

Everyone’s attention is on the woman, so no one notices when Laura gets up and hurries out of the room. Her stomach contracts, she can feel the sweat on the back of her neck.

She just manages to lock the toilet cubicle door, turn on the cold tap and sweep her hair out of the way before she throws up in the hand basin. She swills out her mouth, blows her nose several times to try to get the smell of burned hair out of her nose, but somehow it is still there.

She looks in the mirror. Notes that she is even paler than usual, if that’s possible.

‘Calm down,’ she murmurs. ‘Just calm down.’

After a while she feels better. The voices in the dining room have died down. A slight draught indicates that someone has opened a window.

With hindsight, she realises it wasn’t a good idea to take Tobias down like that. If she hadn’t been showing off, the woman wouldn’t have set fire to her hair, and she wouldn’t be standing here throwing up in Steph’s marble hand basin.

Her headache has got worse, and all she wants to do is to go home, close the door, not see anyone. But she can’t let Steph down.

She takes out her phone. One text message, two missed calls. The first is from a contact called Andreas ex-husband/stalker.

One of Steph’s little jokes that she hasn’t had the energy to correct. It’s her own fault for leaving her phone unattended for a few seconds. Plus, it’s not entirely untrue.

A year after the divorce, Andreas still calls her almost every day. Over the last few weeks, he’s been calling even more frequently. She ought to ask him to stop, of course. Explain that they both need to move on. And yet she hasn’t done it.

The other missed call is from a number she doesn’t recognise. A landline with an area code that looks vaguely familiar.

She opens a search app. The number belongs to a firm of lawyers called Håkansson in Ängelholm, and as soon as she sees the name of the place, a faint warning bell begins to ring in the back of her mind. She makes the call before she has time to think, not really expecting anyone to answer at eight o’clock on a Friday evening.

‘Håkansson.’

The man on the other end of the line speaks with a rough Skåne accent.

‘Hi – my name is Laura Aulin. I think you tried to contact me about an hour ago?’

‘I did, thank you so much for getting back to me.’

She hears the rustle of papers.

‘It’s about your aunt. Hedda, Hedda Aulin. Have you spoken to her recently?’

The warning bell is louder now, and the nausea comes flooding back.

‘We . . . We’re not in touch.’

‘No?’

‘No, we haven’t been for many years. Has something happened to her?’

The brief silence answers her question. She swallows hard.

‘I’m very sorry, but your aunt has passed away.’

‘When?’

‘At some point during the early hours of Monday morning, we think.’

Without warning the skin on her back begins to crawl, a painful mixture of heat and cold that she hasn’t felt for many years. At least not while she was awake.

‘So anyway . . .’ Håkansson goes on. ‘Your aunt spoke to me not long ago. She wanted to make a will. You’re her only heir.’

He falls silent, waiting for Laura to say something, but she is lost for words.

‘As I’m sure you understand, there are a number of practical decisions that will have to be made concerning her estate,’ he continues.

‘I . . . I understand,’ she manages to say. ‘Can I call you back tomorrow?’

‘Monday will be fine – there’s no hurry. Once again, my condolences. Your aunt was . . .’ He pauses, searching for the right words. ‘A very special woman.’

He ends the call, and Laura stands there with the phone pressed to her ear. The skin on her back is burning like fire, drops of sweat are trickling down towards the waistband of her trousers. The rest of her body is ice-cold.