Dead of Winter

38

‘At approximately what time did you see an unknown person in the forest last night?’

‘About two o’clock,’ Laura says for the third time.

Peter has already dealt with all the obvious questions, returned to them wrapped in new speculations. Now he’s on the third round.

‘Why did Kent Rask feel threatened by the Jensen family?’

‘They were after Tomas.’

‘Still? After all these years?’

‘That’s what Kent said.’

Peter is mixing things up, jumping from questions about the fires to the events in the holiday village instead of sticking to the timeline as he did during the first two rounds. It comes across as slightly unprofessional, but in fact it’s a skilfully delivered interrogation technique that she herself sometimes uses when interviewing candidates. Lies are easier to remember in a certain context, and if she was lying she would have started to find it difficult to keep a handle on what she had and hadn’t said.

But Laura hasn’t lied. She’s just omitted a couple of details. Hedda’s board. Tomas’s letters.

No one was meant to get hurt.

But things didn’t turn out the way we expected.

‘When were you last in the apartment above the boathouse?’

‘On Friday.’

‘What did you do there?’

‘Poked around, relived old memories.’

Peter gives her a long look.

‘Did you lock the door when you left?’

‘I don’t remember. Maybe not – there was nothing in there that was worth keeping under lock and key.’

‘The petrol can and the bag of insulating material?’

‘As I said before, they weren’t there on Friday. I’ve never seen or touched them.’

She’s irritated now, and can’t be bothered to hide it. The situation is absurd to say the least. Thirty years ago they were in a similar room, at the hospital. She and Peter and the lawyer from Stockholm, facing Bengt Sandberg. The difference now is that she and Peter are on opposite sides of the table.

She tries in vain to avoid looking at the man sitting in the corner, watching them. Sandberg hasn’t really changed, which isn’t surprising. He was already an adult when they last met.

He ought to be nearing retirement age, but he doesn’t have the air of a man who’s simply serving his time until he reaches sixty-five. His eyes are sharp, his body toned. He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt in the middle of winter; a long white scar is visible on one forearm. On his left hand is a large signet ring, but no wedding ring. Laura thinks back to their first encounter in Hedda’s yard, the flowers and magazines in the car that she pointed out to Milla in a stupid attempt to impress her. Sandberg’s wife was in hospital then, so maybe he’s a widower – or divorced. Married to the job, like her. She feels his eyes on her. Sandberg frightened the life out of her when she was fifteen, and reluctantly she has to admit that he’s having much the same effect on her now, even though she’s forty-five.

Peter has finished going through the questions for the third time. Judging by his body language, there won’t be a fourth. Håkansson shuffles on his chair beside her.

Sandberg gets to his feet in a surprisingly smooth movement. He comes to the side of the table and leans forward, over Peter as much as over her. She can smell his aftershave.

‘Has anything else happened, Laura?’ he asks. ‘Something you’ve come across in the last few days that you haven’t told us?’

His eyes bore into hers.

She glances at Peter. Is he the one Tomas was referring to in his letter? Is it Peter who makes up ‘we’? Thanks to Elsa, she knows they’re in touch.

‘Thirty years, Laura,’ Sandberg continues. ‘You were more talkative back then. So was Larsson here, come to think of it.’

He moves behind Peter and places his big hands on Peter’s shoulders. Peter stares down at the table. Laura would like to do the same, but forces herself to meet Sandberg’s gaze.

‘Tomas Rask confessed as soon as he heard you’d named him. His best friends.’

Peter’s lips have gone white.

‘There hasn’t been a single incidence of arson around Vintersjön in thirty years,’ Sandberg goes on. ‘But Laura Aulin turns up, and suddenly we have two in as many days. We can live with Kent Rask’s barn, to be honest. An old curmudgeon like him has probably brought it on himself – several times over. But when someone attacks a pillar of the community like Ulf Jensen, that rings alarm bells. I’ve had both the chief of police and the governor of the county on the phone, which is why I’d like to be aware of the progress of the investigation. Plus, of course, it’s given me the chance to catch up with a couple of old friends.’

He releases his grip on Peter’s shoulders.

‘So. Tomas Rask has made a career as an arsonist. Do we know if he’s still detained at the taxpayers’ expense?’

‘He’s been out for about a year,’ Peter says.

‘Last known address?’

‘He’s registered just outside Skövde, at a sheltered accommodation complex for people with . . . problems. But according to the staff, no one’s seen him for a month or so.’

‘Which means that theoretically it could be our old friend Tomas Rask who’s sneaking around in the forest. Could it have been him you saw at Gärdsnäset?’

‘Maybe . . .’

Laura tries to recall the figure she thought she saw among the trees, but instead Kent Rask pops into her mind. Tomas isn’t right in the head. God knows I’ve tried to knock some sense into him, in every possible way. Sometimes to the point where my fists hurt.

Sandberg picks up on her thoughts.

‘What was the relationship between father and son like?’

‘Tomas hated his father,’ Peter says quietly.

‘In that case he definitely has a motive for trying to burn down the old man’s barn,’ Sandberg states. ‘What about the Jensens? Does Tomas have any reason to hold a grudge against them?’

He pulls out a chair and sits down between Laura and Peter.

‘If that is the case, then there’s another question we have to ask ourselves: why now? Why is Rask running around starting fires in this area again after almost exactly thirty years? What’s the trigger?’

Laura doesn’t know if she’s expected to answer. Sandberg is talking to her and Peter as if they’re all on the same side. Presumably it’s some kind of trick, a way of lulling one of them into a false sense of security. But which one?

Sandberg turns to her.

‘You were in the vicinity of both fires, and if you’re telling the truth, then it seems as if the perpetrator – or someone else – has made an attempt to frame you.’

He leans across the table.

‘Maybe . . .’ he says slowly, ‘all this is about you, somehow?’

Laura agrees to provide fingerprints and a DNA sample for comparison with the petrol can and the bag of insulating material. Håkansson tells her that she is under no obligation to do so, but she has nothing to hide. She’s also convinced that a refusal would make her look even more suspicious in Sandberg’s eyes.

She’d hoped that Peter would drive her back to Gärdsnäset, giving her the opportunity to ask him about Tomas, perhaps hint that she knows they’ve been in touch. However, as soon as the interview is over he disappears into the depths of the police station, and she has to ask Håkansson for a lift.

Back at Hedda’s house she opens the front door and pauses for a moment. The smell is less overpowering now – or maybe she’s just getting used to it. She turns and looks over at the boathouse, then the forest where she thought she saw someone last night. Sandberg might be unpleasant, but he made an important point: the fires do seem to be connected to her.

Or is there another explanation? Could they be linked to Gärdsnäset, to Hedda?

She goes inside, takes off her coat, says hello to George and feeds her. Turns over the painting to reveal Hedda’s improvised noticeboard.

She still has no idea of what Hedda was actually doing, why she’d put up the newspaper cuttings about the fire, why she’d frozen the sale, why the black feather was there, what she’d meant about Tomas and Iben’s secret.

But she can’t shake off the feeling that the answers lie somewhere in this house.

She thinks back to the words Kent Rask whispered in her ear: Hedda never threw anything away, so those letters must be at Gärdsnäset somewhere . . .

Laura goes into Hedda’s studio and takes down the remaining shoeboxes. They all contain photographs – no more letters or postcards from either Tomas or Jack.

She returns to the living room and the noticeboard.

Kent Rask said that Tomas and Hedda wrote to each other, but so far she’s found only the letter written in 1994, in which Tomas seemed to indicate that he hadn’t acted alone.

Didn’t he write back to Hedda the rest of the time, or are there more letters in a different place? That’s possible, of course.

The note about Tomas and Iben is right at the bottom, which means that it was the last thing Hedda added, probably in early November. If she’d written to Tomas and asked him about the secret at the same time, then his reply wouldn’t be in an old shoebox. But if she had heard from him, then why wasn’t the task crossed off the list and the letter pinned up on the noticeboard?

She is struck by a thought.

It was the postman who found Hedda in the water. He’d driven out here to deliver her mail, got worried when the door was unlocked and the house was empty. But what had he done with the mail?

Laura goes to the front door. There’s more room now, since she and Elsa have cleared away the worst of the mess. Beneath the hallstand there is a half-full rubbish bag. She tips out the contents. Newspapers from five years ago, junk mail, campaign material from the 2014 election. Among it all there is a white envelope, the address written in a rounded, almost childish hand. It’s Tomas’s writing.

She slits open the envelope, her pulse racing.

Dear Hedda,

Thank you for your letters. I haven’t written back for a long time. I’m very sorry.

You asked me about Iben’s secret. I swore I’d never reveal it, but what does that matter now? And I know that you’d never tell anyone.

Iben hated her father.

Hated Ulf Jensen more than anyone or anything.

But most of all she was afraid of him.