Dead of Winter

51

She switches on all the lights in the house. In spite of her and Elsa’s efforts the place is still a terrible mess, but Laura consoles herself with the thought that at least it looks better than when they started. Plus, it no longer bothers her as much. She takes out her phone, plays the sound file Lelle gave her. Hearing Iben’s voice is so uncomfortable that she involuntarily hunches her shoulders.

Källegården. Near Vedarp. Ulf Jensen. He’s messing with his daughter.

So this is Iben’s terrible secret. A secret Tomas has kept for over thirty years.

Poor Tomas in his hideaway in the forest, and Peter who has done his best to protect him all these years, because of a guilty conscience. Peter, who stubbornly insists that Tomas is not behind the fires at Ensligheten and Källegården, even though all the indications suggest that he is.

She tries to go over everything that has been said between them, but it’s all too much. She decides to go out and get some fresh air, clear her mind. She pulls on her jacket and boots and takes her cup of tea with her. George accompanies her, leaping around in the snow like an excited puppy.

‘Stupid cat,’ she murmurs.

George looks up and tilts her head to one side. When they reach the pontoon, the cat stops and looks at her again as if to say: this far and no further. She disappears into the darkness like a grey speckled shadow.

Laura goes right to the end of the pontoon and stands by the ladder. The ice has formed a thin covering at the bottom, and is well on the way to winning the battle against the slight current that has kept the water open.

She gazes across at the northern shore, the yearning lamp on Miller’s boathouse, the silhouette of the ridge, all the way to the castle.

Was Jack out there somewhere, having changed so much that she didn’t recognise him? Or is the whole thing just a fantasy, wishful thinking based on an unhappy teenage love affair? If she’d sat down and carried out a risk assessment the way she did at work, dealing with facts and not emotions, the result would have been a given. The likelihood of Jack being anywhere near Vintersjön is so low that it’s almost non-existent.

And yet she can’t get it out of her mind, in spite of everything she’s found out, in spite of the fact that she and Jack are actually cousins. She will never be able to share this with Steph. The cousin-jokes would come thick and fast, and Steph would bombard her with video clips of unfortunate banjo-playing hare-lipped souls in dungarees.

She smiles to herself, realises that she misses Steph’s dark sense of humour. She sips her tea and looks over at the castle, remembering how she and Iben dreamed of stealing the troll’s treasure and buying Vintersjöholm. Steph would have liked that story.

So what now? Ulf Jensen’s abuse of his daughter is beyond the statute of limitations, and Tomas has admitted that he was behind the dance hall fire, even though he hinted that Milla talked him into it.

Laura can see the black water through the thin crust of ice. Images of Hedda’s dead body come into her mind. Was it Iben’s secret that cost her her life? If so, the main suspects are Ulf Jensen and his two sons, either together or acting on their own initiative.

Hedda was on the trail of the secret, and if she’d found out the truth she would probably have refused to sell Gärdsnäset to the local council. She would have let Ulf lose his beloved family farm. She might even have revealed everything, dragged his good name through the mud.

The Jensens would go a long way to stop that from happening.

But how far? And how big is the secret? Does it stop at abuse, or is there something even worse?

She tries to recall the fight outside the dance hall, Fredrik beating up Jack, Iben screaming at Christian to try and get him to let go of her.

What if Iben had yelled something about Ulf, threatened to tell everyone what had been going on? How would Christian and Fredrik have dealt with that?

Could one of them have returned later in the evening and seized the opportunity when Iben was separated from the others? It’s not impossible. Iben was young and strong, and she was only a few metres from the back door. Nobody had been able to explain why she didn’t get out of the dance hall – but what if she was already unconscious, or even dead, when the fire broke out?

Could the ‘we’ Tomas had mentioned in his letter – the ‘we’ that had almost slipped out an hour or so ago – could he have been referring to Iben’s brothers? Tomas certainly seemed to loathe the two of them as much as he hated Ulf, but during the fight he’d been paralysed with fear. Had they threatened him, forced him to start the fire so they’d have a scapegoat?

A faint glow high up on the ridge catches her eye. At first she thinks it’s the lights of a car, but then she realises it’s getting bigger and brighter.

The scar on her back begins to move, writhing faster and faster as she grasps where the glow is coming from.

She is sweating now, shivering with the cold at the same time, and yet she can’t make herself go indoors. Instead, she stands there on the pontoon staring at the dark slope of the ridge on the other side of the lake, where Tomas Rask’s hideaway is in flames.