Dead of Winter

61

Laura sleeps fitfully, dreams of the boathouse in flames, Tomas’s whispered words.

She asked me to do it, he says, stretching out a hand with pink, bubbling skin and pointing over her shoulder, just as Iben did in her previous nightmare.

When Laura looks around, she sees a line of women standing behind her.

Peter’s wife in her white wedding dress, and an older woman that she knows, the way you do only in dreams, must be Iben’s mother, Sofia.

Milla, with her hood up. Then two faces Laura hadn’t expected to see.

Erica von Thurn with her intense, fascinated gaze, and beside her the Lucia-girl who resembled Iben, the fire still dancing in her eyes.

Before she can work out what they’re doing in her dream, she wakes up needing to pee. She pads into the bathroom. The house is dark and silent.

It’s five to seven and she’s slept for only a few hours, but she can’t get back to sleep. After tossing and turning for a little while, she decides she might as well get up.

She puts on her clothes. Her dress is crumpled, her high-heeled shoes are up in the hallway where she kicked them off and changed into boots. Her tights are laddered.

She checks her phone, discovers an email she missed yesterday. It’s from Ola in the office.

Hi, Laura,

You never called back about that check you asked me to run, so I’m emailing you instead. Jensen & Sons are on the verge of bankruptcy. They’ve been on their knees for years, and have acquired enormous debts. There’s a property listed as part of the company, Källegården 12:1, which is mortgaged to the hilt.

Vintersjöholm Development isn’t exactly stable either. A huge amount of money has been spent on renovating a castle, Vintersjöholm 1:1, over the past few years, with no actual income.

At the moment there are two cases with a debt collection agency – tradesmen who haven’t been paid for work done on the castle. There is some money in the bank, so to speak, but if they don’t get a decent injection of cash very soon, they’re heading in the same direction as Jensen & Sons.

Give me a call if you want any more info.

Laura sits on the bed, staring at her phone. She already knew that the Jensens were in trouble. Vintersjöholm, however, is another matter. Then again, her whole visit, including the Lucia party, has been peppered with little clues that the castle’s finances are not as good as Erica and Pontus would like to pretend. So how can they offer almost four hundred thousand more than the council for Gärdsnäset? Erica even said that they were prepared to raise their bid.

If the von Thurns had money to spare, then surely they would have spent it on finishing off the renovations to Pontus’s beloved castle instead of buying more land that won’t provide an income for years. So where is the money coming from?

She emails Ola asking him to find out if there are any other investors involved in Vintersjöholm Development.

Then she switches on the light and tiptoes into the corridor. The stairs are on the left, but instead she heads to the right, feeling the same tingle of excitement as she did when she was cleaning the cabins in the holiday village as a teenager. Moving around someone else’s house, almost as if she were invisible. Crossing the line, doing something that wasn’t allowed, yet with the perfect excuse.

The smell of detergent is getting stronger. The laundry room is on the right – two washing machines, two tumble dryers, plus a mangle and the kind of professional iron that she’s only seen in a dry cleaner’s.

At least ten identical white shirts are hanging on a rail, along with the same number in pale blue. Peter seems to like an organised, orderly life, as she does.

She continues along the corridor, passing a home gym that must measure some twenty-five square metres, with mirrors along one wall. In the middle of the room is a martial arts training dummy on a black base. The dummy’s head is battered, as if someone has given it a beating every day for several years.

At the end of the corridor there is a closed door. Laura expects it to be locked, but to her surprise it opens easily. The light switch is just inside.

She sees rows of cheap pine IKEA shelves. On some are neatly labelled boxes: CHRISTMAS, EASTER, MIDSUMMER. But most of the shelves are empty, as if someone recently had a clear-out.

She realises that the room reminds her of her own basement storage unit. The place where she keeps painful memories in a box with the lid firmly on, under lock and key.

There is a strong smell of paint and glue. A large desk is covered with a green felt cloth, and in the middle is a model ship. She moves closer. It’s a pirate ship, and on the deck are seven small figures dressed in fairly modern clothes that don’t match the period. It takes Laura a few seconds to work out what she’s looking at.

One-eyed Willy’s ship, with the whole Goonies gang on deck. Mikey, Mouth, Data, Chunk, Brandon, and the girls – Andy and Stef. She can’t help smiling. She must have seen the film a dozen times, along with Peter, Tomas, Jack and Iben – all watching the pirate copy that Peter’s uncle had somehow acquired.

Happy days, long before disaster struck.

The ship must have taken hundreds of hours to build and paint, and yet Peter keeps it here, down in the basement.

She moves over to the shelves lining the walls, where more models are displayed. Most are planes, like the one in Peter’s office, but one particular model attracts her attention.

It’s a car that has crashed into a tree. The front has crumpled into a U-shape, and one of the passengers, a blonde woman, has gone straight through the windscreen and is sprawled over the bonnet. There is blood on her pale dress. Laura bends down to take a closer look. A man is sitting in the driver’s seat. His head is crushed, his facial features barely distinguishable, and in one place the skull is grinning through. Small yellow flames have sprung up around the petrol tank, and even though they’re plastic and not remotely dangerous, she breaks out into a sweat.

The model represents Peter’s wife and her lover.

Laura straightens up. She has a horrible feeling that she’s intruded into something extremely private, something she definitely shouldn’t have seen.

She steps back and is about to leave the room when she catches sight of a model on another table.

She recognises this one right away. The domed roof, the boarded-up windows. The tall, straight trees. The ice extending into the distance. It’s the dance hall at Gärdsnäset. Fascinated, she goes over and lifts off the roof. The inside of the hall is an almost exact replica of her own memories. The stacked-up furniture, the tables, the folding chairs, the tape player, the bottles of booze they stole when they broke into the cottage. A drop of sweat trickles down her spine.

Two figures are sitting at the small table. The boy is leaning forward, as if he’s trying to kiss the red-haired girl. She, on the other hand, is leaning back, rejecting his approach. Maybe it’s her imagination, but Laura thinks she can see the distaste on the girl’s face.

She is the girl, Peter is the boy.

She shudders.

But there are more figures inside the dance hall. In one corner behind the piles of furniture a boy is slumped, with little plastic flames all around his hands. She doesn’t need to look any closer to know that this is Tomas.

Iben is there too, looking in the mirror in the toilet behind the stage. Her dark hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail.

Outside among the trees, two figures are standing side by side, watching. One has a large dressing on his forehead, the other’s hood is pulled up.

‘The moment before the catastrophe,’ she murmurs to herself. She reaches out and gently touches Jack with her fingertips.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

Laura spins around. She was so absorbed in the model that she didn’t hear Peter coming. He is wearing his dressing gown and slippers and would look quite sweet if it weren’t for the expression on his face. Pure rage.

‘You have no right to snoop around in here!’ he shouts. Laura instinctively holds up her hands.

‘I wasn’t snooping.’

This is clearly a lie, and Peter knows it.

‘Get out!’ he yells. ‘Get out of my house!’

His face is white with fury, his fists opening and closing. Laura thinks about the training dummy in the gym, the fact that someone has delivered thousands of blows to its face. Someone filled with pent-up anger. Years and years of humiliations and hurt feelings.

She lowers her hands.

‘I’m so sorry, Peter. You’re right, it was wrong of me. I’ll leave immediately.’

She quickly walks past him and heads for the door without looking at him. Suppresses a sudden urge to run towards the staircase.

Peter doesn’t follow her. He stays where he is, and as she is about to set off up the stairs she thinks she hears him let out a sob.