Dead of Winter

65

‘I presume this is all about your father.’

Laura is surprised at how calm she sounds. Her world has just imploded, everything she has believed for the past thirty years has been a lie. And yet her voice is steady, under control.

‘You want revenge for what he did. You want to take Källegården away from him.’

‘I don’t want to take it away!’ Steph’s eyes flash with rage. ‘I want to raze it to the ground. I don’t want a single stone left standing of his beloved ancestral home. I want to plant fir trees everywhere until all that’s left is a fucking Christmas tree plantation. And when the old man is on his deathbed, when the cancer has finally eaten its way through his black heart, I’m going to lean over him and tell him exactly who is responsible. The girl he’s wept crocodile tears over for the past thirty years.’

She leans back. Her expression has changed again; it’s much harder now.

‘I tried to put it all behind me. Jack managed to persuade me to let go, move on. I studied hard, got myself some decent qualifications, a good job. Built up my CV, married a rich man, stashed away plenty of money. But now and again I couldn’t help doing a little googling to see what was happening around Vintersjön. That was how I’d found out that they’d renamed the school after her. After me. As a way of honouring him!’ Steph spits out the last word. ‘That was when I decided I had to take my revenge, but it was a while before the right opportunity came up – the von Thurns bought the castle and started making plans for the area around the lake. At the same time, via a little discreet manipulation, I managed to get Jensen & Sons to invest in a golf course project which I then shut down. All that remained was to persuade Hedda to sell.’

‘But she refused.’

‘At first she wanted to sell to the council, but I called her one evening, disguised my voice, dropped a few hints about Källegården, told her that Tomas knew the truth. The thing is, I’d tried to tell Hedda what was going on a few days before the fire, but I just couldn’t do it.’

She pauses, takes a deep breath.

‘Anyway, Hedda contacted Tomas, just as I’d hoped. He’d always done what I asked him to do, ever since we were little, but it wasn’t until he started killing Ulf’s sheep that I realised there were no limits to what he was prepared to do for me.’

‘Like lying about the fire? Or at least not giving away the fact that it was you who’d asked him to start it?’

Steph nods. ‘Tomas loved me, and I loved him. He was the brother I should have had instead of those two apes.’

She gestures angrily in the direction of the yard, as if Christian and Fredrik were still out there.

‘And yet you made sure he ended up in jail.’

‘Not in jail. Tomas needed care, and that was what he got. Sooner or later he would have set fire to something else – a house, a school. People would have been killed or injured. He knew it too. Knew he needed to be locked up.’

It is Laura’s turn to lean forward.

‘So what actually happened that night?’

Steph shrugs.

‘Milla and I took Jack into the toilet behind the stage. While we were in there, Milla said she knew what Ulf was doing to me – she’d had a foster father who did the same thing. At first I was shocked, then incredibly relieved. At last there was someone who understood what I was going through. I’d only just plucked up the courage to tell Jack.’ She presses her lips together. ‘But then Milla suggested we should use the information to blackmail Ulf, get money out of him and split it between us. A few thousand each – that’s all my suffering was worth as far as she was concerned. When I refused, Milla said she’d do it off her own bat – she was leaving in a few days anyway. I realised what would happen. Ulf would know I’d told someone, and what he’d do to me afterwards didn’t bear thinking about.’

She pauses, clears her throat.

‘Both Jack and I begged her not to do it, but Milla just laughed at us. So we wrestled her to the floor, tried to shut her up, but she wouldn’t stop laughing. She was crazy. Jack lost it completely. He grabbed her by the throat. And suddenly she went quiet . . .’

Steph takes another sip of cold tea.

‘It was a pure accident, but of course we knew that we were completely fucked. After a few minutes I came up with a solution. Milla was about to turn eighteen, and already had a passport. We were about the same height, with the same colour hair and eyes. So we locked Milla’s body in the toilet, I put on her hoodie, glasses and jewellery, and we sneaked back to her cabin and put a few streaks in my hair. Then I asked Tomas to start the fire.’

She catches Laura’s eye, underlining the last sentence.

‘The bar,’ Laura says. ‘Who dropped the bar?’

‘Jack. He was afraid that one of you would open the door and see us heading for Milla’s cabin, realise it was me and not Milla. But then we forgot to tell Tomas to lift it up. No one was meant to get hurt, I swear. I stayed inside Milla’s cabin, and the police officer who questioned me later that night just glanced at my passport to confirm my identity. Jack gave Milla – or rather me – an alibi, and as soon as Tomas had confessed and the police were no longer interested in Milla, we took off.’

‘But first you broke into Källegården.’

Steph nods. ‘We needed money and I knew where Dad’ – she bites her lip – ‘where Ulf hid the cash that didn’t go through the books.’

‘And you took your mother’s jewellery.’

‘Yes. Ulf tormented my mother. Drove her crazy and had her locked up in an asylum. I couldn’t leave her jewellery with him.’

‘And Jack?’ Laura can’t help asking.

‘Jack loved me.’ The answer comes a little too quickly; Steph seems to notice it herself. ‘I understand now that he was Hedda’s son. He’d inherited her appetite for drugs and booze. Did you know she used to run a moonshine ring with Kent Rask?’

‘Yes, he told me.’

‘No doubt he also told you that Ulf forced her to stop, but do you know why she agreed? Not because she was afraid of either Ulf or the police – she was terrified of you finding out. Or your parents. She didn’t want them to stop you coming to visit. Her little princess.’

Hedda’s words sound poisonous on Steph’s lips.

‘I decided early on that I was going to change. Not make do with pretending to be Milla for a while until we’d managed to get out of the country – I wanted to become a completely different person. Someone who’d never been anywhere near Vintersjön, never lived at Källegården and been subjected to Ulf’s abuse. Someone who wasn’t a victim.’ Steph slowly shakes her head. ‘Do you have any idea how much work it takes to reinvent yourself, change absolutely everything? Not only your appearance, speech, gestures, the way you move, but also the way you think. I did all of that, and yet it wasn’t enough for Jack. Time doesn’t heal all wounds.’

Her tone is bitter now.

‘He never stopped pining for you. However much I changed, I was still damaged goods in Jack’s eyes, and the woman who’d made him a murderer. I couldn’t possibly compete with a perfect, snow-white little princess. So Jack sought refuge in the promised land of drugs, just like your aunt.’

She nods contemptuously in the direction of Hedda’s sagging sofa.

‘As time went on, the secrets poisoned our relationship almost as much as his addiction. I dumped him and married money a couple of times, as you already know. But Jack was my partner in crime, and I couldn’t risk him returning to Sweden, so I took care of him. Made sure he got what he needed.’

‘You mean the drugs he needed.’

Steph’s enigmatic expression probably means yes.

‘But then he decided to get clean, said he was going to sort out his life. I discovered that he’d been googling your name. It was only a matter of time before he got in touch, jeopardising everything I’d spent twenty-five years building up.’

Laura inhales sharply.

‘So you killed him?’

‘No. Jack decided to go for one last hit before he started his new life. I found him on the bathroom floor with the canula in his arm. He was fitting, foaming at the mouth.’

Laura tries not to picture him like that, but fails.

‘You didn’t bother calling an ambulance.’

‘Jack wasn’t himself anymore. You wouldn’t have recognised him. He’d been using on and off for over twenty years. He had hepatitis, he was as thin as a rake. Believe me, it was for the best.’

Laura closes her eyes. Sees eighteen-year-old Jack. His smile, his eyes. The thought that he no longer exists is unbearable.

‘It was you who deleted your voice from my phone,’ she says.

Steph nods. ‘It was easy. I’ve seen you enter the code a thousand times. I left the break-in at the police station to Tomas. I was a little worried about what that recording might lead to.’

‘But why? Peter and I could have used it to nail Ulf.’

‘A thirty-year-old recording of a dead girl’s voice? The statute of limitations is up on all the crimes Ulf committed against me. And besides, I’m the one who’s going to destroy Ulf. Destroy him completely, not with some kind of fucking half-measure that will end up with a shelved investigation.’

‘And Hedda? What happened after Tomas told her about Ulf?’

‘She agreed to sell to Vintersjöholm, just as I’d hoped – but then I made a mistake. I thought that if even you couldn’t see through my disguise, then no one else would be able to. So I came down here with Heinz one day. By that time Hedda was in more or less the same state as the house. It was upsetting. She was once almost like a mother to me.’

She paused, shook her head.

‘I’d underestimated Hedda; something during our meeting must have made her suspicious, because shortly after that she wrote to Tomas and asked him what he knew about me and Ulf. She started making excuses not to sign the contract, said she wanted to give the matter a little more thought. That was when I realised she’d seen right through me. I came back down and found her out on the pontoon.’

‘You pushed her into the water,’ Laura whispers.

‘Hedda was never going to sell Gärdsnäset.’

‘But you hoped you could manipulate me into doing so. After you’d killed Hedda.’

‘I hadn’t planned it. I tried to reason with her, make her understand, but she refused to listen.’

Steph looks away.

‘Do you know what the worst thing was? She begged me to forgive her, because she hadn’t understood what I was trying to tell her all those years ago, because she hadn’t protected me from Ulf. She’d been too preoccupied with you to see what was happening to me.’

Steph’s voice is pure steel, and Laura can’t bear to listen to another word. She covers her eyes with her hands, tries not to think of Hedda’s poor, damaged heart exploding in the cold water, but it’s no good.

She hears the sound of a chair scraping across the floor. The rustle of a pocket.

She lowers her hands, is about to ask another question when a searing pain strikes her back. An electrical whiplash that makes the scar contract in pain, then wraps the whole world in merciful darkness.