Dead of Winter

4

Aulin Consulting is in a beautiful old building in Östermalm. Stucco on the ceilings, dark wood, crystal chandeliers and Persian rugs. Laura would have preferred something more modern, more functional and less expensive. She makes the suggestion at the beginning of every financial year, but her mother flatly refuses to change a single thing from the way it was when Laura’s father was still around, and Marcus always backs her up.

The company has nineteen employees, eleven of them part-time: law and journalism students who check registers, request various documents in the public domain, and go through CVs. In addition there are four risk consultants and an actuary on the payroll, plus Gunvor, who was taken on by Laura’s father as his secretary when they returned from Asia in the mid-Nineties. Laura knows that her mother and Gunvor speak virtually every day, and that if she so much as changes the brand of coffee in the staff room, the information will be passed on.

Changing direction and concentrating on risk assessing people rather than buildings and vehicles was Laura’s idea. Her father reluctantly agreed the year before he died. She knows that her mother blames her, believes that it was the restructuring that broke him rather than the cancer. In fact, they had no choice. Her father had lost his grip, and the company that is now flourishing and supporting both her mother and Pierre, Laura and Marcus, was about to go under. However, that particular aspect is never discussed. Dad was perfect, a saint. Saint Jacob. End of story.

Laura’s office, which was once his, is at the far end of the corridor. On her way she passes Marcus’s closed door. As usual he’s managed to slink away while she was busy with something else. He has an uncanny ability to do that.

She’s first in as always. She woke with her mouth guard beside her on the pillow, which means she has to start the day with a couple of painkillers.

Grinding your teeth and tension headaches – good for you! You’re entitled to free Botox!

Steph means well, but Laura would never subject herself to having a toxin injected into her face. Nor operations, vaccinations, sunbathing or any other kind of physical or mental stress that she can avoid. Stress that could trigger the virus hidden deep inside her. Pregnancy, for example.

She forces her mind to change direction, tugs at the sleeves of her cashmere cardigan until they reach her knuckles, then switches on the heater under her desk before logging onto her computer.

She googles ‘Gärdsnäset holiday village’, and to her surprise finds a link to a homepage. However, when she clicks on the link a message informs her that the page no longer exists, and that the domain name is available.

Instead, she tries ‘Vintersjön’.

The lake, according to Wikipedia, is in the district of Vedarp in north-western Skåne.

Vintersjön is twenty-three metres deep, has a surface area of five square kilometres, and is situated sixty-six metres above sea level. Its waters come from the streams that run down the slopes of the Halland Ridge, as well as from an underwater spring that rises in the middle of the lake.

The community of Vedarp, comprising 4,058 inhabitants, lies in the inlet that forms the lake’s western shore.

The northern aspect, the Halland Ridge, is largely uninhabited and is mostly given over to a nature reserve. There are a number of holiday homes along the southern shore, as well as some permanent residences. Vintersjöholm Castle, on the eastern shore, dates back to the sixteenth century.

Laura gazes for a while at pictures of the lake and the castle. Eventually she gathers her courage, leaves Wikipedia and searches for ‘Vintersjön fire’. Just as she had suspected, there is no direct hit, but she’s not giving up that easily. She looks up a newspaper that covers the area, finds her way into its archive of pre-internet articles that have been digitised. Chooses ‘October 1987’ from the menu, then local news. Scrolls down the list.

The first article isn’t particularly ominous.

Electrical fault probably to blame for fire in summer cottage by Vintersjön.

The next is dated a couple of weeks later, and is given more space.

Second fire in holiday cottage by Vintersjön. Cause unclear.

The third headline is in a much bolder typeface, and she feels the cold beginning to spread through her body.

Yet another fire at Vintersjön. Police cannot discount arson.

And finally, she reaches the headline against which she has no defence. The one that makes the cold penetrate deep into her heart.

Tragedy at Vintersjön. Young woman dead in fierce blaze.

She is about to enlarge the article so that she can read it when there is a knock on the door.

‘Good morning!’

As usual Gunvor has walked in without waiting for Laura to say anything.

‘Your morning tea.’ She moves behind the desk and places a steaming cup next to the keyboard, while unashamedly staring at the screen. Laura quickly minimises the window.

‘You look tired, Laura dear.’ Gunvor tilts her head on one side and gently strokes Laura’s hair. ‘I hope you’re taking good care of yourself.’

Laura doesn’t reply. Both the gesture and the comment infuriate her. She’s the company director, but Gunvor still talks to her as if she is little Laura, coming to work with Daddy.

‘It’s not easy being left alone,’ Gunvor goes on. ‘I remember how your mother felt when Jacob passed away. She cut herself off for months, hardly ate a thing.’

Gunvor drones on, but Laura is no longer listening. She’s heard all this before. She would like to snap at Gunvor, tell her that Andreas isn’t dead, they’re just divorced, and that she definitely doesn’t want to be compared to her mother. It would be pointless, of course. Such an outburst would immediately become another topic of conversation around the dinner table in Majorca.

‘. . . so lucky to meet Pierre. Such a stylish, refined gentleman – exactly what she needed.’

And broke, Laura adds silently to herself. But that doesn’t stop him from spending her mother’s money, not to mention dispensing advice on how the company should be run.

When Gunvor has left the office Laura works her way through her emails, makes a number of calls. It is difficult to concentrate, and she keeps glancing at the screen. In the end she brings up the newspaper article.

It’s not very long. The sensational headline, a grainy picture of tree trunks, snow, and a building in flames.

During the night of the feast of St Lucia, a fire broke out in a dance hall at Gärdsnäset holiday village. A group of six local young people were allegedly having a party inside the hall, which was closed for the winter, when tragedy struck. Four were injured and a fifth, a sixteen-year-old girl, lost her life. According to Chief Fire Officer Arne Jepson, the rapid acceleration of the blaze and the fact that the victims were trapped inside the building suggests that the fire was started deliberately. The police have opened an investigation into suspected arson, and it is possible that this incident is connect to the fires that have plagued the area around Vintersjön during the autumn and winter.

Laura stares at the screen. The articles about the fire are pretty hard to track down, which means that Steph won’t be able to find them through a quick search. And so far there are no inconsistencies, nothing she hasn’t already told Steph. It’s the final piece that worries her.

Suspect arrested in Lucia blaze case

The police have confirmed that they have arrested a person suspected of starting the fires in the Vintersjö area. According to reliable sources, the suspect is a local youth, and it seems likely that he was also involved in the tragic Lucia fire that cost a young woman her life.

Andreas calls her when she is on the way home from work. She rejects the first two calls, but he refuses to give up. Laura adjusts her woolly hat and tucks in the hands-free earpiece. Those brief seconds in the cold are enough to make her fingers go stiff.

‘I heard about your aunt. Just wanted to check that you’re OK.’

Laura sighs to herself. She knows exactly who’s behind this, and she doesn’t have to wait long for confirmation.

‘Your mum said you’re going to the funeral.’

‘Yes . . .’ The headache is still clouding her thoughts, but she knows exactly what’s coming. ‘And she wants you to persuade me not to go.’

A silence that can only be interpreted as a yes. Andreas is a nice guy – much too nice.

‘I just thought it might not be a good idea, this close to . . .’

He breaks off, waits for her to say something.

‘She would have been two last Friday,’ he goes on in a thick voice when she doesn’t speak. ‘I tried to contact you, I thought we could go to the grave together.’

Yes, Andreas, I can count too. I know how many years, months and days have passed. I might even be able to give you the number of minutes and seconds. But that’s no help at all, is it?

She doesn’t say any of that out loud, of course. Never, not to anyone. She simply says quietly: ‘I was out.’

‘I’m worried about you, Laura. You seem so . . .’

‘So what?’

‘I don’t know. Closed off.’

‘Closed off?’

‘Yes. For God’s sake, you didn’t even take any time off last year when . . .’

As usual he can’t say the words.

‘We got divorced, Andreas. Remember? And yet you keep on calling me.’

‘I still care about you. I worry about you.’

‘In that case I think you should stop. Get on with your own life and let me get on with mine.’

Another silence. There’s something he wants to say, and she thinks she knows what it is. She decides to help him out.

‘I believe you’ve met someone.’

A faint gasp. ‘Who told you that?’

‘My mother, of course. Apparently, you bumped into Marcus the other day.’

‘Well, yes, but . . .’ She can hear how uncomfortable he is. ‘I wanted to tell you myself. She’s a former colleague and . . .’

‘You don’t owe me anything, Andreas,’ she interrupts him. ‘Not a single thing.’

She stops walking, makes a huge effort to sound calm and composed.

‘I’m very happy for you, but please stop running errands for my mother.’

She ends the call outside the door of her apartment block. Swipes her fob over the card reader, passes through the locked doors and pauses briefly beneath the camera in the spacious lobby. In the lift she hesitates, then presses the bottom button instead of the top one.

The storage area in the basement is a little unusual. No wire netting cages with cross-country skis sticking out, no piles of banana boxes crammed with Christmas decorations, offering an unwanted insight into other people’s lives. Instead, there is a series of neatly numbered steel doors each with a keypad, in an air-conditioned corridor monitored by CCTV.

Her own storage unit is empty except for two identical plastic boxes. She hasn’t been down here since she moved in last year.

All the furniture in her apartment is new, ordered from the NK department store on the day she signed the contract. Andreas tried to get her to take a load of stuff with her – things they’d bought together, presents he’d given her – but she said no. All she wanted was the little Guan Yu statuette from her father, and these two boxes.

She runs a hand over the box on the left, caresses it tenderly. Inside it is a tiny sleep suit, a flannel rabbit, and a piece of paper with two small prints on it. A hand and a foot. She doesn’t open the lid, just makes sure that the two plastic clips at the sides are holding it in place.

The contents of the box on the right are much older.

Two frames protected by bubble wrap, two diplomas: a second and a third place in the university swimming championship, which once hung in her student room. A pile of textbooks on behavioural psychology, risk management and interviewing techniques. Beneath them she finds what she is looking for: The Great Gatsby. The cover is battered, the pages yellowing. Inside the front cover is a stamp: ST PAUL’S HOSPITAL HONG KONG. The name makes the skin on her back begin to burn.

She was a patient at St Paul’s for almost three months. She could hardly move her arms and legs; she was in so much pain that she couldn’t bear anyone touching her. In the end they put her in an induced coma for two whole weeks.

An enterovirus, the doctors said. Not uncommon in young women. Presumably the virus had got into her body while she was vulnerable to infection because of the burns she’d suffered in the fire, and it had then led to severe meningitis. Her mother had threatened to sue the hospitals, both the one in Ängelholm and the one in Hong Kong. She said their hygiene routines must have been unsatisfactory.

Laura knows better. Knows exactly where the winter fire came from, and why.

Gently she lifts the back flap of the dust jacket. There is a dog-eared photograph tucked inside. Pressure and age have made the photo stick to the cover, but with a little persuasion she manages to free it.

Six people on a jetty. It is the summer of 1987, and she is fifteen years old. The sun is shining; everyone is happy. No one has any inkling of the catastrophe that is just a few months away. Jack is on the far right. She runs her index finger over his smiling face. His eyes make her heart flutter in a way that she hasn’t experienced since that night in the hospital when she saw him for the last time.

They’re after me. I have to get away from here!