Dead of Winter

6

Your mother wanted to call you Jacqueline, can you imagine that? After Jackie Kennedy. How pretentious is that? Fortunately, I managed to change her mind, and that’s why you’re called Laura after my grandmother, your great-grandmother.

Laura’s white SUV is far too big for one person. It consumes too much fuel, and definitely causes too much pollution. But of all the cars that have been crash-tested in recent years, this model is the safest. A great big four-wheel drive tank with a double air-filtration system and a computer that notes and assesses all risk factors through a multitude of sensors and cameras.

When she’s sitting in her car, nothing and no one can get to her. She likes that thought.

Three nights, that’s how long she’s staying in Skåne. That will give her time to bury Hedda and sell Gärdsnäset. She’s spent the last few days trying to get ahead. She’s conducted two in-depth interviews, dealt with all her emails, prepared the office for two days without her.

In spite of her efforts, she only gets as far as Linköping before her work phone rings. It’s Ola, her deputy. He sounds stressed, and Laura immediately knows why.

‘What’s Marcus done now?’

It takes her half an hour and three phone calls to sort it out. Marcus isn’t answering his phone, of course; no doubt he’s fully occupied with being fussed over by their mother.

The third time she tries his number she’s so cross that she almost has a collision. She’s halfway through changing lanes to overtake a lorry when the car’s warning system starts flashing and beeping, and at the very last second she sees the black BMW in her blind spot. The driver sounds his horn and flashes his lights as he sweeps past, and it takes quite a while for her heartbeat to return to normal.

Blind spot. She doesn’t like that expression. Marcus is almost always in her blind spot, at the very edge of her peripheral vision, beyond her control, yet way too close.

Laura stops for fuel just after leaving the motorway, then sits in the car for a while with a cup of disgusting petrol-station tea that’s no use for anything except warming her fingers. There is considerably less snow in Skåne than in Stockholm, only about five centimetres, and the thermometer on the display is showing a couple of degrees below freezing. However, the wind and damp air make it feel significantly colder. The odd snowflake drifts down, and the clouds suggest there is more to come. Apparently six hundred kilometres isn’t far enough to escape the winter.

The resolve that has brought her here has gradually begun to waver. After all, there was a good reason why she left Vintersjön and Gärdsnäset. She’s not here to dig into the past. Only to see Jack.

Hedda was like a mother to him, and if he knows she’s dead, he ought to turn up to the funeral on Saturday. And what then? Would she recognise him? A person can change a great deal in half a lifetime. What if he’s bald, with a beer belly? Or even worse – what if Jack has a wife and children? What if he’s happy and living a good life? What if he hasn’t thought about her in the way she’s thought about him?

She has no answer to these questions. The last trace she found of Jack Gerhard Olsson was a note stating that in 1989 the tax office had transferred him to the database of those with no known address, which means he is no longer registered in Sweden, and that they don’t know where he’s gone. From then on there is no one by that name in any Swedish records, nor the overseas records she has been able to access, although those are not comprehensive. The late Eighties and early Nineties were a little chaotic in Europe. Entire nations ceased to exist. It was a good time if you wanted to acquire a new name, a new identity. A new life.

Laura closes her eyes, pictures his eighteen-year-old face as he perches on her hospital bed. The terror in his eyes, the fear that almost makes his voice break as he says goodbye. The sensation of his lips on hers. Then he’s gone. Vanished without a trace.

Will Jack really dare to return to Vintersjön? Will she?

It would be so easy to rejoin the motorway and head back north. No one would criticise her, and she doesn’t owe Hedda a thing.

Not a single letter or postcard in thirty years. No indication whatsoever that Hedda has thought of her, missed her, longed to see her again, as she longed to see Hedda.

Is that why Hedda has left Gärdsnäset to her? As a way of asking for forgiveness? It’s an appealing thought. And besides, she and Jack aren’t scared teenagers anymore; they’re two adults, each with half a lifetime of baggage.

She puts the car in gear and slowly drives out of the petrol station.

As Laura approaches Vedarp, she realises that the place doesn’t look familiar at all. The road is wider, and the industrial estate, the Lidl store and the residential area opposite weren’t here back in the day.

Dusk is falling, and the gathering darkness combined with the falling snow make it difficult for her to orientate herself. The grey façades that once dominated the village are gone, covered by less dangerous material that has been painted in brighter colours.

But the ironmonger’s is still there, with a brand-new sign. She wonders if Sven-Erik is still behind the counter, then it occurs to her that Sven-Erik, if he’s still alive, must be over eighty, which seems unreal.

The haberdasher’s is gone, replaced by a modern building housing a pizzeria and a solarium. Where the post office once was there is now a gym and a funeral director’s. She looks for the neon WOHLIN’S sign, and discovers an Espresso House instead. A group of kids on mopeds hanging around outside stare at her car as she passes by.

Even the church looks different from the way she remembers it. The old green copper roof has been replaced by black metal that makes the building look furious. The Christmas tree outside is smaller than it used to be, the glow of the lamps colder.

On some subconscious level she had stupidly assumed that Vedarp would look exactly the same as in her childhood memories, preserved in amber at the moment she left the village. Life has gone on without her, of course, which makes her feel childishly disappointed.

A sign at the roundabout points left down to the lake, right towards the castle. She chooses right, passing dirty brown Seventies houses that look more familiar. Peter’s family lived in one of them. The village’s only Jehovah’s Witnesses, who would hardly let him build his models because they were afraid he’d become intoxicated from the glue.

She wonders if Peter’s still around, if he’ll come to the funeral the day after tomorrow. The prospect cheers her up a little.

She thinks about the last time they met. The conference room at the hospital. The lawyer her father had flown down from Stockholm, the big, unpleasant policeman with the boxer’s nose sitting opposite them.

OK, kids. So who do you think did it? Who started the fire at the dance hall?

She shakes off the unpleasant memory. Tries to focus on Jack instead. Will she recognise him? Will he recognise her?

Beyond the houses she can just see the sports hall. There’s a sign, and she’s driven past before she registers what it says. She slams on the brakes, checks her mirrors and reverses.

The sign is white with black lettering, and it looks quite new. It is pointing in the direction of the sports hall, the swimming pool and what used to be Vintersjö School. But not anymore.

THE IBEN JENSEN SCHOOL. That’s what it says.

‘Fuck,’ Laura mutters to herself, without really knowing why.

The winding route to Gärdsnäset isn’t totally familiar either. Maybe it’s because the surrounding forest has grown taller, encroached more. The main road, as it was once known, feels like a ridiculous description of the strip of grey, bumpy asphalt that doesn’t even have a white line down the middle.

The bus stops are gone, and it looks as if the 132, on which she travelled so many times between Gärdsnäset and Vedarp, doesn’t seem to run anymore.

Another memory pops up. Deer on the road, a car in the ditch. Herself, running along the road, caught in the headlights like a frightened animal.

Was that the evening when it all started? The first step towards disaster. Or was it before that? Maybe it was.

Maybe it all started at Kastrup.