Midwinter Sacrifice

23

The canteen of the ICA shop is pleasantly decorated, gently lit by an orange Bumling lamp. A smell of freshly brewed coffee permeates the room, while the almond tart is sticking to their teeth in a very pleasant way.

Rebecka Stenlundh is sitting opposite Malin and Zeke, on the other side of a grey laminate table.

In this light she looks older than she is, Malin thinks. Somehow the light and shadows emphasise her age, revealing almost invisible wrinkles. But everything she has been through has to show somewhere. No one escapes unblemished from that sort of experience.

‘This isn’t my shop,’ Rebecka says. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking. But the owner lets me do what I like. We’re the most profitable shop of this size in the whole of Sweden.’

‘Retail is detail,’ Zeke says in English.

‘Exactly,’ Rebecka agrees, and Malin looks down at the table.

Then Rebecka pauses.

You’re gathering your strength, Malin thinks. You’re taking a deep breath, in it goes, helping to prepare you to talk.

Then she starts to speak again: ‘I decided to leave everything to do with Mum and Dad and my brother Bengt behind. I decided I was bigger than that. Even if I hated my father in a lot of ways, I realised eventually, just after I turned twenty-two, that he couldn’t own me, that he had no right to my life. In those days I was hanging out with the wrong guys, I smoked, drank, sniffed glue, ate too much, all the while exercising so hard that my body could hardly take it. I dare say I would have started shooting up heroin if I hadn’t made that decision. I couldn’t be angry and scared and sad any longer. It would have killed me.’

‘You decided. Just like that?’ Malin is taken aback at how the words come out, almost angry, jealous.

Rebecka starts.

‘Sorry,’ Malin says. ‘I didn’t mean to sound aggressive.’

Rebecka clenches her jaw before going on. ‘I don’t think there’s any other way of doing it. I made up my mind, Officer. If you ask me, that’s the only way.’

‘And your adoptive parents?’ Zeke wonders.

‘I stopped seeing them. They were part of my old life.’

Wherever this case takes us, Malin thinks, it will be tied up with the warped logic of emotions; the sort of logic that makes someone torture another person and hang them up in a tree in the middle of a frozen plain.

Rebecka clenches her jaw again, then her face relaxes.

‘Unfair, I know. Of course it was. There was nothing wrong with them, but this was a matter of life and death, and I had to move on.’

Just like that, Malin thinks. What was it T.S. Eliot wrote?

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

‘Do you have family?’ Right question, Malin thinks. But I’m asking it for the wrong reason.

‘A son. A long time passed before I had a child. He’s eight now, he’s the reason I’m here. Have you got children?’

Malin nods. ‘A daughter.’

‘Then you know. Whatever happens, you want to be there for their sake.’

‘And the father?’

‘We’re divorced. He hit me once, by mistake really, I think, a hand flying out one night after a crayfish party, but that was enough.’

‘Did you have any contact with Bengt?’

‘With my brother? No, none at all.’

‘Did he ever try to contact you?’

‘Yes, he phoned once. But I hung up when I realised who it was. There was a before, and a now, and I was never, ever going to let them meet. Ridiculous, isn’t it?’

‘Not really,’ Malin says.

‘A week or so after he rang I had a call from some social worker. Maria, I think her name was. She asked me to talk to Bengt, even if I wouldn’t meet him. She told me how depressed he was, how lonely; she genuinely seemed to care, you know?’

‘So?’

‘I asked her never to call me again.’

‘One question, and it’s a harsh one,’ Malin says. ‘Did your father or Bengt ever abuse you sexually?’

Rebecka Stenlundh is remarkably calm.

‘No, nothing like that, ever. Sometimes I wonder if I’m suppressing something, but no, never.’

Then a long silence.

‘But what do I know?’

Zeke bites his lip. ‘Do you know if Bengt had any enemies, anything we ought to know?’

Rebecka Stenlundh shakes her head. ‘I saw the picture in the paper. It felt like everything printed there was about me, whether I liked it or not. You can’t escape, can you? Whatever you do, your past always catches up with you, don’t you think? It’s like you’re tethered to a post with a rope. You can move about, but you can’t get away.’

‘You seem to be managing very well,’ Malin says.

‘He was my brother. You should have heard his voice when he called. He sounded like the loneliest person on the planet. And I shut the door.’

A voice over the Tannoy: ‘Rebecka to the till, Rebecka to the till.’

‘What were you doing on Wednesday evening last week?’

‘I was with my son in Egypt. Hurghada.’

Hence the suntan, Malin thinks.

‘We got a last-minute deal. This cold drives me crazy. We got home on Friday.’

Malin finishes her coffee and stands up. ‘I think that was everything,’ she says. ‘Yes, I think so.’