Midwinter Sacrifice

77

The houses of Vreta Kloster line the road.

A sense of wellbeing shelters behind the façades, close but still far away.

After this journey she doesn’t want to come this way again for a thousand years.

They drive across the bridge down by Kungsbro and swing up towards Olstorp, past the Montessori school in Björkö where the blue- and pink-painted buildings, with their anthroposophically angular architecture, look just as browbeaten by the cold as every other building.

Hope they raise good people in there.

Janne had once talked of Tove going to a Montessori school but Malin refused, had heard that children who go to school in protected environments like that could rarely deal with the competition outside the security of the school walls.

Cutting out dolls.

Making their own books.

Learning that the world is full of love.

How much love is there up in the forest? How much dammed-up hate?

The car slides along the slippery road surface as Zeke hits the accelerator.

‘Just drive, Zeke. It’s urgent. I promise you, he’s out there somewhere.’

Zeke doesn’t ask, just concentrates on the car and the road, as they pass the turning to Olstorp and head on towards Lake Hultsjön.

They drive past the golf course, the flags still flying, and Malin imagines the flags as the brothers’ bodies blowing in the wind, the breeze their mother’s breath with the power to send them whichever way she pleases.

Jakob Murvall grips the wheel tighter, turns off on to the road leading to the summer cottages around Hultsjön, little white-painted shacks covered in cotton wool.

The green Range Rover swerves over the snow, ice crystals swirling out over the ditches, like the polished shards of a cluster bomb, but he manages to keep the vehicle on the road.

Elias hasn’t said anything more.

And Adam is sitting silent, focused, in the passenger seat.

We’re just doing what has to be done, Jakob thinks. Like we always do. Like we’ve always done. Like I did when I found Dad at the bottom of the stairs. I pulled myself together, even though I wanted to scream. I closed his eyelids, so Mother wouldn’t have to see those frightening eyes.

We do what we have to. Because if we let someone rape our sister without doing anything about it, what sort of people would that make us? There’d be no end to the crap that followed. What we’re doing now, it says stop, think again.

At the end of the track he stops the car.

‘Out with you,’ he yells, and the brothers jump out, and, if there was any doubt in Elias’s body, it’s gone now.

They’re all dressed in green jackets and dark blue trousers.

‘Come on,’ Jakob shouts, and Adam opens the back door and takes out the stained box, putting it on the ground as he shuts the door.

‘Ready,’ he calls. Then he puts the box carefully under his arm and they clamber across the heaped-up snow and on into the forest.

Jakob in front.

Then Elias.

Adam at the back with the box.

Jakob sees the trees around him. The forest where he’s been hunting so many times. He sees Mother at the table. Maria in bed the only time he could bear to visit her in Vadstena.

He thinks, Bastard. You bastard.

His brothers behind him.

They swear whenever their boots cut through the white crust, breaking up as it does under their rapid, heavy steps.

How can three grenades weigh so much, Adam thinks, yet still so little, when you consider the damage they can do?

He thinks of Maria in her room. How she always shies away when he visits, shrinking into a corner of the bed, and he has to whisper her name over and over again to get her to calm down. He doesn’t even know if she recognises him. She’s never said anything, but she allows him to be there, and after a while she’s no longer scared, accepts the fact that he’s in the room with her.

What then?

Then they sit there in the middle of her hurt.

Fuck it.

His boot crashes through the crust, sinks right down towards a root, and he has to pull hard to get it out again.

It was that bastard who did it.

To his own sister.

There’s no other option. Away, he has to be done away with. No reason for doubt. Doubt isn’t for us.

The box under his arm. He holds it tight. Doesn’t know what might happen if he drops it.

He’s short of breath. Sees his brothers ahead of him, feels the cold and remembers that time by the canal when the two of them took care of that Turkish fucker for him, when they showed that no bastard could get one over on us, we stick together; that means you too, Maria, and that’s why we have to do this.

Kicking, kicking, kicking.

Much more than that.

We’re grown-ups. And we have to behave like grown-ups.

Elias only ten metres or so ahead of him. Adam can still feel his body, the wind in his hair. He is still sitting behind him on a Puch Dakota moped, will always be sitting there.

There’s the vehicle.

The Murvall brothers’ Range Rover has been driven right into the bank of snow, and Zeke parks close behind, taking care to block it in.

They’ve called in, a helicopter is on its way. Malin to Sven Sjöman: ‘Trust me on this, Sven.’

But it takes time to get a helicopter in the air in this sort of cold, so they have to rely on themselves, on their legs. The dog-patrols have just left the station.

They scramble over the bank of snow, following the Murvall brothers’ tracks, head in among the trees, running, landing so hard on their feet that they break the crust of the snow, stumble, run again. Their hearts are pounding in their chests, their lungs are working overtime, overdosing on the cold white air, their bodies straining forward, forward, but not even adrenalin lasts for ever and soon they are stumbling more than running, as they listen to the forest, for the brothers, for signs of activity, of life, but neither of them can hear anything.

‘Shit,’ Zeke pants. ‘How far in do you think they are?’

‘A long way,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve got to go on.’

And Malin starts running into the forest, but the crust can’t take her hard, heavy footsteps and she falls, gets up, rushes on.

Her vision narrows to a tunnel.

‘He wasn’t the one who raped your sister,’ she wants to shout through the forest.

‘Don’t believe your mother. He didn’t rape her, he’s done some repulsive things, but not that. Let all this end now, it isn’t too late, whatever you think, whatever she’s beaten into you. He’s still your brother. Do you hear? Do you hear? He’s your own brother. And he didn’t rape your sister, we know that for certain.’

The tunnel closes.

I’ve got to get there, Malin thinks.

Screams, ‘He didn’t rape your sister,’ but she’s so short of breath that she can barely hear her own voice.

Never show your weakness, never show your weakness, never . . .

Elias mutters the words to himself like a mantra, thinking of all the times he’s showed his strength, how he smashed his fist into that teacher Brogren’s face when he called him a filthy brat from Blåsvädret.

Sometimes he wonders why everything’s turned out the way it has, why they’re on the outside, and the only answer he can find is that it was like that from the start. There were all the people with jobs, with proper lives, decent houses, and it was never, ever us, and the world let us know that.

Adam behind him.

Elias stops, turns round. Thinks how well he’s carrying the weight, his brother, and how his forehead glows pink in the winter light and the cold, how his skin seems healthier.

‘Keep hold of the box, Adam.’

‘I’ve got it,’ he replies, his voice tight.

Jakob walks silently ahead of him.

His steps are determined, his shoulders are drooping in his jacket, angled to the ground.

‘Fuck,’ Adam swears. ‘This snow’s really dodgy.’

He’s gone through yet again.

‘Let’s speed up,’ he says. ‘Get this over with.’

Elias says nothing.

There’s nothing more to talk about. Just one thing to get done.

They walk past the cabin.

Pass it without stopping, carry on across the clearing into the forest, even darker, even thicker than on the other side, and there the crust of the snow is thicker, more stable, but still it gives way every now and then.

‘He’s hiding over there,’ Elias says. ‘I know he is.’

‘I can smell smoke from the stove,’ Adam says.

Adam’s fingers holding the box are starting to cramp, shaking uncontrollably against the wood. He switches arms, flexes his fingers to get rid of the cramp.

‘A fucking hole in the ground. He’s no better than an animal,’ Jakob whispers.

Then he says out loud, ‘Now it’s Maria’s turn.’

He shouts the words into the forest, but the sound dies out against the tree trunks, the forest absorbing his voice.

Go on, Malin, go on. It isn’t too late yet. The helicopter has left the airfield at Malmslätt, it’s whirling its way towards you across the plain, the dogs in the patrols are scrabbling, barking, their numbed senses searching in vain.

Like you, Malin, I think enough is enough.

But even so.

I want Karl here beside me.

I want to drift beside him.

Take him away from here with me.

How is it possible to feel so tired?

Malin’s body is full of lactic acid and, even though the brothers’ tracks lead further into the forest, the two of them have to sit down and rest on the front steps of the cabin.

The whistling of the wind.

A whisper, above the noise of their bodies.

Their heads seem to be boiling, in spite of the cold. Breath rising like smoke from a dying fire out of Zeke’s mouth.

‘Fuck, fuck,’ Zeke says, as he catches his breath. ‘If only I was as fit as Martin.’

‘We have to go on,’ Malin pants.

They get up.

Chase off, deeper into the forest.