The Darkest Room

36

“Hello?” Henrik shouted to the figure down in the snow. “Are you okay?”

It was a stupid question, because the body below him was lying motionless with a bloody face. The snow had already begun to cover it.

Henrik blinked in confusion; it had all happened so quickly.

He thought he had spotted the Serelius brothers outside. When the first of them opened the veranda door, Henrik had thrown his grandfather’s ax as hard as he could, and it had hit the intruder on the head. With the blunt edge-not with the blade, he was sure of that.

He stayed in the doorway of the veranda. In the glow of the outside light he suddenly saw that it was a woman he had hit.

A few yards behind her stood a man, as if he were frozen solid in the whirling snow. Then he strode forward and knelt down.

“Tilda?” he shouted. “Wake up, Tilda!”

She moved her arms feebly and tried to raise her head.

Henrik walked out onto the steps, with his back to the warmth of the house and the cold and wind in his face, and discovered that the woman was wearing a dark-colored uniform.

A cop. She had almost disappeared in a huge billowing drift at the bottom of the steps. A thin stream of dark blood was pouring out of her nose and down around her mouth.

For a few seconds everything stood still, except for the falling snow.

The pains in his belly came back.

“Hello?” he said again. “Are you okay?”

Neither one replied, but the man picked up the ax and came over to the steps.

“Drop it!” he yelled at Henrik.

Behind the man the woman suddenly coughed and started vomiting violently in the snow.

“What?” said Henrik.

“Drop it now!”

The man was talking about the kitchen knife, Henrik realized. He was still clutching it in his hand.

He didn’t want to drop it. The Serelius brothers were around somewhere; he needed to be able to defend himself.

The woman had stopped vomiting. She put her hand to her face, felt cautiously at her nose. The snowflakes were landing on her shoulders and her nose, and the blood had congealed into black patches on her face.

“What’s your name?” asked the man on the steps.

The woman raised her head and shouted something to Henrik through the howling wind, the same thing over and over again, and eventually he was able to make out what it was. His own name.

“Henrik!” she was shouting. “Henrik Jansson!”

“Drop the knife, Henrik,” said the man. “Then we can talk.”

“Talk?”

“You’re under arrest for robbery with violence, Henrik,” the woman went on from her snowdrift. “And breaking and entering… and criminal damage.”

Henrik heard what she said but didn’t reply; he was too tired. He took a step backwards, shaking his head.

“All that stuff… that was Tommy and Freddy,” he said quietly.

“What?” said the man.

“It was those fucking brothers,” said Henrik. “I just went along with them. But it was much better with Mogge, I never thought-”

There was a sudden tinkling noise, just a couple of inches from his right ear. A short, solid sound in the wind.

Henrik turned his head and saw that a black, uneven hole had appeared in one of the small panes of glass in the veranda windows.

Was it the storm? Perhaps the storm had smashed the glass. Henrik’s second confused thought was that the pistol had been fired at him, despite the fact that the cop was no longer holding it.

But when he looked out through the whirling snow, over toward the barn, he discovered that there was someone else there.

A dark figure had stepped out of the half-open door of the barn and was standing there in the snow, legs apart. In the glow from the outside light Henrik could see that the figure was holding a slender stick in its hands.

No, not a stick. It was a gun, of course. Henrik couldn’t make it out properly, but he thought it was an old Mauser.

A man in a black hood. Tommy. He shouted something across the courtyard, then the gun in his hands jerked. Once. Twice.

No panes of glass broke this time-but the face of the man in front of Henrik contorted suddenly, and he went down.