Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

silent. I finally own my own story. Your mumbling means nothing.

Just listen.

Malin greeted the representative of the funeral company, Conny Skoglund, before she went into the chapel. They said hello under the sand-coloured arches, and after the pleasantries they stood beside each other in silent complicity before the bells started to ring and they went into the large hall. Light was flooding into the room in an almost indecent manner through the windows which confidently, as if jealous of their view of the park, stretched from floor to ceiling. It must be beautiful when it’s green outside, Malin thinks. Now it’s just unnaturally light.

They sit on either side, as if trying somehow to fill the empty room.

Alone in life.

Even more alone in death.

About a week since Bengt Andersson was found, and now his funeral is to take place. A single wreath on the coffin, from Ljungsbro Parish. The football club evidently thought it had done enough with the wreath at the crime- scene. Malin has a white narcissus in her hand, and the bells ring and ring and she thinks that if they ring much longer both she and funeral director Skoglund will go deaf. And the priest as well. She’s around thirty-five, red- haired and chubbily freckled, and now the bells stop ringing and a hymn pipes up instead, and when it’s over the priest starts talking.

She says what she has to say, and when she gets to the part where she has to add something personal she says, ‘Bengt Andersson was an unusual, normal person…’ and Malin wants to get up, hold her mouth shut until the platitudes stop pouring out of it, but instead she shuts off and without knowing how it happens she is placing the white narcissus on Ball-Bengt’s coffin as she thinks, We’ll get them, we’ll get him, you’ll have peace, I promise.

Malin Fors, if you think that I need ‘the truth’ in order to have peace, you’re mistaken, but you’re looking for it for your own sake, aren’t you?

You’re the one who needs peace and quiet, not me.

But that’s okay, we can be honest with each other, we don’t have to hide our intentions and other such tiresome nonsense.

Now he’s steering me down the path, the coffin is dark and warm and soon it will be even warmer.

His name is David Sandstrom, forty-seven years old, and everyone wonders how he can do a job like this. Corpse-burners aren’t very well regarded, not much better than fatties who hit their own father over the head with an axe. But he’s happy in his work, it’s solitary, he doesn’t have to worry about the living, and there are other advantages that don’t need to be mentioned now.

We’re inside the room containing the oven; it’s big and spacious with sky-blue walls, located below ground with little windows up near the ceiling. The oven itself is entirely automated, the cremator just has to get the coffin on to a conveyor belt, then the doors open on a hearth that is lit by the press of a button.

Then I burn.

But not yet.

First David Sandstrom has to heave the coffin on to the conveyor belt, something that takes a great deal of effort.

God, it’s heavy. You have to slide them the last bit of the way from the trolley to the conveyor belt and it’s usually easy, but this one’s bloody heavy.

Bengt Andersson.

David knows how he died, lets him lie in the coffin, under the lid, doesn’t even want to look at him. Ideally they should be younger, he likes those ones, they grant him most peace.

There.

The coffin is on the conveyor belt.

He presses the button on the control panel, the door to the oven opens, he presses the next button and the flames lick hungrily for wood to bite into.

A bit more, just a bit.

Then the flames grab hold of the wood, and within ten seconds they have enveloped the coffin completely, and the door of the oven slowly returns to its starting point.

David Sandstrom pulls out his notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. He takes out his special pen, then writes carefully on one of the last pages: Bengt Andersson, 61 10 15-1923. No. 12,349.

I feel the fire.

It is every feeling. I am transforming now. I am vaporised, becoming the smoke climbing from the chimney of the crematorium, the burned-smelling particles that drift in across Linkoping, the air that Malin Fors hungrily inhales as she crosses the car park outside Police Headquarters.

What remains is ashes that will be emptied into the memorial grove beside the chapel in the old cemetery.

All our ashes there are beacons for memory, and my ashes will be there so that anyone who, against all expectation, wants to remember me will have a place to go.

We turn to our memories and thus revisit our lives.

Not much of a consolation for the dead, is it?

But such are the habits of the living these days.

PART THREE. The habits of the living

51

Plants that need watering, post that needs sorting, taps that need checking. Dust that needs sweeping up, a freezer that needs defrosting, a bedspread that needs straightening, and then the memories that need suppressing, events that need forgetting, suspicions that need denying, broken promises that need forgiving and love that needs to be remembered for ever.

Is that possible?

13.45, a few hours after Bengt Andersson’s funeral.

Malin is moving through her parents’ apartment. Remembers when she was last here. Tove, just like her, on her parents’ bed, the same unsuspecting determination, the same naive openness with her own body.

But still.

Malin laughs to herself. She has to give Tove full marks for her ingenuity in her hunt to find a love-nest for her and Markus in this cold. The two of them are at a matinee, a new action film based on the long-forgotten adventures of some comic-book hero from the fifties, updated for modern tastes: more violence, more – but just as chaste – sex, and a more obvious and happier ending. Ambiguity is the enemy of security, and security is necessary for success at the box-office.

Every age, Malin thinks, gets the stories it deserves.

The smell of her parents’ apartment.

It smells of secrets.

In the same way as the hunting cabin in the forest, although it was clearer and cooler in the forest night, not as impenetrable and personal as here. You get twisted, Malin thinks, around your own axle if you spend too long in the past. At the same time, you’re done for if you don’t dare touch it. Psychotherapists know all about that.

Malin sinks into the sofa in the sitting room.

Feels exhausted and thirsty: Dad keeps his drink in the cupboard above the fridge in the kitchen.

Twist the soul.