Bjorn picked up the bucket and they left the room. Anders heard their footsteps moving through the living room and the hallway. Then the outside door closed. He lay there motionless, staring at Elin's lifeless body on the floor, the strands of her wet hair radiating out from her head like black sunbeams.
His fear of the GB-man. The way he'd recited words from Alfie Atkins, the fact that he had started making bead pictures, that all he wanted to do was lie in her bed reading about Bamse. I'm so little. He finally understood what it meant: Carry me.
PART TWO . Possessed
As long as the little boat can sail
As long as the heart can beat
As long as the sun sparkles
On the blue billows
Evert Taube -As long as the little boat can sail
Bodies in the water
Beware of the sea, beware of the sea
The sea is so big, the sea is so big…
Taking care of business
The dawn came creeping behind the eastern islands and a glimpse of the sun was just appearing between the windblown pine trees on Botskar. Anders was standing right on the end of Simon's jetty, squinting into the approaching light. Despite his scarf and padded jacket he was frozen, and couldn't stop his body from shaking. He jumped as Simon dropped a chain in the boat behind his back. He tried to find a point of warmth inside himself, tried to find Maja. There was nothing there, and he felt like the sloughed-off skin of a human being. He turned around.
The chain lay in a heap in the prow of Simon's boat. In the stern lay Elin. He couldn't remember why they had decided to wrap her in two black plastic sacks with parcel tape wound around them. He wished they hadn't done that, would have preferred her empty, staring eyes to the person-shaped package on the deck. It looked horrible, and he didn't want to go anywhere near it. 'Are we really going to do this?' 'Yes,' said Simon. 'I think it's the only thing we can do.'
With half-dried excrement smeared over his legs, Anders had crept to the telephone and called Simon. Simon had come, placed a tea towel over Elin's face and helped Anders to wash himself. Then they had sat opposite each other at the kitchen table, staring out of the window until a lone pink cloud drifted across the sky, a starting flag for the new day.
There were two possible courses of action.
Nobody would believe that two dead teenagers had turned up and drowned Elin in a bucket. On the other hand, as far as everybody was concerned, there had been no sign of Elin since the fire.
Therefore, one possibility was to come up with a different story: a story that would be closely scrutinised under interrogation, since this was a murder. Would Anders be able to stick to a made-up story when the police started questioning him? Probably not.
Which left the other possibility. To get rid of Elin and pretend it had never happened.
After Simon had argued back and forth for some time, mostly with himself, they agreed that this was the lesser of two evils.
Anders took the torch and went out to the shed to fetch a couple of plastic sacks. Once inside he stopped, and his knees gave way. He had a bowling ball stuck in the middle of his chest. A black, shining sphere of guilt. He had done nothing when they were murdering Elin, he had just stayed in his bed and watched.
'It's not my fault,' he whispered.
He was finding it difficult to breathe, because the bowling ball was in the way, pressing on his lungs. Stiffly he swept the torch over the walls of the shed, and caught sight of the plastic bottle.
He unscrewed the top, raised the bottle to his mouth and took two swigs. If there was a thought in his head it was burn away. What was to be burned away he had no idea. Maybe it was the ball, maybe it was he himself. The liquid coursed down his throat and he waited for the fire, but the fire did not come.
This wormwood was not dissolved in alcohol but in something else, and the substance running down into Anders' stomach had a thick, slippery consistency. Like oil. Only when he had finished swallowing did the taste come. It didn't explode on his palate as it had at Anna-Greta's, but came creeping along and squeezed his tongue, his palate, his throat, his chest.
Anders sank down into a crouching position as the upper part of his body was turned inside out. He lost all feeling in his fingers, and his breathing stopped.
Poison. Not the instantaneous shock of a toxin that compels the body to spit it out immediately, but the treacherous effect of something that slips down and takes root, spreads through the bloodstream and kills.
Anders pressed his hands to his temples and his brain crackled with discharging electricity. He took a deep breath, and discovered that he could do it. His lungs were not paralysed, he had actually been holding his breath. The air he inhaled brought his tastebuds to life, and he was wormwood. It tasted so vile that it wasn't a taste at all, it was a state of being. He grabbed hold of the workbench and pulled himself to his feet.
The ball in his chest was gone. The revolting taste had encased it, and it had shrunk and disappeared. He blinked and blinked again, trying to focus his gaze. He fixed on a piece of rope with a frayed end. He shone the torch on it and he could see every single fibre. There were fifty-seven threads.
The outlines of everything perceived by the eye of the torch were blurred, yet at the same time all too clear. He wasn't seeing the objects, he was seeing what they were. He reached out for the roll of plastic sacks and knew there were eight sacks left on the roll and together they would hold one thousand six hundred litres.
As he picked up the roll he found a still point inside his head, a rock in the river where he could stand and
