Midwinter Sacrifice

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.