Midwinter Sacrifice

The sound of a car stopping in front of the building. A car door closing. She feels with her hand for her holster. The pistol, she usually hates it, but now she loves it. The front door of the building closing out in the stairwell. Malin creeps into the hall, listening to the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Then a key in a door on the floor below.

A door being closed carefully.

Malin breathes out.

Goes back to the bedroom and there she sees it, the wardrobe. It is at the foot of the bed. She switches on the wall-mounted lamp above the bed to get more light, and realises it has been set up to shine directly at the wardrobe.

A padlock on the handle.

Something locked in.

An animal?

With a practised hand Malin applies the skeleton key to the lock. It has a tricky mechanism and after three minutes of trying she feels herself breaking into a sweat.

But eventually the lock lets out a click and slips open. She carefully pulls the door towards her and looks inside.

I see you, Malin. Is it the truth you see? Does what you’re looking at make you feel safe or scared? Will you sleep better at night?

Look at him, look at me, at Rebecka, or Lotta, as she will always be to me. We are lonely.

Can your truth cure our loneliness, Malin?

Malin looks at the inside of the wardrobe, covered with wallpaper whose pattern represents a stylised tree full of green apples. On the bottom, beside a packet of plain biscuits, are various books about ?sir beliefs and psychoanalysis, a Bible, and a copy of the Koran. A black notebook.

Malin leafs through the book.

Diary entries.

Neat handwriting, letters so small that it’s hard to read.

About work at Collins.

Visits to Viveka Crafoord.

Further on in the book it’s as if something inside the writer has capsized, as if another hand is holding the pen. The writing becomes shaky, there are no dates any more, and the style is fragmented.

. . . in February it is midwinter . . .

. . . now I know, I know who has to be sacrificed . . .

And in various different places: Let me in.

At the back of the book is a detailed map. Blasvadret, a field with a tree marked on it, close to the site where Ball-Bengt was found, and then a site in the forest, close to where the Murvalls’ cabin must be.

He sat here talking to us.

With this book behind him, with everything inside him.

The whole world, at its very worst, was right here in front of us, and it managed to maintain its mask, it managed to cling to reality as we know it.

Malin can hear all his voices roaring. Out of the wardrobe, into the room, and on, into herself. A chill passes through her, a chill far worse than anything below zero outside the window.

Fault-lines.

Within and without.

The fantasy world.

The real world.

They meet. And right up to the end his consciousness knows what is required. Plays the game. I’ll escape: the last remnant for his mind to cling to before awareness and instinct become one.

Another map.

Another tree.

That’s where Rebecka was going to be hanged, isn’t it?

Don’t lose heart, Malin. It isn’t over yet.

I see Rebecka in her bed. She’s sleeping. The operation to transplant skin to her cheeks and stomach went well; maybe she won’t be as beautiful as she was before, but she’s long since abandoned vanity anyway. She isn’t in pain. Her son is sleeping on a bunk beside her bed, and new blood is pumping through her veins.

Karl isn’t doing so well.

I know. I ought to be angry with him, because of what he did to me. But he’s lying there in his cold earthen cellar, wrapped in blankets in front of a stove where the fire is fading and I can’t see anything but that he is