Sits down on the red-painted rib-backed chair in the hall, looks at the photograph on the wall, of herself surrounded by the boys in the garden when they were young, Blackie in the picture too, before the wheelchair.
Fucking little brat. You must have taken that picture.
If you disappear, disappear for good, she thinks, then maybe my secrets can remain my own.
If he disappears there will only be one or two rumours left, and I can lock those away in a dark wardrobe. He needs to go now, it’s as simple as that. Be got rid of. Anyway, I’m so tired of him existing.
She picks up the receiver.
Calls Adam.
The little lad answers, his boy’s voice high and innocent.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello, Tobias. This is Grandma. Is your daddy there?’
‘Hello, Grandma.’
Then the line goes quiet, before an older, gruffer voice says, ‘Mother?’
‘You need to come over, Adam. And bring your brothers with you. I’ve got something important to tell you.’
‘I’m coming, Mother. I’ll tell the others.’
I used to cycle up here.
The forest was mine.
You would go hunting near me sometimes. I could hear your shots all year long, and even then I wished that you would come to me.
Mother, why were you so angry?
What had I done? What have I done?
Images and warmth. I am an angel under an apple tree of biscuit crumbs. The fire is warm again. It’s nice here in my hole, but I’m lonely. But I’m not scared of loneliness. Because you can’t be scared of what you are, can you?
I can sleep a bit longer here in my darkness. Then you’ll come and get me, to let me in. And then I’ll become someone else, won’t I? When you let me in.
‘What do we do now?’
Zeke is driving towards Vreta Kloster, the church like an ancient fortress on top of a hill maybe a kilometre away, the stables of Heda Riding Club on one side of the road, open fields on the other.
Malin wanted to knock on the brothers’ doors, ask them if they knew whose son their brother Karl was, but Zeke told her to think about it.
‘If they don’t know, the old woman has a right to her secrets, Malin. We can’t just blunder into her past and stir things up.’
And she knew that Zeke was right, in spite of the possible consequences of not telling them. If they stopped considering other people, no matter who they were, how could they ever demand consideration from anyone else?
In answer to Zeke’s question: ‘We wait for Sjoman’s search teams. They’re getting ready to go through the forest, but it’s too cold for the dogs. They’re taking a couple with them anyway, apparently.’
Then: ‘Do you think we should get up there first?’
‘No, Malin. We didn’t find anything yesterday, so how would we be able to find anything today?’
‘I don’t know,’ Malin replies. ‘We could take a look at where the body was found, and the site of the other tree. Well, where it ought to be, anyway.’
‘We’ve had a car looking since last night. We would have heard if they’d found anything.’
‘Have you got any better suggestions?’
‘None at all,’ Zeke says, and does a U-turn. They head back the same way they’ve just come, past the houses in Blasvadret, where they see the brothers heading together towards their mother’s house.
‘How long do you think it’ll take Karin to have the results of the tests on Karl Murvall?’ Malin asks. ‘I want to know if he was the one who raped Maria Murvall.’
‘Do you think he did?’
‘No, but I want to know. I think she’s deceiving us again. I just don’t know how. But I know that she’d never have let us in if she didn’t have something to gain from it herself. She’s still directing this. And she’ll grasp at any straw to protect what she thinks of as hers.’
Malin takes a deep breath.
‘And to preserve her secrets.’
Adam, Elias and Jakob Murvall are sitting round the table in their mother’s kitchen. Sipping cups of freshly brewed coffee, eating biscuits their mother has just warmed in the oven after getting them out of the freezer.
‘How are the biscuits, boys?’
Rakel Murvall is standing by the stove, with the
