Midwinter Sacrifice

The stink of sweat, burned flesh. Of blood.

Who’s that screaming? A woman?

He turns round.

Sees a woman holding a pistol approach from the edge of the forest.

Her? How the fuck did she get here so quickly?

Malin has got up, is walking, pistol drawn, towards the three men who are all clambering to their knees, getting up, putting their hands above their heads.

‘You’ve killed your own brother,’ she yells. ‘You’ve killed your own brother. You think he raped your sister but he had nothing to do with it, you bastards,’ she yells. ‘You’ve killed your own brother.’

Then Jakob Murvall walks towards her.

He yells, ‘We haven’t killed anyone. We were coming to get him, we knew you were looking for him and when we got close to the hideaway it exploded.’

Jakob Murvall smiles.

‘He didn’t rape your sister,’ Malin yells.

The smile vanishes from Jakob Murvall’s lips; now he looks offended, misled, and Malin takes a swing with the pistol, allowing it to cleave the air as fast as it can before the barrel connects with his nose.

The blood pours from Jakob Murvall’s nostrils as he staggers forward, colouring the snow dark red, and Malin sinks to her knees and screams up into the air, she screams again and again but no one hears her cries, slowly turning into a howl just as a helicopter glides in above the clearing and stifles the sound coming from her lungs. The despair and pain and the fragments of human lives that the drowned-out howl contains will echo through the forests around Hultsjon for ever.

Can you hear the rumble?

The unquiet muttering.

The rustling from the moss.

That’s the dead whispering, the stories will say. The dead, and the dead who are yet living.

Epilogue

Mantorp, Wednesday, 2 March

‘I’m not scared any more.’

‘Me neither.’

There’s no rancour. No despair, no injustice to forgive.

Here there is only a scent of apples and balls flying weightlessly through a space that never ends.

We are drifting side by side, me and Karl, the way brothers should. We don’t see the earth any more, instead we see almost everything, and we’re fine.

Rakel Murvall is sitting at the head of her kitchen table, her back to the stove, where a cabbage bake is almost done, spreading a sweet smell over the room.

Elias gets up first.

Then Jakob. And finally Adam.

‘You lied, Mother. The articles in the paper. He was our . . .’

‘You knew.’

‘He was still our brother.’

‘You lied . . . you made us kill our . . .’

One by one they leave the kitchen.

The front door closes.

Rakel Murvall pushes back her long white hair.

‘Come back,’ she whispers. ‘Come back.’

How did it happen?

Malin is sure, as she hunts through the racks of clothes in H&M in the Mobilia shopping centre just outside Mantorp.

They threw the grenades into the hole, and their mother had tricked them into doing it.

But the brothers’ stories match; it’s impossible to prove that Karl Murvall himself didn’t pull out the pins of grenades that he somehow acquired. The brothers will get a month in Skanninge in the summer for poaching and possession of illegal weapons, that’s all.

Tove holds up a red flowery spring dress. Questioning, smiling.

Malin shakes her head.