Midwinter Sacrifice

Copyright © 2011 Hard Boiled Company Limited

English translation © Neil Smith 2011

The right of Mons Kallentoft to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN: 9781444721546

Book ISBN: 9781444721508

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

AUTHOR’S THANKS

I would like to thank the following people for their help with this book:

Bengt Nordin and Maria Enberg for their encouragement and unstinting commitment. Nina Wadensjo and Petra Konig for their open-mindedness and enthusiasm. Rolf Svensson for his ability to control reams of paper, among other things. My mother, Anna-Maria, and father, Bjorn, for detailed information about Linkoping and the surrounding area.

I would also like to thank Bengt Elmstrom, without whose common sense and warm-heartedness there would probably never have been any books at all.

I owe my greatest debt of thanks to my wife Karolina, who has been absolutely invaluable to so many aspects of Midwinter Sacrifice. What would have become of Malin Fors, her family and colleagues without Karolina?

My main focus has always been on what is best for the story. For this reason I have taken certain liberties, albeit small ones, with police procedure, the city of Linkoping, the geography of the surrounding area, and the people who live there.

Mons Kallentoft

21 March 2007

Prologue

Ostergotland, Tuesday, 31 January

In the darkness

Don’t hit me. Do you hear me? Leave me alone.

No, no, let me in. Apples, the scent of apples. I can almost taste them.

Don’t leave me standing here, in the cold and wet. The wind feels like nails that tear at my hands, my face, until there is no frosted skin, no flesh, no fat left on my bones, my skull.

Haven’t you noticed I’m gone? You couldn’t care less, really, could you?

The worms crawl on the earthen floor. I hear them. The mice too, how they make love, going mad in the heat, tearing each other to pieces. We ought to be dead now, they whisper, but you have lit your stove and are keeping us alive, we are your only company in the cold. But what company? Was I ever alive, or did I die long ago, in a room so cramped that there was never any space for love?

I pull a damp blanket over my body, see the flames burn through the opening of the stove, feel the smoke spread through my black hovel and seep out to the sleeping pines, the fir-trees, the rocks, the ice on the lake.

Where is the heat? Only in the boiling water.

If I fall asleep, will I wake up?

Don’t hit me. Don’t leave me in the snow. Outside. There I’ll turn blue, then white, like everything else.

Here I can be alone.

I am sleeping now, and in my dreams the words return: fucking runt, bastard brat, you’re not real, you don’t exist.

But what did I ever do to you? Just tell me: what have I done? What happened?

And where did the scent of apples first come from? The apples are round, but they explode, disappear in my hands, and there are biscuit crumbs on the floor beneath me.

I don’t know who she is, but a naked woman is drifting above my body. She says, I’m going to look after you, you exist for me, we are human beings, we belong together. Then she is dragged away and the ceiling of my hovel