Midwinter Sacrifice

Lotta, six. As far as Bengt was concerned, it was probably already over by then. Damaged goods, fit only for throwing away. He was the loneliest of the lonely, the corner kid, a monster to stay away from. How do you talk to people who look at you like you’re a monster? I watched it happen from a distance, and if I have committed any sin, it was that I passed him by then, when he was somehow still there for real, if you understand my meaning, Miss Fors. When he needed me and the rest of us here.’

But the mother? Elisabeth. When is a raised hand to fend off a blow the only power you have left? When your hands are so badly beaten that you can no longer sew?

Malin walks round the house.

She feels eyes watching her from within. How they stare at her, wondering who she is. Fine, you carry on staring. Newly planted apple trees, an idyll of scented flowers: do you know how easy it is for that to fall apart and vanish, never to reappear?

Mum, even if you haven’t got the strength, come back.

Was that your prayer, Bengt?

I can’t say anything more now.

Even we, I, have limits.

I want to drift now.

Drift and burn.

But I missed her, and I was worried about my sister; maybe that was why I fought back, I don’t know, to hold it together somehow. You can see the houses that surrounded ours. I could see how it was supposed to be, how it could be.

I loved him, my dad, that’s why I raised the axe that evening.

Piss kids, dirt kids. Scared kids, teased kids. Never-go-to-school kids. Alcoholic’s kids.

A girl, a little Lotta who has stopped talking, who smells of wee, who stinks of a misery that has no place in the newly polished Social-Democrats’ ‘people’s home’.

Two Caterpillar boots breaking the hard crust of the snow in the back garden of a dream villa, a door opening, a suspicious male voice: ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’

The young police officer, expecting the question, holds up her ID. ‘Police. I’m just taking a look at the plot. Someone who lived here a long time ago is under investigation.’

‘When? We’ve lived here since 1999.’

‘Don’t worry. It was a long time ago, before this house was even built.’

‘Do you mind if I go in? I’m letting in so much cold air.’

The salesman variety. Highlights in his hair even though he’s almost forty.

‘Go ahead. I’m almost done.’

A mother vaporised by cancer, a father who destroys anything that comes within arm’s length. A howl full of longing echoing from the history of this place, these forests and fields.

Gottfrid’s voice: ‘He took the axe, Miss Fors. He wasn’t even fifteen at the time. He waited in the house for Cornerhouse-Kalle to come home from one of his drunken fights. Then, when the old man opened the door, he hit him. The boy had sharpened the axe, but the blow wasn’t clean. The blade hit him on the ear, almost severing it from the head in one clean cut. They say it was dangling like a flap from just a few sinews. And Kalle ran out of the cottage, blood pouring down his neck, down his body. His screams echoed right across town that night.’

The snow is white, but Malin can sense the smell of Cornerhouse-Kalle’s alcohol-diluted blood. Can sense the smell of Ball-Bengt’s fourteen-year-old despair, his little sister Lotta in the bed she has wet herself in, her mouth open, eyes full of a terror that will probably never fade.

‘He never touched her. Even if there was talk of that as well.’

‘Who never touched her?’

‘Neither the old man, nor Bengt. I’m sure of that, even if neither of them escaped suspicion.’

Traces of blood running through history.

The girl was adopted. Bengt spent a year or so in a foster home, then was sent back to Kalle. His father was earless, with a bandage round his head and a white patch over the hole where his ear should have been.

Then the old man died early one spring. After a few furious years when they spent most of their time watching each other, him and Bengt. His heart gave out in the end. They found Ball-Bengt, who couldn’t have been much more than eighteen at the time. ‘He’d been living with the corpse for more than a month. Only going out to buy bread, apparently.’

‘And then?’

‘Social services organised the sale of the house. It was torn down, Miss Fors. And they put Bengt in a flat in Harna. Trying to draw a veil of forgetfulness over the whole affair.’

‘How do you know all this, Gottfrid?’

‘I don’t know much, Miss Fors. Everyone round here knew what I have just told you. But most of us are dead now, or have forgotten. Who wants to remember such terrible people? Remember the madmen?’

‘And after that, once they’d installed him in the flat?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve kept to myself these last ten years or so. He fetched balls. But he was clean and tidy the few times I saw him, so someone must have cared.’

Malin gets back in the car and turns the ignition.