‘Johan Jakobsson and Borje Svard, Linkoping Police. Can we come in? I presume you’re Rickard Skoglof.’
The man nods. ‘ID first.’
They hunt through their pockets, have to take off their gloves and undo their coats to find their ID.
‘Happy now?’ Borje asks.
Rickard Skoglof gestures with one hand as he pushes the door open with the other.
‘We’re born with the gift. It arrives in our flesh the moment we arrive in this dimension.’ Rickard Skoglof’s voice is as clear as ice.
Johan rubs his eyes and looks round the kitchen. Low ceiling. The draining-board full of dirty plates, pizza boxes. Pictures of Stonehenge on the walls, Old Norse symbols, rune-stones. And Skoglof’s clothes: obviously home-made trousers of black-dyed canvas and an even blacker kaftan-like affair hanging loosely over a fat stomach.
‘Gift?’
Johan can hear how sceptical Borje sounds.
‘Yes, the power to see, to influence.’
‘Soothsaying?’
The house is cold. An old eighteenth-century farmhouse that Rickard Skoglof has renovated himself: ‘Got it cheap, but it’s bloody draughty.’
‘Soothsaying is the word for it. But you have to be careful about using the power. It takes as much life as it gives.’
‘So why a website about your sooth?’
‘My soothsaying. In our culture we’ve lost track of our roots. But I have comrades.’
Rickard Skoglof crouches down and goes into the next room. They follow him.
A worn sofa against one wall, and a huge computer screen, switched off, set up on a shiny desk with a glass top, two whirring hard drives on the floor, a modern black leather office chair behind the desk.
‘Comrades?’
‘Some people who are interested in soothsaying and in our Old Norse forebears.’
‘And you have meetings?’
‘A few times a year. Most of the time we communicate on discussion forums and by email.’
‘How many of you are there?’
Rickard Skoglof sighs. He stops and looks at them. ‘If you want to carry on talking you’ll have to come out to the barn with me. I have to feed S?hrimnir and the others.’
Cackling hens run to and fro in an even colder space with badly plastered walls. There is a pair of new cross- country skis leaning in one corner.
‘You like skiing?’ Johan asks.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘But you’ve got a new pair of skis.’
Rickard Skoglof doesn’t reply, just carries on towards the animals.
‘Bloody hell, it’s below freezing in here,’ Borje says. ‘Your livestock could freeze to death.’
‘No chance,’ Rickard Skoglof says as he scatters food for the hens from a bucket.
Two pens along one wall.
A fat black pig in one, a brown and white cow in the other. They are both eating, the pig grunting happily at the winter apples he has just been given.
‘If you think I’m going to give you the names of the comrades who usually come to our meetings, you’re mistaken. You’ll have to find them yourselves. But it won’t do you any good.’
‘How do you know that?’ Johan asks.
‘Only harmless kids and old folk with no lives of their own are interested in this sort of thing.’
‘What about you? Haven’t you got a life of your own?’
Rickard Skoglof gestures towards the animals. ‘The farm and these beasts are probably more of a life than most people have.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I’ve got the gift,’ Rickard Skoglof says.
‘So what is this gift, Rickard? In purely concrete terms?’ Borje is staring intently at the canvas-clad figure in front of them.
Rickard Skoglof puts down the bucket of feed. When he looks up at them his face is contorted with derision. He waves the question away with his hand.
‘So the power of soothsaying gives and takes life,’ Johan says. ‘Is that why you make sacrifices?’
