and camouflaged with gray-green sheets of fabric. The snow has been driven up into an almost vertical wall against the eastern side by the blizzard.
The other air-monitoring watchtower at Eel Point is the southern lighthouse, which was converted to electricity just before the war broke out; it has heating and is a very comfortable place to sit and watch for foreign aircraft. But he knows that Ludvig prefers to be alone here out on the peat bog.
Of course Eskil suspects that he is not always alone in the watchtower. The Rorby boys hate Ludvig, and Eskil thinks he knows why. The girls from Rorby like him too much.
Ludvig goes over to the tower. He sweeps the snow from the steps with his glove, climbs up, and disappears for a minute or so. Then he comes back down again.
“Here,” he says, handing over a bottle to Eskil.
It’s schnapps. The alcohol content is high; it hasn’t frozen, and Eskil unscrews the cork and takes a warming gulp. Then he looks at the bottle, which is less than half full.
“Were you drinking in the tower yesterday?” he asks.
“Last night,” says Ludvig.
“So you walked home in the blizzard?”
Ludvig nods. “More like crawling, really. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face… good job the rope was there.”
He puts the bottle back in the tower, then they plow on northward through the snow, toward Rorby.
Fifteen minutes later they find the girl’s body.
In the middle of a vast expanse of snow north of Offermossen, something that could be the slender stump of a birch tree is sticking up. Eskil peers at it and moves closer.
Suddenly he sees that it is a little hand.
Greta Friberg had almost reached Rorby when the snow caught her. Her rigid face is staring up at the sky when they scrape away the snow, and even her eyes are covered in ice crystals.
Eskil can’t stop looking at her. He falls to his knees in silence.
Ludvig stands behind him, smoking.
“Is this her?” says Eskil quietly.
Ludvig knocks the ash off his cigarette and leans over for a quick look.
“Yes, that’s Greta.”
“She was with you, wasn’t she?” says Eskil. “Yesterday, up in the tower.”
“Maybe,” says Ludvig, and adds, “I’d better varnish the truth a bit for Stovey about all this.”
Eskil gets to his feet. “Don’t lie to me, Ludvig,” he says.
Ludvig shrugs his shoulders and stubs out his cigarette. “She wanted to go home. She was freezing cold, and she was terrified of getting stuck in the tower with me all night. So she went her way in the blizzard and I went mine.”
Eskil looks at him, then at the body in the snow. “We have to fetch help. She can’t stay here.”
“We’ll use the tow sled,” says Ludvig. “We can put her on that. We’ll go and fetch it.”
He turns and heads toward Eel Point. Eskil walks slowly backward so that he won’t be turning his back on the dead girl too quickly, then catches up with Ludvig.
They plow along silently in the snow, side by side.
“Are you going to carve her name up in the barn?” he asks. “Like we did with Werner?”
Werner was a seventeen-year-old who had been called up for military service; he fell into the water from a boat and drowned off the point in the summer of 1942. Greta’s name should be carved next to his up in the hayloft, in Eskil’s opinion. But Ludvig shakes his head.
“I hardly knew her.”
“But…”
“It was her own fault,” says Ludvig. “She should have stayed with me in the tower. I’d have warmed her up.”
Eskil says nothing.
“But there are plenty of girls in the villages,” Ludvig goes on, looking across the far side of Offermossen. “That’s the best thing about girls, they never run out.”
Eskil nods, but he can’t think about girls right now. He can only think of the dead.
December
18
It was a new month, the month of Christmas, and it was Friday afternoon. Joakim had returned to the hayloft in the ice-cold barn, and was standing in front of the wall with the names of the dead carved in it. In his hands he held a hammer and a newly sharpened chisel.
He had gone up into the loft an hour or so before he was due to pick up Livia and Gabriel, just as the sun was going down and the shadows were gathering in the inner courtyard. It was a kind of reward that he allowed himself if the renovation work had gone well.
Sitting up here in the loft felt quiet and restful, despite the cold, and he liked studying the names on the wall. He read Katrine’s name over and over again, of course, like a mantra.
As he began to learn many of the names by heart, so the wall itself, with its knotholes and the convoluted rings in the wood, was becoming familiar to him. On the left, in the corner, a deeper split ran along one of the middle
planks, and in the end it tempted Joakim to go and take a closer look.
The plank had split along one of the rings, showing the age of the original tree. The crack had then widened downward in a diagonal line, and when he pressed his hand against it the wood cracked and gave way.
That was when Joakim had gone to fetch his tools.
He pushed the chisel into the crack, hit it with the hammer, and the sharp metal went straight through the wood.
All it took was a dozen or so hard blows with the hammer to loosen the end of the plank. It fell inward, and the dull thud when it landed proved that the wooden floor continued on the other side of the wall. But it was impossible to see what was in there.
When Joakim bent down to look through the hole, just a couple of inches wide, a definite smell struck him. It rushed toward his face, making him close his eyes and lean against the wall.
It was Katrine’s smell.
He got down on his knees and pushed his left hand into the opening. First his fingers, then his wrist, and finally the whole of his forearm. He groped about, but could feel nothing.
But when he lowered his fingers, they touched something in there, something soft.
It felt like coarse fabric-like someone’s pants or jacket.
Joakim quickly withdrew his hand.
The next moment he heard a dull rumbling on the track outside, and a beam of light illuminated the windows of the barn, white with frost. A car was driving into the courtyard.
Joakim cast a final glance at the opening in the wall, then went over to the steps leading down from the loft.
In the courtyard he was dazzled by the headlights of a car. A door slammed.
“Hi there, Joakim.”
It was a brisk voice that he recognized. Marianne, the head of the preschool.
“Has something happened?” she asked.
He stared at her in confusion, then pulled up his sleeve and looked at his watch. In the beam of the headlights he could see that it was already half past five.
The school closed at five. He had forgotten to pick up Gabriel and Livia.
“I missed… I forgot what time it was.”
