Hulda followed him down a set of steep steps that had been turned into a treacherously slippery slope by impacted ice and snow. The windowless cellar was illuminated by a single, low-watt light bulb, but the dim illumination was enough to reveal the body of a middle-aged woman lying against one wall.
‘Erla, Einar’s wife.’
This time there was no blood, but the scene was somehow even more gruesome than the first. The cold, drab, enclosed space gave Hulda a creeping sense of claustrophobia. She halted just inside the door, unable to make herself go any further.
‘Of course, we don’t know what happened here,’ the inspector said, ‘but there are various clues to suggest a violent death. A blow to the head, or strangulation, maybe. We’ll soon find out.’
‘Was it just the two of them here, as far as you know?’ Hulda asked, cutting across his speculation.
‘Yes, just them.’
‘OK, let’s go back outside.’ Hulda was holding her breath. ‘Get some air.’
‘The smell, yes,’ said the inspector, putting a hand to his nose.
‘You get used to it,’ Hulda said, once they were out in the open. Don’t think about Dimma, she told herself. She tried to imagine that Hulda the detective was not the same woman as the one who had found her daughter dead on Christmas Day. She had to separate out these two sides of her life if she were to maintain her detachment. It was the only way she could carry on working, or indeed carry on at all.
In an effort to distract herself, she turned her attention to the surrounding countryside. The snow had stopped and the setting, now that she could see it, had a desolate sort of beauty under its light covering of white. The contrast between this pure, untouched landscape and the sordid scenes inside couldn’t have been greater. The inspector had told her that the sheep had starved to death in the barn and that the scene that met the police there had been no less harrowing than the ones inside the house.
‘Weren’t there three of them?’ Hulda asked.
‘Three? The couple lived alone.’
‘I mean, didn’t they have a visitor?’
‘Not at this time of year. That’s completely out of the question. Nobody would come up here. Not –’
‘Not even a guest for Christmas?’
‘I very much doubt it. The road’s usually blocked in December and the snow ploughs don’t come this far up the valley, so it would mean covering a fair distance on foot.’
‘So not completely out of the question, then?’ Hulda asked carefully.
‘No, of course not completely – it’s just a manner of speaking – but I could swear they were alone here. They sometimes had visitors in the summer, and maybe in the spring and autumn too – they ran a sort of farm stay, or maybe that’s not quite the right word…’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They invited young people to stay here in return for working on the farm – as cheap labour, you know. That’s no way to run things, in my opinion, but then I’m old-fashioned.’
‘It sounds like a perfectly sensible idea to me,’ Hulda said, not hesitating to contradict the inspector, who was increasingly getting on her nerves. But maybe that was because she was letting everything get to her at the moment; her concentration was shot and her mind refused to stay on the job.
‘Anyway, what made you wonder if there were three of them?’ Jens asked.
‘The three coffee cups in the sitting room.’
‘Maybe they didn’t bother to clear up every time they used a cup.’
‘Well, we’ll find out once we’ve lifted fingerprints from them. But, apart from that, the kitchen was very tidy, as if they were the types who put things away,’ she replied dismissively. ‘Besides, it doesn’t work, does it? I mean, who killed who?’
‘What? Oh, no, right, I see what you’re getting at, of course,’ Jens said, though Hulda suspected he had only just cottoned on. He frowned, then added: ‘It’s a hell of a situation – a hell of a situation.’
‘If Einar attacked his wife, who murdered him?’ Hulda asked rhetorically.
‘Quite.’
‘And if Erla attacked Einar, who killed her?’
‘Quite,’ Jens repeated, and stood there, brow furrowed. ‘Unless one of them committed suicide?’
‘Shall we take another look inside?’ Hulda suggested, and started back without waiting for an answer.
The inspector followed a little way behind. Eventually he asked: ‘Where is he, then?’
She paused and looked round enquiringly.
‘Where is he, then – the other man, the third person?’
‘We’ll find out, don’t you worry,’ she said, the air of quiet authority in her voice disguising the fact that she wasn’t at all sure her theory was correct or that she would ever identify the mysterious visitor. She mustn’t lose faith in herself, though. She had to keep believing, as she tried to every day at work, that she was better than her male colleagues and that there was nothing she couldn’t achieve.
It felt eerie going back into the house, where a quite literally deathly silence hung in the air and even the most ordinary, everyday objects took on a sinister appearance in light of what had happened. There were the three coffee cups, which her colleagues would take away for further analysis. And the stairs to the attic – Hulda had no intention of going back up there. She told herself it was because she wanted to let the experts do their job, but, if she were honest, it was because she would resort to any excuse to avoid seeing that grisly scene again, with its echoes of that other, more personal tragedy.
There were four rooms opening off the passage downstairs. The bathroom was stuck in a seventies time-warp with its yellow suite, green and yellow tiles, slightly damp-smelling carpet and the single bottle of Old Spice on one shelf. There were no signs of a struggle, no blood smears on the taps or sink, or anything else untoward. Then there was the master bedroom. At least, Hulda assumed this had been the couple’s room. The double bed was large
