wedding.
‘Sure, that’s great. Of course.’
The guests had started streaming in, taking their places in the pews. Anders Knutas came walking up the aisle, arm in arm with his wife Lina. Johan went over to say hello.
‘Hi, how nice of you to come.’
‘We’re glad to be here.’
Knutas didn’t look entirely comfortable. The last time they’d met, they had stood on the dock at Slite yelling at each other. Johan was glad the superintendent had decided to come. He wondered how Knutas, as the head of the investigation, was feeling about the fact that they hadn’t caught the Norrstroms. Maybe they would eventually. There was a hunt on for both Stefan and Vera Norrstrom through Interpol, but so far they seemed to have vanished without a trace.
Ten minutes remained before the bells would chime four o’clock, the time for Johan and Emma to enter the church. He started to feel nervous. Andreas steered him outside and handed over a pocket flask of whisky.
‘Here, have some.’
‘Thanks. I’m feeling really shaky.’
‘That’s not so strange. You’re about to get married. That’s major.’
For the hundredth time in the past hour, Johan glanced at his watch. Five minutes left. She should be here by now.
No car in sight.
‘Where the hell are they?’
Johan took out a cigarette and lit it. The area in front of the church was now deserted. Only a few minutes left.
Now even Andreas was looking worried.
‘Should you try and ring her? Maybe something happened.’
He punched in Emma’s mobile number. No answer.
The church bells began ringing. It was four o’clock. Why wasn’t she here?
The pastor came outside and smiled with satisfaction.
‘It’s time.’
At that moment a car came driving along Farovagen.
Johan breathed a sigh of relief.
EPILOGUE
KARIN JACOBSSON WALKED along the deserted beach alone. The tourist season was over. She was wearing jeans with the cuffs rolled up and a light shirt. A sweater was draped over her shoulders. She walked barefoot, carrying her sandals in one hand, feeling the lukewarm water between her toes. The long hot summer had warmed up the sea to an unbelievable 79 degrees. The temperature was posted on a solitary sign in the middle of the beach.
The air was warm, even though clouds were gathering over the sea. The little turquoise ice-cream stand was closed, shut down for the season, and it wouldn’t open again until next year. She paused with her back to the water and studied the sand dunes and the woods higher up. Peter Bovide’s caravan had been parked at the edge of the campsite. He’d jogged along this beach on that fateful morning barely two months earlier. And this was where he had met his killer.
It all seemed so long ago. She felt as if she had aged, changed. She was carrying a secret, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to continue to do so, much less share it with anyone else.
Vera had given birth to a baby girl in the cabin on the ship. Everything had gone well. The birth was over in less than ten minutes.
Before Karin left the cabin and the new parents with their baby, she had demanded to know the truth.
The killer that the police had been searching for the whole time was a woman. And a very pregnant woman. Who would ever have imagined that?
In the cramped cabin, with her blood-smeared newborn child at her breast, Vera had confessed to shooting both Peter Bovide and Morgan Larsson. Before they died, she’d forced them to their knees and then demanded to hear their remorse. Peter Bovide had pleaded and begged. He claimed that the murder was a mistake. That Tanya had started screaming when she was raped, and Morgan had hit her on the head with a rock to make her shut up. He hadn’t meant to hit her so hard. Tanya died instantly, both young men were seized with panic, and without even thinking, they had tossed her body overboard. By then it was too late, and they fled back to Nynashamn as fast as they could go.
His explanation made no difference. Vera carried out what she had intended to do.
She’d smuggled into Sweden her father’s old army pistol in the moving van from Germany, keeping it as a memento. Then she had put it to use. In all these years, she had been convinced that the two men on Gotska Sandon were Stockholmers she would never see again, but by chance she’d recognized Peter Bovide in the ICA supermarket in Slite. And after that it didn’t take long before she located Morgan Larsson. She guessed that he too was from Slite, and she started looking for him at the big work sites in the area. She found him in a personnel catalogue from the Cementa factory. He hadn’t changed.
Without telling her husband, Vera had carried out her plan. But after Morgan Larsson was killed, Stefan had discovered that the gun was missing from the locked cabinet in the living room. He had confronted her, understood why she’d done it, and forgiven her. He loved her, and they were about to become parents.
Together they’d decided that there was little chance the police would ever figure out that the pregnant woman from Kyllaj was the murderer. So they could just go on living their lives.
But if Vera should come under suspicion for the murders, they’d devised an escape plan. When Karin Jacobsson had come on board the boat from Gotska Sandon with the old newspaper clippings, Stefan had realized that the jig was up. He rang Vera, who came to pick him up in Farosund when the boat docked. She had packed their bags and brought along cash, passports and everything else they needed. To confuse the police, they went out to the airport and bought tickets on the last plane to Stockholm that evening. They parked the car, and even checked in for the flight. But instead of proceeding through security, they left the airport and took a cab to the ferry that was due to depart at eight o’clock for Nynashamn. From there they planned to go out to Arlanda to catch a flight. Karin hadn’t wanted to know where they were headed.
She sat down on the sand and looked out at the sea. She wondered how they’d managed to evade the police and what they were doing at this very moment.
Presumably, she ought to run away too. She’d helped a double murderer go free. She couldn’t explain why she’d made that decision. Maybe it was because of the whole tragic story about the two young girls who had just wanted to sleep on the beach under the open sky on that hot July night twenty years ago – the night that shattered the entire family. The father had taken his own life, the mother became addicted to painkillers and lost all contact with Vera. Leaving her alone with the guilt.
Maybe, in her heart, Karin thought that it was a matter of justice. Maybe it had been easier to make the decision because she’d helped bring Vera’s baby into the world, and most of all because of her own life-long trauma. She would probably never see her own child again, unless her daughter decided to look for her biological mother. And so far she hadn’t. She would be twenty-five this year. Karin knew nothing about the people who had adopted her or where she had ended up, except that she was not living on Gotland.
She wondered how much her daughter knew about her birth. She hoped that no one would tell her the truth.
Karin thought of her as Lydia, the name she had secretly given the baby in that dimly lit maternity room at Visby hospital. The happiest hour of her life.
In all these years, she had never forgiven her parents. When she changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby, they told her it was impossible. They said all the papers had already been signed. During the whole pregnancy, they had actually never asked her what she wanted or how she felt. They’d just taken it for granted
