‘Erica, come over here.’
‘Did you find something?’ she said, and walked over to him, bending forward.
‘I don’t know, but this chest looks fairly promising.’
‘It could be Pappa’s,’ she said pensively, but something told her that the chest wasn’t his. It was made of wood, painted green, with an elegant but faded floral pattern painted on the wood. The lock had rusted but the chest wasn’t locked, so she carefully lifted the lid. There were pictures of two children lying on top. When she picked them up she saw that something was written on the back. ‘Erica, December 3, 1974’ it said on one of them, and on the other it said ‘Anna, June 8, 1980’. Astonished, she saw that it was her mother’s handwriting. A little lower down in the chest there was a whole stack of drawings, and things that she and Anna had made in art class were jumbled up with Christmas decorations and things they had made at home. All the things she’d always thought that her mother didn’t care about.
‘Look,’ she said, still incapable of taking in what she was seeing. ‘Look what Mamma saved.’ She carefully picked out one thing after another. It was like a journey back in time, back to her own childhood. And Anna’s. Erica felt the tears come, and Patrik stroked her back.
‘But why? We thought that she didn’t… Why?’ Erica wiped the tears on the sleeve of her jumper and went back to rummaging through the chest. About halfway down the childhood mementos came to an end, and older things began to appear. Still with an expression of disbelief, Erica picked up a bunch of black-and-white photographs and looked through them breathlessly.
‘Do you know where these are from?’ said Patrik.
‘No idea,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But you can bet I’m going to find out!’
Eagerly she dug deeper, but stopped when her hand closed round a soft object with something hard and sharp inside. She lifted it up to see what it was. She was holding in her hand a soiled piece of cloth that had once been white but was now yellowed and covered with ugly brown rust stains. Something was rolled up in the cloth. Erica carefully opened the packet and gasped when she saw what it was. Inside the cloth lay a medal, and there was no doubt about its origin. She couldn’t mistake the swastika. Mutely she held up the medal to Patrik, whose eyes grew wide. Then he looked down at the cloth, which Erica had carelessly dropped in her lap.
‘Erica?’
‘Yes? she said, her gaze still fixed on the medal she was holding in her hand.
‘You should look at this,’ Patrik said.
‘What? What is it?’ she said in confusion and then noticed what Patrik was pointing at. She put down the Nazi medal and spread out the piece of cloth. But it wasn’t merely a piece of cloth. It was an, old-fashioned child’s shift. And she realized that the brown spots on the shift weren’t rust after all. They were bloodstains.
Where had this tiny garment come from? Why was it covered with blood? And why had their mother saved it in a chest in the attic, along with a medal from the Second World War?
For a moment Erica considered putting everything back in the chest and closing the lid.
But like Pandora she was much too curious to let the lid stay closed. She had to find out the truth. No matter what it might be.
Acknowledgements
As usual there are many people to thank. But as always, my foremost thanks go to my husband Micke and my children Wille and Meja.
Other people who were helpful during the work on
Zoltan Szabo-Lackberg and Anders Torevi read the manuscript and made comments, as did Karl-Axel Wikstrom, who is in charge of cultural affairs for Tanum municipality. A big thanks to them for taking the time to check the details.
Karin Lande Nordh at Forum Publishers also wielded her talented red pen to elevate and improve the content and plotting of the book. Thanks also to everyone else at Forum; it’s always fun to work with you!
Equally indispensable were those who volunteered as babysitters time and again: Grandma Gunnel Lackberg, Grandma and Grandpa Mona and Hasse Eriksson, as well as Gabriella and Jorgen Gullbrandson, and Charlotte Eliasson. Without you we never could fit together all the puzzle pieces of daily life.
I’d like to send a special thanks to Bengt Nordin and Maria Enberg at the Nordin Agency. With your help I’m able to reach readers both in Sweden and in the rest of the world.
‘The girls’ – you know who you are… Thanks for all your support, encouragement, and entertaining conversations, to say the least. What would I do without you?
A highly unexpected, but positive contribution this year was made by all my excellent blog-readers, with encouragement the order of the day. The same is true of all of you who have e-mailed me during the year. I am especially grateful for help with suggested names and other details that I’ve received via the blog! But what seemed most important during the past blog year were all the texts about my friend Ulle that Finn generously shared with me. We miss her.
Last but not least, I’d like to thank all my friends, who patiently waited me out when I ‘retreated into my cave’ to write.
Any errors are solely the fault of the author. The characters in the book are entirely the product of my imagination – except for ‘Leif the Rubbish Man’, who was a bit nervous when I said I was going to put a corpse in his rubbish truck. Naturally that was an opportunity too good to resist…
Camilla Lackberg-Eriksson
Enskede, 27 February 2006
www.CamillaLackberg.com
About the Author
Born in 1974, Camilla Lackberg worked as an economist before a course in creative crime writing led to a drastic change of career. She is a household name in Sweden and all seven of her psychological thrillers featuring Erica Falck and Patrik Hedstrom are number one bestsellers across Europe. Camilla lives in Stockholm with her husband and three children.
www.CamillaLackberg.com
