with all your files about that Maria woman.
And I want to ask you how you are, because I can see you’re feeling bad, but I’m scared you’d just be angry. You’re completely shut off, Mum, and I don’t know how to get you to open up.
And there’s so much else that I’d rather think about: school, my books, all my friends, all the fun stuff that I feel I’m just at the start of. All the boys.
Tove pulls the covers down. The room is there again.
The ache in her stomach, her heart, is still there. But for me it’s quite natural that you don’t live together, you and Dad. And there’ll be more fighting. Because I don’t think you’re coming back here, and I don’t know if I want to live with you now.
A crow has landed on the windowsill. It looks in at her. It pecks at the glass before flying off into the night.
The room is dark.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Tove thinks. ‘I’ll be fine.’
Janne is lying in bed with one of the bedside lamps on. He’s reading a folder from the British Armed Forces. It’s about building latrines, and it helps him to find his way into his memories, to Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan, where he most recently constructed latrines in a refugee camp. The memories from his time in the Rescue Services Agency mean that he can avoid thinking about what happened this evening, about what has happened, and now must happen.
But the images, black and white in his memory, of people in desperate need in distant corners of the planet, are constantly shoved aside by Malin’s face, her red, puffy, tired, alcoholic’s face.
He confronted her several times. And she evaded the issue. Yelled at him when he poured away the drink from the bottles she’d stashed away, screaming at him that it was pointless, because she still had ten bottles hidden in places he’d never find.
He pleaded with her to see someone, a psychiatrist, a therapist, anyone at all. He had even spoken to her boss, Sven Sjoman, telling him that Malin was drinking more and more, but that it might not be visible at work, and asking him to do something. Sven had promised that something would be done. That conversation had taken place in August, but nothing had happened yet.
Her rage. Against herself. Presumably because of what happened to Tove. She refused to accept that it wasn’t her fault, that there is evil everywhere, always, and that anyone can get in its way.
It’s as if her stubbornness has led her in the wrong direction. That she’s absolutely committed to driving herself as far down as she can go.
And tonight she hit him. She’s never done that before.
Dig deep.
Janne throws the files across the room. Turns out the light.
It was pretty stupid, really, he thinks. To imagine that a bloody terrible experience could make us work together as a family. As if evil could be a catalyst for good. In truth the complete damn opposite has happened.
Then he looks at Malin’s side of the bed. Reaches out his hand, but there’s no one there.
4
Sleepless dawn.
Axel Fagelsjo is about to get up from his leather armchair, but first he rubs his fingers over the worn, shiny armrest and stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray on the leather-topped sideboard. Then he lets his legs take the weight of his heavy yet still strong seventy-year-old body and pulls in his stomach, feeling strangely powerful, as if there were some enemy outside the door that he needs to fight with one of the many hunting rifles in the cabinet over in the apartment’s master bedroom.
Axel stands in the sitting room. He sees Linkoping wake up outside the windows, imagines its inhabitants in their beds, all those people with their different lives. Anyone who says there’s no difference between people doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
The trees in the Horticultural Society Park, their crowns blown this way and that by the wind. Only gentle rain now. Not the sort of downpour that drives the rats out of the sewers. That’s happened several times this autumn. And the city’s pampered middle classes have been horrified by the beasts nurtured in subterranean Linkoping. As if they refuse to accept that there are rats living beneath their well-shod feet. Rats with hairless tails and razor-sharp teeth, rats that will still be there long after they themselves are gone.
It’s been a long time since he slept through the night. He has to get up at least three times to go to the toilet, and even then he has to stand there for five minutes before releasing the little trickle that made him so incredibly desperate to go.
But he doesn’t complain. There are people with far worse ailments than him.
He misses Bettina when he wakes up at night. Only an empty white bed where she was always contours, warmth and breath. As luck would have it, she went before the catastrophe, before Skogsa slid out of his grasp.
The castle was at its most beautiful on mornings like this.
He can see the castle within him, as though he were standing in front of it, at the edge of the forest.
The seventeenth-century grey stone walls seem to rise up from the fog, more potent than nature itself.
Skogsa Castle. Constructed and altered over the years according to the eccentric whims of his ancestors.
The copper roof seems to glow even when the sky is covered by low cloud, and the countless eyes of the building, the old castle’s loopholes and the more recent lead windows. He has always imagined that the loopholes were watching him from a distant moment in history, measuring him against his predecessors as master of the castle. The new windows are blind by comparison, as if looking for something lost.
From this viewpoint in his memory he can’t see the chapel, but it’s there. Bettina isn’t there, however — she had wanted him to spread her ashes in the forest at the north of the estate.
He can hear them.
The fish splashing uneasily in the black water of the moat, maybe the dead Russian soldiers, the hungry, walled-in spirits, are nipping at their gills.
Count Erik Fagelsjo.
A robber baron during the Thirty Years War. A favourite of Gustav II Adolf, the most brutal warrior of all, said to have mutilated twenty men in one day during the skirmishes following the Battle of Lutzen. Count Axel Fagelsjo thinks: I have always felt that man’s blood flowing through my veins.
In his youth he wanted to serve with the UN. But his father said no. His father, the friend of Germany, the colonel who had gone around Prussia in the thirties fawning over the blackshirts, the castle-owner who believed in a German victory long into the early 1940s.
And now?
After what had happened.
Count Erik Fagelsjo must be spinning with shame in the family vault in the chapel at Skogsa, lying there naked and shrieking with utter fury.
But there’s still a chance, if it weren’t for that useless dandy, that bastard who came slithering down from Stockholm like a legless lizard.
Axel Fagelsjo looks out across the park again. Sometimes this autumn he has imagined he can see a man under the trees, a man who seemed to be peering up at his windows.
Sometimes he’s thought it was Bettina.
He talks to her every day, has done since she died three years ago. Sometimes he goes out to the forest where he scattered her ashes, hiking there no matter what time of year, most recently through mouldering fiery yellow leaves and swaying mushrooms, his dark voice like an echo between the trees, trees that seemed almost rootless, floating.
