Sofia remembers the visit to Gr?na Lund when Johan Kihlberg disappeared. There are similarities with Martin’s disappearance, but she’s sure she would never have harmed Johan. He probably vanished of his own accord, or was taken by someone else. Someone who later thought better of it, seeing as Johan was found unharmed.
Sofia Zetterlund goes on looking through the scribbled memories. Puts one sheet aside and picks up another. Reads and remembers what she felt at the moment she wrote the note. She had been living in a cloud of medication and alcohol, suppressing all the unpleasant memories. Hiding parts of herself away deep beneath her skin.
It had worked for years.
At its thinnest points, the skin is a fifth of a millimetre thick, yet still forms an impenetrable line of defence between inside and outside. Between rational reality and irrational chaos. At this precise moment her memory is no longer hazy and unclear, but beautifully crystal clear. But she doesn’t know how long the moment will last.
Sofia reads Victoria’s diary entries from her time at boarding school in Sigtuna. Two years of torment, bullying and mental torture. Words that recur in the diary are ‘revenge’ and ‘retribution’, and she remembers dreaming of going back one day and blowing up the whole school. Now two of the people referred to in the entries are dead.
She knows Victoria had nothing to do with their deaths.
But even if she’s innocent of those murders, she knows what she has done.
She’s killed her parents. She set fire to her childhood home, the house in Grisslinge, out in V?rmd?, and since then she has sat in her soundproofed room and drawn the burning house in crayon on picture after picture.
Sofia thinks about Lasse, her former partner and most meaningful relationship. But she can’t feel the same hatred for him as she does for her parents. Boundless disappointment would be a better description, and for a brief second she is seized by doubt. Did she really kill him as well?
The memories of having done so are emotionally very strong, but she can’t see the actual sequence of events inside her that would confirm that she really did it.
But she knows that the fact that she has actually murdered others is something she will have to come to terms with for the rest of her life. It’s something she must learn to accept.
Judar Forest – Nature Reserve
SQUEEZED IN BETWEEN ?ngby and ?keshov in the west of Stockholm is the city’s first nature reserve.
Ice and rock formed the landscape, which consists of forest and open fields, as well as a small lake. The passage of glaciers is visible in the form of large blocks of rock and stony moraine ridges. First the ice pressed the ground down one thousand metres, then ripped it apart and scattered it with boulders torn from the ground rock.
Here and there in the forest there are the remains of a wall that wasn’t raised by the ice, but by human hands. According to tradition, the stones were piled up by Russian prisoners of war.
The lake in the centre of the forest is called Judar Lake. The name is derived from the Swedish word ljuda, ‘to make a sound’, but etymologically it has nothing to do with the cries of the emaciated labour force, nor with the scream that is currently echoing through the forest.
A young, fair-haired woman in a cobalt-blue coat is staring up at the starry sky above the trees.
Thousands and thousands of burning points.
After emptying her lungs of rage once more, Madeleine Silfverberg walks back to the car, which is parked by a cluster of trees close to the lake.
The third scream echoes inside the car, five minutes later, at almost ninety kilometres an hour.
The world is a windscreen with the road at its centre and blurred trees at the edge of her field of vision. She shuts her eyes and counts to five as she listens to the sounds of the engine and the friction of the tyres on the road surface. When she opens her eyes again she feels calm.
Everything has gone as planned.
Soon the police will pay a visit to the house in Fagerstrand.
Beside the large bunch of yellow tulips on the kitchen table they’ll also find a couple of neatly arranged Polaroid pictures that document the murders.
Karl Lundstr?m lying in his bed in Karolinska Hospital.
Per-Ola Silfverberg, slaughtered like a pig in his elegant apartment.
The police already have the third picture, because she left it in the Lundstr?ms’ mailbox. It shows Fredrika Grünewald in her tent in the crypt beneath St Johannes Church with her fat, greasy face contorted in a dead grimace.
When the police go down into the cellar they’ll find the reason why the house stinks.
The forest suddenly stops, there are more buildings and she lowers her speed. Soon she has to stop completely at the intersection of Gubbk?rrsv?gen and Drottningholmsv?gen, and as she waits for a few cars to pass she drums restlessly on the steering wheel with nine fingers.
Hannah ?stlund had lost her finger after being bitten by a dog.
She had used a bolt cutter.
As Madeleine pulls out onto Drottningholmsv?gen she thinks about those who will soon die, and about those who have already died, but also about those she wishes she had had the pleasure of killing.
Bengt Bergman. Her dad and grandad. Daddygrandad.
The fire took him before she got there. But no one can take her own fire. It’s going to take others.
First it’s going to take the woman who once called herself her mother.
Then it’s going to take Victoria, her real mother.
As she heads along Drottningholmsv?gen back into the city, she reaches for the drink she got from McDonald’s, pulls the lid off and sticks her hand in among the ice cubes. She puts a handful in her mouth and chews them greedily before swallowing.
There’s nothing purer than water that has frozen. The isotopes are cleansed of earthly dirt and become receptive to cosmic signals. If she eats enough of the frozen water, it will spread through her body and change its properties. Make her brain sharper.
Denmark, 1994
I bring plenty of water to flow in the stream, so that it skips and rushes.
I bring lots of swallows that fly, and midges for the swallows.
I bring new leaves for the trees, and little birds’ nests here and there.
I make the evening sky beautiful, because I make it so rosy.
SHE WIGGLED THE loose tooth up to the left. It was getting close to coming out, not now, but maybe this evening.
She closed her mouth. It tasted of blood and stung like ice.
The tooth fairy had given her five hundred kronor. One hundred for every tooth she put under her pillow. She’d saved the money in her secret box, the one under the bed that now contained six hundred and twenty-seven kronor, what with the money she had taken from the pig farmer.
She had spent the whole summer with him, and this was the third time her foster-parents had come to visit. She never called them Mum and Dad, because they weren’t her real parents. Calling them Per-Ola and Charlotte were also out of the question, because they might get the idea that she respected them. Instead she called them ‘you’ and ‘you’.
This time they had their friends from Sweden with them.