‘It’s too windy,’ Milla hissed.
The voices came closer and closer. Snow began to drift down between the planks as the two men walked out onto the jetty.
‘Nice place your cousin’s got here,’ said the one with the boxer’s nose.
‘Yes, these lakeside properties don’t come onto the market very often. It certainly wasn’t cheap, and Göran’s spent a fortune doing it up.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Fuck knows – something involving stocks and shares.’
The footsteps paused directly above the girls. They could see the soles of the men’s shoes through the gaps. Laura felt as if her bladder was about to burst.
The shorter officer cleared his throat. ‘Shall we make a move, Bengt?’
As the men walked away Laura let go of Milla and fumbled with her jeans and knickers. Just as she squatted down the lights went out. The relief almost made her weep.
After about five minutes they crawled out from under the jetty. Everywhere was dark and silent.
‘What’s happened to the boys?’
The door of the shed opened slowly and Tomas emerged, followed by Peter, who closed the door carefully before joining them.
‘Let’s get out of here.’
Tomas kept going, straight down to the ice. His backpack looked well filled. Milla set off after him, but Laura waited for Peter. His body language had changed. As he drew closer, she became aware of something else. Peter smelled of petrol.
‘What happened in there?’ she said quietly when they reached the ice.
‘Tomas decided to have some fun. Picked up a can of petrol and started splashing it around inside the shed. Said he was going to burn the whole place down if we got caught. I had to tear the lighter out of his hands. Fuck knows what would have happened if I hadn’t.’
Laura looked at Tomas, leading the way with Milla. Saw them talking to each other, just as she and Peter were doing.
‘Tomas isn’t well,’ Peter said. ‘Milla’s playing games with him. If nobody stops this, something terrible is going to happen.’
38
‘At approximately what time did you see an unknown person in the forest last night?’
‘About two o’clock,’ Laura says for the third time.
Peter has already dealt with all the obvious questions, returned to them wrapped in new speculations. Now he’s on the third round.
‘Why did Kent Rask feel threatened by the Jensen family?’
‘They were after Tomas.’
‘Still? After all these years?’
‘That’s what Kent said.’
Peter is mixing things up, jumping from questions about the fires to the events in the holiday village instead of sticking to the timeline as he did during the first two rounds. It comes across as slightly unprofessional, but in fact it’s a skilfully delivered interrogation technique that she herself sometimes uses when interviewing candidates. Lies are easier to remember in a certain context, and if she was lying she would have started to find it difficult to keep a handle on what she had and hadn’t said.
But Laura hasn’t lied. She’s just omitted a couple of details. Hedda’s board. Tomas’s letters.
No one was meant to get hurt.
But things didn’t turn out the way we expected.
‘When were you last in the apartment above the boathouse?’
‘On Friday.’
‘What did you do there?’
‘Poked around, relived old memories.’
Peter gives her a long look.
‘Did you lock the door when you left?’
‘I don’t remember. Maybe not – there was nothing in there that was worth keeping under lock and key.’
‘The petrol can and the bag of insulating material?’
‘As I said before, they weren’t there on Friday. I’ve never seen or touched them.’
She’s irritated now, and can’t be bothered to hide it. The situation is absurd to say the least. Thirty years ago they were in a similar room, at the hospital. She and Peter and the lawyer from Stockholm, facing Bengt Sandberg. The difference now is that she and Peter are on opposite sides of the table.
She tries in vain to avoid looking at the man sitting in the corner, watching them. Sandberg hasn’t really changed, which isn’t surprising. He was already an adult when they last met.
He ought to be nearing retirement age, but he doesn’t have the air of a man who’s simply serving his time until he reaches sixty-five. His eyes are sharp, his body toned. He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt in the middle of winter; a long white scar is visible on one forearm. On his left hand is a large signet ring, but no wedding ring. Laura thinks back to their first encounter in Hedda’s yard, the flowers and magazines in the car that she pointed out to Milla in a stupid attempt to impress her. Sandberg’s wife was in hospital then, so maybe he’s a widower – or divorced. Married to the job, like her. She feels his eyes on her. Sandberg frightened the life out of her when she was fifteen, and reluctantly she has to admit that he’s having much the same effect on her now, even though she’s forty-five.
Peter has finished going through the questions for the third time. Judging by his body language, there won’t be a fourth. Håkansson shuffles on his chair beside her.
Sandberg gets to his feet in a surprisingly smooth movement. He comes to the side of the table and leans forward, over Peter as much as over her. She can smell his aftershave.
‘Has anything else happened, Laura?’ he asks. ‘Something you’ve come across in the last few days that you haven’t told us?’
His eyes bore into hers.
She glances at Peter. Is he the one Tomas was referring to in his letter? Is it Peter who makes up ‘we’? Thanks to Elsa, she knows they’re in touch.
‘Thirty years, Laura,’ Sandberg continues. ‘You were more talkative back then. So was Larsson here, come to think of it.’
He moves behind Peter and places his big hands on Peter’s shoulders. Peter stares down at the table. Laura would like to do the same, but forces herself to meet Sandberg’s gaze.
‘Tomas Rask confessed as soon as he heard you’d named him. His best friends.’
Peter’s lips have gone white.
‘There hasn’t been a single incidence of arson around Vintersjön in thirty years,’ Sandberg goes on. ‘But Laura Aulin turns up, and suddenly we have two in as many days. We can live with Kent Rask’s barn, to be honest. An old curmudgeon like him has probably brought it on himself – several times over. But when someone attacks a pillar of the community like Ulf Jensen, that rings alarm bells. I’ve had both the chief of police and the governor of the county on the phone, which is why I’d like to be aware of the progress of the investigation. Plus, of course, it’s given me the chance to catch up with a couple of old friends.’
He releases his grip on Peter’s shoulders.
‘So. Tomas Rask has made a career as an arsonist. Do we know if he’s still detained at the taxpayers’ expense?’
‘He’s been out for about a year,’ Peter says.
‘Last known address?’
‘He’s registered just outside Skövde, at a sheltered accommodation complex for people with . . . problems. But according to the staff, no one’s seen him for a month or so.’
‘Which means that theoretically it could be our old friend Tomas Rask who’s sneaking around in the forest. Could it have been him you saw at Gärdsnäset?’
‘Maybe . . .’
Laura tries to recall the figure she thought she saw among the trees, but instead Kent Rask pops into her mind. Tomas isn’t right in the head. God knows I’ve tried to knock some sense into him, in every possible way. Sometimes to the point where my fists hurt.