Loe raamatut: «The Preacher»

2
SUMMER 1979

She was wobbling badly as she pedalled homewards in the bright midsummer night. The party had been a bit wilder than she’d expected, but that didn’t matter. She was grown-up, after all, so she could do as she liked. The best part was getting away from the kid for a while. The baby with all her shrieking, her need for tenderness and demands for something she couldn’t give. It was because of the baby, after all, that she still had to live at home with her mother, with the old lady who hardly let her go a few yards away from the house, even though she was nineteen years old. It was a miracle that she’d been allowed to go out tonight to celebrate Midsummer’s Eve.

If she hadn’t had the kid she could have had her own place by now; she could be earning her own money. She could have gone out whenever she liked and come home when she felt like it, and nobody would have said a word. But with the kid that was impossible. She would have preferred to give her up for adoption, but the old lady wouldn’t hear of it, and now she was the one who had to pay the price. If her mother wanted to keep the kid so much, why couldn’t she take care of her alone?

The old lady was really going to be furious when she came rolling in like this in the wee hours of the morning. Her breath stank of alcohol, and she would surely be made to pay for that later. But it was worth it. She hadn’t had this much fun since the brat was born.

She bicycled straight through the intersection by the petrol station and continued a bit up the road. Then she turned off to the left towards Bräcke but lost her balance and almost went into the ditch. She straightened out the wheel and pedalled harder to get a little head start up the first steep hill. The wind riffled through her hair, and the light summer night was utterly quiet. For a moment she closed her eyes and thought about that bright summer night when the German had got her pregnant. It had been a wonderful and forbidden night, but not worth the price she finally had to pay.

Suddenly she opened her eyes as the bike hit something. The last thing she remembered was the ground rushing towards her at great speed.

Back at the station in Tanumshede, Mellberg was sunk in uncharacteristically deep thought. Patrik didn’t say much either as he sat across from him in the lunchroom, pondering the morning’s events. It was actually too warm to be drinking coffee, but he needed something stimulating, and alcohol was hardly suitable. Both men absentmindedly flapped their shirts up and down to cool off. The air-conditioning had been broken for two weeks now, and they still hadn’t had anyone out to fix it. In the morning the temperature was usually tolerable, but around noon the heat began to climb to unbearable levels.

‘What the hell is this all about?’ said Mellberg as he scratched cautiously at the nest of hair that was coiled on top of his head to hide his bald pate.

‘I have no idea, to be honest with you. A woman’s body was found lying on top of two skeletons. If someone hadn’t actually been killed, I would have thought it was some sort of prank. Skeletons stolen from a biology lab or something. But there’s no getting round the fact that the woman was murdered. I heard a comment from one of the Forensics as well – he said the bones didn’t look fresh. Of course that could be due to where they’ve been lying. They might have been exposed to wind and weather or they might have been protected. I hope the ME can give some estimate as to how old they are.’

‘All right, when do you think we can expect the first report from him?’ Mellberg frowned anxiously.

‘We’ll probably get a preliminary report today, then it will take a couple of days for him to go over everything in more detail. So for the time being we’ll have to work on whatever evidence we’ve got. Where are the others?’

Mellberg sighed. ‘Gösta is off today. Some damn golf tournament or something. Ernst and Martin are out on an investigation. Annika is on some Greek island. She probably thought it was going to rain all summer again. Poor thing. It can’t have been fun to leave Sweden right now with this great weather we’re having.’

Patrik gave Mellberg another surprised look and wondered at this unusual expression of sympathy. Something funny was going on, that was for sure. But he couldn’t take the time to worry about it now. They had more important things to think about.

‘I know you’re on holiday for the rest of this week, but would you mind coming in and helping out on the case?’ Mellberg asked. ‘Ernst isn’t imaginative enough and Martin is too inexperienced to lead an investigation, so we could really use your help.’

The request was so flattering to Patrik’s vanity that he found himself saying yes on the spot. Of course he would catch hell for it at home, but he consoled himself with the fact that it would take no longer than fifteen minutes to get home if Erica needed him in a hurry. Besides, they’d been getting on each other’s nerves in the heat, so it might be a good idea for him to be out of the house.

‘First I’d like to find out whether any woman has been reported missing,’ said Patrik. ‘We should check a fairly wide area, say from Strömstad down to Göteborg. I’ll ask Martin or Ernst to do it. I thought I heard them come in.’

‘That’s good, a great idea. That’s the right spirit, keep it up!’ Mellberg got up from the table and cheerfully slapped Patrik on the shoulder. Patrik realized that he would be the one doing the work, as usual, while Mellberg once again took all the credit. But he no longer got upset about that; it wasn’t worth it.

With a sigh he put both of their coffee cups in the dishwasher. He wasn’t going to need to put on any sunblock today.

‘All right, everybody up! Do you think this is some sort of bloody boarding-house where you can lie about all day long?’

The voice cut through thick layers of fog and echoed painfully against his temples. Stefan cautiously opened one eye but closed it the instant he saw the blinding glare of the summer sun.

‘What the hell …’ Robert, his older brother by one year, turned over in bed and put the pillow over his head. It was abruptly yanked out of his grasp and he sat up, muttering.

‘Can’t I ever sleep in a little at this place?’

‘You two slackers sleep in every single day. It’s almost noon. If you didn’t stay up late gadding about every night and doing God knows what, maybe you wouldn’t have to sleep half the day. I actually need a little help around this place. You live here for free and you eat for free too, and both of you are grown men. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to give your poor mother a helping hand.’

Solveig Hult stood with her arms crossed. She was morbidly obese, with the pallor of someone who never goes outside. Her hair was filthy, framing her face with straggly, dark locks.

‘You’re almost thirty years old and still living off your mother. Yeah, you’re real he-men, all right. And how can you afford to run around partying every single night, if I may ask? You don’t work and I never see you contributing anything to the household expenses. All I can say is that if your father were still alive, he’d put a stop to this behaviour. Have you heard anything from the Job Centre yet? You were supposed to go down there week before last!’

Now it was Stefan’s turn to put the pillow over his face. He tried to block out the endless nagging; she was like a broken record. But his pillow was yanked away too. He sat up, hung over, his head pounding like a marching band.

‘I put away the breakfast things long ago. You’ll have to find something in the fridge yourselves.’

Solveig’s huge posterior waddled out of the little room that the brothers still shared, and she slammed the door behind her. They didn’t dare try to go back to sleep, but took out a packet of cigarettes and each lit a fag. They could skip breakfast, but the fag lifted their spirits and gave them a nice burn in the throat.

‘What a fucking blast last night, eh?’ Robert laughed and blew smoke rings in the air. ‘I told you they’d have great stuff at home. He’s a director of some company in Stockholm. Thank God guys like that can afford the best.’

Stefan didn’t answer. Unlike his big brother, he never got an adrenaline rush from the break-ins. Instead he went about for days both before and after a job with a big cold lump of fear in his stomach. But he always did as Robert said; it never occurred to him that he could do anything different.

Yesterday’s break-in had given them the biggest payday they’d had in a long time. Most people had grown more wary of leaving expensive things in their summer houses; they used mainly their old junk that they would have otherwise thrown out, or finds from jumble sales that made them feel they’d made a coup even though the items weren’t worth a shit. But yesterday they’d got hold of a new TV, a DVD player, a Nintendo, and a bunch of jewellery belonging to the lady of the house. Robert was going to sell the stuff through his usual channels, and it would bring a pretty penny. Not that it would last them very long. Stolen money always burned a hole in their pockets, and after a couple of weeks it would be gone. They spent it on gambling, going out and treating their friends, and other necessary expenses. Stefan looked at the pricey watch he was wearing. Luckily their mother couldn’t recognize anything valuable when she saw it. If she knew what this watch cost, the nagging would never stop.

Sometimes he felt trapped like a hamster on a wheel, going round and round as the years passed by. Nothing had really changed since he and his brother were teenagers, and he saw no possibilities now, either. The one thing that gave his life meaning was the only thing he had ever kept secret from Robert. An instinct deep inside told him that no good would come of confiding in his brother. Robert would only turn it into something dirty with his rude remarks.

For a second Stefan allowed himself to think about how soft her hair was against his rough cheek, and how small her hand felt when he held it between his own.

‘Hey, don’t just sit there daydreaming. We’ve got business to take care of.’

Robert got up with his cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and headed out the door first. As usual, Stefan followed, which was all he knew how to do.

In the kitchen Solveig was sitting in her usual place. Ever since Stefan was a little boy, since that incident with his father, he had seen her sitting on her chair by the window as her fingers eagerly fiddled with whatever was in front of her on the table. In his earliest memories his mother was beautiful, but over the years the fat had accumulated in thicker and thicker layers on her face and body.

Solveig looked as if she were sitting there in a trance; her fingers lived their own life, incessantly plucking at things and then smoothing them out. For almost twenty years she had messed about with those fucking photo albums, sorting and resorting them. She bought new albums and then re-arranged the photos and news clippings. Better, more elegantly. He wasn’t so stupid that he didn’t understand that it was her way of holding on to happier times, but someday surely she would see that those days were long gone.

The pictures were from the days when Solveig was beautiful. The high point of her life had been when she married Johannes Hult, the youngest son of Ephraim Hult, the noted Free Church pastor and owner of the most prosperous farm in the region. Johannes was handsome and rich. Solveig may have been poor, but she was the most beautiful girl in all of Bohuslän; that’s what everyone said at the time. And if further proof were needed, the articles she had saved from when she was crowned Queen of the May two years in a row would suffice. It was those articles, and the many black-and-white photos of herself as a young girl, that she had carefully preserved and sorted every day for the past twenty years. She knew that the girl was still there somewhere beneath all the layers of fat. Through the photos she could keep the girl alive, even though she was slipping further and further away with each passing year.

With a last look over his shoulder, Stefan left his mother sitting in the kitchen and followed Robert out the door. As Robert said, they had business to take care of.

Erica considered going out for a walk, but realized that it probably wasn’t such a good idea right now, with the sun at its peak and the heat most intense. She’d done splendidly throughout her entire pregnancy until the heat wave set in. Since then, she went about like a sweaty whale, desperately trying to find a way to cool off. Patrik, God bless him, had come up with the idea of buying her a table fan, and now she carried it about with her like a treasure wherever she went in the house. The only drawback was that she had to plug it in, so she could never sit further from an outlet than the cord would reach, which limited her choices.

But on the veranda the outlet was perfectly placed, and she could settle down on the sofa with the fan on the table in front of her. No position was comfortable for more than five minutes, which made her keep shifting to find a better position. Sometimes she felt a foot kicking at her ribs, or else something that felt like a hand punching her in the side. Then she was forced to change position again. She had no idea how she was going to stand another month of this.

She and Patrik had only been together for half a year when she got pregnant, but oddly enough it hadn’t upset either of them. They were both a little older, a little more certain of what they wanted, and they didn’t think there was any reason to wait. Only now was she starting to get cold feet, at the eleventh hour, so to speak. Perhaps they’d not shared enough everyday life before they embarked upon this pregnancy. What would happen to their relationship when they were suddenly presented with a tiny stranger who required all the attention they’d been able to devote to each other before?

The crazy, blind infatuation of their early days together had faded, of course. They had a more realistic, everyday foundation to build on now, with better insight into each other’s good and bad sides. But after the baby was born, what if only the bad sides were left? How many times had she heard the statistics about all the relationships that fizzled out during the first year of a baby’s life? Well, there was no use worrying about it now. What’s done is done, and there was no getting around the fact that both she and Patrik were longing for the arrival of this child with every fibre of their bodies. She hoped that sense of longing would be enough to get them through the turbulent changes ahead.

Erica gave a start when the telephone rang. Laboriously she struggled to get up from the sofa, hoping that whoever was calling had enough patience not to hang up.

‘Yes, hello? … Oh, hi, Conny … Oh, I’m fine, thanks, it’s just a little too hot to be fat … Drop by? Sure, of course … Come on over for coffee … Spend the night? Well …’ Erica sighed inside. ‘Of course, why not? When are you coming? Tonight? Well no, it’s no problem at all. You can sleep in the guest room.’

Wearily she hung up the receiver. There was one big drawback to having a house in Fjällbacka in the summertime. All sorts of relatives and friends – who hadn’t uttered a peep during the ten colder months of the year – would pop up out of the blue. They weren’t particularly interested in seeing her in November, but in July they saw their chance to live rent-free with an ocean view. Erica had thought that they might be spared this year, when half of July passed without a word from anyone. But now her cousin Conny said he was on his way to Fjällbacka from Trollhättan with his wife and two kids. It was only for one night, so she supposed she could handle it. She’d never been that fond of either of her two cousins, but her upbringing made it impossible to refuse to take them in, even when that was what she wanted to do. In her opinion, they were both freeloaders.