Stallo (50 page)

The boiler room. He would have to go down to the boiler room. Why had he not thought of that earlier?

His footsteps echoing with determination, Seved went into the hall and put on his boots. Then he ran outside and down the snow-covered concrete stairs to the cellar. When he pushed open the door he could hear the boiler burning at full force. Börje must have loaded more logs into it a short while ago. The ceiling was low, so he walked with his head bent towards the heat of the boiler.

He opened the iron lid and raised his hand to drop the mouse into the fire. He was not entirely sure what happened next. He threw, he knew that, but somehow the mouse did not leave his hand. Instead it shot up his sleeve and from there jumped down
to the floor. In his haste to get the killing over with as quickly as possible Seved had not bothered to close the cellar door behind him, and he watched as the little creature ran over the high threshold and was gone.

Susso had pulled out the yellowing newspaper articles and spread them over the envelope to get them in order.

Gudrun gave her a quick glance.

‘The fact that the squirrel exists and is sitting here in our car after all these years suggests that what Esther told Sven was true. It doesn’t prove it but it
suggests
it. Doesn’t it? In which case there is no reason to doubt Magnus’s mother when she says a giant came out of the forest and took her child.’

‘I want to know what happened to the Vaikijaur man,’ Susso said. ‘I mean, that’s why we came down here. It was for Mattias’s sake. I don’t actually care about Magnus. That was twenty-five years ago.’

‘But it could be the same kidnapper.’

Susso sighed and pulled off her hat.

‘Are you sure Dahllöf’s daughter doesn’t know something else? Something she’s not telling us?’

‘Pretty sure.’

‘But he can’t have just disappeared!’

‘What do you mean?’

Susso thumped her thigh with the side of her hand.

‘Where did he go after he ran out onto Björkudden?’

‘I don’t know. But perhaps the squirrel does. Or Mona?’

*

They had driven out of the city. The sky had sunk lower and sleet was striking the windscreen. In the ditches framing the farmland, rushes had sprung up in tight clumps and Susso thought it was weird seeing rushes growing like that in the middle of a field. She looked down at the mosaic of newspaper articles on her lap but had little desire to read them, and soon her eyes returned to the window. A feeling of nausea was building up inside her.

‘Phone Cecilia again,’ Gudrun said, pressing one nostril closed with a knuckle and blowing air out of the other one.

‘I’m sure she’s all right,’ Susso said weakly.

‘But why doesn’t she answer then?’

‘There are probably lots of customers. Maybe she hasn’t got time.’

‘She always answers her mobile.’

‘Can you stop for a minute …’

Gudrun glanced at her and then took a second look. Immediately she slowed down and swung into a lay-by.

Susso gathered together the cuttings, pushed the envelope behind the briefcase, opened the door and climbed out. She filled her lungs with fresh, damp air. They had just driven across a bridge. There was open country on all sides and the pine forest was keeping its distance like a dark, watchful army. In the withered and flattened grass on the roadside lay a cracked hubcap, and an angelica plant looking like a charred spire had snared a plastic bag that was rustling in the wind.

Torbjörn also got out but he left the squirrel in the car. He zipped up his hooded sweatshirt and looked at her, his eyes narrowed in the wind.

‘Not feeling so good?’ he asked.

Susso shook her head and stepped aside to avoid being splashed by a large white car that roared past them.

‘I don’t know what it is.’

‘Do you think it’s the squirrel? Because I don’t feel too good either.’

‘Don’t you?’

He shook his head as he swallowed. Then he leaned forwards and spat on the tarmac. Susso opened the car door and bent in to ask her mother if she was also feeling ill, but Gudrun was talking on the phone, and judging from her sharp, animated voice it was not a good time to interrupt her. No doubt she had got hold of Cecilia and had one or two things to tell her.

‘I felt like this the night I was followed in the park, and when we were out with the snowmobile at Holmajärvi, right before those guys leapt on us. I thought it was a migraine or something.’

‘You never told me.’

‘I didn’t know what it was, did I?’

Torbjörn took out his snus tin. He twisted off the lid, took out a pouch and lifted his upper lip in preparation, but then he stopped. A thought had occurred to him and he stood for a moment, holding the snus before finally inserting it in his mouth.

‘The bat,’ he said.

‘Oh yes,’ Susso said. ‘That makes sense. But where did it come from?’

Torbjörn looked at her.

‘Have you still got the film you took?’

He started hunting for his phone as the car door slammed. Gudrun came running round the bonnet of the car. She was holding the collar of her down jacket together to keep out the cold wind.

‘The shop has been closed all day and Ella hasn’t been to nursery! And Tommy hasn’t been able to get hold of Cecilia either.’

‘Do you feel ill?’ asked Susso.

‘Tommy’s going round to her place now,’ Gudrun said, and held up the phone as if to double check it was not ringing. ‘Oh God, think if something’s happened? And what about Ella!’

Susso folded her arms.

‘She’s probably just not well.’

‘But why isn’t she answering her phone!’

‘What about you? How are you feeling?’

‘Well, I’m worried of course!’

‘Yes, but how
are
you? Have you got a headache? Do you feel sick? Because both me and Torbjörn feel ill, and we think it’s because of the squirrel.’

‘Oh yes, blame the squirrel. You’ve both just got hangovers.’

‘Do you remember I asked you if you had ever had a migraine?’ Susso said. ‘After I had been followed in the park? This is something similar, and Torbjörn feels it too.’

‘That’s not so strange,’ said Gudrun, ‘if it’s true what Torbjörn says about the squirrel talking inside his head.’

‘He doesn’t talk exactly …’

‘Communicate then.’

‘But haven’t you noticed anything?’ asked Susso. ‘That it hurts?’

Gudrun shook her head.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, turning out of the wind. ‘Maybe a little. It’s hard to say what’s causing it, after everything that has happened. It gives me a headache just thinking of everything Barbro told us, and that the squirrel, that squirrel in our car, is supposed to be the same one John Bauer brought back with him from Lapland a hundred years ago.’

She took out her lip balm and rubbed it over her lips.

‘It’s not easy to take it all in. So of course my head aches.’

At first Seved thought it was the boy standing at the top of the steps, short and with narrow, sloping shoulders, legs pressed tight together. Then he saw the ancient face like a pale speck in the hood’s opening. The sharp yellow eyes.

Seved stopped momentarily and then backed up and almost tripped over the threshold. He knew only too well what was being held in the hand hidden in the sleeve of the anorak and pressed up against the old man’s chest. Now he was in trouble.

The old man stared at him. His grey lips were parted and the canine teeth of his lower jaw pointed upwards like two spikes. They looked worn. Between them protruded the tip of his tongue. He was wearing canvas shoes and he placed the old battered soles carefully in the snow that lay thick on the flight of steps.

‘What do you want?’ asked Seved from inside the gloom of the boiler room, where he had taken refuge. He tried to sound harsh but his fear of the foxshifter had a stranglehold on his vocal cords.

‘Flee. You must flee.’

The cracked voice sounded so strange that it was impossible to tell if this was an accusation or an order. He had heard the forest folk talk, listened to their squeaky chattering, but it was only a lot of nonsense. Bits of words he hardly understood. But this was directed at him.

‘You flee. And then he will destroy. He will tear down.’

The words had been spoken inside Seved’s head and nowhere else, and that frightened him. He had never experienced forest folk talking like this before. The old man drilled deeper and deeper inside him, and he had nowhere to run.

‘Kills. He kills.’

Seved backed up until his shoulder came up against the enamelled curve of the hot-water tank. He could go no further in the cluttered cellar.

The old foxshifter had come to a halt. He was standing motionless in the doorway, watching him. His tail had found its way out of the long jacket and was moving freely and furtively behind his legs. It was not red exactly, more a grey colour, but the tip was as white as if he had dipped it in a pot of paint.

‘But we’re not running away.’

‘You flee. And he kills.’

Not until then did it occur to Seved that the old man might not have come to hurt him, or even rebuke him. If that was the case, he would have done it already. Instead it seemed as if he was trying to help. But it could be some kind of mischief. Skabram could have sent him.

‘Then what shall we do?’ he mumbled.

There was no answer. The old man had shuffled up to the boiler. He tilted his head to one side and knocked on the green-painted casing as if to test it, whispering something only the forest mouse could hear. It had dug its claws into the old man’s shoulder and was hanging on, its tail dangling like a hook, and it was also looking at the boiler.

‘There’s burning.’

Seved took a step sideways. He was not thinking of escaping
exactly but he wanted to be in a position to do so if the old foxshifter turned nasty. He knew how cunning they could be.

‘See how it burns. When it burns.’

What did he mean?

‘See how the fire bites at your fur. Biting, biting.’

I was scared to death of meeting Mona Brodin. I imagined a wreck, a person eaten up with guilt and suppressed grief. She must have had to distance herself from all her memories to be able to go on – buried them, more or less like Jerring had done. In one way it was surprising she was still alive. If it was true she had been abusing prescription drugs at the time of her son’s disappearance, then it was not difficult to work out how she would have chosen to deal with his loss and the doubt in her own mind about what she had experienced.

What happens to you if you can no longer trust your own eyes? Dad had asked that question often, but at least he had his camera with him. What had Mona Brodin had? What proof did she have to challenge the disbelief she faced? The
suspicions
directed at her? With a burden like that there was only one thing to do, and that was to betray herself and try to create someone new.

How would she react when we appeared and raked it all up again?

However, my fear of meeting Mona Brodin was put aside when I found out the shop had been closed all day. Instead I sat there trying to work out what could have happened to Cecilia. What if the people who had attacked Susso were not driven by a hatred for her but for our whole family? Maybe they thought we were all involved in the website – which in a way we were. I was on the
point of calling the police in Kiruna to make them aware of that when I heard my mobile’s ring tone. It was Tommy, saying that Cecilia was at home watching a video with Ella and wanted to be left alone. She’d had all her hair cut off and Tommy thought she was unhappy about it and didn’t want to show herself in public. My relief was so great that I wasn’t at all nervous by the time we pulled up outside Mona Brodin’s house.

It looked neat and very ordinary: painted red wood panelling, black concrete roofing tiles and house plants on the windowsills. Behind a fence were apple trees with bird feeders, a small greenhouse and a vegetable garden. There were two cars, one big and one small, a guest cottage, a flagpole with a faded pennant catching the wind, and a couple of bird boxes on an oak tree on the slope leading to the edge of the pine woods.

A man wearing blue overalls came out of the cellar door and stared at us.

Torbjörn wondered if he should bring the squirrel.

‘I think we’ll save that for later,’ I said, and opened the door.

He greeted them by imperceptibly lifting his chin, and when Gudrun asked if Mona was home he walked slowly towards them on the gravel, wanting to know what it was about. He was in his fifties and had light-grey hair combed in a centre parting. He seemed more suspicious than hostile. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his fleece.