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  Tell went on: 'I need to know, as accurately as possible, what time it was when you arrived at the garage and found the body.'

  Åke cleared his throat.

  'Er… I, or rather we, left home - we're neighbours, you see - at half past six. I know that for sure because I saw the six-thirty bus at the stop.'

  Happy now because he had managed to be helpful, give concrete information. Then he frowned.

  'I was driving quite slowly, of course, because as I said there was something wrong with the car. The exhaust pipe fell off up by the petrol station. It must have taken me a while to tie it back on. Twenty minutes, maybe. Then I looked -1 mean we looked for the garage…'

  'So you did know the place?'

  'No… well, I knew it must be around here somewhere, if it was still open. I'd only driven past it before, seen the sign, and that was a few years ago. I usually go to Christer. Or sometimes I go to Nordén Son in Lerum. I've always-'

  'So that was all the two of you did: you drove up to the main road and made the call. So can we make a rough guess that you found the body say ten or fifteen minutes before you called?'

  Åke nodded again.

  'Yes, I think I - I mean we - sat at the bus stop for a while, but it can't have been long. Just to gather my thoughts. I mean I was in shock, you understand. I realise I should have stayed here, of course, until you arrived, but… I wasn't even thinking. I just wanted to get away. It didn't even occur to me that I had a telephone with me. I haven't had one long, but my wife-'

  'It's perfectly fine, I realise the first impulse is to get away,' said Tell reassuringly. Åke seemed to relax slightly. He took a gulp of his coffee and crossed his legs.

  Tell leaned forward.

  'I want you to tell me exactly what happened, as accurately as you can. Did you see anything in particular? Did you hear anything? Did anything seem odd? Whatever comes to mind.'

  While Åke Melkersson took his time formulating his reply, Tell spotted Karlberg chatting to the doctor who had certified the death. The medics were getting ready to move the body into the ambulance, and Tell considered asking them to wait. He would have liked to go over the way the man was lying one more time before they moved him, but decided to let it go.

  Reluctantly he turned his attention back to the disparate couple in front of him, just in time to see Seja cast a pleading look at Åke. She shrugged her shoulders.

  'I didn't really see anything other than what Åke has already told you.'

  'Can we just go through it once more, Åke.'

  'The house looked empty but the door of the workshop was open. There was a light on inside. I went in to have a look, I called out but nobody answered. The radio was on - Soothing Favourites. I usually listen to that myself.'

  'Good. That's something else. And where were you, Seja, when Åke went off to look for help?'

  'In the car. I stayed in the car, so I didn't see… the dead man.' If you're going to lie successfully, say as little as possible.

  Tell nodded slowly. When she didn't go on he turned back to Åke, who picked up where he had left off.

  'I decided to take a walk around and see what was happening. I mean It seemed as if somebody was there, or had been there not long ago.'

  Åke pointed in the direction of the yard by tapping on the van window.

  'And then I saw him. He was just lying there. I could see straight «way that he was dead. I didn't get too close… then I think I… brought up my breakfast. It happened so suddenly, I mean you don't expect to find someone, not like that…'

  'It's perfectly understandable, Åke. Perfectly understandable.'

  Tell had taken out a notebook and started jotting down some points. The colour had come back to Åke's cheeks, and he had regained his confidence. He risked a question.

  'I was just wondering… He'd been shot, hadn't he? Someone shot him and then ran over him?'

  Tell glanced up from his notes and pushed his fringe out of his eyes.

  'It's up to the pathologist to establish the cause of death. But he's definitely been shot, so we can assume that's what killed him.'

  He took a packet of cigarettes from his inside pocket and shook one out with an apologetic smile. Seja noticed he had a crooked front tooth, which made him look younger.

  'It's not acceptable to smoke anywhere these days, but if you don't mind I'm going to have a couple of drags.'

  He smiled again, slightly embarrassed, and turned away to exhale the smoke, which immediately filled the small space. Seja felt her nausea welling up, like a delayed reaction, and suddenly she was enormously and irrationally irritated with this ugly, attractive, smug man who clearly thought the world was there for his convenience, although he did stub out the cigarette after two drags.

  'So, back to your story… Åke, you said the car broke down and you couldn't drive it from the bus stop where you made the phone call. So the car you arrived in just now, that's not the one that broke down?'

  'No. I had to leave the Opel up there by the road. I didn't have anything else to secure the exhaust pipe with.'

  'I understand. But the person who came to help you, I presume that person was driving the dark blue Hyundai you just arrived in?' He looked out through the steamed-up window. The Hyundai was in full view a little way off. 'Who does the car belong to?'

  He's looking at the registration number.

  'Me,' said Seja quickly.

  Her impulse was to stand up and walk out.

  'So someone borrowed your car to come out and pick you up. Did you drop that person off somewhere, before you came here?'

  Åke gasped for breath a little too loudly and nodded.

  'Exactly. In Hjällbo. It was my wife, Kristina. Her sister lives in Hjällbo, so I dropped her off there. We dropped her off there.'

  His face was now quite red, and a vein was throbbing in his temple just below the edge of his fur hat. Seja was just about to put a stop to the whole charade by explaining what had really happened, that she was to blame because she was so insanely curious, that she had wanted to write a crime report or just to see a dead body, but then Tell closed his notebook.

  'I noticed that the back seats were folded down.'

  The comment broke Seja's train of thought.

  'I had horse fodder in the back.'

  She knocked over her coffee cup, which contained only the last few dregs. A thin stream ran towards the edge of the table and dripped on to her knee. Christian Tell passed her some toilet roll.

  'Where was Kristina sitting?' he said.

  'Kristina?' said Seja stupidly.

  Tell nodded.

  'Where was Kristina sitting, if you were driving and Åke was sitting next to you and the back seats were folded down?'

  Seja wiped her trouser leg with exaggerated care. She sighed when the silence became too much for her.

  'Nowhere,' she admitted. 'She wasn't with us. I lied because I didn't want to leave Åke alone.'

  Tell nodded tersely.

  'Right, let's start from the beginning. And let's have the truth this time.'

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  1993

  Once upon a time there was a workhouse close to a mountain lake; apart from the house there were only gravel tracks covering the forest landscape like a spider's web.

  The red three-storey house with its high stone foundations still sits there on the edge of the forest. The lake still reflects the clouds when there is not a breath of wind. The gravel area in front of the house is just the same, apart from the fact that three cars have been carelessly parked there, their paintwork dulled by the dust from the road. On the side of the minibus it says STENSJO FOLK HIGH SCHOOL, and something else that has been eroded to the point of illegibility. And it is also Stensjö Folk High School that is filling up all the rooms. She will soon be familiar with the history of the house. She will also find out that it is boiling hot in the summer beneath the roof beams - she will be one of the few who do not leave Stensjö during the su
mmer break. In the winter an open fire burns in the common room on the ground floor, but its warmth does not find its way up to the boarders' bedrooms. The electric radiators are of course turned up to maximum, but they barely keep the worst of the cold at bay.

  It has taken Maya almost a whole day to get there, travelling by bus and train up through the country. It is a cleansing process: she is leaving Borås with its suburbs and outlying areas and the strategies she has so far employed in order to get by. No one knows where she is going, well, her family does, but no one in her circle of acquaintances. As far as they are concerned she has disappeared in a puff of smoke. Perhaps she is letting people down, but no one would be able to take her to task for that. After all, it is a well-known fact that morality is closely linked to the risk of discovery.

  She is not quite eighteen, and three years seems an absolute eternity. No one will even remember her when she goes back, if she ever does go back. All the people to whom she has been so closely bound during those turbulent teenage years will have entered the adult world they know so little of as yet. A world they want to forswear, nevertheless, as if it were a matter of life and death. They think they are defending themselves against the boring, middle-class mentality of adulthood, but in fact it is their childhood they are fighting against.

  The idea of flight has always been like a balm to her soul, often with the help of drugs: hash, trips and amphetamine bombs rolled in scraps of cigarette paper and swallowed with a glass of water. Now she is running away with the feeling that this is her last chance. That she is jumping on the last train to somewhere completely unknown. It is terrifying, but not as terrifying as what she knows is waiting if she stays in town: the meetings with stiff-necked social workers; the youth centre with its employment training programme because she dropped out of grammar school; in the long term, a residential facility for young people.

  And she would continue to pretend to fit in with her friends while at the same time feeling a marked distance that only she seemed to see: those last few inches of closeness that were simply not there. She had chosen the security of the gang because she felt even more of an outsider with everyone else. And her circle of acquaintances has at least formed some kind of fixed point, even if it is more apparent than structured. They have made something of having grown up in the wake of prog music, freshly plucked from both the hippie movement and punk; they have been political in those contexts where it attracts attention, running the gauntlet at every opportunity to demonstrate, going barefoot or sitting cross-legged on the streets in the town centre. Hut the drugs have a definite tendency to take over.

  She has never been afraid of ending up an addict; the drugs were to make her happier, to enable her to stay awake at night, to have the courage to be against something or for something. She has never been afraid of getting hooked on them, only of getting hooked on the rest of it - never being able to move on, suddenly realising one day that she has forgotten what she was for or against, that the revolt has faded into everyday life and she is no longer streetwise, just bloody stubborn. She has always been afraid of being pathetic.

  She is sitting in the buffet car on the train to Stensjö, writing in her black notebook. It's an ordinary black book with a red spine, although she has stuck a newspaper cutting on the cover: Ulrike Meinhof, a black and white prison photograph. Beneath the picture it says,This book belongs to Maya. On the lined pages are her poems.

  She writes a great deal but keeps very little. If her words frighten her once the heat has died down, she burns them. Even as she sits on the train she scrutinises and crosses out old words in a frenzy of shame. And yet the poetry she keeps is painfully unstructured, self-centred and obscured by powerful unidentified emotions. As if to force some future reader to feel the mood of the author rather than his own. It is mostly about love, because she has devoted the years since leaving junior school to believing that she is constantly in love, among other things.

  A middle-aged ice cream maker tries to strike up a conversation with her in the buffet car. He asks almost straight away what she does for a living, and she tells him she is unemployed. It sounds more mature than saying that she has dropped out of school and hasn't yet decided what to do with her life. He waves vaguely in the air as if to say it's nothing to be embarrassed about.

  'I've got money, but I don't think I'm better than anyone else because of that. I'm just as happy talking to a company director as to someone who's out of work and has a ring through their nose,' he says.

  He invites her to share one of the tiny ridiculously expensive bottles of wine they keep behind the counter. She accepts his offer. After a glass of red he gets personal and wants to talk about his ex-wife. She soon loses interest.

  'I'm just going to the toilet,' she says, and goes to sit a couple of tables behind him. The lie, when he discovers it on his way back to his seat, doesn't seem to bother him. Perhaps he's used to it.

  She starts a letter to her mother. She writes that growing up has been the very opposite of an Oedipal child's great fear. Her father has never even existed on paper, and so there was no united parental front to make her feel alone and excluded. Instead her anxious mother, desperate for approval, wanted to carry her daughter close to her heart; to keep her like a child as yet unborn. Intimate. Like a partner. Mum. I have to put some distance between us in order to be free of you. In her mind's eye she can see her mother opening the envelope as if it were a great event. As if she had been waiting for the moment when she would finally understand her daughter. As if she had spent years wondering.

  But deep down Maya knows that her mother has not spent years wondering, despite all the arguments and reconciliations. Not really. Her mother has had enough to cope with just looking after herself.

  In the notebook Maya has scrawled on page after page, words that have somehow burned themselves into her mind, embarrassing and full of overblown emotions. It was a significant part of her adolescence, this revelling in her emotional life. Constantly giving every Tom, Dick and Harry information about how she is feeling, which is not so different from her mother, in fact. She has frightened off a whole load of potential boyfriends in this way. She spoke with such insight about angst that the supervisor at the youth centre contacted the psychiatric service. He was afraid she might be suicidal. Which, after some consideration, she feels she wasn't really, not at that particular time.

  Out in the wilds she is picked up by the minibus at a bus stop with a shelter on the narrow tarmac road. The bus to and from the railway station evidently runs just twice a day, once in the morning and once

  In the afternoon, and is the only way to travel to the school if, like Maya, you have neither a car nor a driving licence.

  The end of August brings the heat of high summer when the sun is at its zenith. The evenings have begun to grow cooler as autumn approaches. In her suitcase is a blank calendar boasting of a fresh start, her nicest clothes and a mishmash of things representing the room she had as a girl and her earlier life. Being seventeen means that every step is for ever.

  Her stomach is churning. Apart from that she is stone-faced behind the black-painted eyes and lips. She is wearing black jeans, a black long-sleeved sweater and Doc Martens. She took the ring out of her nose at the railway station, only to put it back in ten minutes later. It is difficult to decide how she will behave until she has observed what the others are like.

  Most of all she is afraid of having to share a room with someone. That is also the first thing she asks the woman who pulls over in front of her on the empty road, just as she thinks the school bus is going to drive past her. The woman responds with an inscrutable smile, if indeed it is a smile. It makes Maya feel embarrassed because she has forgotten to introduce herself. She realises then that it is the borderlands that are the most difficult.

  Being angry and rebellious is easy; being well-behaved is something she knows all about. If you're a girl and you've grown up in a small town, gone through school before the equal opportunities program
me kicked in, you get to be good at making room for other people. Standing with one foot in each camp in front of a woman who is ten years older than you, with cropped hair and a leather waistcoat worn over paint-stained dungarees, with that smile and that indulgent expression - that's the difficult part. She thought her appearance would protect her. Instead she wishes she could turn back the clock. She wants to be a blank sheet of paper coming to this new situation, with nothing to fall back on.

  The woman throws Maya's bag into the back of the bus. She has a pale rose tattooed on her upper arm. It looks as if something had been written on the leaves of the rose, something that has almost been erased. Down the side of her neck winds the shape of a black snake. For a second Maya thinks it looks ominous.

  Next to the main building a handful of smaller cottages are scattered over the lawn. High above the roofs are the tops of deciduous trees, their trunks so gnarled and thick that you probably couldn't put your arms all the way round them. Maya has no idea what kind of tree they are. She wonders if there is a garden round the back, and feels a sudden impulse to become a child again, to run around the corner and have a look. Maybe hide deep inside the leafy greenery. Instead she stands on the gravel, rooted to the spot.

  She stands there until Caroline comes back and takes her by the hand, leading her on her way to her first day at school. Through the brown doors and up the stairs to the attic, where the boarders' rooms lie. Maya switches off the bigger picture, as she always does when she feels stressed, and silently adds together the details. Stains and scratches beneath the shining surface of the varnish on the staircase. The black snake on the neck. Long snakes of scar tissue winding their way up the inside of Caroline's arms, towards the crease of her elbow.

  Maya just goes along with her.