She did not slow her steps as she walked. In fact she almost strode, very upright, with her long hair hanging loose down the back of her coat, across the garden and up the steps to the front door. Then Karolina heard her pause, and saw the door handle slowly press down. The door opened and Johanna stepped inside, tall and slender and covered in snow. As if she had known all along that Karolina was crouched on the floor by the big window, she slowly turned towards her.
The bright ceiling light went on as Johanna flicked the switch on the wall.
‘Sitting here in the dark?’ she said, observing her sister and the gun.
Karolina leapt to her feet, raising the weapon.
‘I need to know why,’ she said grimly, clutching the gun in her chilled hands.
Not once on all those hunting trips with her father had she ever dreamt she would have to use her skills to defend her own life one day. Against her own sister.
‘Betrayal.’
Karolina shook her head.
‘You’re sick. You’ve had your whole family wiped out and you have the gall to say you’re the one who feels betrayed.’
Her sister’s face twitched.
‘I did everything for you after that goddamn midsummer’s eve,’ she hissed. ‘Everything. I even had the daisy tattoo done as an everlasting reminder of what you’d been through. And what did you do? Turned your back on me and turned Dad against me.’
Karolina felt the tears prick her eyes.
‘You’ve never done anything for anyone but yourself, Johanna. And you turned Dad against you yourself.’
‘You’re lying,’ Johanna yelled with such force that Karolina flinched. ‘Just like the lie that you didn’t care about Måns or Viggo.’
‘We were so young,’ whispered Karolina impotently. ‘How can you still be blaming me for that?’
‘Viggo tried to take revenge for your sake,’ Johanna went on loudly. ‘And you thanked him by choosing his brother instead.’
Mention of Viggo frightened Karolina. She had not realised he was mixed up in all that happened, but of course he must be. Bit by bit the truth dawned on her, and she felt her strength draining away as the picture became clear.
‘So now you understand,’ Johanna said gently. ‘I must say you impress me, Lina. You not only extricated yourself from that unpleasant state of affairs in Thailand, you also managed to get back to Sweden and find out the truth.’
‘Måns,’ whispered Karolina.
‘Quite right,’ smiled Johanna. ‘It was stupid of you – very stupid, in fact – not to realise who Måns would turn to when you rang and asked him for help. We were one step ahead of you the whole way. I wanted you for once in your life to experience what it was like for me, invisible to everything and everyone.’
‘But you never were invisible,’ protested Karolina. ‘You were the one everybody could see. Good grief, I spent half my childhood hearing that I ought to be more like you.’
The air inside the house felt thick in the throat. Johanna was standing stock still, but for a repeated clenching and opening of her fists. She was seething with rage.
‘That’s exactly it. Half your childhood. Then things got better, didn’t they? But not for me. Nor for Viggo.’
Fear and fatigue made Karolina start to cry.
‘I thought this was all about that wretched new network of smugglers,’ she said through her tears, the gun shaking in her hands. ‘Drawing Mum into all this. How could you?’
Johanna’s face darkened still further at the sight of her sister’s tears.
‘I never intended forgiving any of you. Not ever. Believe me, everything that’s happened was going to happen sooner or later anyway. But when our fool of a father kept on sticking his nose in things that were none of his business, I have to admit it got more urgent than we’d originally planned. And it was so easy to pull the wool over Mum’s eyes, it was almost pathetic. She was completely convinced that only Dad was in danger.’
The room closed in as Johanna spoke. Johanna, who had both her parents murdered without feeling the slightest remorse. Karolina still could not quite accept how deranged her sister must be. Her desire for explanation was still not satisfied.
‘I read all about it in the papers,’ Karolina said. ‘And talked to Elsie. Between you all, you’ve murdered so many people.’
Johanna put her head on one side.
‘I do admit that more lives have been lost than we first calculated, but when people can’t stick to the simple rules of the game, it’s hard to be accountable for their actions. We expressly told them they weren’t to let on to anyone that they were going to Sweden, yet several of them still did precisely that. So we couldn’t send them home again.’
‘We? You and Viggo, you mean?’
Johanna sneered, but said nothing.
‘What were you thinking?’ said Karolina. ‘That Mum and Dad would die and I’d rot in jail in Thailand?’
‘I think you deserve some credit after putting us to such trouble,’ Johanna said in a businesslike tone. ‘We had hoped you’d be back home before we tackled Mum and Dad’s activities. But then we realised you’d sniffed out one of our most vital collaborators in Bangkok, and we had to take action.’
‘Just so you know, I didn’t realise how close I’d got.’
‘No, but that doesn’t really change anything, does it? You had to be dealt with on the spot, we decided that straight away. A challenge for us all, but a bit of imagination finds a solution to most things here in life. It was a piece of cake to shut down your email accounts, since you’d usefully provided Dad with your password and user name. Just think, he kept them in a notebook on his desk. So easy I was almost disappointed. And we had all the contacts we needed to make stuff happen in Bangkok. The mugging, shifting your gear to another hotel, putting the drugs in your room, tipping off the police so they mounted the raid.’
Johanna stopped for a moment.
‘Everything has its price,’ she said. ‘No one can do what you lot did to me without paying for it.’
Its price. Words piled up in Karolina’s head, but in the wrong order. She thought about Viggo again. Viggo, who had got into her parents’ flat, raised a gun and shot them in the head. At what point had they realised they were going to die? Did they ever get time to realise why?
‘Why didn’t you tell us you were a couple?’ Karolina asked feebly. ‘You and Viggo.’
A hollow laugh echoed round the room.
‘What was there to tell, Lina? That I’d picked up the pieces you didn’t want? You and I have scarcely seen each other for years, so why should I confide in you?’
There was nothing to say, nothing to add. It was all over, and this was the end. Everything has its price. So Karolina abandoned the topic, and asked:
‘Where is he now? Is he waiting for you somewhere?’
‘He’s in the garden,’ Johanna answered in such a cool voice that Karolina had to take her eyes off her and turn her head to the big window at the front of the house.
And she saw his outline, out there in the falling snow. The man who had once loved her so much that he had committed a crime to take revenge for an injustice she had long since put behind her.
‘You’re never going to get away with this, the pair of you. You’ve deceived too many people, forced them into a chain of murders I refuse to believe they wanted to be part of.’
‘It’s very touching that the last thing you do in your life is to worry about how I’m going to get out of this awkward situation,’ Johanna said.
If the light had not been on in the room, she would have seen what he had in his hands and possibly been the first to shoot. But in the event it was Viggo, surrounded by swirling snow and standing a few metres from the house with one of her father’s shotguns raised to his shoulder, who fired the first shot. The weight of her sorrow was the last thing she felt.