“Come on!”
Henrik fled, without even looking to see whether Tommy was obeying his order or not. There was still no sign of Freddy.
Out through the veranda and out into the night.
Henrik ran across the grass, which was hard with frost, came around the corner of the house and raced into the forest. Branches tore at his face, his rucksack was chafing his shoulders, and he couldn’t find the track, but he still kept on running.
Something grabbed hold of his foot and suddenly he was flying through the air.
Straight down into the shadows, where the wet leaves and undergrowth received him.
Something hit the back of his head hard. The night became blurred.
He felt really bad.
When Henrik came to, he was crawling on all fours. He was moving slowly forward across the ground, his head aching, aiming for a black shadow that was growing up ahead of him. A little cave. He crept in through the opening and curled up. Someone was after him, but in here he was safe.
It took several minutes for Henrik’s mind to clear. He raised his head and looked around.
Silence. Total darkness. Where the fuck had he ended up?
He felt earth beneath his fingers and realized that he had crawled into an old stone-covered cellar in the forest near the vicarage. It was cold and damp.
It smelt of fungus, kind of moldy.
Suddenly he got the idea that he was lying in an old death
chamber. An earth cellar for the dead, where they lay waiting to be buried over in the graveyard.
Some kind of insect with long legs landed on his ear. A spider that had just woken up. He knocked it away quickly with his hand.
Henrik was beginning to feel claustrophobic, and slowly crawled out of the cellar. His rucksack got hooked on the roof, but he turned sideways and made it out onto the frozen ground.
Fresh winter air.
He got up and set off through the undergrowth, away from the lights shimmering in the windows of the vicarage through the trees. When he reached the wall of the graveyard, he knew he was heading the right way.
Suddenly he heard a van door slam. He listened.
An engine started up far away in the darkness.
Henrik moved more quickly through the trees, came out onto a broad path and began to run. The trees thinned out and he saw the Serelius brothers’ van. It was just reversing out onto the road.
He got there just in time and ripped open the side door.
Freddy and Tommy turned their heads quickly, and realized who it was.
“Drive.”
Henrik jumped in and slammed the door. Once the van was moving, he finally breathed out and leaned back, his head pounding.
“What the fuck happened to you?” asked Tommy over his shoulder. He was breathing heavily, clutching the wheel very tightly. The stiff rage was still there in his shoulders.
“I got lost,” said Henrik, shrugging off his rucksack. “Fell over a tree root.”
Freddy chuckled to himself.
“I had to jump out of a window!” he said. “Straight down into the shrubbery.”
“Still, we got some good stuff,” said Tommy.
Henrik nodded, his jaws rigid with tension. The old guy Tommy had knocked down-what had happened to him? He didn’t want to think about that right now.
“Take the east road,” he said. “To my boathouse.”
“Why?”
“The police are going to be out this way tonight,” said Henrik. “When there’s violence involved, they come tearing over from Kalmar… I don’t want to bump into them up on the highway.”
Tommy sighed, but took the turn down to the eastern coast road.
It took them a good half hour to unload everything and hide it in the boathouse, but it was worth it to feel safer. All Henrik had left in his rucksack when they got back in the van was the money and the old glass lantern.
They took a detour along the east coast to Borgholm, but didn’t see any police activity. On the outskirts of the town Tommy ran over a cat or a hare, but this time he seemed too tired to take any pleasure in it.
“We’ll take a break,” said Tommy as they reached the streetlights of the town. “A little bit of time off.”
They pulled in by Henrik’s apartment block. It was quarter past three.
“Okay,” he said, opening the door. “And we need to go through the money… make sure it’s all sorted.”
He wasn’t about to forget that the Serelius brothers had been about to drive off and leave him up in the forest.
“We’ll be in touch,” said Tommy through the open window of the van.
Henrik nodded and walked toward the building.
It wasn’t until he was inside his apartment that he realized how filthy he was. His jeans and jacket were covered in black stains from the soil. He threw them in the laundry basket, drank a glass of milk, and stared blankly through the window.
His recollections of the night in the vicarage had been vague from start to finish, and he had no desire to go over them again. Unfortunately, his clearest memory was of the old man’s hand crunching beneath his boot. He hadn’t meant to do that, but…
He turned the light off and went to bed.
It was difficult to get to sleep, his forehead was aching and his nerves were buzzing all over his body, but sometime after four he slipped into the mists.
A couple of hours later Henrik was woken by the sound of knocking in the apartment.
The sound of knocking on glass. Then silence.
He raised his head from the pillow and looked around the darkness of the room in confusion.
The soft sound of knocking came again. It seemed to be coming from the hallway.
Henrik left the warmth of his bed and staggered out into the shadows to listen.
The knocking was coming from his rucksack. Three knocks, then silence. Then a couple more knocks.
He bent down and unzipped the bag. The old lantern from the vicarage was inside, still wrapped in the tablecloth.
Henrik lifted it out.
The wooden frame of the lantern had cooled down in the van, presumably. Now it was getting back up to room temperature. That’s why it was clicking and knocking.
He placed the lantern on the kitchen table, closed the door, and went back to bed.
The sound of faint knocking could be heard from the kitchen from time to time. It was just as irritating as a dripping faucet, but Henrik was so tired he eventually went to sleep anyway.
13
The important thing was never to forget Katrine.
Every time Joakim forgot her, even if it was only for a moment, the pain returned inexorably when he suddenly remembered that she no longer existed. For that reason he tried to keep her in his thoughts all the time-just beyond the border where grief took over, but keeping her constantly present.
On the Sunday three weeks after the accident, he took the children on a long trek in the area around the manor house. They started by heading west, inland, and Joakim could feel the presence of Eel Point behind him; he imagined that Katrine had stayed behind indoors to put up some wallpaper. Maybe she would soon come out into the fields and catch up with them.
It was a windy but sunny November day, and they had pastries and hot chocolate with them. Joakim’s rucksack had a built-in child’s carrying seat where Gabriel could sit when
he was tired, but most of the time he was running across the meadows with Livia.
When they reached the main highway, Joakim shouted to them to stop, and they all crossed over together after looking in both directions, as Livia and Gabriel had learned.
Livia had slept more peacefully for the last few nights and didn’t seem the least bit tired, but Joakim could feel the constant lack of sleep like a swollen weight behind his eyes. He felt slightly better during the day now he had set to work on the house again, but the nights were still difficult. Even when Livia was fast asleep, he lay there awake in the darkness, waiting. Listening.
Talking in her sleep didn’t seem to have any negative effects on Livia-almost the reverse.