She puts her glass down, kisses him again, and thinks that she’s mad as she lets him caress one of her breasts.
Reidar suppresses the urge to burst into tears, making his throat hurt, as he strokes her thigh under her dress, feeling her nicotine patch, and moves his hand round to her backside.
Marie pats his hand away when he tries to pull her underwear down, then stands up and wipes her mouth.
‘Maybe we should go back down and join the party again,’ she says, trying to sound neutral.
‘Yes,’ he says.
Veronica is sitting motionless on the sofa and doesn’t meet her enquiring gaze.
‘Are you both coming?’
Reidar shakes his head.
‘OK,’ Marie whispers and walks towards the door.
Her dress shimmers as she leaves the room. Reidar stares through the open doorway. The darkness looks like dirty velvet.
Veronica gets up and takes her glass from the table, and drinks. She has sweat patches under the arms of her dress.
‘You’re a bastard,’ she says.
‘I’m just trying to get the most out of life,’ he says quietly.
He catches her hand and presses it to his cheek, holding it there and looking into her sorrowful eyes.
11
The fire has gone out and the room is freezing cold when Reidar wakes up on the sofa. His eyes are stinging, and he thinks about his wife’s story about the Sandman. The man who throws sand in children’s eyes so that they fall asleep and sleep right through the night.
‘Shit,’ Reidar whispers, and sits up.
He’s naked, and has spilled wine over the leather upholstery. In the distance is the sound of an aeroplane. The morning light hits the dusty windows.
Reidar gets to his feet and sees Veronica lying curled up on the floor in front of the fireplace. She’s wrapped herself in the tablecloth. Somewhere in the forest a deer is calling. The party downstairs is still going on, but is more subdued now. Reidar grabs the half-full bottle of wine and leaves the room unsteadily. A headache is throbbing inside his skull as he starts to climb the creaking oak stairs to his bedroom. He stops on the landing, sighs, and goes back down again. Carefully he picks Veronica up and lays her on the sofa, covers her, then retrieves her glasses from the floor and puts them on the table.
Reidar Frost is sixty-two years old and the author of three international bestsellers, the so-called Sanctum series.
He moved from his house in Tyresö eight years ago, when he bought Råcksta Manor, outside Norrtälje. Two hundred hectares of forest, fields, stables and a fine paddock where he occasionally trains his five horses. Thirteen years ago Reidar Frost ended up alone in a way that shouldn’t happen to anyone. His son and daughter vanished without trace one night after they sneaked out to meet a friend. Mikael and Felicia’s bicycles were found on a footpath near Badholmen. Apart from one detective with a Finnish accent, everyone thought the children had been playing too close to the water and had drowned in Erstaviken.
The police stopped looking, even though no bodies were ever found. Reidar’s wife Roseanna couldn’t deal with him and her own loss. She moved in temporarily with her sister, asked for a divorce and used the money from the settlement to move abroad. A couple of months later she was found in her bath in a Paris hotel. She’d committed suicide. On the floor was a drawing Felicia had given her on Mother’s Day.
The children have been declared dead. Their names are engraved on a headstone that Reidar rarely visits. The same day they were declared dead, he invited his friends to a party, and ever since has taken care to keep going, the way you would keep a fire alight.
Reidar Frost is convinced he’s going to drink himself to death, but at the same time he knows he’d kill himself if he was left alone.
12
A goods train is thundering through the nocturnal winter landscape. The Traxx train is pulling almost three hundred metres of wagons behind it.
In the driver’s cab sits Erik Johnsson. His hand is resting on the control. The noise from the engine and the rails is rhythmic and monotonous.
The snow seems to be rushing out of a tunnel of light formed by the two headlights. The rest is darkness.
As the train emerges from the broad curve around Vårsta, Erik Johnsson increases speed again.
He’s thinking that the snow is so bad that he’s going to have to stop at Hallsberg, if not before, to check the braking distance.
Far off in the haze two deer scamper off the rails and away across the white fields. They move through the snow with magical ease, and disappear into the night.
As the train approaches the long Igelsta Bridge, Erik thinks back to when Sissela sometimes used to accompany him on journeys. They would kiss in each tunnel and on every bridge. These days she refuses to miss a single yoga lesson.
He brakes gently, passes Hall and heads out across the high bridge. It feels like flying. The snow is swirling and twisting in the headlights, removing any sense of up and down.
The train is already in the middle of the bridge, high above the ice of Hallsfjärden, when Erik Johnsson sees a flickering shadow through the haze. There’s someone on the track. Erik sounds the horn and sees the figure take a long step to the right, onto the other track.
The train is approaching very fast. For half a second the man is caught in the light of the headlamps. He blinks. A young man with a dead face. His clothes are trembling on his skinny frame, and then he’s gone.
Erik isn’t conscious of the fact that he’s applied the brakes and that the whole train is slowing down. There’s a rumbling sound and the screech of metal, and he isn’t sure if he ran over the young man.
He’s shaking, and can feel adrenalin coursing through his body as he calls SOS Alarm.
‘I’m a train driver, I’ve just passed someone on the Igelsta Bridge... he was in the middle of the tracks, but I don’t think I hit him...’
‘Is anyone injured?’ the operator asks.
‘I don’t think I hit him, I only saw him for a few seconds.’
‘Where exactly did you see him?’
‘In the middle of the Igelsta Bridge.’
‘On the tracks?’
‘There’s nothing but tracks up here, it’s a fucking railway bridge...’
‘Was he standing still, or was he walking in a particular direction?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘My colleague is just alerting the police and ambulance in Södertälje. We’ll have to stop all rail traffic over the bridge.’
13
The emergency control room immediately dispatches police cars to both ends of the long bridge. Just nine minutes later the first car pulls off the Nyköping road with its lights flashing and makes its way up the narrow gravel track alongside Sydgatan. The road leads steeply upwards, and hasn’t been ploughed, and loose snow swirls up over the bonnet and windscreen.
The policemen leave the car at the end of the bridge and set out along the tracks with their torches on. It isn’t easy walking along the railway line. Cars are passing far below them on the motorway. The four railway tracks narrow to two, and stretch out across the industrial estates of Björkudden and the frozen inlet.
The first officer stops and points. Someone has clearly walked along the right-hand track ahead of them. The shaky beams of their torches illuminate some almost eradicated footprints and a few traces of blood.
They shine their torches into the distance, but there’s no one on the bridge as far as they can see. The lights of the harbour below make the snow between the tracks look like smoke from a fire.
Now the second police car reaches the other end of the deep ravine, more than two kilometres away.