‘And when was this?’

  ‘The skinny one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mrs Zetterlund shrugged her shoulders. ‘A couple of years ago . . . or it could have been three. The Danish woman has been around for longer. She’s better-looking all round. She must be ten years younger than him, but he’s well preserved, really well preserved.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Eva Backman. ‘And what about male friends? Do you know about any of those?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man visit Mr Grooth,’ declared Mrs Zetterlund after another brief contemplation behind closed eyes. ‘No, not as far as I can remember. He was a pretty solitary type, really. But a gentleman, I want to stress that. Fine and decent. Shame he’s dead.’

  Interesting summary of Germund Grooth, thought Eva Backman as she left Prennegatan. Fine and decent gentleman, unfortunately dead.

  But if Mrs Zetterlund’s information was accurate, he had returned home at a quarter past nine on the evening of 24 September. The following day, Saturday the twenty-fifth, he was lying dead at the bottom of Gåsaklyftan outside Kymlinge, 300 kilometres away.

  What were his movements in between?

  Why and when had he travelled up to Kymlinge?

  And how?

  But, above all, why? Why, in heaven’s name?

  She sat down on a bench in a pedestrian precinct, took out her mobile and rang Sorrysen.

  ‘Have you been able to get hold of Grooth’s phone records?’

  DI Borgsen confirmed that he had. They were on the desk in front of him in fact.

  ‘Anything startling?’ asked Backman.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by startling,’ said Sorrysen. ‘If we take just the last week of his life, we’ve got eleven calls in all. Not much to go on, in other words. I’m not talking about his work phone here, but his home landline. He didn’t have a mobile. All the numbers have been identified except one.’

  ‘Except one,’ said Backman.

  ‘Except one,’ said Sorrysen. ‘To his home phone from a mobile. Pay-as-you-go, so we can’t trace it.’

  ‘When?’ said Backman.

  ‘Saturday morning at seven twenty-two,’ said Sorrysen. ‘The call lasted just over forty seconds. Forty-three, to be precise. It hasn’t been kept; too much time has elapsed.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Backman.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Sorrysen. ‘But I don’t think you could call it startling.’

  ‘And the other ten?’

  ‘Not a single one to a private individual,’ said Sorrysen. ‘Or from one.’

  ‘I see,’ said Backman. ‘I guess I’ll take a look at it for myself when I get back. Thanks very much.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ said Sorrysen and hung up.

  She checked out of the hotel, grabbed a bite of lunch at a hot-dog stand near the central station, and at a quarter past one she met Larsson and Ribbing in the latter’s room at Lund police HQ.

  ‘There’s good news and bad news,’ said Ribbing.

  ‘Bad first, please,’ said Backman.

  ‘We haven’t got into this laptop yet,’ said Larsson. ‘But it’s only a matter of time, of course. Our computer whizz is out working on something else at the moment.’

  ‘OK,’ said Backman. ‘And the good?’

  Inspector Ribbing cleared his throat. ‘The good news is that we’ve found Kristin Pedersen,’ he explained. ‘She’s in the Seychelles, but she’ll be back in Copenhagen on Monday. We can interview her then, if you think it’s important.’

  ‘It’s extremely important,’ said Eva Backman, with a brief stab of annoyance that her trip to Denmark was off the agenda. ‘I want you to record it and I’d like to send you some questions beforehand.’

  ‘That’ll be fine,’ said Ribbing. ‘You’ve got the whole weekend to formulate them. Do you want to take the laptop up with you or shall we get it sorted here?’

  Backman considered this. ‘Would it be possible to copy the whole lot and send it up to us?’

  Larsson shrugged. ‘Of course. Would you like us to do that then?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ decided Backman. ‘I assume it’s only the emails that are of interest, but send the whole lot once you get into it.’

  ‘Kotkas will have it fixed in an hour,’ promised Ribbing. ‘He’s phenomenal, you’ll have Grooth’s secrets on a silver platter by the time you’re back in Kymlinge. Is there anything you need help with at the moment? We’ll keep in touch anyway, as we discussed.’

  ‘Yep, we certainly will,’ Larsson chimed in.

  Eva Backman thought about it, but couldn’t recall anything else on her current wish list. She thanked her Scanian colleagues and promised she’d contact them again after the weekend.

  She made her way to the police-station car park, climbed into her car and ten minutes later she was out on the northbound E6.

  She decided to give Piaf and Holiday a rest and reflected that at least she wouldn’t be returning empty-handed from her sojourn in the southerly provinces. Far from it.

  Matters were coming to a head, essentially.

  Germund Grooth had a trip to Paris booked for a week after his death.

  He had been at home in his flat in Lund as late as a quarter past nine on the evening before his death. Probably until eleven, if it really was the case that the Zetterlund sisters had been playing cards in the bay window above, with at least one pair of eagle eyes fixed on the street.

  The next morning, the last of his life, someone had rung him from an untraceable number. At twenty past seven.

  Suicide? DI Backman asked herself. Forget it.

  Accident? Forget that, too.

  So that was two question marks straightened out, she noted.

  But the new ones that had arisen in their place were more crooked still and she beat her head against them until it bled, all the way back to Kymlinge.

  Metaphorically, of course.

  33

  They drove off the ferry at the terminal in Świnoujście in the early morning of 24 July. None of them had slept very much during the crossing, but that didn’t stop Rickard Berglund feeling intensely wide awake as he looked out through the bus window at the unfamiliar, dirty grey buildings of the port area. Apart from a couple of short visits to Denmark and Norway, it was the first time in his life he was beyond the borders of Sweden, and something that might be described as a quiet sense of exultation was growing in his breast.

  He could recall a similar feeling from a time long ago. When he was twelve, to be precise, in the summer between primary and lower secondary. He had gone with his classmate Sune to the boy’s summer cottage in Malung up in Dalarna, and that car journey – well, his recollection of it was as clear as anything; he and Sune had sat in the comic-strewn back seat of the Stridsbergs’ black Volvo PV on their way through unknown forests with their mouths full of Trixi and Tuttifrutti sweets – and it was then, then he had felt that sense of embarking on an adventure ticking inside him. The same feeling as now.

  Even though he was now a grown man – basically twice the age he had been then – newly married and halfway to his theology degree and ordination. A much later stage along life’s path, to speak in Kierkegaard’s terms. Yet it was still just as overwhelming, that seductive lure of whatever you wanted to call it: adventure, the unknown, freedom and all the unpredictable experiences waiting round the corner.

  Childish or not, he did nothing to try to quash that vague sense of excitement. Carpe diem, he thought, and when he cast surreptitious glances at his fellow passengers, he could see it was the same for them.

  Tomas at the steering wheel. Gunilla in the passenger seat beside him, with a big map open on her lap and a half-eaten banana in her hand. Anna: she was sitting back-to-back with him in their autobus-pied-à-terre. It was Maria who had invented the word; everything sounded better in French, she claimed, and perhaps she was right. It consisted of a big wooden crate with a mattress and pillows on top and storage space beneath. Maria and Germund had one, too, at the back of the bus. Tomas and Gunilla lived on another one in the front; they were rustic but practical. They had also installed curtains running across the bus to make private night-time territory, but now the curtains were all hitched up to the roof because it was morning.

  Yes, it was their first morning on foreign soil, on a journey that would last at least thirty-five days and thirty-five nights and take them to countries and places that until now – until this July morning in this year of Our Lord 1972 – had not been much more than empty names and abstractions. You can’t be sure Rome exists until you’ve been there and seen it for yourself, Germund observed, and there was a lot of truth in that.

  But first of all, Świnoujście and Szczecin! They had sat in a cafe on the ferry at some late hour, eating sauerkraut and something called bigos, drinking beer and trying to pronounce those tangles of consonants. A rather drunk long-distance lorry driver called Marek had helped to guide their unpractised tongues and told them a few things in broken English about Poland, the first country awaiting them on the other side of the Baltic Sea.

  And then: Prague. Balaton. Budapest. Vienna. Zagreb. Et cetera, et cetera. Rickard had started keeping a travel diary when they left Uppsala, as had Anna, and she was taking it rather more seriously than he was, planning to write it up as a reportage for publication. She’d had half promises from Vi magazine and Dagens Nyheter, but no firm undertaking to pay her a fee, because naturally they wanted to see the result first. Anna was only a second-year student at the college of journalism, not a recognized name in reporting circles. Still, she had invested in a new system camera, a Nikon; a travelogue without pictures naturally wouldn’t do. And if Rickard’s notes and reflections could be of use in any way, that was all to the good, of course.

  They were a twosome, they were newly married. The world lay open and the possibilities were boundless.

  The first day they got as far as the town of Jelenia Góra. It was dusk and they had been travelling more or less all day, with Tomas and Germund taking it in turns at the wheel. Germund had managed to get himself a bus driver’s licence in just a few weeks, and it was undeniably useful that they could share the driving. They could basically be on the road all day and all night if they wanted.

  Not that they did want to, of course. It was important to stop and give themselves time to look around and soak things up. Register and experience them. This first day they had stopped for a couple of hours in Poznań and bought in supplies, mainly fruit, drink and dry goods; they had no way of keeping things cool on the bus, but of course the Eastern Bloc was a civilization that provided everything its citizens needed in the way of fresh food. It would be the same as other civilizations in that respect, and thinking otherwise was just imperialist prejudice. They could buy milk and butter every morning and, with six of them, they would have no problem consuming it all the same day, before it went off. Or they could do it the other way round, buy provisions for dinner and breakfast at the same time, in the evening, and take advantage of the cooler temperatures overnight.

  They had also bought beer and vodka in Poznań, at almost laughably low prices, and as they sat around a fire at the campsite with food and drink in the warm darkness, and with the silky female voice of an unfamiliar Polish singer streaming out of the transistor radio, the word ‘magical’ sprang very readily to mind.

  ‘Thank you, Tomas,’ said Anna. ‘Thank you for coming up with this trip. We’re going to have our horizons well and truly widened. It feels amazing to be part of this, don’t you all think?’

  She laughed because she was a little drunk. Rickard found himself wishing she would be drunk a bit more often, it had such a liberating effect on her. He took a pull on his beer, had a mouthful of bread and sausage and wished he could stop the clock. Right there, right then.

  ‘Eat and drink, my friends,’ said Tomas, lighting a cigarette. ‘Especially eat, because this sausage will be a goner by tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t already?’ said Rickard.

  ‘The beer’s cheaper than water,’ remarked Germund. ‘It would be a shame not to drink that up, as well.’

  ‘Can’t you choirboys give us a serenade?’ suggested Maria. ‘We can turn off this Polish nightingale.’

  ‘The summer hymn,’ requested Gunilla. ‘Then we can all join in.’

  And so it was. They sang in four parts and the much-loved hymn rang out in the darkness. Rickard felt Anna’s hand creeping cautiously up his thigh and he knew that this moment – this evening at an obscure campsite on the edge of the Polish town of Jelenia Góra – was something he would never forget.

  They made the quietest love they had ever made, and once Anna had fallen asleep, he pulled on his tracksuit and sneaked out of the bus.

  He took a pee behind some bushes and then stood stock still, listening out into the darkness. The croak of the frogs and the burble of the water were all that he could hear. The half-empty campsite spread down a long, gradual slope to a murmuring stream; he hesitated for a moment and then made his way down to sit on a rock beside the water.

  He put his hands together and had a strong sense that God could see him now. That He could see them all – himself and Anna, Tomas and Gunilla, Maria and Germund – and was holding His protective hand over them. He didn’t often have thoughts of that kind; studying theology and sensing God’s presence were rather different things, and it wasn’t the first time he had reflected on the fact. Like baking bread without eating it, you could say, or practising swimming strokes without water. But now he was suddenly filled with an intense and naive experience of God which – like that joyous sense of expectation at the ferry port that morning – had clear echoes of childhood. It was simple and pure.

  And he prayed. Prayed for them all and for the rest of their European trip to be meaningful, and there was something about the flowing water, and perhaps the croaking frogs as well, which all at once presented him with the sensation of God’s voice coming to him through that unexpected medium.

  It was an experience that was totally and utterly his own, what was more. Nothing from which he could wring images or metaphors for use in his future role as a vicar, and he wondered why this boundary seemed so evident and so crucial. But as he knew only too well, there were some things you understood without knowing how you understood them.

  He thought about Anna, too, of course, and the way they had become a married couple so precipitately. He still wondered what had impelled him to propose, that evening at the start of May. Anna had revealed how it had felt for her: she had been as taken aback by his proposal as she had by her own acceptance. They had both laughed about that and agreed this was how things should go in life; it was spontaneous and unreflecting actions that won out in the long run.

  Things had been going pretty well for Anna all through the spring and early summer. It wasn’t only marriage that deepened their relationship; perhaps in fact mere passage of time was doing the work for them. You grow together, Rickard would often think. You learn each other’s habits and idiosyncrasies, that’s the way enduring love is built. What was more, Anna had a few articles published, in Our Home and The Metalworker; it was unquestionably important to her to win approval on the professional front as well. She was even offered a summer job upcountry on the Östersund Post, but the question of accommodation and the fact that she would be expected to stay on until the end of August made her turn it down. She went back to her hospital assistant’s job at Akademiska for six weeks instead. Rickard took temporary work at a post office in Svartbäcken for the same period; barring unforeseen circumstances, they ought to have enough in the kitty for the trip, at any rate. And with any luck, some left over to make their study loans go a bit further in September.

  The first payment on the bus loan wasn’t due until January, but that felt pleasantly distant. If everything worked as Tomas had calculated, they would also be making some money from the cheap trips they would run to Norrland in the autumn. Tomas and Germund could take it in turns to drive at the weekends, and maybe Rickard could get himself a bus driver’s licence, too, eventually.

  He thought about the others as he sat there by the flowing Polish stream, and asked himself what sort of effect a trip like this was likely to have on relations within the group. It wasn’t easy to predict. Gunilla and Tomas’s relationship was as much a given as his own and Anna’s, of course, but Gunilla had been through a tough year. After the stillbirth in October she had spent a few months as a patient at Ulleråker; she’d come home to Sibyllegatan in January, admittedly, but as far as Rickard knew, she’d had a doctor’s certificate for the whole spring term. She certainly hadn’t been studying, and although Tomas didn’t like talking about her condition or complaining to other people, Rickard could see it was hard going for them. There was a kind of fearfulness and fragility about Gunilla, characteristics there had been no hint of in the attractive, independent girl he had met three years ago. He remembered envying Tomas and thinking he could never find a woman to match Gunilla, but now he felt rather differently. It was hard not to feel sorry for them; they had lost two babies in two years, neither of them even making it across life’s threshold, and of course that must be painful. Incredibly painful. Rickard and Anna still hadn’t talked about bringing babies into the world, but he could sense that the sadness of Gunilla’s two unsuccessful pregnancies had made Anna even more hesitant than she might have been on her own account.

  But even if things happened and situations changed, he knew it would still be Tomas and Gunilla. It was different where Maria and Germund were concerned. Radically different. Tomas’s way of putting it was that they were two exceptional individuals, and whatever he meant by that, it was quite an apt description. Rickard had known them for three years, too, or to be more precise, three years had gone by since he first met them, because nobody could really claim to know people like Germund and Maria. They were erratic, and maybe saw it as a badge of honour to be that way; it was impossible to predict what they would say, or how they would react, in any given situation. Rickard knew they had virtually no social circle beyond the quartet making this trip with them – but other people, and relationships with other people, did not seem to bother them, or to occupy any space in their mental universe at all. This could just be an act, of course; striving to be special and out of the ordinary wasn’t such a rarity among young people. Rickard had encountered a lot of them in the theology faculty – the weirder, the better, it sometimes seemed – but in Maria and Germund’s case there was no sign of that kind of trivial posing. None at all.