STOCKHOLM
Kriminalinspektör Stella Cole put her car into gear and pulled out from the parking space at Arlanda airport.
The snowy landscape – bare-branched silver birches, and spiky black hedges like a pathologist’s sutures across pale skin – made her glad to be home again.
Home? Was that really how she thought of Sweden? After just a year? She smiled as she realised the answer was yes.
The trip had been a short one, to sign a few legal documents and enjoy a catchup dinner with Vicky Riley, her best friend.
The pale February sunlight threw a yellowish cast over the white fields to each side of the E4. Stella signalled to overtake a tractor towing a load of hay. Winter fodder.
As she pulled in again, a dead deer on the hard shoulder caught her eye. Three crows pecking at its flank rose in a tangle of ungainly flapping: blood-drunk undertakers disturbed in their work.
* * *
Approximately 141 kilometres northwest of the dead deer, in a small, blue-collar town called Söderbärke, Reverend Lilianne Mogren parked her car behind her church. She didn’t have a wedding today, but there were a couple of bits of paperwork waiting for her in the office that she’d been putting off for far too long.
Saint Matteus resembled a great, upturned rowing boat. Jesus’ affinity for simple fishermen was said to have been the inspiration for the design. Its position on the west bank of Norra Barken, the lake just outside Söderbärke, reinforced the association with the water.
Smiling at the memory of the joke her five-year-old son, Anders, had told her at breakfast time – ‘Mama, why do bees have sticky hair? Because they use honeycombs!’ – she pulled her hood up and crunched across the snow-covered shingle to the path.
A man called out to her from the pavement. She turned to see Björn Johansson waving to her. Tova, his Golden Retriever, stood patiently at his side. The big dog’s mouth hung open so that it appeared to be smiling.
Lilianne crossed the snowy churchyard to greet him. Björn was eighty-seven years old. When he’d lost his wife to cancer five years earlier, he’d mourned her for three months and then, as if someone had flipped a switch, thrown himself into a new obsession: truffle-hunting. He’d bought Tova as a puppy and claimed, to anyone who’d listen for long enough, that he was training her to be ‘the best goddamn truffle-hound in all Sweden’.
‘Hi, Björn. You should be indoors by the fire,’ she said. ‘You know you won’t find any truffles down here. Gotland’s where the action is.’
His refusal to acknowledge that he was looking in completely the wrong place was a source of amusement in the town’s bars and hunting clubs.
He raised wiry steel-grey eyebrows and snorted, sending a plume of frosty air from his nostrils.
‘What? And go and live on a goddamn island? No thank you very much!’ he said. ‘Place is practically part of the Baltics. I might just as well go and live in goddamn Russia!’
‘Have you ever found a truffle in Söderbärke, Björn?’ she asked with a smile, though the cold nipping her nose made her long to get inside the church.
He held his hands wide and fixed her with a rheumy-eyed stare.
‘You never know, Vicar. You never know! This could be the day.’
Lilianne bent to stroke Tova’s head. The dog responded by leaning into her leg and standing on her left foot with one of its forepaws.
‘So will I see you later? After your hunting trip?’
The old man grunted. She knew he was as proud of his atheism – ‘Goddamn rationalism!’ he’d shout, if she ever challenged him on it – as he was of Tova’s supposed prowess out in the woods.
‘If you’re dropping into the pub, you might. Otherwise, no. But I tell you what,’ he said, leaning closer so she caught a whiff of piss, brandy and unwashed clothes, ‘if I was a religious man, I’d say the taste of a Swedish truffle was proof the Old Boy existed.’
‘Then I’ll pray for Tova to strike lucky today.’
With a wink as Björn’s mouth dropped open in outrage, she moved away and up towards the west door of the church. ‘Maybe I will see you later for a drink, Björn!’ she called over her shoulder.
Shaking her head, Lilianne went inside and closed the heavy oak door behind her. Saint Matteus was a strikingly modern building, yet the architect had imbued its interior with a simple beauty she felt the vicar of the church that had originally stood on the site would have appreciated.
She switched on the lights, and then she frowned. Why was Lucy Petersson lying asleep on the altar? In her wedding dress? The ceremony wasn’t until the following Saturday.
Lilianne hurried down the aisle, already calling out to her unexpected guest.
‘Are you all right, Lucy? What are you doing on the altar? Is there …’
The rest of the third question died in her throat. The young woman lying with her hands folded on her chest and her eyes closed wasn’t Lucy Petersson at all. It was Fatima Engquist. Lilianne knew this because she had conducted the wedding ceremony for Fatima and Edward Engquist exactly one year earlier.
Before entering the priesthood, Lilianne had been a paramedic. So she didn’t panic. She pressed her index and middle fingers into the soft place just behind the angle of Fatima’s jaw. The flesh was cold. And there was no pulse. While she waited to be sure she looked at the posy of cornflowers beneath Fatima’s folded hands. They looked freshly picked. Certainly no more than a day old. Which was very strange. Because it was the middle of winter.
Lilianne knew Fatima was dead, but, on autopilot, she turned her head away and leaned closer still, until her cheek was a few millimetres away from Fatima’s nose. No breath disturbed the fine hairs on Lilianne’s skin.
She straightened and sighed. Then she made the sign of the cross over the body.
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