The Girl in the Woods. Camilla Lackberg

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      Annoyance crept over him, as it always did when he thought about Sam. Sleeping past eight in the morning? He’d always been up by six in the summertime, and then he’d worked until late in the evening.

      ‘Go wake him,’ he said, taking a swig of coffee, but the next instant he spat it out. ‘What the hell? No milk?’

      ‘Oh, sorry,’ said Helen, taking the cup from his hand.

      She poured the coffee into the sink, refilled it, and added a dash of whole milk.

      Now it tasted the way it should.

      Helen hurried out of the kitchen. He could hear her rushing up the stairs, followed by a murmur of voices.

      His annoyance returned. The same annoyance he felt when he was deployed with a unit and one or more of the soldiers tried to downplay or avoid situations out of fear. He couldn’t understand that kind of behaviour. If a man chose to join the military, especially in a country like Sweden where it was completely voluntary to deploy to a war zone in another country, then he should do the job he’d been assigned. Fear was something you left at home.

      ‘Where’s the fire?’ grumbled Sam as he came sauntering into the kitchen, his black hair standing on end. ‘Why do I have to get up at this hour of the morning?’

      James clenched his fists under the table.

      ‘In this house we don’t sleep away the day,’ he said.

      ‘But I couldn’t find a summer job, so what the hell am I supposed to do?’

      ‘No swearing!’

      Both Helen and Sam flinched. For a moment anger made everything go black before his eyes, and James forced himself to take several deep breaths. He had to maintain control, both over himself and over his family.

      ‘At nine hundred hours we’ll meet out back for target practice.’

      ‘Okay,’ said Sam, looking down at the table.

      Behind him Helen was still cringing.

      They’d been walking all night. Harald was so tired he could hardly see straight, but he had no intention of going home. That would mean giving up. Whenever the fatigue got the better of him, he’d returned to the farm for a short break to warm up and drink some coffee. Each time he’d found Eva Berg sitting mutely in the kitchen, her face grey with worry. That was enough for him to go back out to rejoin the search party.

      He wondered whether the others knew who he was. And what role he’d played thirty years ago. He was the one who had found the other little girl. People who had lived in Fjällbacka back then knew about it, of course, but he didn’t think Eva and Peter did. At least, he hoped not.

      When they were assigned search areas, he had deliberately chosen the area with the lake where he’d found Stella. And that was the first place he’d gone to search. The small lake had dried up long ago, leaving behind only a patch of wooded land. But the old tree trunk was still there. The huge tree had clearly withstood a good deal of wind and weather, and it looked more brittle and drier than thirty years earlier. But he found no little girl lying there. He caught himself heaving a sigh of relief.

      The search party had regrouped several times during the night. Some people had gone home to get a few hours’ sleep, then come back and joined different groups. New volunteers had also arrived as the summer night gave way to morning. Those who had not gone home to rest included the men and boys from the refugee centre. Harald had chatted with them as they searched. They spoke in halting Swedish while he tried out his halting English. But somehow they’d managed to communicate.

      He was now part of a small group that included the man who had introduced himself as Karim, and Johannes Klingsby, a local builder whom Harald had hired whenever he needed renovations done at the bakery. They were moving slowly and resolutely through the woods as the sun broke through and the day brightened. The police officers in charge of the search had reminded them several times during the night not to hurry. It was best to make their way forward carefully and methodically.

      ‘We’ve been searching this area all night,’ said Johannes. ‘She can’t have gone this far.’

      He threw out his hands.

      ‘Last time we spent twenty-four hours searching,’ said Harald.

      Once again he pictured Stella’s body in his mind.

      ‘What?’ asked Karim in English, shaking his head. It was hard for him to understand Harald’s broad Bohuslän accent.

      ‘Harald was the one who found the dead girl in the woods, thirty years ago,’ Johannes explained in English.

      ‘Dead girl?’ said Karim, stopping. ‘Here?’

      ‘Yes. Four years old, same as this girl.’

      Johannes held up four fingers.

      Karim looked at Harald, who nodded quietly.

      ‘Yes. It was right over here. But there was water back then.’

      He was ashamed of his poor English, but Karim nodded.

      ‘There,’ said Harald, pointing at the tree trunk. ‘It was not a big lake, it was a … the Swedish word is “tjärn”.’

      ‘A small lake, more like a pond,’ Johannes chimed in.

      ‘Yes, yes. A pond,’ said Harald. ‘A pond over there by that tree, and the girl was dead.’

      Karim slowly walked towards the tree. He squatted down and placed his hand on the trunk. When he turned to look at the other men, his face was so pale that Harald took a step back.

      ‘Something is under the tree. I can see a hand. A small hand.’

      Harald staggered back another step. Johannes leaned over a bush, and they soon heard him sobbing. Harald met Karim’s eye and saw a reflection of his own despair. They needed to call the police.

      Marie held the script on her lap as she tried to learn her lines for the upcoming scene, but she couldn’t concentrate. The scene was going to be filmed indoors, in the big industrial warehouse in Tanumshede. Inside, they’d constructed a number of sets, almost like mini-worlds, ready for the actors to enter. For the most part, the rest of the filming would be done on location, on the island of Dannholmen. Ingrid Bergman had spent a great deal of time on the island when she was married to the theatre director Lars Schmidt. She’d carried on visiting Dannholmen long after she and Lars were divorced.

      Marie stretched out her arms and shook her head. She wanted to be rid of all the thoughts that had started haunting her when people began talking about the missing girl. All those memories of a laughing Stella running ahead of her and Helen.

      Marie sighed. She was here now, about to play her dream role. This was what she’d been working towards for so many years; it was the thing that had kept her going after the roles in Hollywood dried up. She’d earned this part, and she was a good actress. It didn’t take much effort for her to immerse herself in a role, pretending to be someone else; after all, she’d had plenty of practice, ever since she was a child. Lying or acting – there was so little difference between СКАЧАТЬ