the lines linking Viktor to Sanna and the girls.
She leans back in her chair and allows her gaze to range over the sparse furniture, the hand-carved green beds, the kitchen table with its four odd chairs, the sink with the red plastic bowl and the little stool that just fits into the corner by the door.
Once upon a time, when the cabin was used on hunting trips, Uncle Affe used to stand his rifle on the stool, leaning against the wall. She remembers her grandfather’s frown of displeasure. Her grandfather himself always placed his gun carefully in its case and pushed it under the bed.
Nowadays the axe for chopping wood stands on the stool, and the handsaw hangs above it on a hook.
Sanna, thinks Rebecka, and looks back at her painting.
She draws curly little spirals and stars above Sanna’s head.
Silly-billy Sanna. Who can’t manage anything by herself. All her life a series of idiots have leapt in and sorted things out for her. I’m one of them. She didn’t even have to ask me to come up here. I came scampering up anyway, like a damned puppy.
She makes Sanna’s arms and hands disappear by painting over them in black. There, now she can’t do anything. Then she paints herself and writes “IDIOT” above.
Comprehension rises out of the picture. The brush shakily traces the figures she has painted on the newspaper. Sanna can’t manage anything by herself. There she stands, no arms, no hands. When Sanna needs something, some idiot leaps in and sorts things out for her. Rebecka Martinsson is an example of such an idiot.
If Viktor is doing something to her children…
... and she gets so angry she wants to kill him, what happens then?
Then some idiot is going to kill Viktor for her.
Can that be what happened? It has to be what happened.
The Bible. The murderer put Viktor’s Bible in Sanna’s kitchen drawer.
Of course. Not to frame Sanna. It was a present for her. The message, the postcard with the sprawling handwriting, was written to Sanna, not to Viktor. “What we have done is not wrong in the eyes of God.” Killing Viktor was not wrong in the eyes of God.
"Who?" says Rebecka to herself, drawing an empty heart next to the picture of Sanna. Inside the heart she draws a question mark.
She listens. Tries to make out a sound through the storm. A sound that doesn’t belong here. And then suddenly she hears it, the noise of a snowmobile.
Curt. Curt Bäckström, who sat on his snowmobile under the window, gazing up at Sanna.
She gets up and looks around.
The axe, she thinks in a panic. I’ll get the axe.
But she can’t hear the noise of the engine anymore.
It was just your imagination, calm down, she reassures herself. Sit down. You’re stressed and scared and you imagined you heard something. There’s nothing out there.
She sits down, but can’t take her eyes off the doorknob. She ought to get up and lock it.
Don’t start, she thinks, like some kind of spell. There’s nothing out there.
The next moment the doorknob begins to turn. The door opens. The moaning of the storm bursts in, along with a rush of cold air, and a man dressed in a dark blue snowsuit steps quickly inside. Pushes the door shut behind him. At first she can’t make out who it is. Then he takes off his hood and balaclava.
It isn’t Curt Bäckström. It’s Vesa Larsson.
Anna-Maria Mella is dreaming. She jumps out of a police car and runs with her colleagues along the E10 between Kiruna and Gällivare. They are on their way to a crashed car lying upside down ten meters from the carriageway. It’s such hard work. Her colleagues are already standing next to the crumpled car and yelling at her.
“Get a move on! You’re the one with the saw! We’ve got to get them out!”
She carries on running with the chainsaw in her hand. Somewhere she can hear a woman; her screams are heartrending.
She’s there at last. She starts up the chainsaw. It shrieks through the metal of the car. She catches sight of the child seat hanging upside down in the car, but she can’t see if there’s a child in it. The saw gives a shrill howl, but suddenly it makes a loud piercing ringing sound. Like a telephone.
Robert nudges Anna-Maria in the side and goes back to sleep as soon as she has picked up the receiver. Sven-Erik Stålnacke’s voice comes down the line.
“It’s me,” he says. “Listen, I went