Sara was reading on her bed upstairs. She hadn’t even bothered to say no when Rebecka asked if they wanted to go outside, she’d just shut the door behind her and thrown herself on the bed.
“Rebecka, look at me!” shouted Lova. She was standing on the ridge on top of the cold store roof. She turned around and let herself fall backwards into the snow. It wasn’t particularly high. She lay there in the snow, flapping her arms and legs to make the outline of an angel in the snow.
They’d been playing outside for almost an hour, building an obstacle course. It went along a tunnel through the bank of snow toward the barn, three times around the big birch tree, up on to the roof of the cold store, walk along the ridge without falling off, jump down into the snow, then back to the start. You had to run backwards in the snow for the last bit, Lova had decided. She was busy marking out the track with pine branches. She had a problem with Virku, who felt it was her job to steal all the branches and take them off to secret places where the outdoor lights didn’t reach.
“Stop it, I said!” Lova shouted breathlessly to Virku, who was just scampering off happily with another find in her mouth.
“Come on, what about some hot chocolate and a sandwich?” Rebecka tried for the third time.
She’d worn herself out tunneling through the snow. Now she’d stopped sweating and started to shiver. She wanted to go inside. It was still snowing.
But Lova protested furiously. Rebecka had to time her as she did the obstacle course.
“All right, but let’s do it now,” said Rebecka. “You can manage without the branches—you know the route.”
It was difficult to run in the snow. Lova only managed twice around the birch tree, and she didn’t run the last bit backwards. When she got to the end she collapsed in Rebecka’s arms, exhausted.
“A new world record!” shouted Rebecka.
“Now it’s your turn.”
“In your dreams. Maybe tomorrow. Inside!”
“Virku!” called Lova as they walked toward the house.
But there was no sign of the dog.
“You go in,” said Rebecka. “I’ll give her a shout.
“And put your pajamas and socks on,” she called after Lova as she disappeared up the stairs.
She closed the outside door and called again. Out into the darkness.
“Virku!”
It felt as if her voice reached only a few meters. The falling snow muffled every sound, and when she listened out into the darkness there was an eerie silence. She had to steel herself to shout again. It felt creepy, standing there exposed by the porch light, shouting into the silent, pitch-black forest all around her.
“Virku, here girl! Virku!”
Bloody dog. She took a step down from the porch to take a walk around the garden, but stopped herself.
Stop being so childish, she scolded herself, but still couldn’t bring herself to leave the porch or to call out again. She couldn’t get the image of the note on her car out of her head. The word “BLOOD” written in sprawling letters. She thought about Viktor. And about the children inside the house. She went backwards up the steps to the porch. Couldn’t make herself turn her back on the unknown things that might be lurking out there. When she got inside she locked the door and ran upstairs.
She stopped in the hallway and rang Sivving. He turned up after five minutes.
“She’s probably in heat,” he said. “She won’t come to any harm. Probably just the opposite.”
“But it’s so cold,” said Rebecka.
“If it’s too cold, she’ll come home.”
“You’re probably right,” sighed Rebecka. “It just feels a bit funny without her.”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “I want to show you something. Wait here, I don’t want the girls to see it.”
She ran out to the car and fetched the note that had been on the windscreen.
Sivving read it, a deep frown creasing his forehead.
“Have you shown this to the police?” he asked.
“No, what can they do?”
“How should I know—give you protection or something.”
Rebecka laughed dryly.
“For this? No way, they don’t have the resources to do that. But there’s something else as well.”
She told him about the postcard in Viktor’s Bible.
“What if the person who wrote the postcard was somebody who loved him?”
“Well?”
“ ‘What we have done is not wrong in the eyes of God.’ I don’t know, but Viktor never had a girlfriend. I’m just thinking that maybe… well, it just occurred to me that there might be somebody who