Frozen Moment (50 page)

    The
waiting soon became unbearable. If he lit a fire, made some coffee, put on a CD
to drown out the ticking of the clock, it would look as if he were making
himself at home, which might annoy her - as if he were overstepping the mark,
as if he thought he had rights but not obligations.

    An
enormous amount of time seemed to have passed. Looking at the clock wasn't a
great deal of help, since he hadn't the faintest idea when he had sat down at
the table and fixed his eyes on the path leading into the forest.

    He
moved into the other room in the hope that the chill from the hallway would be
less noticeable there. As he was about to sit down on the sofa something caught
his eye, drawing his attention to the desk. A world atlas lay open with a
picture on top of it. He stared at the picture. It was printed on shiny
photographic paper and was slightly out of focus, but there was no doubting the
subject matter: Lars Waltz, his head shot to pieces, lying on the gravel at his
farm. Underneath the picture were some hastily scrawled comments which he
couldn't make out, and the back was covered with fine, elegant but barely
legible script. On closer inspection he thought it was written in Finnish.

    A
sound made him stiffen. What if Seja was back from her ride? He would be forced
to confront her with the incomprehensible object in his hand. His thoughts were
spinning far too quickly; he was shocked at seeing his two worlds come together
so inexorably without understanding how or why. He discovered that his hand was
shaking. Was Seja involved in some other way, apart from having driven Åke
Melkersson to the scene of the crime? Had she actually been there at the farm
already that morning?

    A
shadow passed across the windowsill, making him jump. It was only the cat. He
still had a little time.

    Only
now did he recall the hesitation he had felt on the morning of the murder. He
had found it difficult to put his finger on what it was, but something about
Seja Lundberg and Åke Melkersson's account of what had happened when they found
the body had seemed wrong. Tell had found holes in their story, and it had
turned out that they were lying. He had intended to question them both again at
a later stage, to see if there were any further lies embedded in their
statements, to break them down and see what was hiding underneath. But it
wasn't unusual for people to lie during questioning; they often withheld
information for the most banal and vain of reasons.

    He
hadn't followed up his plan, and he knew exactly why: bad judgement. Now he
would have to suffer for his mistake, and in quite a different way from the one
he had imagined.

    Tell
took two long strides across the floor and gazed out into the garden. The
stable door was still closed. He thought fast. Somewhere in the house there had
to be something,
anything, that
would provide further
explanation. Wherever it was, he intended to find it, even if he had to turn
the entire house upside down. He opened the window so that he would be able to
hear her coming.

    Tell
rummaged among the papers on the bookcase and on the desk and found several
articles that she had started writing and in some cases finished, but nothing
that explained the picture from the scene of the crime. One drawer in the desk
was locked; it took him a couple of minutes to find the key in the bottom of a
pot on the windowsill. The drawer contained a thin folder. He was so agitated
that he had to read the two pages twice before he understood what he was
looking at. The document appeared to be a synopsis of a longer text. Even if
the brief sentences were more like questions, and even if he couldn't quite
work out what it was that Seja Lundberg had withheld from him, there was enough
information for a new idea to form in his head. It was obvious that she was
involved in a way he didn't yet understand. But he was certainly going to find
out.

    He
found the laptop pushed down between two coffee tables - she clearly had some
idea of security after all. An eternity went by as the computer started up,
only to deny him access. It was password protected. He glanced at the clock and
wondered what time Lise-Lott Edell closed her shop. If he put his foot down he
could be in Grabo in fifteen minutes.

    1997

    She
allowed herself to take the plastic cover off the bed twice a day, morning and
afternoon. Without the cover, the smell of Maya would disappear within just a
few months. Even now Solveig could tell that it was growing fainter each time
she reverently folded back the shabby rose-patterned quilt which Maya had had
since she was a child. Solveig laid her cheek against the sheet and took deep
breaths - slowly and carefully, so that she wouldn't start coughing. She had
even cut down on the cigarettes, because she wanted to preserve her sense of
smell. Losing the ability to experience the smell of things would be like
losing another part of Maya.

    It
would happen one day, inevitably. The particles from a human body did not
remain for all eternity, and when that day came she would have to turn to
something else. Maya's diary from when she was a little girl. Maya's clothes,
which Solveig had hauled down from the attic, where they had been stored in bin
bags. She had always had difficulty in throwing things away. She had always
saved things, as if she had known all her life that there would come a day when
she would be forced to cling to worldly objects in order to survive.

    She
had crammed her own clothes into the smaller wardrobes in the bedroom so that
she could hang up Maya's in the dressing room.
One item per
coat hanger.
The baby clothes were placed carefully in the blue-painted
chest of drawers, the ripped punk gear in the middle of the rails and the
outdoor clothes at the back next to the wall. She papered the walls with a
ridiculously expensive dark purple wallpaper, then hung scarves on ornate gold
hooks, along with the hats, berets and other accessories Maya had worn over the
years, as if it were an exhibition in which every work of art symbolised an
epoch in her daughter's all-too-short life.

    Solveig
spent most of her time in the dressing room. There was always plenty more to
do. She was particularly pleased with the fitted carpet, which had also made a
big hole in her savings. However, nothing was too good for Maya. It was
important that everything was just right.
Maya's colours.
Her favourite materials.
As long as Solveig was
working, she could keep the tinnitus at bay and the panic at arm's length, well
aware that the day the memory room was
finished,
she
would be driven into the fire. But that day was far away, because there was
still a great deal to do.

    She
had albums of photos to be sorted, enlarged and framed. She had boxes of Maya's
music up in the attic; she would have to listen to it all to see what might be
important. Every single lyric might contain those words Maya never had time to
say. In her early teens music had been everything to Maya. She lived through
her music, wallpapered her room with her idols, dressed like them,
quoted
them over and over again.
those
words Maya never had time to say. In her early teens music had been everything
to Maya. She lived through her music, wallpapered her room with her idols,
dressed like them,
quoted
them over and over again.

    Solveig
didn't know anything about music, and she definitely didn't know anything about
the kind of music Maya listened to. But she realised that the words were at
least as important as the melodies. Maya had written on her mirror with a black
kohl pencil, and on the walls she had pinned up quotations written in red ink
on rice paper, making the words into works of art. Solveig had never bothered
to read them; her English wasn't as good as it had been. Nor had she realised
before that it was important for her to understand them, those words, that they
were potential routes into her daughter's innermost being. That they could
provide answers to the questions she had never managed to ask.

    There
was no room for the crates of vinyl records in the dressing room so they had to
go in the bedroom.

    If
in the past Solveig had regretted leaving the larger apartment in Rydboholm,
she was now almost torturing herself to death. Maya's room was there, the room
she grew up in - Maya was in every little detail. The marks on the wallpaper
from the toothpaste she had decided to use to put up her posters.
Inside the fitted wardrobe, where Maya had painted a landscape in
tempera.
Solveig had gone mad at the time, afraid she would have to pay
the
landlord
to have the wall repainted when they
moved out. The scratch marks at the bottom of the door made by that disgusting
cat Maya had dragged home, the one that had caught ringworm and managed to
infect them all before they got rid of the wretched animal.

    Maya
had only ever stayed in the new apartment on a temporary basis, so Solveig was
trying to recreate something that had never existed. And there were new tenants
living in Rydboholm these days. Maybe some other teenage girl in Maya's old
room who played her music so loud that the walls bellied outwards and the
neighbours complained.
A girl who wasn't dead.

    Eventually
Solveig received Maya's possessions from the school, in a wooden crate with the
address on a sticky label. It felt like receiving a coffin, and just as she was
opening the lid she got the idea that it was

    Maya
she would find inside.
Lifeless, of course, but still a body
to hold on to.
Because she was terrified of
forgetting.

    She
put the record player with the crates of albums. Only when she was so tired
that her arms were aching, did she climb up on to her bed and start from the
very beginning of the collection.

    She
tried to allow herself to be rocked into restfulness by the strange discordant
music she had always loathed, telling herself that this was Maya's
music, that
it represented Maya's world and must be appreciated
at all costs.
Because Maya was irreproachable now.
Perfect. Complete. Her death had ensured that this fact would never change.

    While
Solveig worked on her memorial, Sebastian gave his mother a wide berth. He
rarely spoke directly to her, perhaps because he suspected that she only had
ears for his sister's voice.
Perhaps because his burden of
guilt remained a silent agreement between them.
Sometimes he would sit a
little way off, just watching. Occasionally he would be able to help in some
way: holding a shelf while she screwed it into place, making coffee when she
needed a break.

    It
wasn't only the physical things that had changed in the Granith household. For
example, Sebastian had never seen his mother with so much energy; normally
exhaustion was her signature, along with her infectious apathy and
listlessness. He had often felt tired as soon as he walked in through the door.
He and Maya had talked about it once: the way their home
sucked the strength
out of them both. It wasn't the only time they had discussed Solveig, but those
were the words he remembered most clearly. Maya had said that Solveig sucked
all the strength out of her. From time to time Sebastian was tempted to hurl
her words in his mother's face, straight into that pale puffy face, the eyes
bloodshot from the dust, the cheeks burning feverishly.

    Maya
hated you, you old cow. Got it? She hated you. You're remembering things that
were never true. You remember that she loved you.
That you
were close.
You think you were alike, you and Maya, but you were nothing
like each other. Maya was strong, she was for real. You're nothing but crap,
Mum. You're crap, and everybody knows it.

    Of
course he never said that. He had forfeited his right to have an opinion and he
was well aware of that fact. Solveig now had the upper hand.

    One
morning she woke up as usual with a scream in her throat. The tablets produced
such a heavy dreamless sleep that the arm she had been lying on was numb and
useless.
Dead meat,
she thought as her numbed hand banged into the chest
of drawers.

    As
soon as she hauled herself into a sitting position the scream began to work its
way determinedly up her throat to await her decision: out through the mouth or
stuck fast in the auditory canals like the cry of an animal in torment? There
was nothing to be done about the tinnitus, according to one of the doctors she
saw regularly. Avoid noisy environments.
Which she did, of
course.
And he prescribed tranquillisers, either to reduce the noise
level or for some other reason. She didn't really know. She took them anyway,
but they didn't help much.

    
Her
breathing was jagged, making her gasp for air.
Up you get, Solveig. Open
the door. Walk through the hallway. Open the door of the dressing room just a
little bit. Switch on the light.