The injustice made Agnes's old eyes well up with tears. She had never received anything from her daughter, even though she herself had given and given and given. Everything that Mary had perceived as nasty and horrid had been done for her own good. It wasn't true that Agnes had taken any joy in punishing her daughter or telling her that she was fat and ugly. On the contrary. No, it had actually pained her to be so harsh, but that was her duty as a mother. And it had produced results. Hadn't Mary finally pulled herself together and got rid of all that flab? Yes, she had. And it was all thanks to her mother, though she'd never received any credit.
A strong gust of wind outside made a branch strike the window- pane. Agnes jumped in her wheelchair, but then laughed at herself. Was she turning into a scaredy-cat at her age? She who had never been afraid of anything. Except of being poor. The years as a stonecutter's wife had taught her that. The cold, the hunger, the filth, the degradation. All that had made her scared to death of ever being poor again. She had believed that the men in the States would be her ticket out of misery, then Äke, then Per-Erik. But they had all betrayed her. They had all broken their promises to her, just as her father had. And they had all been punished.
In the end she was the one who had the last word. The blue wooden box and its contents had served as a reminder that she alone controlled her own destiny. And that any means were permitted.
She had fetched the ashes in the wooden box the night before the ship left for America. Under cover of darkness she had sneaked to the site of the fire and gathered up ashes from the spot where she knew Anders and the boys had been sleeping. At the time she didn't know why she did it, but as the years passed she began to understand her impulsive action. The wooden box with the ashes reminded her how easy it was to do something in order to achieve her own goals.
The plan had gradually taken shape in her mind as the day of their departure for America approached. She knew that her fate would be sealed if she let herself be shipped off like a milk-cow with her family as a dead weight round her legs. But alone she would have a chance to create a different future for herself. One in which poverty would be only a distant and distasteful memory.
Anders never knew what hit him. The knife sank into his back all the way to the hilt, deep into his heart, and he fell like a dead piece of meat over the kitchen table.
The boys were taking a nap. She stole quietly into their room, eased the pillow out from under Karl's head and put it over his face. Then she pressed it down with her whole weight. It was so easy. He kicked and struggled briefly, but no sound escaped from under the pillow, so Johan kept sleeping peacefully while his twin brother died. Then it was his turn. She repeated the procedure, and this time it was a little harder. Johan had always been stronger and more powerful than Karl, but even he couldn't fight for long. He was soon as lifeless as his brother. With unseeing eyes they lay there staring at the ceiling, and Agnes felt strangely empty of feelings. It was as though she were putting things back in their proper order. They never should have been born, and now they were no more.
But before she could go on with her own life there was one more thing she had to do. In the middle of the floor she gathered a big pile of the boys' clothes and then went out to the kitchen. She pulled the knife out of Anders's back and dragged him to the boys' room. He was so big and heavy that she was totally soaked with sweat when he finally lay in a heap on the floor. She fetched some of the aquavit they had in the house, poured it over the pile of clothes, and then lit a cigarette. With pleasure she took a few drags before she cautiously placed the lit cigarette next to the clothing drenched in alcohol. Hopefully she could get a good distance away before it caught fire properly.
Voices out in the corridor of the nursing home roused Agnes from her reverie. She waited tensely until they passed, hoping they weren't coming for her, and didn't relax until she heard them go by and continue down the hall.
She hadn't needed to pretend she was shocked when she came back from her errands and saw the fire. She never dreamed it would burn so hot or spread so fast. The whole house had burnt to the ground, but at least all had gone according to plan. No one had even for a moment suspected that Anders and the boys might have died in some other way, and not in the fire.
During the days that followed Agnes felt so wonderfully free that she sometimes had to look at her feet to make sure they were touching the ground. Outwardly she had kept up the pretence, played the grieving widow and mother, but inside she had laughed at how easily those stupid, simple people could be fooled. And the biggest idiot of them all was her father. She was itching with the desire to tell him what she'd done, to hold up the crime to him like a bloody scalp and say, 'See what you did? See what you drove me to do when you banished me like a Babylonian harlot that day?' But she thought better of the idea. No matter how much she wanted to share the blame with him, she would be better served by accepting his sympathy.
The whole plan had worked so well. It had turned out exactly as she wanted and hoped, and yet bad luck had hounded her. The first few years in New York had been everything she'd dreamt of when she sat in the stonecutter compound, imagining a different life for herself. But later she had again been denied the life she deserved. And one injustice followed another.
Agnes felt the rage rising in her breast. She wanted to free herself of this old, loathsome skin. Wriggle out of it like a chrysalis and emerge as the lovely butterfly she once had been. She could smell the odour of old age in her nostrils, and it made her want to vomit.
A consoling thought occurred to her: maybe she could ask her daughter to send over the blue box. Mary couldn't have any use for it, and Agnes would like to run its contents through her fingers again, one last time. The thought cheered her up. She would ask her to bring the box over here. If her daughter brought it herself, maybe she would even tell Mary what it actually contained. To her daughter she had always called it Humility when she fed her spoonfuls of it down in the cellar. But really it had been Fortitude that she wanted to impart to the girl. The strength to do whatever was necessary to achieve what she wanted. She believed she'd succeeded when the girl had obeyed her wishes to get rid of Äke. But after that everything had fallen apart.
Now Agnes couldn't wait to get hold of the ashes again. She reached out a trembling, wrinkled hand for the telephone, but froze halfway there. Then her hand dropped to her side, and her head fell forward, with her chin resting on her chest. Her eyes stared unseeing at the wall, and saliva trickled down from the corner of her mouth to her chin.
A week had passed since Patrik and Martin had arrested Lilian at the hospital. It had been a week full of both relief and frustration. Relief that they had found Sara's murderer, but frustration that she still refused to tell them why she had done it.
Patrik put his feet up on the coffee table and leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head. He'd been able to spend more time at home this past week, which eased his guilty conscience a little. Besides, things were beginning to settle down at home. With a smile he watched Erica as she resolutely rocked the pram with Maja in it back and forth over the threshold to the hall. Now he had also learned the technique, and it usually took no more than five minutes for them to get Maja to fall asleep.
Cautiously Erica pushed the pram into the work room and closed the door. That meant that Maja was asleep and they would have at least forty minutes of peace and quiet together.