They drove in silence. Winter wasn’t familiar with the road. It was all darkness and narrow roads and trees lit up by his powerful headlights. Gloomy houses came and went, but they could have been different from the ones he’d seen earlier that afternoon.

They drove over the plain, the mother of all plains. Flickering lights like solitary stars anchored to the earth. Another crossroads. No traffic.

“Had a boy,” said Smedsberg without warning from the darkness of the backseat.

“I beg your pardon?” said Winter, turning right toward Smedsberg’s farm.

“Carlström. He had a boy at the farm for a few years. I remember now. Nothin’ to do with it, I reckon, but I remembered just now as we turned in.”

“What do you mean by ‘a few years’?” asked Ringmar.

“A foster son. Had a foster son living with ’im. I never seed ’im misself, but Gerd said somethin’ about ’im once or twice.”

“Was she sure?” asked Ringmar.

“That’s what she said.”

No children, Winter thought. Carlström had said no when asked if he had any children, but maybe he didn’t count a foster child.

“She said ’e was fed up with the boy,” said Smedsberg. They’d arrived. Smedsberg’s house was in darkness. “The old man was fed up with the boy and then ’e grew up, and I reckon ’e never came back again.”

“Fed up?” said Winter. “Do you mean Carlström treated him badly?”

“Yes.”

“What was his name?” asked Ringmar. “The boy?”

“She never said. I don’t think she knew.”

They drove home on roads wider than the ones they’d made their way along earlier in the day.

“Interesting,” Ringmar said.

“It’s a different world,” said Winter.

They continued for a while in silence. It was almost exciting to see lit-up houses and villages and towns passing by, to see other cars, trucks. Another world.

“The old man was lying,” said Ringmar.

“You mean Carlström?”

“I mean Natanael Carlström.”

“That’s the understatement of the day,” said Winter.

“Lied through his teeth.”

“That’s a little bit closer to the truth,” said Winter, and Ringmar laughed.

“But it’s not funny,” said Ringmar.

“I had bad vibes out there,” said Winter.

“We’ve stumbled on a secret here,” said Ringmar. “Maybe several.”

“We’d better check up on burglaries in the area.”

“Is it worth the effort?” Ringmar asked. They were approaching Gothenburg now. The sky was a fiery yellow and transparent, lit up from underneath.

“Yes,” said Winter. He couldn’t forget the feeling he’d had when he was about to hammer on the old man’s front door. There was a secret. He’d sensed it. He had sensed the darkness that was deeper than the heavens that fell down over the earth around the big farmhouse.

24

THEY WERE INSIDE THE CITY LIMITS NOW. WINTER COULD STILL detect the rotten smell of the countryside in the car. If he was lucky it would accompany him up to Angela and Elsa. Or unlucky. Angela would say something about the house in the country. Or lucky. She might be right.

Coltrane was playing away on the CD player. A pickup truck passed by, driven by a man wearing a Santa Claus hat. Coltrane’s solo vibrated through the Mercedes and Winter’s head. Another person wearing a Santa Claus hat drove past.

“What the hell’s going on?” said Ringmar.

“Parade of the Santa Clauses,” said Winter.

“Don’t you have any carols?” Ringmar asked, nodding toward the CD player.

“Why not sing along?” said Winter. “Make up your own words.”

“While coppers watched their crooks by night too thinly on the ground, a villain slipped past with his swag and didn’t make a sound.”

He fell silent.

“Encore,” said Winter.

“Fear not, said Winter, we shall make your life a living hell. We’ll track you down and sort you out and lock you in a cell.”

“The best carol I’ve heard in years,” said Winter.

“And it isn’t even Christmas yet,” said Ringmar.

Winter stopped at a red light. The opera house was glittering like its own solar system. The river behind it was red in the self-confident glow. Well-dressed people crossing the road in front of him were on their way to see some opera or other he didn’t even know the name of. Not his kind of music.

“It’s not going to be much fun this Christmas,” said Ringmar softly as they set off again.

Winter glanced at him. Ringmar was staring ahead, as if hoping to see more Santa Clauses who might put him in a better mood.

“Is it Martin you’re thinking about?”

“What else?” Ringmar was gazing out over the water that had lost the glitter from the opera house by now, and instead was reflecting the motionless cranes on the docks on the other side, rising skyward like the skeletons they were. “I’m only human.”

“I’ll have a word with Moa,” said Winter. “I’ve said that before, but I really will this time.”

“Don’t bother,” said Ringmar.

“I mean that I’ll speak indirectly to Martin. First Moa and then perhaps Martin.”

“It’s between him and me, Erik.”

“From him to you, more like,” said Winter.

Ringmar made a noise that could have been a quick intake of breath.

“I sometimes lie awake at night and try to figure out what particular incident caused all this,” he said. “When did it happen? What started it? What did I do?”

Winter waited for him to continue. He exited the highway in order to take Ringmar home. Mariatorg was the same small-town square it had always been. Young people were loitering around the hotdog stand. Streetcars came and went. There was the drugstore, as in all little towns, the photo shop, the bookshop that he sometimes stopped in to buy the occasional book for Lotta and the girls on the way to Långedrag.

It had been Winter’s own local square when he was growing up in Haga, in the same house his sister and her children now lived in.

“I can’t find it,” said Ringmar. “That incident.”

“That’s because it doesn’t exist,” said Winter. “Never did.”

“I think you’re wrong. There’s always something. A child doesn’t forget. Nor does a teenager. Adults can forget, or regard whatever happened as something different from what it was. In the child’s eyes, at least.”

Winter thought about his own child. All the years in store for them both. All the individual incidents.

He drove up to Ringmar’s house. It was illuminated by the neighbor’s Christmas lights in the same way that the river had seemed to be ablaze with the gleam of the opera house.

Ringmar looked at Winter, whose face looked like it had been caught in searchlight beams.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Ringmar with a thin smile.

“Very. And now I understand the real reason why you can’t sleep at night.”

Ringmar laughed.

“Do you know him well?” Winter asked.

“Not well enough to march into his garden with my SigSauer and shoot out all the lights and be confident he’d get the message.”

“Want me to do it for you?”

“You’re already doing enough for me,” said Ringmar, getting out of the car. “See you tomorrow.” He waved goodbye and walked up the path that was lit up by the luminous forest outside the neighbor’s house. You can get all the light therapy you need here, Winter thought. Light therapy. About ten more days and they would be lounging back in the Spanish garden with the three palm trees, overlooked by the White Mountain, and listening to the rhythmic music created by his dear mother as she mixed the second Tanqueray and tonic of the afternoon in the kitchen bar. Some tapas on the table, gambas a la plancha, and jamón serrano, a dish of boquerones fritos, perhaps un fino for Angela and maybe one for him as well. A little cloud in the corner of his eye, but nothing to worry about.