and Martin exchanged a quick glance. The story of this house and Ebba’s family was well known in the area, but this was not the right moment to bring it up. Patrik was glad Erica hadn’t come with him. She wouldn’t have been able to restrain herself.
‘Where did you live before?’ asked Patrik, even though he could make a good guess, based on Tobias’s distinctive accent.
‘Göteborg, born and bred,’ said Tobias.
‘And no old quarrels to settle with anyone back there?’
‘We’ve never quarrelled with anyone in Göteborg – or anywhere else, for that matter,’ said Tobias curtly.
‘So what made you decide to move here?’ asked Patrik.
Ebba stared at the table as she fingered the pendant that hung on a chain around her neck. A lovely little angel made of silver.
‘Our son died,’ she said, tugging so hard on the angel that the chain bit into her neck.
‘We needed a change of scene,’ said Tobias. ‘This house had been allowed to fall into disrepair, and nobody cared about it any more. We saw it as a chance for us to start over. I come from a family of innkeepers, so it seemed the natural choice to set up in business, open a bed-and-breakfast. In time, we hope to get conference-goers to stay here.’
‘Looks like you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you,’ said Patrik, staring at the big house with the peeling paint. He purposely chose not to ask about their deceased son. The pain on their faces was too obvious.
‘We’re not afraid of working hard. And we’ll keep at it as long as we can. If we run out of steam, we can always hire some help, but we need to save money. It’s going to be tough to make a go of it financially.’
‘So you can’t think of anyone who might want to hurt you or your business?’ Martin persisted.
‘Business? What business?’ said Tobias with a sarcastic laugh. ‘But no. As I already told you, we can’t think of a single person who would do something like this to us. That’s not the kind of life we lead. We’re just ordinary folk.’
Patrik thought for a moment about Ebba’s background. Not many ordinary folk had that sort of tragic mystery in their past. Fjällbacka was rife with wild rumours about what had happened to Ebba’s family.
‘Unless …’ Tobias cast an inquisitive glance at Ebba, who didn’t seem to understand what he was hinting at. With his eyes fixed on her, he said, ‘The only thing that comes to mind is the birthday card.’
‘Birthday card?’ said Martin.
‘Ever since she was little, on every birthday Ebba has received a card from someone who simply signs the card “G”. Her adoptive parents never found out who was sending those cards. And the cards kept on arriving, even after Ebba moved away from home.’
‘And Ebba has no idea who they’re from?’ asked Patrik before he realized that he was speaking as if she wasn’t present. He turned to her and repeated the question. ‘You have no idea who has been sending these cards to you?’
‘No.’
‘What about your adoptive parents? Are you sure they don’t know anything?’
‘They haven’t a clue.’
‘Has this “G” ever tried to get in touch with you in any other way? Or threatened you?’
‘No, never. Nothing like that, right, Ebba?’ Tobias reached out as if to touch his wife, but then he let his hand drop back on his lap.
She shook her head.
‘Torbjörn is here,’ said Martin, gesturing towards the path.
‘Good. In that case we’ll stop now and let the two of you rest. The medics are on the way, and if they feel you ought to go to the hospital, I think you should do that. These kinds of things need to be taken seriously.’
‘Thanks,’ said Tobias, standing up. ‘Let us know if you find out anything.’
‘We’ll do that.’ Patrik cast another worried glance at Ebba. She still seemed to be enveloped in a bubble. He wondered how the tragedy of her childhood had shaped her, but then he pushed that thought aside. Right now he needed to focus on the job at hand. And that meant determining whether they were dealing with an arsonist.
Dagmar still didn’t understand how it could have happened. Everything had been taken from her, and she was utterly alone. No matter where she went, people whispered ugly words behind her back. They hated her because of what her mother had done.
Sometimes at night she missed her mother and father so much that she had to bite the pillow to stop herself sobbing aloud. Because if she did that, the horrid witch she lived with would beat her black and blue. But she couldn’t always hold back her screams when the nightmares got so bad that she woke up drenched in sweat. In her dreams she saw the chopped-off heads of her mother and father. Because in the end both of them had been beheaded. Dagmar had not been present to see it happen, but the image had been burned into her mind.
And sometimes images of the children also hounded her dreams. The police had found the bodies of eight infants when they dug up the earthen floor in the cellar. That was what the witch had said. ‘Eight poor little children,’ she said, shaking her head, whenever anyone came to visit. Her friends would then turn to glare at Dagmar. ‘The girl must have known about it,’ they said. ‘Even as young as she is, surely she must have realized what they were doing, don’t you think?’
Dagmar refused to be cowed. It didn’t matter whether that was true or not. Mamma and Pappa had loved her, and nobody wanted those dirty, squealing little kids. That was why they had wound up with her mother. For years she had worked so hard, yet the only thanks she ever received for taking in all those unwanted children was that people ended up demeaning her, jeering at her, and then they killed her. The same thing had happened to her father. He had helped Mamma bury those children and for that reason people said that he too deserved to die.
Dagmar had been sent to live with the witch after the police took her parents away. No one else was willing to have her, not the relatives or any friends. No one wanted anything to do with her family. The angelmaker from Fjällbacka – that was what people had started calling her mother the day those little skeletons were found. Now people even sang ballads about her. About the murderer who had drowned the children in a basin, and about her husband who had buried them in the cellar. Dagmar knew those songs by heart. Her foster mother’s snotty-nosed kids sang them to her whenever they got a chance.
None of this mattered to her, because she was still her parents’ little princess, and she knew that she had been both wanted and loved. The only thing that made her tremble with fear was the sound of her foster father’s footsteps approaching across the floor. At those moments Dagmar wished that she could have followed her mother and father into death.
Josef nervously ran his thumb over the stone that he was holding. This meeting was important, and he wasn’t about to allow Sebastian to ruin things.
‘Here it is.’ Sebastian pointed at the drawings that he’d placed on the conference table. ‘Here’s our vision. A project for peace in our time.’ He said the last phrase in English.
Josef sighed to himself. He