gulp. Veronica takes the glass from him, tastes the wine, and sits down.
She pushes her shoes off, leans back and rests her bare feet in his lap.
Gently he caresses her calf, the bruise from the new stirrup leather of her saddle, then up the inside of her thigh towards her groin. She lets it happen, not bothered by the fact that Marie is still in the room.
The flames are rising high in the huge fireplace. The heat is pulsating and her face feels so hot it’s almost burning.
Marie comes cautiously closer. Reidar looks at her. Her red hair has started to curl in the heat of the room. Her leopard-skin dress is creased and stained.
‘An admirer,’ Veronica says, holding the glass away from Reidar when he tries to reach it.
‘I love your books,’ Marie says.
‘Which books?’ he asks brusquely.
He gets up and fetches a fresh glass from the dresser and pours some wine. Marie misunderstands the gesture and holds out her hand to take it.
‘I presume you go to the toilet yourself when you want to have a piss,’ Reidar says, drinking the wine.
‘There’s no need—’
‘If you want wine, then drink some fucking wine,’ he interrupts in a loud voice.
Marie blushes and takes a deep breath. With her hand trembling she takes the bottle and pours herself a glass. Reidar sighs deeply, then says in a gentler tone of voice:
‘I think this vintage is one of the better years.’
Taking the bottle with him, he goes back to his seat.
Smiling, he watches as Marie sits down beside him, swirls the wine in her glass and tastes it.
Reidar laughs and refills her glass, looks her in the eye, then turns serious and kisses her on the lips.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
Reidar kisses Marie softly again. She moves her head away, but can’t help smiling. She drinks some wine, looks him in the eye, then leans over and kisses him.
He strokes the nape of her neck, under her hair, then moves his hand over her right shoulder and feels how the narrow strap of her dress has sunk into her skin.
She puts her glass down, kisses him again, and thinks that she’s mad as she lets him caress one of her breasts.
Reidar suppresses the urge to burst into tears, making his throat hurt, as he strokes her thigh under her dress, feeling her nicotine patch, and moves his hand round to her backside.
Marie pats his hand away when he tries to pull her underwear down, then stands up and wipes her mouth.
‘Maybe we should go back down and join the party again,’ she says, trying to sound neutral.
‘Yes,’ he says.
Veronica is sitting motionless on the sofa and doesn’t meet her enquiring gaze.
‘Are you both coming?’
Reidar shakes his head.
‘OK,’ Marie whispers and walks towards the door.
Her dress shimmers as she leaves the room. Reidar stares through the open doorway. The darkness looks like dirty velvet.
Veronica gets up and takes her glass from the table, and drinks. She has sweat patches under the arms of her dress.
‘You’re a bastard,’ she says.
‘I’m just trying to get the most out of life,’ he says quietly.
He catches her hand and presses it to his cheek, holding it there and looking into her sorrowful eyes.
The fire has gone out and the room is freezing cold when Reidar wakes up on the sofa. His eyes are stinging, and he thinks about his wife’s story about the Sandman. The man who throws sand in children’s eyes so that they fall asleep and sleep right through the night.
‘Shit,’ Reidar whispers, and sits up.
He’s naked, and has spilled wine over the leather upholstery. In the distance is the sound of an aeroplane. The morning light hits the dusty windows.
Reidar gets to his feet and sees Veronica lying curled up on the floor in front of the fireplace. She’s wrapped herself in the tablecloth. Somewhere in the forest a deer is calling. The party downstairs is still going on, but is more subdued now. Reidar grabs the half-full bottle of wine and leaves the room unsteadily. A headache is throbbing inside his skull as he starts to climb the creaking oak stairs to his bedroom. He stops on the landing, sighs, and goes back down again. Carefully he picks Veronica up and lays her on the sofa, covers her, then retrieves her glasses from the floor and puts them on the table.
Reidar Frost is sixty-two years old and the author of three international bestsellers, the so-called Sanctum series.
He moved from his house in Tyresö eight years ago, when he bought Råcksta Manor, outside Norrtälje. Two hundred hectares of forest, fields, stables and a fine paddock where he occasionally trains his five horses. Thirteen years ago Reidar Frost ended up alone in a way that shouldn’t happen to anyone. His son and daughter vanished without trace one night after they sneaked out to meet a friend. Mikael and Felicia’s bicycles were found on a footpath near Badholmen. Apart from one detective with a Finnish accent, everyone thought the children had been playing too close to the water and had drowned in Erstaviken.
The police stopped looking, even though no bodies were ever found. Reidar’s wife Roseanna couldn’t deal with him and her own loss. She moved in temporarily with her sister, asked for a divorce and used the money from the settlement to move abroad. A couple of months later she was found in her bath in a Paris hotel. She’d committed suicide. On the floor was a drawing Felicia had given her on Mother’s Day.
The children have been declared dead. Their names are engraved on a headstone that Reidar rarely visits. The same day they were declared dead, he invited his friends to a party, and ever since has taken care to keep going, the way you would keep a fire alight.
Reidar Frost is convinced he’s going to drink himself to death, but at the same time he knows he’d kill himself if he was left alone.
A goods train is thundering through the nocturnal winter landscape. The Traxx train is pulling almost three hundred metres of wagons behind it.
In the driver’s cab sits Erik Johnsson. His hand is resting on the control. The noise from the engine and the rails is rhythmic and monotonous.
The snow seems to be rushing out of a tunnel of light formed by the two headlights. The rest is darkness.
As the train emerges from the broad curve around Vårsta, Erik Johnsson increases speed again.
He’s thinking that the snow is so bad that he’s going to have to stop at Hallsberg, if not before, to check the braking distance.
Far off in the haze two deer scamper off the rails and away across the white fields. They move through the snow with magical ease, and disappear into the night.
As the train approaches the long Igelsta Bridge, Erik thinks back to when Sissela sometimes used to accompany him on journeys. They would kiss in each tunnel and on every bridge. These days she refuses to miss a single yoga lesson.
He brakes gently, passes Hall and heads out across the high bridge. It feels like flying.