Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman Page B

stopped rowing and the boat glided on with the force of the last strokes, then slowed down. The man was pouring water on to the rowlocks. The oars had probably been creaking. Birger couldn’t hear it, but he heard footsteps in the gravel outside. Åke Vemdal was running back.
    The otter board sagged and swung crosswise. With a soft jerk, the oarsman got up speed again to keep it at a distance. It was Björne Brandberg. Birger could see him now. Clever old boy, too. Making the most of it while the others slept, slack and dry-mouthed. And he must have the line between his teeth.
    Åke flung open the door.
    ‘Come on, you too,’ he said. ‘We’re going up to the Strömgren homestead.’

She was wearing a blue denim skirt smeared with blood down the sides, the hem wet and dirty. Her hair was fair and fell quite a long way down her back. Both she and the little girl were exhausted. The child had plaits that had come undone and her swollen, battered face made him at once hostile to the mother. He hadn’t believed a word of what she had said, it was all so unbelievably insane. Out with a six-year-old on the marshlands up towards Starhill in the middle of the night. In a long skirt.
    But when he examined the child, he saw the swellings on her face had been caused by insect bites. Oriana heated some milk for her and tucked her up on a sofa in the bedroom. The mother was sitting bolt upright on a kitchen chair, staring at the blank television screen.
    They really needed Henry Strömgren with them to find the place, but Åke did not want to leave Oriana alone with the girl’s mother, so he asked Henry to keep an eye on her. She was not to leave, and she was not to go anywhere near any kind of weapon. No knives on the table. He had phoned for reinforcements. But it would be an hour or two before they got to Blackwater and up there.
    Åke and Birger set off down to the Lobber and found the place after some wandering about. There was a tent and it lay on the ground just as she had said, slashed to pieces and soaked in blood that had begun to dry. The canvas was moulded round the two bodies. One body lay half over the other. Everything was quite still.
    They carefully turned back the canvas and had to loosen the light metal pegs in one or two places to be able to lift it. But Åke wanted them to touch the tent as little as possible.
    The sunlight flooded a head of long hair. It had been dark and curly, but was now sticky with blood and there were feathers stuck to it. There were feathers everywhere, stuck in patches of dried blood. The sleeping bags had been slashed to shreds and the feathers poured out of them whenever the canvas was touched. Fine down floated away on the mountain breeze.
    A face. Lips drawn back. The upper lip had dried over the teeth. A young woman. She lay underneath. Perhaps the man, lying half over her, had tried to protect her from the knife. He was fair. At the back of his neck was a cake of coagulated blood.
    Birger put two fingers where the pulse in the neck had once throbbed. He found the woman’s neck under the tangled hair and feathers. Her flesh was still and colder than his fingertips.
    ‘Just leave them where they are,’ said Åke. ‘The technical boys are on their way.’
    They had pulled a bit of the canvas aside to reveal a transistor radio. A hand that must be the man’s looked as if it had stiffened as it reached for the handle. Beside it was a pair of rolled-up socks, fluffy with down, a large unopened bar of chocolate and a whole lot of small polished stones which looked like uneven beads. She must have been wearing a necklace. The face had a pallor that had already begun to turn grey.
    ‘Sit over there,’ said Åke, pointing at a fallen birch. The top of it was green and dipping its first leaves in the water. They were already eaten by larvae, which disgusted him. The water was racing along in a web of many sounds, rustling, murmuring and tinkling. Sometimes someone seemed to be talking