The Living and the Dead in Winsford by Håkan Nesser Page B

you felt cold it was always better to keep moving.
    I asked if he was born on Exmoor, and he said he was. Not quite here in Winsford, but in Simonsbath, a bit higher up and more or less in the middle of the moor. He had moved away when he started at university, but came back ten years ago. As he worked with computers it didn’t matter where he lived: twenty years of city life and stress was quite enough for him, he maintained.
    He said nothing about his family. Didn’t say if he had any children or had anything that could be described as ‘personal relationships’. I suspected he might be gay: he had precisely the frankness that heterosexual men usually lack. Even if he showed noticeably little interest in my circumstances.
    I didn’t ask him about details, of course not, and while he was talking I gained the time I needed. I was able to decide how much of my own personal circumstances I was prepared to reveal.
    Not very much, I concluded. And I stuck to that line.
    Maria Anderson, a writer from Sweden. I think I even man-aged to convince him that I wrote under a pseudonym. I told him I was living just outside Winsford, but I didn’t go into precisely where.
    What sort of books do you write? he wanted to know.
    Novels.
    No, I was not a well-known name, especially not outside Sweden. But I managed to keep going. I had been awarded some kind of scholarship for a year, and that was why I was here on Exmoor.
    ‘And you intend to write about the moor, do you?’
    ‘I think so.’
    Then I asked him what he had meant by that reference to a shadow, an absent husband and a house in the south.
    ‘I can’t help it. I can see into people’s minds, that’s the basic truth of the matter. It’s always been the case.’
    We’d had our glasses refilled. He had another dark beer, and I had a drop more red wine.
    ‘Interesting,’ I said, non-committally.
    ‘I’ve been able to do that ever since I was a child,’ he explained. ‘I knew my father had another woman long before my mother found out about it. I was eight then. I knew that my schoolmistress’s mother had died the moment I saw her walking across the schoolyard that winter morning. Five minutes before she came into the classroom and told us about it. And I knew . . . No, I’d better stop. It’s pointless to keep providing proof. It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not.’
    I nodded. ‘I’ve no reason to doubt you.’
    ‘And now you’re sitting there wondering what I have to say about the husband and the house, aren’t you?’ said Mr Britton, taking a swig of beer.
    ‘Once you’ve started you might as well go on,’ I said.
    He laughed. Somewhat nervously, I thought – in any case it was the first time he’d done so during our conversation.
    ‘I don’t really have anything to go on about,’ he said. ‘I just get a fleeting image in my brain, and all I can do is describe what the image looked like. What it might mean is another matter altogether.’
    ‘And what exactly did you see in my case?’
    He thought for a moment, no more. ‘I didn’t see a lot,’ he said. ‘At first a man, then a white house . . . Bathed in strong sunlight – it looked as if it were somewhere in the south. The Mediterranean or North Africa, perhaps. Then came the shadow: it came from up above, and I had the impression that it was your shadow. Or that it had something to do with you at least. And it swept away the man. But the house remained standing. Anyway, that’s all – but it was pretty clear. I suppose “mist” is a better word than “fog” to describe it, by the way.’
    I swallowed. ‘What did this man look like, did you notice any details?’
    ‘No. I saw him standing quite a long distance away. But he was rather elderly, not really old – about sixty or so.’
    ‘And you saw all this inside my mind?’
    He adopted an apologetic expression. ‘Perhaps not quite – but it’s when I observe a face that images like these crop up, and that’s what