The Blood Spilt Page 0,3

do you get the energy, she thought.

She gave the taxi driver a tip that was much too big. Compensation for her monosyllabic answers when he’d attempted to talk.

“Big party,” he said, nodding toward the hotel.

The whole law firm was assembled up there. Almost two hundred people milling around. Talking in groups. Detaching themselves and moving on. Handshakes and air kisses. A line of enormous barbecues had been set out. Members of staff dressed in white were laying out a barbecue buffet on a long table covered with a linen cloth. They scurried between the hotel kitchen and the table like white mice in their ridiculously tall chef’s hats.

“Yes,” replied Rebecka, and hoisted her crocodile skin bag onto her shoulder. “But I’ve got through worse things.”

He laughed and pulled away, the prow lifting out of the water. A black cat slunk silently down from the jetty and disappeared into the tall grass.

Rebecka set off. The island looked tired after the summer. Well trodden, dried out, worn out.

This is where they’ve walked, she thought. All the families with children, carrying their picnic blankets, all the well dressed, tipsy people from the boats.

The grass was short and turning yellow. The trees dusty and thirsty. She could imagine what it would look like in the forest. No doubt there were heaps of bottles, cans, used condoms and human feces under the blueberry bushes and ferns.

The track up to the hotel was as hard as concrete. Like the cracked back of a prehistoric lizard. She was a lizard herself. Just landed in her spaceship. Wearing human clothing on her way into the trial by fire. Trying to imitate human behavior. Look at people around her and do the same. Hope the disguise wouldn’t gape at the neck.

She had almost reached the gardens.

Come on, she said to herself. You can do this.

After she’d killed those men in Kiruna she’d carried on with her job at the law firm of Meijer & Ditzinger as usual. Things had gone well, she thought. In fact they’d gone completely to hell. She hadn’t thought about the blood and the bodies. When she looked back now to the time before she was signed off on sick leave, she couldn’t actually remember thinking at all. She’d thought she was working. But in the end all she was doing was moving paper from one pile to another. True, she was sleeping badly. And wasn’t really there, somehow. It could take an eternity just to get ready in the morning and get to work. The catastrophe came from behind. She didn’t see it before it landed right on top of her. It was just a simple merger and acquisition case. The client had been wondering about the period of notice on a local rental agreement. And she’d given completely the wrong answer. All the files with all the contracts right under her nose, but she hadn’t understood what they said. The client, a French mail order company, had demanded compensation from the firm.

She remembered how Måns Wenngren, her boss, had looked at her. His face blood red behind the desk. She’d tried to resign, but he wouldn’t agree.

“It would look terrible for the firm,” he’d said. “Everybody would think you’d been pushed out. That we were letting down a colleague with psychological… who isn’t very well.”

She’d staggered out of the office that same afternoon. And when she stood on Birger Jarlsgatan in the autumn darkness with the lights of the expensive cars swishing past and the tastefully decorated shop windows and the pubs down on Stureplan, she was suddenly overcome by a strong feeling that she’d never be able to go back to Meijer & Ditzinger. She’d felt as though she wanted to get as far away from them as possible. But it didn’t turn out like that.

She was signed off on sick leave. For a week at a time, first of all. Then for a month at a time. The doctor had told her to do whatever she enjoyed. If there was anything she liked about her job, she should carry on doing that.

The firm’s criminal caseload had begun to increase significantly after Kiruna. Her name and picture had been kept out of the papers, but the name of the firm had appeared frequently in the media. And it had produced results. People got in touch and wanted to be represented by “that girl who was up in Kiruna.” They got the standard response that the firm could provide a more experienced criminal