eating dinner with the other members of the Sanctum scholarship committee, and the drinking songs can be heard all the way out to the back of the garden.
Reidar turns and looks at Veronica and Marie. Steam is rising from their flushed bodies, they’re enveloped in veils of mist as the snow falls around them. He is about to say something when Veronica bends over and throws an armful of snow up at him. He backs away, laughing, and falls onto his back, vanishing under the loose snow.
He lies there on his back, listening to their laughter.
The snow feels liberating. His body is still scorching hot. Reidar looks straight up at the sky, the hypnotic snow falling from the centre of creation, an eternity of drifting white.
A memory takes him by surprise. He is peeling off the children’s snowsuits. Taking off hats with snow caught in the wool. He can remember their cold cheeks and sweaty hair. The smell of the drying cupboard and wet boots.
He misses the children so much that his longing feels purely physical in its intensity.
Right now he wishes he was alone, so he could lie in the snow until he lost consciousness. Die, surrounded by his memories of Felicia and Mikael. Of how they had once been his.
He gets to his feet with an effort and gazes out across the white fields. Marie and Veronica are laughing, making angels in the snow and rolling around a short distance away.
‘How long have these parties been going on?’ Marie calls to him.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Reidar mumbles.
He is about to walk off, drink until he’s drunk, then tie a noose round his neck, but Marie is standing in front of him, legs akimbo.
‘You never want to talk. I don’t know anything,’ she says with a laugh. ‘I don’t even know if you’ve got children, or—’
‘Just leave me the fuck alone!’ Reidar shouts, and pushes past. ‘What is it you want?’
‘Sorry, I …’
‘Leave me the fuck alone,’ he snaps, and disappears into the house.
The two women walk shivering back into the sauna. The steam on their bodies runs off as the heat closes round them again, as if it had never been gone.
‘What’s his problem?’ Marie asks.
‘He’s pretending to be alive, but feels dead,’ Veronica replies simply.
Reidar Frost is wearing a new pair of trousers with a double stripe, and an open shirt. The back of his hair is damp. He is clutching a bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild in each hand.
That morning he had been on his way to the room upstairs to remove the rope from the beam, but when he reached the door he had been filled instead with an aching sense of longing. He stood with his hand on the door handle and forced himself to turn round, go downstairs and wake his friends. They poured spiced schnapps into crystal glasses and rustled up some boiled eggs with Russian caviar.
Reidar is walking barefoot along a corridor lined with dark portraits.
The snow outside is casting an indirect light, like a pale darkness.
In the reading room with its shiny leather furniture he stops and looks out of the huge window. The view is like a fairytale. As if the king of winter had blown snow across a landscape of apple trees and fields.
Suddenly he sees flickering lights on the long avenue leading from the gates to the front of the house. The branches of the trees look like embroidered lace in the glow. A car approaching. The snow swirling into the air behind it is coloured red by its rear-lights.
Reidar can’t recall inviting anyone else to join them.
He is just thinking that Veronica will have to take care of the new arrivals when he sees that it’s a police car.
Reidar stops and puts the bottles down on a chest, then goes back downstairs and pulls on the felt-lined winter boots beside the door. He heads out into the cold air to meet the car as it arrives in the broad turning circle.
‘Reidar Frost?’ a woman in plain clothes says as she gets out of the car.
‘Yes,’ he replies.
‘Can we go inside?’
‘Here will do,’ he says.
‘Would you like to sit in the car?’
‘Does it look like it?’
‘We’ve found your son,’ the woman says, taking a couple of steps towards him.
‘I see,’ he sighs, holding up a hand to silence the police officer.
He is breathing, feeling the smell of the snow, of water that has frozen to ice high up in the sky. Reidar composes himself, then slowly lowers his hand.
‘So where did you find Mikael?’ he says in a voice that has become strangely calm.
‘He was walking over a bridge—’
‘What?! What the hell are you saying, woman?’ Reidar roars.
The woman flinches. She’s tall, and has a long ponytail down her back.
‘I’m trying to tell you that he’s alive,’ she says.
‘What is this?’ Reidar asks uncomprehendingly.
‘He’s been taken into Södermalm Hospital for observation.’
‘Not my son, he died many years—’
‘There’s no doubt whatsoever that it’s him.’
Reidar is staring at her with eyes that have turned completely black.
‘Mikael’s alive?’
‘He’s come back.’
‘My son?’
‘I appreciate that it’s strange, but—’
‘I thought …’
Reidar’s chin trembles as the policewoman explains that his DNA is a one hundred per cent match. The ground beneath him feels soft, rolling like a wave, and he fumbles in the air for support.
‘Sweet God in heaven,’ he whispers. ‘Dear God, thank you …’
His face cracks into a broad smile and he looks completely broken, and he stares up at the falling snow as his legs give way beneath him. The policewoman tries to catch him, but one of his knees hits the ground and he falls to the side, putting his hand out to break his fall.
The
