Camilla Läckberg - The Stone Cutter

Once inside the sacristy all hope vanished that Arne might have stayed securely at home. Harald heard his voice and thought that he was probably talking to some poor tourists who had run into the most conservative verger in the Swedish realm. For a moment Harald was tempted to sneak back out. Then he sighed and thought he should do the Christian thing and go in and rescue the poor creatures.

But there were no tourists in sight. Instead Arne was standing high up on the pulpit and preaching in a thunderous voice to the empty pews. Harald stared at him in disbelief, wondering what on earth had taken possession of the fellow.

Arne was waving his arms and working hard as if he were holding a sermon on the mount; he stopped only for a moment when he saw Harald come in the door. Then he went on as if nothing had happened. Now Harald also saw all the papers strewn beneath the pulpit. That was explained when Arne with sweeping gestures tore pages out of the psalmbook he held in his hand and let them float to the floor.

'What do you think you're doing?' said Harald indignantly, striding resolutely up the centre aisle of the church.

'I'm doing what should have been done a long time ago,' replied Arne belligerently. 'I'm ripping up the horrible new-fangled things. Ungodly is what they are,' he snorted and continued to rip out page after page. 'I don't understand why everything old suddenly has to be changed. It was all so much better before. Now all morality has been made lax, and people dance and sing whether it's Thursday or Sunday! Not to mention that they're copulating everywhere, outside the sanctity of marriage.'

His hair was standing on end, and Harald wondered once again whether poor Arne had completely lost his mind. He didn't know what had brought on this sudden outburst. Arne had of course been muttering much the same opinions year in and year out, but he had never ventured to do anything this bold before.

'You've got to calm down, Arne. Please come down from the pulpit and we'll have a talk.'

'Talk? Ha! That's all anyone does,' Arne spouted from his elevated position. 'That's what I'm saying, it's time for action instead! And this place is as good as any to begin,' he said as page after page continued falling to the floor like big snowflakes.

But now Harald flew into a temper. Standing here vandalizing his magnificent church! There had to be a limit to the man's nonsense!

'Come down from there, Arne, come down right now!' he shouted, which made the verger stop short. Never before had the pastor raised his voice. He was normally so gentle, so it had an effect.

'You have ten seconds to come down from there, or I'll come up and get you, big as you are!' Harald went on, now bright red in the face with rage. The look in his eyes left no doubt that he meant business.

Arne's belligerence was deflated as fast as it came on, and he docilely obeyed the pastor's command.

'All right, then,' said Harald in a considerably milder voice when he went over to Arne and put an arm round his shoulders. 'Let's go over to the parsonage. I'll put on a pot of coffee, and we'll have a little of that coffee cake that Signe was so kind to bake. Then we'll have a talk, you and I.'

And they walked off down the centre aisle towards the door, the small man with his arm round the big man. Like an odd bridal couple.

Monica felt a bit dizzy when she got out of the car. She hadn't got much sleep the night before. The thought of the horrible thing Kaj was accused of doing had kept her awake till the wee hours.

The worst thing was actually the lack of any doubt. When she heard the police officer read off the allegations, she knew from the first moment that they were true. So many pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place. Suddenly there was an explanation for so much that had happened during their years together.

A feeling of disgust turned her stomach, and she leaned against the car and spat out a little gall onto the asphalt. She had fought off the nausea all morning. When she arrived at work, her boss had told her that she didn't have to work if she didn't feel like it, considering the circumstances. But she had refused to go home. The thought of sitting at home all day was repulsive. She would rather endure people's stares than walk about in his house, sit on his sofa, cook food in his kitchen. The thought that he had touched her, although not in a long, long time, made her want to flay the skin from her body.

But in the end she had no choice. After she'd tried to stay on her feet for an hour the boss had told her to go home, and this time he refused to take no for an answer. With a lump in her stomach she had slowly started driving home. By the time she got to the bottom of Galärbacken she was just creeping along. The driver of the car behind her had honked his horn in annoyance, but Monica couldn't have cared less.

If it hadn't been for Morgan she would have packed a bag and driven to her sister's house. But she couldn't abandon him. He would go crazy anywhere else than in his little cabin; the fact that they had taken his computers was enough of an upheaval in his world. Yesterday she had found him wandering restlessly among his stacks of magazines. He was lost without his anchors in the real world. She hoped that the police would give back his computers soon.

Monica took out the key to the front door and was about to unlock it when she stopped. She wasn't ready to go inside yet. A sudden longing to see her son made her stuff the key back in her pocket, go down the steps and take the path to Morgan's cabin. He would surely be annoyed that she was breaking the routines and showing up at his place, but for once she didn't care. She remembered how he had smelled as a baby, how that smell had made her want to move mountains for his sake. Now she felt a need to sniff the back of his neck once more, as big as he was, to hug him as if he were her rock, instead of vice versa, as it had been for all these years.

She knocked cautiously on the door and waited. There was no sound from inside, and she began to feel uneasy. Monica knocked again, a little harder this time, and waited tensely to hear the sound of footsteps inside. Nothing.

She tried the door, but it was locked. Fumbling, she reached above the door for the spare key and finally found it.

Where could he be? Morgan hardly ever went anywhere by himself. Never before had he gone anywhere without either taking her along or at least very properly telling her where he was going. Fear began prickling at her throat, and she half-expected to find him dead inside his cabin. That was what she had always dreaded. That one day he would stop talking about death and instead decide to seek it out. Maybe the loss of his computers and the encroachment into his world had made him finally decide to set off for the place from which there was no return.

But the cabin was empty. Anxiously she looked around, and her gaze quickly fell on a piece of paper lying on top of a pile of magazines near the door. She recognized Morgan's handwriting even before she read what he'd written, and her heart skipped a beat. She breathed a sigh of relief as soon as she read the note. She didn't realize until her shoulders relaxed how hard she'd been clenching her muscles.

'Computers ready. Went with the police to pick up,' it said on the paper, and her concern returned. It wasn't the suicide note she had feared, but there was something that didn't make sense. Why would the police come to collect him so that he could get his computers back? Wouldn't they have brought them along and delivered them directly?

Monica made up her mind in an instant. She dashed back to the car and drove off with a squeal of rubber. The whole way to Tanumshede she pressed the accelerator to the floor, and her hands clutched the steering wheel so hard that they began to sweat. When she passed the intersection by Tanum Tavern she heard sirens behind her and was overtaken by an ambulance driving at high speed. She unconsciously sped up and almost flew past Hedemyr's. At Mr Li's store she had to stop suddenly, and the strap of the seat belt locked hard against her chest. The ambulance had stopped right in front of the police station, and a queue of cars had formed from both directions because they couldn't get past what looked like the scene of an accident. When she craned her neck she could see a dark heap lying in the street. She didn't need to see any more to know who it was.