Mari Jungstedt - The Dead Of Summer

It all seemed so long ago. She felt as if she had aged, changed. She was carrying a secret, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to continue to do so, much less share it with anyone else.

Vera had given birth to a baby girl in the cabin on the ship. Everything had gone well. The birth was over in less than ten minutes.

Before Karin left the cabin and the new parents with their baby, she had demanded to know the truth.

The killer that the police had been searching for the whole time was a woman. And a very pregnant woman. Who would ever have imagined that?

In the cramped cabin, with her blood-smeared newborn child at her breast, Vera had confessed to shooting both Peter Bovide and Morgan Larsson. Before they died, she’d forced them to their knees and then demanded to hear their remorse. Peter Bovide had pleaded and begged. He claimed that the murder was a mistake. That Tanya had started screaming when she was raped, and Morgan had hit her on the head with a rock to make her shut up. He hadn’t meant to hit her so hard. Tanya died instantly, both young men were seized with panic, and without even thinking, they had tossed her body overboard. By then it was too late, and they fled back to Nynäshamn as fast as they could go.

His explanation made no difference. Vera carried out what she had intended to do.

She’d smuggled into Sweden her father’s old army pistol in the moving van from Germany, keeping it as a memento. Then she had put it to use. In all these years, she had been convinced that the two men on Gotska Sandön were Stockholmers she would never see again, but by chance she’d recognized Peter Bovide in the ICA supermarket in Slite. And after that it didn’t take long before she located Morgan Larsson. She guessed that he too was from Slite, and she started looking for him at the big work sites in the area. She found him in a personnel catalogue from the Cementa factory. He hadn’t changed.

Without telling her husband, Vera had carried out her plan. But after Morgan Larsson was killed, Stefan had discovered that the gun was missing from the locked cabinet in the living room. He had confronted her, understood why she’d done it, and forgiven her. He loved her, and they were about to become parents.

Together they’d decided that there was little chance the police would ever figure out that the pregnant woman from Kyllaj was the murderer. So they could just go on living their lives.

But if Vera should come under suspicion for the murders, they’d devised an escape plan. When Karin Jacobsson had come on board the boat from Gotska Sandön with the old newspaper clippings, Stefan had realized that the jig was up. He rang Vera, who came to pick him up in Fårösund when the boat docked. She had packed their bags and brought along cash, passports and everything else they needed. To confuse the police, they went out to the airport and bought tickets on the last plane to Stockholm that evening. They parked the car, and even checked in for the flight. But instead of proceeding through security, they left the airport and took a cab to the ferry that was due to depart at eight o’clock for Nynäshamn. From there they planned to go out to Arlanda to catch a flight. Karin hadn’t wanted to know where they were headed.

She sat down on the sand and looked out at the sea. She wondered how they’d managed to evade the police and what they were doing at this very moment.

Presumably, she ought to run away too. She’d helped a double murderer go free. She couldn’t explain why she’d made that decision. Maybe it was because of the whole tragic story about the two young girls who had just wanted to sleep on the beach under the open sky on that hot July night twenty years ago – the night that shattered the entire family. The father had taken his own life, the mother became addicted to painkillers and lost all contact with Vera. Leaving her alone with the guilt.

Maybe, in her heart, Karin thought that it was a matter of justice. Maybe it had been easier to make the decision because she’d helped bring Vera’s baby into the world, and most of all because of her own life-long trauma. She would probably never see her own child again, unless her daughter decided to look for her biological mother. And so far she hadn’t. She would be twenty-five this year. Karin knew nothing about the people who had adopted her or where she had ended up, except that she was not living on Gotland.

She wondered how much her daughter knew about her birth. She hoped that no one would tell her the truth.

Karin thought of her as Lydia, the name she had secretly given the baby in that dimly lit maternity room at Visby hospital. The happiest hour of her life.

In all these years, she had never forgiven her parents. When she changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby, they told her it was impossible. They said all the papers had already been signed. During the whole pregnancy, they had actually never asked her what she wanted or how she felt. They’d just taken it for granted that the child had to be given away.

It was a Thursday afternoon when Karin went out riding in the woods alone. Her horse fell and ended up lame, so she had to lead him home. On the way back, she passed the riding teacher’s remote farm, and she went in to borrow the phone to ring for help.

The riding teacher was home alone. He explained that his wife and children were away. They put the horse in the stable and went back to the house.

He invited her to sit in the living room and offered her a glass of juice before she used the phone.

The next second, he was on her, tearing off her sweater and riding breeches, raping her right there on the burgundy carpet. She could still remember how the rug scratched against her bare back.

Afterwards, she was allowed to use the phone. Her father came to get her and the horse. The riding teacher was very pleasant and completely unfazed.

Karin didn’t tell anyone, not even her parents. Occasionally, she would run into the riding teacher in town, at the post office or in the Konsum supermarket; she felt nauseated every time she saw him. He pretended nothing had happened.

When she missed her period and began throwing up in the mornings, she repressed the whole episode. The shame was too great. In the end, she couldn’t hide it any longer. Even though she wore baggy sweaters, her mother saw that her belly was sticking out and took her to the local clinic. By then she was five months pregnant, and it was too late to have an abortion.

At first it was a relief to tell her parents what had happened. Even though she felt ashamed and guilty, she knew in her heart that she wasn’t to blame. But just the fact that he’d been in her knickers, and inside of her, made her feel strangely ashamed. She told herself that when her parents found out about it they would help her, take charge of everything and see to it that this terrible wrong would be redressed. They would report the riding teacher to the police, see to it that he had to answer for his actions to his family and be put in jail for the crime he’d committed. Justice in the end would prevail.

But their reaction shocked her. Not only did they refuse to report the riding teacher to the police, they refused even to talk about what had happened. They chose to pretend it had never occurred, as if, deep inside, they didn’t believe her. Karin would never forget the humiliation. They told her that, since she was so far along, the only option was to give the baby up for adoption; there was nothing else to discuss. Karin didn’t object; she wanted to get rid of all traces of the rape. She wanted to continue being young.

But after the birth, everything changed. That was when the worst betrayal occurred, when she regretted her decision and wanted to keep the baby. Her parents’ claim that it was impossible, since the papers had already been signed, turned out to be a lie. Something died inside her on the day she gave birth to the baby and had to give her up.