Håkan Nesser: The Living and the Dead in Winsford

Half an hour later I parked outside The Bridge Inn next to an old stone bridge over the Barle. Without doubt Dulverton is a market town that can supply everything a modern person can possibly need — or an unmodern one, come to that. After strolling around the town for ten minutes — under a greyish white sky with no trace left of the mist, and even a suggestion that the sun was about to break through the clouds — Castor and I were able to establish that the place had not only restaurants, but also a police station, a fire station, a pharmacy, a library, and a variety of shops, pubs and teashops. There was even an old antiquarian bookshop, which we couldn’t resist paying a visit to, as a notice pinned to the rickety door announced that four-footed friends were especially welcome.

We did the shopping at a leisurely pace, then went for a little stroll by the cheerfully babbling brook that was the Barle — oh, I am so pleased to be able to write ‘cheerfully babbling brook’, I think it enables me to redress matters somewhat — and I found it difficult to understand where all the water was coming from. To round things off we ate some venison pie with a large helping of peas at The Bridge Inn — well, Castor had to be satisfied with a handful of doggy treats produced willingly from a store under the counter.

I noted that there is a considerable difference between being a single middle-aged woman and a single middle-aged woman with a dog. Castor’s company, as he lies there under my table in the pub, gives me some sort of natural dignity and legitimacy that I find difficult to explain. A sort of undeserved blessing that one can make the most of. I would not be able to cope with the situation I find myself in were it not for his reassuring presence and support — certainly not. Nevertheless I am of course very unsure if everything will end up happily, whatever that cliché might mean, even with this formidable companion by my side. But at least it helps me to get by in the short term. Minutes, hours, perhaps even days. Presumably that is also how a dog thinks and makes its way through life. One step at a time. They obviously have an advantage on that score.

In fact he was Martin’s dog to start with. Martin was the one who insisted that we needed a pet when the children had flown the nest — and by a pet, he meant of course a dog, nothing else. He grew up with lots of pooches around the house; in my well-organized childhood there was no room for such extravagances, I don’t really know why. I had to make do with unreliable cats and a handful of aquarium fish that soon died off, that was all. Oh, and a brother as well. Not to mention a younger sister — I would prefer to write my way around her, giving her as wide a berth as possible, but I can see that it wouldn’t work.

He’s seven years old, getting on for eight, Castor. A Rhodesian ridgeback. I had never heard of them when Martin first brought him home. I think he had a vague dream of the dog lying at his feet in his study at the university, and perhaps also accompanying him when he delivered his lectures. But of course, that never happened. I was the one who took Castor on courses, and to the vet’s. I was the one who looked after all the practical details involved in owning a dog, and I was the one who took him for long walks every day.

Because I was the one who had time.

Or to be frank, who made the time: but there was never any argument about it. I enjoyed doing it, it was as simple as that. To go wandering through woods and fields for a few hours every day with a silent and loyal companion, with no other aim than doing just that — walking through the countryside in silence — well, after only a few weeks that was an occupation I came to regard as the most important and meaningful aspect of my life.

Perhaps that says something about my life.

When I drove back to Darne Lodge — following the elevated route over the moor — the mist had dispersed altogether and the views extended for miles. I wound down the side window and thought I could just about make out the sea in the distance, or the Bristol Channel at least, and I was overcome by a feeling of being very solitary, totally insignificant and passed over. In many ways it is easier to live somewhere without horizons, in the mist and in a confined space. At least I am well aware that I need to stick to simple and practical activities, to make decisions and stick to them, as I said before — otherwise everything can go to pot. When everything, every step and every action and every undertaking has no broader significance, when you might just as well be doing something else rather than what you are actually doing at the moment, and when you can’t help but think about that — and when the only thing that might possibly have some point seems to be linked with the mistakes and misdeeds one was guilty of in the past — well, then madness is lying in wait just round the corner.

Living on the moor involves an attractive but dangerous freedom, I’m beginning to understand that already. I stopped in a lay-by and let Castor move from the poky back seat to the front passenger seat. He loves being there, puts his nose over the air intake and thus creates for himself an ethereal range of scents.

Or he pokes his whole head out through the side window, like dogs do in the countryside. There is nobody in the whole world who knows that we are here.

I’ll say that again: there is nobody in the whole world who knows that we are here.

Early in the morning of the tenth of April my husband raped a young woman in a hotel in Gothenburg. Her name was Magdalena Svensson, twenty-three years old, and she had been working at the hotel as a waitress since the beginning of the year. She reported the incident to the police after about three weeks mulling it over, on the second of May.

Or perhaps he didn’t actually rape her. I don’t know for sure, because I wasn’t there.

Martin was interrogated, spent a night and a day in police custody and was then released on bail.

Just over two weeks later, on the eighteenth of May, a tabloid newspaper became aware of the situation — the fact that the well-known polemicist, author and professor of literature, Martin Holinek, had been charged with rape — and by the following week the whole of Sweden knew about it. Magdalena Svensson talked about what had happened that night to a large number of media outlets, and for five days running it made the headlines in the evening tabloids Expressen and Aftonbladet . My husband refused to comment and was given sick leave by the university; but it was widely discussed on the radio and television and in the press. But above all it was a hot topic on social media: in one blog, for instance, another woman claimed she had also been raped by ‘that sleazy professor’ — in a hotel in Umeå almost a year ago. He was alleged to have been ‘as randy as a bloody chimpanzee’ — an expression she had obviously borrowed from an earlier case involving a French banker and politician — but she had not got round to reporting the incident because she was afraid. Two other women wrote in their blogs that they had also been raped by different professors, and comments were as numerous as grasshoppers in Egypt.

To crown it all one of the commercial television channels offered me and Martin 50,000 kronor if all three of us would agree to take part in one of their evening discussion programmes. By ‘all three’ they meant the rape victim, the rapist and the rapist’s wife. They considered it to be a matter of considerable public interest. We declined the offer. We never discovered whether or not Magdalena Svensson accepted. Or at least, I didn’t.

On the tenth of June Miss Svensson withdrew her rape accusation, and for a few days the incident had new wind in its sails in the media. There was speculation about her having been threatened, about the rapist having bought himself free in accordance with time-honoured practice, and various other theories similar in nature. A demonstration against men who hate women attracted two thousand people to Sergels Torg in Stockholm. Somebody posted a condom full of shit through our letter box.