Missing

Hedlund’s wife to keep a look-out for Sibylla. They would be keen to find a link between them, to trace Sibylla’s motive.
    She glanced over her shoulder. Maybe they were here already?
    ‘Don’t you realise I know what you’ve been up to for ages?’
    After a pause the woman spoke again.
    ‘I knew ever since the funeral, when I saw your flowers.’
    She sounded outraged.
    ‘What’s going on in the mind of someone sending an anonymous bouquet of red roses to a funeral? What did you hope to gain by it? Can you tell me that? Did you think it would please Rune?’
    The contempt in the woman’s eyes was so searing that Sibylla had to look away.
    ‘If he really wanted to live with you he’d have chosen you while he was alive. But he stayed with me. Not you. So was that why you had to produce the flowers – to humiliate me?’
    The woman frowned demonstratively as if she was trying to make the revulsion she felt visible.
    ‘Every Friday, week in and week out, one more bloody red rose on his grave. Do you want to punish me? Make me suffer because I was the one who got him in the end?’
    Her voice was cracking, but it was obvious that she had stored up more to say. Words had been piling up, waiting for an outlet.
    Sibylla was shaken by her own miscalculation. The authorities would have had to ask this woman. She was one of the ‘close relatives’ whose informed consent must be sought. The answer was presumably that someone else out there was feeling abandoned and bitterly wanted to restore something of what had been lost. She had to make sure.
    ‘Have the police contacted you?’
    ‘What? The police? Why should they?’
    Rune Hedlund’s widow took a step forward, kneeled and jammed the sharp tip of her tin vase into the ground. The crocuses shied away in alarm.
    Watching the other woman’s back rising and falling with her heavy breathing, Sibylla was quite sure that she had been looking forward to this moment of confrontation. She had probably practised carefully what to say when she was finally face to face with her husband’s unknown mistress.
    Shame that she had wasted her ammunition.
    Of course, she was not to know that Rune’s real lover had committed much, much worse acts than putting flowers on her man’s grave. Sibylla wouldn’t like to be the one who enlightened her.
    When the distraught woman got up, there were tears in her eyes.
    ‘You’re sick – you realise that, don’t you?’
    The detestation in her eyes hit Sibylla almost like a physical blow. Old memories came back and she looked away to stop remembering.
    ‘Can’t let him be, can you? Not even in death?’
    She walked away. Sibylla just stood there, watching her disappear.
    It was obvious that Rune Hedlund’s widow had no idea of how right she was, in a way.

S he stayed in the cemetery, sitting on a bench she had picked for its good view of Rune Hedlund’s final resting place, even though it was a safe distance away. Not many people had decided to visit their loved ones’ graves that day and those who did come were either couples or too old.
    Not that she was in a hurry. She was ready to stay until that woman came. Sooner or later she would.

    At nightfall she pulled out her sleeping bag and mat. There was a stone wall at the back of the urn enclosure and she tucked herself up between it and the bare branches of shrubbery. It was reasonably out of sight, but it also allowed her to keep watch at all times. Not that she thought the woman would turn up this late, but from what she had learned about her she was well able to surprise.
    She wouldn’t miss this woman when she finally came.
    * * *
    The next day she picked another bench to sit on. It was less well placed for observing the grave, but the wife’s big bouquet of tulips helped by marking it out. She left her station only once, when she ran to the nearby garage to use their toilet and buy bread. It took only ten minutes before she was back in place, resuming her guard.
    No one came near Rune Hedlund’s grave.
    The next day she fell asleep. She did not know for how long but rushed to the grave to check. No red rose had turned up during the night.

    On the Wednesday she felt her pulse beat faster, for the first time. A solitary woman in her forties turned the corner by the water tap and walked briskly along the path towards the urn enclosure.
    Sibylla hurried away, taking a shortcut across a small lawn to keep an eye on what was happening. The woman disappointed her by