Missing

were keeping Jörgen Grundberg company while he ate his last meal.’

A lert and quivering like tensed bow-strings, they sat watching each other across the kitchen table. Both were expecting something to happen that would release the tension. She lost any sense of time passing.
    Trying to link isolated perceptions of the truth into a continuous chain, she began with him. She had been right, as well as catastrophically wrong. Rune Hedlund’s secret was and was not what everyone had suspected. He had a lover, but the lover was a man.
    Now, that man’s strong hands were placed on the kitchen table in front of her. Hands which had carried out all the repulsive mutilations that she had been accused of. Stained with ordinary hobby paints and then covered with plastic gloves, they had searched the hidden cavities of his victims to recover what had been taken from his beloved’s body.
    She whispered an appeal to him.
    ‘Tell me why.’
    This made him relax and took them into a new phase of their relationship, in which neither needed to pretend to the other. There was no point in dropping hints or making covert threats. The only thing left between them was the final confrontation. Before that, she wanted to know and he wanted to tell.
    Afterwards was another matter.
    He seemed calm now, clasping his hands in his lap and poised, it seemed, ready to give a speech.
    ‘Have you ever been to Malta?’
    This question was so unexpected all the air went out of her, making a snorting noise. He might have thought she was laughing, because he started to smile again.
    ‘I went to Malta. It was about six months after Rune’s accident.’
    The smile had faded from his face now, his hands were back on the table and he was looking down at them.
    ‘No one ever grasped how … profoundly I mourned him.’
    He inhaled deeply, as if needing more air before he could carry on speaking.
    ‘Our love is buried in Rune’s grave. They all pitied her, of course. People were trotting round to commiserate every hour God gave. Feeding her stuff they’d brought. Listening to her endlessly babbling on about how unfair life was. All her fucking garbage. There were times when I was on the brink of going there and shouting the truth out loud, straight into her fat, ugly face. I could’ve told her a thing or two! He had been with me that night, just before he collided with the elk. Straight from my bed, where my hands had held him and caressed him.’
    Reaching out with his hands, stretching his long fingers, he wanted to make her feel what he felt. His terrible mental turmoil was almost palpable. He was on the verge of tears, his extended hands were shaking, his lungs struggling to get enough air and his lower lip trembling. His grief seemed mixed with barely restrained anger.
    She reflected that this might well be the first time he had been free to put his feelings into words, the first time in the thirteen long months since Rune’s death. The words had built up a pulsating pressure inside him, which was finally – maybe just this once – released.
    ‘She went back to work soon enough. That meant she could be the queen of the coffee-room, droning on about how Rune’s passing had not been in vain because she had been so generous with parts of his body, allowing four lives to be saved … blah, blah, blah.’
    His head was shaking from side to side, his face twisted with disgust.
    ‘Bullshit! It’s enough to make you want to puke. Is that love? Is it? Letting them cut up the body you’ve loved? And then having his remains scattered to the four winds?’
    He got up from the table, a movement so sudden that she instinctively tried to back away. The wooden chair behind him tipped backwards and crashed on the floor. He righted it, walked across the kitchen to the sink, picked up the coffee-pot and came back.
    ‘Would you like some more coffee?’
    She shook her head, still in a state of confusion. He poured himself a cup and, with the same deliberation, took the pot back to the sink. She had calmed down enough to take the chance of looking around. Behind her was a closed door.
    ‘After six months of this I thought I had better get away for a bit. Seeing her pious face every coffee break was becoming unbearable.’
    The distance between where she was sitting and the door was about two metres.
    ‘When I turned up there was only one reasonable holiday left at the travel agency. I didn’t understand it then, but this was the first time the Lord