The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [75]
Now the thoughts of Riis returned. A boat. Sure, don’t we all have something we would like to buy cheap and fix up?
But what would he do with a holiday? What would he do?
A car came down the small road to the stables. It was Sammy Nilsson. Berglund raised his hand in greeting, walked with rapid steps even farther away from the crime scene, and sat down on a rock at the edge of the forest. He knew that a few minutes alone could cure him—at least temporarily—of the paralysis of hopelessness.
Twenty-three
She couldn’t stop shaking. Never had she experienced such inner fire, it was as if her blood were heated to its boiling point and ran through frozen veins to muscle tissue of ice. The pain pulsated through arms and legs, creating an almost freezing chill that resisted all willful movement.
The blankets and covers didn’t help. Laura tensed her body in an arc in order to force away the evil that had possessed her but her body did not obey, only curling up and transforming her into a shivering bundle.
In her distress she let everything be, let go, and sank into a river of confused images and memories. The fever chills ebbed away and she could passively float along. Then she was caught up in a whirling anxiety, was washed up on rocks whose sharp edges razed her limbs.
Under half shut lids she glimpsed a shoreline of moss-covered stones, a clump of reeds here and there, and small, rickety docks, sunk down in the mud, that looked as if they had been abandoned for a long time.
She passed a deserted country without human life. She was caught in a river that rushed by more strongly. In the distance she heard a waterfall. The water became rapidly more shallow, there were more rocks on the bottom, and she was helplessly bumped between the white cliffs that now replaced the bands of reeds and abundant meadows.
The current was stronger than before and the thundering noise was overpowering. She came to her senses and just before the falls she was washed onto, or rather thrown onto, a cobblestone beach. She was blinded by a strong light, realized the stones were made of pure gold, and caught sight of a plaque with an ornately inscribed text in Latin. Before she sank into unconsciousness she read the inscription aloud to herself but could not make any sense of the words.
Laura Hindersten woke up with the taste of blood in her mouth. Her lips were chewed up and her thighs scratched by nails.
A thick layer of dried sweat covered her thin body and she was cold, but now in a more human way than before. The blankets were on the ground and she reached down and pulled them up again.
The fever dreams lingered in her consciousness like a veil of mist over a deserted landscape. In her memory she looked for the source of her nightmare, because it was certainly somewhere in the literature. She was, after all, Ulrik Hindersten’s daughter. But she found nothing. This was her own river journey.
Ulrik would have loved the story and would have encouraged her to write it down, but she only wanted to bury the nightmare in forgetfulness.
After an hour she got up and, wrapped in a blanket, walked to the bathroom on unsteady legs. She knew what had to be done. The visit of the woman from the police had shaken her more than she first had realized. There was something in Ann Lindell’s gaze that bothered her, as if she had grasped more than she had let show.
But mostly it was Lindell’s ease that worried Laura, who had found herself during the conversation enjoying her time with the policewoman. She liked her voice, her slightly careful movements, and the little smile that was so well suited to self-irony.
Laura did not want to be disarmed by conversation. She feared the friendly