Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman

the real Midsummer Eve. He was lying there asleep. So that must have been it.’
    ‘But why do you think he drew back his foot when you tapped on the window?’
    ‘How would I know that?’
    ‘You know him.’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Why did you run away? Why didn’t you try to get into the cottage?’
    She said nothing.
    ‘What were you afraid of?’ he said.
    Yes, what had she been afraid of? She no longer knew. It had all shattered. A greater terror had wiped it out.
    ‘Why did you walk back?’
    ‘I don’t really know. Everything was . . . creepy.’
    ‘Did you think he had someone else there? Another girl?’
    Neither of them had any expression any longer. Not even features.
    ‘Did he?’ Their faces were nothing but two discs of pale, moist flesh. They said nothing. They were looking attentively at her. But she held out and did not reply.
    The policeman got up. He was red-eyed and looked tired, but the other man seemed sleepier, his mouth occasionally dropping open and his eyelids drooping. He had pale, creased eyelids. He pulled himself together and followed the policeman out of the kitchen. A little later, Oriana Strömgren came down from the top floor, where she and Henry had been banished with the children.
    She looked swiftly sideways several times at Annie as she made the coffee. When it was ready, it was a pale brown, slightly sour drink. She offered Annie thin crispbread with soft goat’s cheese on it. Annie ate it at the time, but was never again able to eat that cheese. Mia went on eating it, not connecting it with what had happened.
    Mia was asleep in Oriana and Henry’s bedroom. No one had said they had to stay at the Strömgrens’. Annie didn’t even know if she was allowed to leave the kitchen. She had no car to get down into the village. She could decide nothing.
    Now and again she dozed off as she sat there on the kitchen bench, and Oriana said she should go to bed. But she wanted to stay up. She didn’t want to go to bed. She thought if she fell asleep and slid away from this event that was no longer an event, she would wake up to something irretrievable.
    Eventually a policeman in a grey overall with badges and reflectors on it came in. She was to go with him down to the river. A question of identification, he said.
    ‘But it can’t possibly be anyone I know!’
    He didn’t reply, just stood with the kitchen door open until she joined him. The doctor and the chief of police were waiting outside. There were lots of people and cars now, dogs barking incessantly. She said she couldn’t look at the bodies in the tent. That was impossible.
    ‘We must request you to,’ said the police chief. He said he had to ask but he didn’t ask. He had gone through her belongings and the other man had fumbled over her body with his hands.
    ‘We want to know if you know one of them.’
    ‘Why should I? Why just the one?’
    ‘We think we may know who the girl is,’ he said. ‘We want you to look at the boy.’
    She vomited on the way down. They waited patiently, the doctor even holding her up. But then they hustled her on to continue along the path that disappeared into the wet of the marsh. She was weeping as she approached the river, the men pushing and shoving her.
    ‘It won’t take long, it won’t take long,’ said Birger, whose name she did not know then.
    ‘I know it’s not Dan!’
    ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then it’ll be quick.’
    The tent canvas was lifted off. They were lying side by side on their backs. But they were stiff and the bodies had not been properly straightened out, knees and elbows bent, fingers splayed. The girl’s back was hunched, her head apparently raised from the plastic sheeting and stiffened like that. She had a wound with brownish black edges on her cheek. It looked like a mouth, another mouth, and it was open.
    It was not Dan. They were two alien, whitish-grey, dried-up faces with sticky hair all round them. And there were more men round the tent.