ELLEN

10.45 P.M.

‘How can you have Elsa’s necklace? Didn’t it sink and disappear?’ Ellen looked at her mother for a long moment.

‘It was an accident, Ellen. A sibling quarrel that went too far. We shouldn’t have left the two of you alone.’

Ellen went over and took the necklace with the broken chain. ‘What went too far? What are you trying to say? That I was the one who …’ She shook her head and squeezed the necklace hard. ‘That I killed Elsa?’ She was breathing heavily. ‘What do you mean? I know I should have tried to get hold of you when she disappeared …’

Ellen had always felt guilty about her sister’s death. If she had told someone that Elsa had disappeared, maybe she would have been found in time. But that she could have killed her … She tried to stay calm, but it was hard. ‘I don’t need to listen to this.’ She went to the door.

‘You stay here.’ Margareta stood up firmly from the chair. ‘Now you’re going to listen to me, young lady.’

Ellen turned around and met her mother’s sad eyes.

Her legs crumpled.

‘We searched. She wasn’t where you said the two of you had been.’

‘Please …’

‘I’ve tried, believe me, I have tried to remove the memories of how this could have happened. Everything was a power struggle for you — you were always so jealous of Elsa, and your temper was frightful, we couldn’t control you. It was one of your outbursts of anger that went too far. It was often the case that you couldn’t remember what you did when you got so angry.’

The ground cracked open.

‘You really don’t remember?’

‘But Mum, you weren’t even there.’

‘No. Didrik.’

‘Didrik? What does he have to do with this?’

‘He saw the way you were quarrelling and how you pushed Elsa down under the water. He heard the two of you shrieking, and then how it got quiet. He saw you come up from the shore. You didn’t do it on purpose. It was a game that got out of control. A terrible accident.’

‘But why didn’t Didrik tell that to the police? Why did he lie about the birds and …?’

‘Because he understood what the truth would have done to you. He’s obsessed with you. He always has been. No one wished you harm. It was so terrible that we’d lost Elsa, and we didn’t want to lose you, too. You wouldn’t have been able to handle the truth. It was for your sake.’

‘You’re all out of your minds.’ She thought about what Kjell Thulin had told her, how he’d sensed that someone was lying. ‘Was that why you drugged me? Thulin told me everything.’

Margareta nodded.

Her fingers were tingling. She rummaged for the sleeping pills in her bag. Took two and swallowed them without water. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said when Margareta took her hand. ‘I don’t understand. How?’

‘When we came home that night and Elsa wasn’t in her bed, I woke you, and you mumbled and cried by turn and told us what had happened. We ran down to the shore, but there was no Elsa there. We decided to tell you that it couldn’t have happened that way. That you went down to swim, but that Elsa never showed up. We said that you’d had a horrible nightmare.’

‘Maybe I did. Why do you trust Didrik?’

‘During the period she was missing, I almost thought it was just a nightmare myself, because they couldn’t find her. But when she was found dead, drowned …’ Ellen’s mother hiccuped and wiped away the tears on her face. ‘Ellen, you had scratches on your arms, Elsa too. You had quarrelled. You yourself told us what had happened, even if it was incoherent. But Didrik saw everything.’

‘Maybe he’s lying.’ She was grasping at straws.

‘You often had blackouts when you were that angry, and in your clenched hand you were holding Elsa’s necklace. It was broken. You’d pulled it off, or else it came off in the quarrel. You had your own on around your neck. I took Elsa’s necklace and hid it. I haven’t taken it out in all these years, not until Didrik called me and told me that you’d started to remember.’

Ellen sat down on her bed. She was feeling physical pain. ‘Stop. Please, stop.’

She thought of Thulin and his suspicions. How she’d had defensive wounds, but that it wasn’t something that could be proven.

‘Why did you all lie to me?’

‘Because you were a child, and because you didn’t have control of your emotions. You still don’t. But when you were smaller, it was even worse. It was hard for all of us. Today, you would certainly be diagnosed with something and maybe be medicated, I don’t know.’

‘Stop!’

‘There are so many who share part of the guilt in this, and the truth was unmanageable for all of us. It was like losing two daughters — what should we have done? We decided to try to protect you from your own story. Maybe we were wrong. Do you really not remember? Sometimes, I’ve thought that maybe you’ve been harbouring your own secret, and that was the reason you turned out the way you have.’

‘This is so sick. Don’t you understand how sick this is?’ Ellen didn’t want to experience what she was feeling now. ‘Death, death, death,’ she screamed, hitting at things around her before she fled from the room.

‘Ellen!’