With my colleague Ian Giles, I was recently asked to translate a sample of The Muse, the new book by Mats Strandberg. It’s the story of Hedda, a struggling writer whose best idea – in fact, her whole life – was stolen by a college friend from whom she was once inseparable. Specifically, it’s the story of what happens one hot summer when she reconnects with that former confidant and ends up staying at his parents’ country place – a weird, stifling manor house in the Swedish countryside.

Working on a translation is always a fun process, but this time Ian and I were genuinely struck by the creeping sense of dread and wrongness skillfully woven by the author as Hedda’s visit progresses.

The sample only covers the first 70 pages, so we had no idea whether this unsettling prelude laid the ground for something even more claustrophobic and sinister, or whether the rest of the book might be disappointing. But at the London Book Fair in March, we got to meet up with Lena Stjernström, the literary agent representing the title, where she revealed the rest of the story.

And it is fantastic.

As Lena enthusiastically outlined how Hedda’s situation becomes increasingly nightmarish, I for one squeed with a mixture of horror and delight. Picture The Wicker Man meets Rebecca with a good dash of The Haunting of Hill House. And the big reveal will truly make you shudder. It would make an amazing TV series.

Musan is published in Swedish on 15 May, and the rights have already been sold to Finland. Needless to say I’ve got all my fingers and toes crossed that an anglophone publisher buys it too so all of my British friends get to experience it too! In the meantime, you can read the sample below.

(Apologies for the lack of first-line indents: WordPress won’t let me.)

Needless to say, rights enquiries should be addressed to Lena Stjernström at Grand Agency.

---

‘Why were you worried about me?’ Mummy asks.

They’re sitting next to each other on the unfamiliar bed. The walls are made of upholstered fabric in fleshy pink. In the daytime it was quite nice, but now it feels like they’ve been eaten by a giant animal.

Hugo wants to tell her. But she doesn’t pause long enough for him to work out how.

‘Nothing’s going to happen to me,’ she says, pulling him closer and kissing him on the head.

He wishes he could believe her, but terrible things happen to mothers all the time. They die in car crashes and fires and wars, and they choke and fall and are murdered. Hugo knows that in films and books, the worst always happens just when the main characters aren’t expecting it. When they think everything’s going to turn out fine. Then they stand there, open-mouthed and sobbing, wondering how things could go so wrong.

Hugo could start crying now. His eyes are burning and there’s a lump in his throat making it difficult to swallow.

You have to be prepared. You have to expect the worst. That’s the only way you can be sure it won’t happen. That’s why he has to think about the parasite. How it will come and get them while they’re asleep.

‘You’ll see,’ Mummy says, nudging him. ‘I’ll get so old and so decrepit you’ll long to be rid of me.’

Hugo isn’t going to pretend to laugh. He hates that she’s trying to joke about it.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asks.

There’s a parasite in this house.

When he looks up, he is dazzled by the bedside lamp. She wouldn’t believe him, but he knows he’s right. He feels it in his whole body. The walls are coming closer, as if the room is shrinking.

‘Nothing,’ he says.

He knows all about parasites. On YouTube, he saw a parasite that burrows its way in under the tongue of a fish. Then it eats the tongue until the tongue is no longer there. Only the parasite is left, in the middle of the fish’s mouth. The clip is playing inside his head now. Over and over again.

‘I was scared of the dark too, when I was a kid,’ Mummy says. ‘It’s really hard, but it’s a good thing too. It means you have an imagination.’

‘I don’t want an imagination,’ Hugo says.

There’s another type of parasite. A worm that people can get in their eyes. It eats them from the inside. They go blind and it hurts.

‘Imagination is the best thing ever. If you have a good imagination, you can never be bored.’

She smiles as she says it, as if it was something wonderful. But Hugo would rather be bored. He glances at the wardrobe door, which is also covered with the upholstered fabric. It stands ajar like an open wound, and a strange smell emanates from inside. Like a tea towel that needs changing.

She hugs him again. ‘Will you try to sleep now?’

‘Okay.’

He wriggles down from the bed and the air bed beside it creaks as he settles into position on his stomach. He tries to concentrate on the borrowed book, but the sentences are difficult and old-fashioned and he’s too conscious of the wardrobe.

The smell comes out of there in gusts. As if something was breathing in the darkness inside.

She looks there too. Their eyes meet for a moment, and she gives him an artificial smile.

Hugo knows the truth about the wardrobe now.

Mummy doesn’t like it either.

---

SEVENTY-FOUR DAYS TO MIDSUMMER

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

Franz Kafka

1.

The taste of burned coffee from the library staff room lingers in Hedda’s mouth. Between the shelves she gets a glimpse of the audience, which consists of three people in a sea of empty chairs.

‘It’s really strange that more people haven’t come,’ whispers the librarian.

She’s obviously worried Hedda will be upset. That’s why she’s told her about the newsletter, about the posters they displayed everywhere in the library, about the notice they put in the local newspaper, about the Facebook event. She wants Hedda to know they’ve done everything they could, but the librarian doesn’t understand that it just makes her feel even more of a failure. And also faintly guilty, as if she had cheated them when she accepted their invitation.

‘I’m sure it’s just the weather,’ Hedda says.

The librarian smiles in relief and glances at the black squares of the windows.

‘Yes, in this kind of downpour people just want to be at home.’

She knows as well as Hedda that they have now agreed on a story about the bad turnout – a story in which it is out of their control and thus no one’s fault.

‘But I’m sure the people who have come will find it very exciting,’ she continues. ‘It always makes for a more intimate conversation when it’s a smaller audience.’

Hedda smiles back and does her best imitation of someone who doesn’t want to run away. She strolls away along the row of bookshelves, pretending to inspect the books while someone announces through the speakers that the author event with Hedda Stromberg is about to begin. She arrives at a table of staff favourites and isn’t surprised to see Persephone lying there. It’s the latest edition, the one with the cover illustration of the young girl poised to bite into the pomegranate. The author’s name is twice as big as the title.

‘Do you know him?’ The librarian’s eager whisper makes Hedda cold inside. ‘I saw you were in the acknowledgements.’

Hedda turns around and looks at the librarian’s green dress with its pattern of owls and her round glasses with their thin gold frames. The expression behind the lenses leaves no doubt that the book on the table is her contribution. She looks exactly like Hedda would have done if she were fifteen years younger and worked in a library. And of course she loves David Ridings.

Hedda wants to say that David Ridings isn’t the person she thinks he is. Persephone isn’t the book she thinks it is.

‘It was a long time ago,’ she replies.

The librarian looks disappointed. She opens her mouth to speak when a demonstrative cough comes from the other side of the shelves. They both look at the clock on the wall. Two minutes past six.

Hedda’s nerves have suddenly disappeared. Anything’s better than talking about David Ridings.

They walk to the end of the bookshelves and she follows the librarian towards the small stage, where two armchairs await on either side of a table. Hedda’s first crime novel is propped there, its cover facing the audience.

‘Perhaps we don’t need microphones, what do you think?’ the librarian says, as they step out into the spotlight.

Hedda shakes her head, sinks into one of the chairs and takes a few sips of water. Then she smiles broadly at the faces watching them. Two are older women who return friendly smiles. The third, an old man with his arms crossed over his protruding stomach, smirks at her.

‘Is that meant to be you in that picture?’ he says, as if he has caught Hedda red-handed.

She turns to the screen hanging behind the stage.

The Hedda Strömberg who meets her gaze from the author’s portrait has been in make-up for more than an hour, professionally lit and posed, and instructed to hold her head at unnatural angles to create shadows in the right places. The shiny red curls are the only spot of colour in the blue-grey shades of the photograph. It’s a picture worthy of the new queen of crime fiction that the publishing company had hoped for. Her father had just been admitted to hospital, but in the portrait there’s no trace of the stress spots she had on her chin or the bags under her eyes. She doesn’t even have any pores. And there is hope in the frozen gaze. The Hedda Strömberg of the author’s portrait is satisfied with the book despite it all. She believes that it might have something to say.

The real Hedda Strömberg turns around in her armchair again and takes another sip of water. She suppresses the memories of her father’s last weeks in Ward 5. Of the end-of-life care he received. A never-ending succession of morphine doses and incontinence pad changes. Christmas lights shining warmly in the windows, reminding them of everything they were about to lose. Her father had been so proud of Hedda publishing a detective novel. ‘You’ll see that everything will be okay now,’ he said. ‘I just wish I’d been able to see it all.’

He must have been this guy’s age. Hedda looks at his shit-eating grin and wishes he was dead instead of her father.

‘Yes’, she replies. ‘It actually is me, believe it or not.’

Nobody smiles. The librarian asks for a round of applause for the evening’s author. When three pairs of hands stop clapping, she picks up Hedda’s book.

‘You’ve previously been famous for your young adult fiction, but this is the first time you’ve written a crime novel.’

Hedda smiles in embarrassment. She doubts that any of the people present know who she is.

‘Famous might be a bit much. But yes, I wanted to try something new.’

The librarian turns to the audience.

‘This is A Time to Kill, the first part of what will be a trilogy about police cadet Nina Ljung. Her mother is a retired priest, who is increasingly losing touch with reality through conspiracy theories on social media.’ She looks warmly at Hedda. ‘I think you describe their relationship so well. As a reader, you really feel Nina’s sadness and frustration.’

Hedda thanks her, and out of the corner of her eye notices the old man shifting impatiently in his seat. She wonders why he came, what he’s getting out of it. She recognises the type. They usually turn up with their wives and make out that they’ve come under protest. But he’s here on his own.

‘When Nina literally stumbles across her first murder victim, her mother’s knowledge of the Bible comes into its own,’ the librarian continues. ‘The brutal act also provokes reflections on the nature of good and evil.’

The last sentence is taken directly from the back cover text. The librarian pauses theatrically while she sets the book back in its place. Hedda looks reluctantly at the cover, with its ominous church tower beneath stormy skies, the back of the blonde woman supposed to be Nina Ljung.

It was a representative from the big publishing company who had contacted Hedda to say he liked her YA books. He wondered if she had ever thought about writing a crime novel. She hadn’t, not seriously. But she was flattered by the question and couldn’t stop thinking about it. In the end she sent him a pitch. It took months to get an answer, and the lengthy wait awoke self-doubt that made her question whether this was something she really wanted. Her constant need for affirmation prompted her to rush into the trap of her own free will. When she was offered a contract for a whole trilogy, she said yes without even thinking it over. The advance made it easy to close her eyes to her last remaining doubts. It was several times higher than the ones she had received for her YA books.

A Time to Kill was released in late January. The publishing company had bought good spaces on the front tables in the big chain stores, just inside the entrance. In the first few weeks she was tagged several times a day by book accounts on Instagram that had received a copy. She got a nice mention in one of the nationals – even if it was in a mass grave with other crime novels that didn’t deserve real reviews. And an average rating of 4 across the online bookstores and streaming services. But when she logged in to the publishing house’s statistics page, she could see that sales were stuck at just over 1500 copies. Well below the optimistic levels the advance had been based on. She was still hoping the book would take off, if only people liked it and talked about it to their acquaintances. Then in February along came the annual clearance sale and swept everything else away, and in March the real queens of crime began to release their books. They reigned comfortably at the top of the charts while Hedda’s novel was forgotten by the world. It was only then that she realised how much she had actually allowed herself to hope.

‘It’s a shame it isn’t going better,’ her publisher had said when they last spoke on the telephone. ‘The next book might take off, and then people will buy the first one too. But there mustn’t be more than a year between them.’

It didn’t sound like he believed it himself. Hedda Strömberg was his embarrassing mistake.

‘How did you get the idea?’ the librarian asks.

One of the old women cups her hand around her ear to hear better.

‘That’s always so hard to answer.’ Hedda clears her throat. ‘But I’m really just trying to write the books I’d like to read myself.’

The glare from the spotlights gets warmer. She considers taking off her far too tidy jacket, the one that makes her feel like she’s in disguise.

‘We’ll come back to A Time to Kill, but first I want to talk about you for a while.’

The librarian smiles in encouragement, and opens a black notebook that exudes her own dreams of becoming an author. Neat rows of ballpoint print, with a little star at the start of each question. A few of her colleagues come over and sit in the audience. One of them holds up his phone. Hedda smiles straight at the lens, aware that she can’t compete with the retouched image behind her. All she can do is try to look pleasant.

‘How did you become an author?’

Hedda pretends to think, as if she’s never been asked the question before.

‘I love books. That was how it all started. We lived way out in the countryside, and there were no other children nearby. So I read a lot instead, and used my imagination.’

It sounds like she’s poking fun at herself. The old women and the librarians look kindly at her.

‘Sometimes when I write it feels like I’m still making up imaginary friends,’ she adds, and manages to sound spontaneous.

There is polite laughter. But the man doesn’t crack a smile as he holds up his hand.

‘We’ll open the floor for questions at the end of the session,’ the librarian says.

But he can’t be deterred. And Hedda smiles courteously as she listens to his lengthy explanation about a Fiat that appears in the book’s flashbacks, even though that particular model didn’t actually exist in 1989. Hedda realises this is why the old bastard has come. Her mistake has given his life meaning. The two old women don’t react, but the librarian glances at her in pained understanding. Hedda crosses her legs and looks down at her oxblood-coloured boots. She smiles and smiles, thinking that David Ridings would never have made such a mistake in his books, but that if he had, the publisher or editor would have discovered it. They’re careful about fact-checking when they work with an important author. And if David Ridings had been sitting on this stage, the queue would have been right out into the street.

An hour later, she drags the wheelie case full of unsold books back to the hotel. Gravel and wet snow clog the wheels, making them stick. The town is depressingly familiar, even though she’s never been here before. The same square, the same shops as always. It’s stopped raining, and the sparse street lights are reflected in the puddles. Beyond the light cast by the street lamps, the April darkness is so compact that it feels like blindness.

She answered questions about strong women and where she finds her inspiration. About her writing routine. About whether she knew from the outset who the killer was, and how much Nina Ljung is based on herself. She gave helpful advice to everyone with dreams of becoming an author, and chatted to the other librarians afterwards and agreed that yes, it was a shame that there weren’t more people but you never knew with this kind of event. She posed with them for a photograph and uploaded it to Instagram, and wrote Thanks to everyone who came tonight, ♥♥♥ #Author #AuthorLife #ATimetoKill.

The tote bag with classic illustrations from Alice in Wonderland has slipped down her shoulder, and she pulls it up. She glares bitterly at a middle-aged couple who have just come around the corner, laughing at the sudden wind. She hates them for not having gone to the library. What else is there to do in this shithole of a town?

Get a hold of yourself, Hedda. You’re losing your grip.

You should check into your room, get something to eat in the restaurant, maybe even have a glass of wine to calm down. Then there’s still a few hours of the evening left. It will feel better if you write for a while. Just for an hour.

Even as she makes the plan she knows it’s a lie.

She’s supposed to deliver the first version of A Time for Silence, the next part of the trilogy about Nina Ljung, in early August. And the sales text for the publishing company’s spring catalogue should be ready then too. She’s told her publisher that things are moving forwards, that it feels promising, but in fact she’s only managed to produce a few thousand words – and she hates them all. They are flat and lifeless, already used. She’s written them all before.

Her wheelie case sticks again. She kicks one wheel hard, but it doesn’t help. The case bounces over the tarmac as she strides on between the puddles.

Stop feeling fucking sorry for yourself.

Fifteen years ago, you’d have loved to have these problems. Writing books was the only thing you dreamed about. And now you get to do it.

At least for a while longer.

The last thought makes her dizzy with dread. It’s a fear that Hedda recognises all too well, and she wishes it could give her a much-needed kick in the backside. But it’s not the sort of fear that gives her an energy boost. Instead it just hurtles around in her body, paralysing her completely. The advance that sounded so substantial is almost nothing if she divides it up into working hours. The money she got for A Time to Kill has already run out, even though she extended it with lectureship and translations and extra shifts at the old people’s home where her mother works. So what will she do if she doesn’t write the rest of the trilogy? How on earth will she support herself and Hugo?

The pedestrianised street ends in a poorly lit park that she didn’t come through on the way to the library. Last year’s leaves cover the ground, sodden and half decayed. The wind ruffles her hair when she turns around. There’s no sign of the middle-aged couple. Only dark windows and closed doors. An empty crisp packet flutters along the ground.

Hedda puts up the hood of her coat and takes her phone out of her bag, opening the map app. She enters the name of the hotel and lets the satellites floating silently through space stake out her path. But the map suddenly disappears. A familiar face fills the screen, together with his name.

David Ridings.

He’s standing on the stone steps up to Skillinge College, recently woken up and squinting in the spring sunshine with a cigarette in his mouth. Her own shadow lies folded over the steps.

It’s many phones since she last saw this picture, but she has never been able to bring herself to delete him from her contacts.

The connections in her brain misfire. Understanding arrives a bit at a time, with long delays in between. Her phone is still set to silent after the author event. The image hasn’t just appeared on her screen through some weird bug. He’s actually ringing her.

Do you know David Ridings? I saw you were in the acknowledgements.

She feels like she’s been found out, as if he knew she’d been thinking about him. On the other hand, she often thinks of David.

For a moment, she wonders if the librarian’s colleague posted his photo on Instagram, if David had seen all the empty chairs in front of the stage. But David doesn’t do social media. He doesn’t need to.

Hedda can imagine exactly what he’d say about the situation she’s got herself into. Authors often talk about their inner critic, but hers speaks with David Riding’s voice. Well-formulated and categorical. Always so sure of itself. It’s been a long time since she broke contact, but she’ll never be free of him.

Hedda stares at the picture. Not even his facial features show any hesitation. Thick, dark eyebrows. A strong nose. A well-defined Cupid’s bow. She’d forgotten how handsome he was back then.

She doesn’t want to talk to him, but it would be worse to go around wondering what he wanted. Before she has consciously made a decision, she taps the screen, then watches the seconds of the conversation begin to tick off. One. Two. Three. Far too fast, and yet so much slower than the beating of her heart.

Hedda puts the phone to her ear. There’s a crackle of static and she tries to turn away from the wind.

‘Hello?’ she says.

‘Is now a good time?’ David asks. ‘It sounds like you’re out.’

Over the years, Hedda has seen him interviewed on TV, heard his voice on the car radio on the way to Hugo’s preschool and hastily changed stations.

Hearing his voice again on the phone is something else entirely.

He sounds familiar and unfamiliar at the same time; there’s a nervous undertone in his voice that she doesn’t recognise at all.

David offers his belated condolences and says that he would have rung sooner if he had known. Hedda manages to stay on an even keel – right up until she hears him light a cigarette.

The sound plunges her back in time, to phone calls that stretched far past midnight. It’s like a Pavlovian bell. Hedda finds herself craving a cigarette for the first time since she was pregnant with Hugo.

‘Was that all?’ she says.

The wind makes the connection crackle again, but David remains silent.

‘Do you think we could meet?’ he says finally. ‘It would be easier face to face.’

‘I’m not sure’, she says quickly. But she’s already remembering that she’s due in Stockholm soon for her publisher’s spring party. ‘What is it you want to talk about?’

‘I want to say I’m sorry,’ David Ridings replies.

---

SEVEN DAYS TO MIDSUMMER

‘I believe every artist had someone who told them they weren’t worth dirt and someone who told them they were the second coming of the baby Jesus and they believed them both. And that’s the fuel that starts the fire.’

Bruce Springsteen 

2.

The underarms of her bulky men’s shirt smell of wet cotton, and the prickly upholstery of the seat is itchy on the back of her thighs. She doesn’t even want to think about the sweat stains she probably has on her khaki shorts. It took an unreasonably long time to choose them this morning. She yanked clothes out of the wardrobe and rejected them as quickly as if she was in a montage from a 1980s film.

The bus from Kungälv was late, so she had to run to catch the train in Gothenburg. The modern commuter train from Västerås is the last leg of the journey that has taken Hedda half the day. The windows don’t open and she feels like she’s been steamed. Unfamiliar place names scroll across the digital display above the doors. The next stop is Skarpudden. Seven minutes to go. The information doesn’t make her sweat any less.

The only other passenger is a bald man in a hoodie listening to a loud football match on his phone. The crowd roars and the treble makes Hedda turn around and give him a meaningful look. He doesn’t even notice. Of course he doesn’t. She adds a passive aggressive sigh before she turns around, thinking that she’s turning into her mother.

Six minutes to go.

She drank far too much white wine at the spring party, and the evening is a series of contextless fragments of memory. The publisher who immediately went on the defence when she told him about the mistake with the Fiat. The sales manager who held court at the buffet but avoided her eyes. The courtyard with its clearly defined groups of successful writers and forgotten poets, giving her the sensation of being back at high school. Of not belonging anywhere. The following day, she had wobbled, still hungover, into the restaurant that David had chosen for lunch. ‘Now I remember why I stopped drinking,’ he said with a laugh.

Because that’s what David had wanted to tell her. He had joined AA and had reached the ninth step. That was why he had called her. He was trying to make amends to anyone he had treated badly. ‘You’re top of that list,’ he said.

His facial features were softer, he had gained a little weight and had a touch of grey in his hair, but it suited him.

He had asked for forgiveness even before the seafood chowder was brought to the table. He said everything Hedda had long since stopped hoping to hear.

‘Without you, there would never have been a book. You were right. I stole everything from you.’

He had succeeded in convincing himself that he wasn’t doing anything wrong. David had been an alcoholic even back then. He drank to get over his low self-esteem, but even when he dared to write, he was too drunk to produce anything worth reading.

‘Not that it’s any excuse,’ he said.

It’s only now he’s sober that he realises what he actually did. Realises that, deep down inside he’s known that all along.

‘I knew you intended to write about it yourself. All of my successes are down to you.’

And Hedda was shocked at how easy it was to forgive. To finally hear him admit what he had done was enough to dissolve the anger she’s been carrying all these years. It was such a relief not to have to bear that burden any more.

They FaceTimed almost every day during the following weeks. She began to realise how much she had missed him, how much she missed the person she was with him.

‘Come and celebrate Midsummer with us at the country place,’ said David during one of their conversations. ‘It’s just the family, so there’s no stress. We can sit and write together again. It’ll be like old times.’

The football game has finally fallen silent. All she can hear is the gentle humming of the train. Outside the windows, the forest rolls past against a white sky. Now and then she gets glimpses of the lakes that are linked by the Strömsholm Canal. Hedda roots out the pack of tissues from her tote bag and dabs at her face and neck. She glances at the man, who is still absorbed by his phone. Undoing the shirt, she reaches her hand in under her vest top, hastily wiping beneath her breasts. She has only four minutes to stop sweating.

She dabs at her face again and takes a selfie where she’s thoughtfully looking out of the window, adding a filter that tones down the redness.

Taking a break from social media for a whole week! Going on a writing camp with a good friend, and then celebrating Midsummer. See you soon! ✿✿✿ #Author #AuthorLife #ATimetoKill #ATimeforSilence.

David has asked her not to reveal their plans. ‘We never usually have guests for the major holidays. Someone might get upset if they saw it.’She agreed without hesitation, deciding to take a complete break from social media. Everything to focus on her writing.

These few days will be her lifeline. The manuscript has turned into quicksand. She writes a line and immediately deletes it again. She pokes holes in all her ideas as soon as they come to her. She’s too stressed to write, but until she gets something written she can’t be calm. And so she just goes around in circles, as her deadline creeps closer and she constantly recalculates the number of pages she needs to write per day to stick to the schedule.

But far away from everyday life, perhaps there will be hope. When she goes home again, a few days after Midsummer, maybe she’ll have managed to breathe life into her dead characters and their barren dialogue. But the idea of a week with David’s family is making her nervous. She’s never been in their company for more than a few hours at a time. Now, for the first time, she’ll meet them in their natural environment – a world that’s far removed from hers. She’s afraid she will lose herself completely in it.

Next station Skarpudden, the pre-recorded voice informs her through the train’s speakers. Next station Skarpudden.

Hedda posts the photo and looks up from the screen just as the trees thin out and then disappear completely. A large lake glistens beyond fields and meadows, like spilled mercury in the white light. She pulls on her trainers, having to force her heat-swollen feet into them. Outside the window on the other side of the carriage, a residential area with leafy gardens climbs up a steep hillside, and she wonders which of the houses David’s grandmother and grandfather inhabit.

The train slows with screeching brakes and Hedda gets up, tugs at her shorts and lifts the tote bag onto her shoulder. She feels the man’s eyes as she lifts her wheelie case down from the shelf and heads for the doors. Through the windows she sees that they’re passing an old station building with flaking, dirty yellow wooden walls and boarded up windows.

The platform is empty. There’s no sign of David.

You can still change your mind

Hedda looks back at the seat she has just left. She sways as the train stops and the brakes abruptly fall silent.

There’s a loud beeping from the doors and then they open with a hiss. The light outside is dazzling, even though she can only sense the sun as a white disc in the hazy sky. She puts on her sunglasses, takes a firm grip of the handle of the wheelie case and climbs down from the train.

3.

The compact mass of clouds is like a lid over the sky that lets in no oxygen and releases no heat. The train doors close behind Hedda, and the heat from the asphalt is already penetrating the thin soles of her trainers.

David comes jogging along the platform in loud flip-flops and a faded T-shirt. He looks like he hasn’t slept properly for weeks. His face is swollen and unshaven, his eyelids so heavy that they completely change the shape of his eyes. But he lights up when he sees her, and her last doubts evaporate as he increases his pace.

We can sit and write together again. It’ll be like old times.

Hedda goes to meet him. She reflexively pulls the bag straps up her shoulder again to reassure herself that she hasn’t forgotten it on the train, which has just started to move off.

In the middle of the platform they give each other a hug in the shade of an awning.

‘I’m sweaty,’ she says, but David merely hugs her harder.

‘Doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you came.’

The skin of his arms is so hot that it burns through the fabric of her shirt. It’s a relief when he lets go and Hedda can tug at her vest top so it hangs loosely over her stomach again.

Away by the old station building, the barriers slowly rise again.

‘How long have you been out here?’ she asks, and David grins.

‘Long enough for anyone to become an alcoholic.’

At least he can joke about it. That should be a good sign.

‘Is it that bad?’ she asks.

‘Grandfather’s preparing an exhibition at Moderna. It’s a retrospective, but he’s presenting five new works. I’m sure you can imagine.’

Hedda nods as if she understands perfectly.

‘And something has happened.’ David pauses, seeming to regret his words as soon as they have left his mouth. ‘We can talk about it later.’

He gives her another smile, more strained this time.

The wheels on her case seem unnaturally loud in the silence left in the wake of the train. Even the birds are too hot to make a sound. Hedda looks up at the wooden houses on the steep slope, seeing nothing in the windows, which reflect the white sky.

‘I brought a bottle of wine for Olof and Leonita. Is that okay?’

‘Why wouldn’t it…?’ David stops in mid-sentence when he realises what she means. ‘Of course it’s okay.’

‘I don’t need to drink either. It makes no difference to me.’

‘Nor to me either. Seriously, Hedda. I just want you to enjoy this week.’

They’ve reached the end of the platform, and David halts her as she heads towards the houses on the hill.

‘We’re going this way.’

When she turns around, he’s already crossing the tracks on the other side of the platform. Beyond the raised barriers, a gravel road cuts through a flower-filled meadow, towards the shimmering white lake. And up on a wooded bluff, she glimpses red bricks and large windows between the tree trunks. The spire of a square tower extends to the sky like a raised weapon.

She comes to a complete halt. The house is enormous. A mansion from a novel by one of the Brontë sisters, or an Agatha Christie novel in which the owners complain about how death duties have risen after the Great War.

‘My god,’ she hears herself say.

So this is where David’s grandfather and grandmother live. This is the house he calls the country place.

She should have understood.

‘Mother and Father are already here,’ says David as they start walking along the gravel road. ‘Joakim and Ellie are arriving in a few days.’

She’s never met David’s older brother. She’s only seen Facebook photos of a guy with blond dreads and kauri shells around his neck – named after Joakim Thåström, just like David is named after Bowie. Back then, Jocke was backpacking in Asia or working as a diving instructor in Egypt. The sort of life that’s easy to live when there’s a trust fund waiting at home.

‘Ellie?’ she says. ‘Is that his new girlfriend?’

‘His daughter. She’s nearly eight.’

Hedda looks at him in surprise.

‘She’s almost the same age as Hugo, then.’

‘Did I never tell you Jocke had become a father? We found out just after I visited you at the flat.’

‘No. I don’t think you ever mentioned it.’

She wonders if David also realises that they’re skirting the edges of the minefield now. There was a lot he didn’t tell her after that week when he came to visit. She had been recently divorced and the rooms were still full of moving boxes. Hugo was only six months old.

It was after that week that David started writing Persephone. For the first time, he barely spoke about his writing. He never asked her to read any of it. He said he was trying to find a new voice, that the process was too fragile. And she suspected nothing.

‘Jocke has turned into the black sheep of the family.’

Hedda looks at him curiously, and David smiles as if he’s going to reveal a terrible secret.

‘He’s in venture capital these days. All he talks about are mergers and acquisitions.’

‘I’m already looking forward to it,’ she replies, and David laughs.

It must have rained recently, because the air is saturated with the scent of warm, damp soil. In the tall grass of the meadow, daisies and buttercups bend their heads. The buzzing of insect wings is constant and hypnotic. Before them, the road is blocked by a pair of iron gates, fastened with a thick chain. A lime-washed wall surrounds the whole bluff, to keep out unwanted guests. Hedda looks up at the house, which still only shows itself in glimpses between the crowns of the pines and the dense foliage of the birch trees.

‘How’s the writing going?’ said David.

‘Procrastination is part of the process, right? In that case, it’s going really well.’

He laughs again.

‘I’m meant to be submitting the first draft in August,’ she continues. ‘To be honest I’m not sure how I’m going to manage it.’

It’s the first time she’s said it aloud. She thought it would be a relief, but in fact it’s the opposite. It suddenly feels real. Irretrievable. Insurmountable.

‘But surely you can get an extension?’ says David. ‘Nobody will want you to publish a book that isn’t ready.’

He sounds so unconcerned. It’s easy for him to say. He can afford integrity. But Hedda has absolutely no idea what will happen if she doesn’t get the book finished on time.

‘We can help each other this week,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit stuck with my writing too.’

‘Is there anything we need to do to get ready for Midsummer?’ she asks to change the subject.

‘Don’t worry about it. My grandmother would rather do it all by herself.’

Hedda looks at the house again. It must be a full-time job to take care of, especially for an old woman like Leonita.

‘And she’s already fully stocked up,’ David adds.

She wonders if David will ask her to pay her share of the costs at the end of the week, and if it will be more than she can afford. He’s done similar things before. Hedda can’t ask. She doesn’t even know how. Instead, they talk about the tourist boats that ran along the canal when David was a child, and about the holiday village a few miles away where one of the worst mass murders in Swedish history took place just four years earlier.

The massive building rises majestically from the bluff. In an opening between the tops of the pines, she sees another tower – a brick cylinder lower than its square sibling – and thinks that Hugo would love it. The refrigerator door in her flat is covered with his drawings of knights and castles.

They reach the gate and David goes over to a mailbox made of sun-bleached red plastic. While he pulls out advertising brochures and window envelopes, she gets out her phone and aims it at the house.

The artificial shutter sound from the camera makes David look up with something like fear in his eyes.

‘I’m not going to upload it,’ Hedda says quickly. ‘I just wanted to show Hugo.’

David looks at her uncertainly before grinning with embarrassment and unlocking the padlock on the chain around the gates.

‘Sorry. I’ve been totally brainwashed by my grandfather. If it was up to him, he’d shut down the entire internet.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if that wouldn’t be a good idea,’ Hedda says.

The chain rattles loudly as David undoes it.

‘Last year, he asked Dad to call the Wikipedia editorial team and ask them to take down their page on the house.’

David laughs as he opens the gates, and Hedda gives him a weak smile. Of course, the house has a Wikipedia entry.

As strange as it may seem, it took a long time before she understood what kind of family David came from.

When she was twenty she arrived at Skillinge College with naive fantasies based on Brideshead Revisited. Life would finally start in earnest. She would finally find her tribe. And she would finally learn how to write.

At high school she was the only one who voluntarily read Karin Boye and Selma Lagerlöf. The one who had seen the most black-and-white films. The one who went to the theatre by herself to see Angels in America when nobody else wanted to come. She was as anorexic as her peers – it was the era of scrawny arms and concave chests on the red carpet – but Hedda stopped eating to imitate her literary role models. Both Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion seemed to be above all need for physical nutrition.

She was so black-clad and so old for her age. But at Skillinge her self-image collapsed. The whole of her identity. Hedda could no longer tell herself that she was different or interesting just because she had dreams of becoming an author. And the most influential students had a head start that she could never catch up. They had grown up with regular visits to the big theatres, were used to having museum curators and Swedish Academy members to dinner, had rubbed shoulders with writers and opera singers during the summer holidays on Gotland, or with leading authors and sculptors in Österlen. For them, the cultural world was completely demystified, neither idealised nor unattainable. They already spoke the same language as the teachers and could dismiss Hedda’s horror stories with statements like ‘It’s just too post-colonial, the political slant is too heavy-handed’. It was painfully clear that she had never read George Sand, even though in a desperate moment she claimed she had, and that she’d never heard of Benjamin Britten.She mixed up The Seagull and The Wild Duck during one discussion, and believed that Hamlet held up the skull during the “To be or not to be” monologue. On that occasion, Hedda received the same compassionate, embarrassed looks that she would herself have given someone who thought the monster was called Frankenstein. She had no opinions about broadsheet newspaper critics, knew nobody who wrote op-eds in the cultural press and had nothing to say during the discussion evenings about Proust organised by a skinny guy with a skinny scarf. But the others had plenty to say. They had so many thoughts, all the time, and never doubted that their voices were worth hearing. And that was true most of all of Vendela Torberg, the leader of the unmade-up girls with constantly sleep-tousled hair, the ones who talked about being born in the wrong time, the ones who longed for a past where art was appreciated for the sake of art, where beauty had its own value. It was their writing that was praised, against which everyone else’s was measured. With every lesson that passed, Hedda became more and more convinced that she was a fake who couldn’t understand the point of their impenetrable walls of text describing a state or trying to push the boundaries of language. She felt cheap and superficial in her longing for stories with action.

She had dreamed about Skillinge for so long, but she didn’t fit in there either. Not for the want of trying. She dug so deep inside herself that finally only an empty shell remained.

But in the middle of the autumn term, the guy with the dyed black hair and the Trust No Man necklace switched to her writing group, and everything changed.

‘I don’t think it feels like the author is rooted in this text,’ he said, and Hedda enjoyed finally seeing Vendela Torberg taken down a peg.

‘I think this section about incest feels like an afterthought.It’s obvious the author wants to shock the reader, but it’s just like a hollow special effect,’ he said. And Hedda loved him because he too could see that the Emperor was wearing nothing at all.

‘Here I think the subtext is more like a flashing neon sign’, he said, and they started smiling at each other in agreement.

David Ridings came from one of Stockholm’s most infamous suburbs, and yet he was respected by everyone. He never softened his criticism, he dissected their texts with a scalpel, and Hedda was amazed that it only made them admire him even more.

It was thanks to David that she began to trust her own instincts again, to be inspired by his boldness. He talked about becoming a writer in such a self-evident way. Without false modesty, without any thought of back-up plans.

They became inseparable during the autumn holidays, when only the two of them remained at the college. At that time, David had cut off contact with his family. He didn’t want to have anything to do with them, even going so far as to call them evil one night when they were drinking cheap red wine in his room. By the end of the holiday she had more or less moved in with him. For the first time, she was someone’s best friend. The person who came first. She finally felt seen. Chosen.

Was she in love? Perhaps. But it was a comforting love, because she knew it would never be returned. Like falling in love with a member of one of the boy bands they listened to – ironically, of course.

Naturally, she stopped going to the Proust nights. She didn’t need anyone but David. They cultivated their alienation at school, refusing to allow anyone into their two-person clique. It was them against the world. Hedda knew she was living in a cliché, and she loved it. At night they smoked and drank instant coffee until their bodies vibrated, and in the dawn they read each other’s work.

David never spared her. He could always put his finger on what didn’t work, and his praise meant all the more because she knew it was honest.

Meanwhile, she wasn’t so forthright. David’s writing often felt as polished and cold as shiny stones, but Hedda was the only one who knew how little self-esteem he had, how hard it was for him to write. If he was harsh in his criticism of others, he was even harder on himself. He was easily depressed, and Hedda knew it was genuine because he tried to conceal it. So instead she chose to encourage him, to emphasise the things she liked. She pretended it was a strategy to help David. In fact, it was more about the fear of losing him.

Of course she noticed people had stopped greeting her in the corridors, but she never wondered why they continued talking to David.

At the start of the spring term, he made Vendela Torberg cry in the writing group. It was the first time Hedda felt sorry for her. When she tried to get him to stop, Vendela directed her anger at Hedda instead.

‘David’s little puppy,’ she said. ‘You’re just trying to worm your way into his family.’

Hedda looked around the room in incomprehension. Nobody said anything. Everyone looked away from her. Including David.

‘You don’t know what it’s like to come from my family,’ he said afterwards in his room. ‘It was so nice that you didn’t know who they are.’

He had indeed grown up in the infamous suburb, until he started high school. But then his family had moved to Stocksund, a completely different kind of area. His father, Patrik Ridings, was unknown to Hedda but owned a video game studio valued at almost twenty million dollars. And David’s mother was Annika Svantesson, the director of Sweden’s national theatre and a prominent feminist. Several of her plays had been broadcast on SVT and were part of Hedda’s own cultural awakening. It was only then that she understood David’s self-confidence. Making himself an irritant never held any risk for him. He not only came from money, but also from a cultural capital that stretched back for many generations.

No wonder everyone listened to him. No wonder he had no back-up plans. The first jealousy had already begun to sprout in Hedda. A poisonous, invasive species that threatened to suffocate her.

And now it’s back.

The gates close behind them with a metallic rattling. She looks up at the house that’s just a house to David, while her only frames of reference are Gothic novels and Hugo’s fairy tale worlds.

She hears the chain rattling behind her. It was a mistake to come here. She’d forgotten what it felt like when the deepest roots of envy sucked all the power out of her body. How it made it unbearable to be David’s friend, even before Persephone.

His money, his security, his confidence and his self-evident place in the world. The flat his father paid for. His contacts in the top layers of the cultural sphere. All reminders of what she didn’t have.

Sometimes she felt like she hated her best friend. But she hated herself even more for her envy, for all the ugly feelings that could never be stated.

She mustn’t let it out again. Mustn’t let it ruin these few days.

‘Shall I take that?’

David doesn’t wait for an answer before he takes her wheelie case and walks ahead along the gravel road that carves its way up the bluff. Hedda takes a deep breath. Even the air feels different inside the walls. Fresher. A gentle breeze brings with it the cool smell of the lake.

‘Can we go swimming later?’ she asks.

‘We can swim exactly as much as you want,’ he replies over his shoulder.

She’s just about to follow when something catches her attention in the corner of her eye. Amongst the trees a sharp splinter of rock protrudes from the ground, as black as a rotten tooth. Small sculptures have been carved out of it and observe everyone who intends to go up to the house. Hedda hesitates for a moment before she leaves the road and follows a faint hint of path. Pine needles crackle under her trainers. Long strands of grass rub against her calves.

Reaching the stone, she counts nine figures. One of them is holding something resembling a harp. Another is carrying a ball on its shoulders. The bodies are roughly chiselled, with large breasts and hips. Their faces have been left unaltered by human hand and the rough stone transforms into a lazy smile here, a raised eyebrow there. She reaches out and touches one of the female figures. It’s surprisingly cold against her fingertips, and she thinks vaguely about underground rivers that have perhaps cooled the rock. When she takes a few steps to the side, the shadows shift over the women’s faces. The lazy smile becomes rapturous ecstasy. A condescending eye seems to glint beneath the raised eyebrow. The effect is both impressive and unpleasant.

‘Hedda? Where are you?’

She follows David’s voice with her eyes, but can’t see him. Further up the hill, the brush grows densely between the tree trunks, obscuring her view.

‘Coming!’ she cries, and hurries back to the gravel road.

David is waiting with her bag at the crest of the hill.

‘I was looking at the statues,’ she says, breathless.

‘They guard the house.’ David smiles broadly. ‘My grandfather’s father made them.’

He lifts her bag again and they enter the gravel-covered courtyard, where Hedda gets her first sight of the house in its full glory. As they head for the open entrance door, she tries to take in all the sharp angles of the brick façade, the steep black roof and the balconies with their forged iron railings. They pass a scruffy old Saab that looks out of place amongst all this beauty. In the flowerbeds, larkspur and gladioli shine like fireworks against the stone of the plinth.

‘I thought it would be nicer to stay here,’ David says.

Hedda looks curiously at him.

‘Where else would we stay?’

‘You’ll see.’

The contempt in his voice is impossible to miss.

An overgrown English dogwood is growing next to the steps up to the front door. The branches trail over the railing. In the damp heat, the scent of the flowers is stifling and heavy, almost animalistic.

She looks up and gets a sudden dizzying feeling that the house is leaning over her, about to fall and crush her. She reaches out and grabs the worn iron railing, but can’t take her eyes from the façade. The patterns formed by the bricks seem to billow.

‘Are you okay?’

Hedda blinks. The enchantment is broken and the house unmoving again. But the smell of the dogwood is still overwhelming. Her heart is beating at twice its normal speed, David looking at her in concern.

‘I probably just need a drink of water,’ she says.

David nods earnestly and disappears into the house. Hedda remains standing at the bottom of the steps, becoming gradually aware of the compact silence. She can’t even hear any buzzing of wings from the lavish flowerbeds. She squints tentatively up at the wall again. It’s still not moving

Nobody is visible in the windows. And yet she feels watched by someone with a bird’s eye view. Perhaps it’s the house itself.

She releases her rigid grip on the railing and goes resolutely up the steps and through the open door.

In the cloakroom, muddy Wellingtons and worn trainers are scattered about. Paper bags of recycling are lined up next to what appears to be a cellar door. Raincoats and fleece sweaters are carelessly hung on hooks, with scarves and hats entangled on the shelf above.

‘Grandfather?’ David’s voice comes from further into the house. ‘Grandmother?’

If anyone answers, she can’t hear them.

It’s a relief to get out of her hot trainers. In stockinged feet, she walks deeper into the house, finding herself in an enormous entrance hall where the ticking of a grandfather clock echoes between smooth, dark wood panels. A staircase winds dramatically towards a landing on the floor above, as if designed for a grand entrance before gathered guests.

Hedda’s wheelie case has been abandoned in front of an oil painting that takes up an entire wall – the only one not covered in wainscoting. There’s just a flat white surface, as if nothing should distract the viewer’s eyes from the painting. She’s never seen it before, but the artist is so famous that even Hedda can pick out his work without hesitation.

Axel Svantesson. David’s great-grandfather. The family’s first success story.

In the picture are a blond boy and a girl, their backs to Hedda. He’s pointing to something below the wrought iron balcony railing, but the painting doesn’t reveal what he’s looking at. In front of them is only a hazy green indication of treetops. The scene seems idyllic, and yet it awakens a deep melancholy within her. Is it because the boy’s slender neck resembles Hugo’s?

No. Something else. She searches with her eyes until she understands. The children are framed by the open balcony doors, which in turn are framed by a gleaming wooden floor and walls with patterned wallpaper. The composition is all straight lines and straight angles. But the children aren’t completely centred. They’re standing close to each other, as if they have left room for someone else, someone missing.

Hedda goes closer to the canvas and sees a bee stuck in the thick layers of paint. More than a hundred years after it was painted, she can still discern the brittle wings.

‘Here.’

David’s voice makes her jump. When she turns around he hands her a glass of water, and she drinks thirstily. It’s so cold that it hurts her throat, but her thoughts are finally clear.

‘Do you feel better now?’

She nods and wipes her chin, suddenly embarrassed by his probing gaze. And now she sees that her socks have left sweaty footprints on the herringbone parquet.

They go up the curved stairs, each step creaking beneath their feet. She lets her hand glide along the banister rail, and when they reach the upper floor her fingers are covered with grains of dust stuck to her damp skin. A pair of double doors is standing open onto a salon bathed in the white light from the windows. Beyond, she can see the glittering lake and the forest climbing up the mountains on the other side.

‘There’s a shower and bathtub there,’ David says, pointing to a closed door. ‘And a toilet of course, but you can only pee in there. For anything else you need to go downstairs, otherwise the pipes get blocked.’

This information makes Hedda no less nervous about the nine days before her.

‘Here’s my room,’ David continues, opening a door to the left of the stairs.

When she looks in, she recognises it immediately. The balcony doors are open today too. The wallpaper is still the same, and now she sees that the pattern consists of snowdrops against a dark green background.

David’s room is part of art history. As depicted by the great Axel Svantesson.

She walks through the door and looks around. A pair of oil paintings hang above the unmade bed, a couple of jumpers are thrown over a gilded armchair, and in front of the window stands a desk with a worn oak top. There are heaps of old games on top of the bookshelf. Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, Taboo. Hedda looks at the worn corners of the boxes and tries to imagine David as a child, how he would nag the adults to play with him. But it’s impossible. Her eyes run across the spines of the books. Most of the editions are so old that they must have been inherited from previous generations of the Svantesson family. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. The Children of the Frostmoor. Oliver Twist. Ivanhoe. When she turns around, David is standing in the doorway.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Your room is upstairs.’

Hedda follows him into a walk-through room lined with wardrobes and linen cabinets, with dust bunnies along the skirting board. He points to a closed door at the other end, telling her that it is his grandmother and grandfather’s bedroom, before turning to the right and opening a door set with diamonds of leaded glass. It opens onto a claustrophobically narrow staircase, with a faint shimmer of pink light from the floor above.

Her case bangs against the walls as David carries it up. A heart-shaped spot of sweat has appeared on his T-shirt between his shoulder blades.

‘As you might expect, there’s no Wi-Fi in the house,’ he says.

She checks her phone as she follows him.

‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a full 5G signal.’

When she looks up again she meets David’s expectant eyes. And then she sees the room that he’s calling hers.

The walls are covered in padded fabric in a powder pink shade, which seems to colour the very air itself. Fabric-covered buttons form a regular pattern. Through an open door, a Juliet balcony offers a view of the lake. On the other side of the room is a double bed. The window above the head end is also open, so that a slight cross-draught fans Hedda’s hot face. She looks out over the treetops, seeing the train station and the houses beyond it, the railway tracks disappearing into the forest in both directions. And she realises that they are at the highest point of the house on the bluff, at the top of the square tower.

‘King of the castle,’ she mutters, crossing the cream carpet and touching the wall above a neat, white-painted bureau.

The fabric feels rough against her fingertips, the padding firmer than she expected.

‘I hope you like it,’ David says. ‘Even if it’s a bit like a padded cell in a Barbie dream house.’

They grin at each other, but Hedda’s smile becomes forced when she catches sight of herself in a wooden-framed mirror leaning against the wall. The glass has no filters that can magic away the bright red patches on her neck, no strategic cropping that leaves her cellulite outside the frame. Her body looks heavy and palpably physical in the light, girlish room.

‘I feel extremely un-Barbie just now,’ she says, opening a door covered in the same upholstered fabric.

Behind it, she finds a long narrow wardrobe that extends behind the wall. A faint scent of mould oozes from the darkness. Once upon a time the wallpaper must have been white, with clusters of roses, but it’s now bright yellow. Some of the rose petals are brown, as if they’ve withered on the wall.

‘Unfortunately there’s no toilet up here,’ David says.

‘I’m sure I’ll survive.’ She closes the wardrobe door and turns to face him. ‘I love it.’

David looks relieved, as if he had been truly worried, and suddenly she’s overwhelmed by a great feeling of tenderness for him. For their shared history. For how it was ؘ– before Persephone destroyed everything.

She walks over to a framed pencil sketch hanging above the bed, suspended from the picture rail with fishing line. A serious woman is posed rigidly, her hands clasped in front of her stomach. Judging by her dress, it was drawn a long time ago. Her hair is up in a tight knot, her eyes sorrowful.

‘Who is she?’

‘That’s my grandmother, Brita,’ says a voice that isn’t David’s. ‘This was her room.’

4.

Olof Svantesson is clutching the banister rail, and supports himself on a crutch when he steps up into the room. David’s grandfather has lost weight since she last saw him. The skinny calves protruding from his worn denim shorts are covered with blue veins. The checked shirt is several sizes too large, and the merciless light from the windows reveals the broken blood vessels on his fleshy nose, the dark bags under his eyes. Hedda wonders if he is sick.

And something has happened. We can talk about it later.

But perhaps Olof Svantesson has just got older. He must be at least ninety by now.

‘This is a study for Carl Larsson’s portrait.’ Olof stands next to Hedda, and they look at the sketch together. ‘He was a good friend of the family. The finished painting is hanging in the National Museum in Stockholm now. Perhaps you’ve seen it?’

She shakes her head, surprised it was Carl Larsson who brought Olof’s grandmother to life in pencil. The images that Hedda associates with Larsson are as uninteresting as a lifestyle account on Instagram, with sumptuous Christmas buffets, leafy gardens and joyful children.

‘Of course this is something completely different from his sentimental idylls,’ Olof adds, as if he has read her thoughts. ‘It’s more like his earlier work.’

They regard it in silence for a moment.

‘She looks so sad.’

‘My grandmother had a difficult life,’ Olof replies simply.

Hedda waits for a continuation, but none comes, so she pulls out the wine bottle from the bag still hanging on her shoulder. She immediately regrets the gift ribbon that she curled and tied around the neck of the bottle. It looks cheap and out of place in a tower room with fabric-covered walls and an original sketch by Carl Larsson, a good friend of the family. But she proffers the bottle to the old man who will soon have a retrospective exhibition at Moderna Museet.

‘For you and Leonita.’

‘Thank you.’ Olof smiles enthusiastically and myopically inspects the label. ‘This will be a treat. We’re not very familiar with wines from the New World.’

David throws himself down on the bed, and Hedda rummages in the tote bag again. Her fingers find the copy of A Time to Kill she has brought with her. But she hesitates. It’s hard to imagine Olof Svantesson reading a crime novel.

‘We’re so happy that you want to celebrate Midsummer with us,’ he says. ‘We’re in need of new blood here at Villa Thamyris.’

‘Thamyris?’

She tastes the unfamiliar word on her tongue, and Olof squints at her.

‘You don’t know him?’

‘Should I?’

His smile broadens. For a moment, she can sense a younger version of Olof Svantesson behind the aged face, and realises that he was probably handsome once. And if not handsome in the classic sense, then at least accustomed to making people like him.

‘It depends on how interested you are in Greek mythology,’ he says.

She glances quickly at David. If she had known more about the myths, would she have understood earlier what he was doing?

No. She would never have believed David could do such a thing.

‘I’m afraid that’s a gap in my knowledge,’ she says. ‘One of many,’ she adds, with something approaching defiance. But Olof’s eyes brighten under the heavy forehead.

‘You must fill that if you’re going to call yourself a writer.’

Of course she knows that Olof is right. The ancient myths are the origin of Western storytelling. The wellspring. But she’s never tried seriously, just as she never learned to appreciate Shakespeare or classical music. The project seems overwhelming – and frankly not interesting enough when there are so many new things to learn.

‘But you do know the Muses?’ Olof asks.

She hesitates. The word muse is something she associates with extremely human women, beautiful but interchangeable, whose sole purpose is to inspire male genius. To give birth to them in their artistry.

‘Grandfather,’ says David and sits up on the bed. ‘Perhaps we should let Hedda unpack before you start with the lecture?’

Olof looks as if in surprise at his grandson, as if he had forgotten that David was there.

‘Oh yes, of course. You’ll be exhausted after travelling across the country in this heat. You must forgive an old man who has at last found a new audience for his blethering.’

Hedda laughs.

‘You can tell me later.’

She finally makes the decision, and pulls out A Time to Kill from her bag. Ollie looks down at the shiny cover.

‘Thanks, but I’ve already read it.’

He’s still smiling, but doesn’t say anything more. The silence stretches out like an elastic band between them. Hedda has already signed the book to him and Leonita, but she replaces it in her bag.

‘Did you work out who the murderer was?’

She sounds too cheerful, dangerously close to manic. And Olof waves the question away as if it was of no interest.

‘I liked the author you wrote about. It’s an exciting idea that she can use her skill with intrigue to help solve the case.’

It feels like a consolation prize. The crime writer Disa Toivonen, a childhood friend of police cadet Nina Ljung, is only a minor figure in A Time to Kill.

‘Was she perhaps an homage to Ariadne Oliver?’

Hedda nods. When she wrote the book, she was afraid that the reference to Agatha Christie’s alter ego was overstated, but Olof is the first to make the connection.

‘You really have an eye for the human condition.’ Olof’s tone is softer now. ‘All murder stories are essentially tragedies. A life has been snuffed out. It’s unusual for a writer to make use of this aspect. You should really be commended for that.’

‘But?’

Hedda regrets it as soon as the short word leaves her lips, conscious that David is observing them. The carpet has become incredibly hot under her bare feet. A drop of sweat runs down the small of her back and trickles between her buttocks.

‘It didn’t seem like you were so interested in the police work,’ says Olof. ‘Those parts felt more like you were following a template.’

Those parts are the majority of Hedda’s book, and she smiles weakly.

‘Yes, but I’m writing in a genre. I was hoping I’d played enough with the conventions to make it feel fresh.’

Olof looks thoughtful. It’s clear that he neither agrees nor wants to lie. But he lights up when he catches sight of something behind Hedda’s back.

‘Look what we’ve got,’ he says, waving the wine bottle cheerfully.

David’s grandmother is on her way up the stairs with a light step.

‘Hedda,’ she says warmly. ‘Welcome.’

Leonita still has dark hair down to her shoulders. The same impossibly narrow neck, the same impossibly straight posture that can only belong to an aged ballerina. When they hug, Hedda can clearly feel her shoulder blades through the floral dress, but there is nothing fragile about the old body. The thin arms that hold her are strong and wiry.

‘I heard about your father,’ she says. ‘I’m truly sorry.’

‘Thank you.’

‘David says you were close to each other. It must have been difficult.’

Leonita’s consonants still retain a faint trace of the Balkans. She lets go of Hedda and looks at her with bright, black eyes.

‘This house is yours too, for as long as you’re here,’ she says. ‘We just want you to feel at home.’

Hedda can only nod, afraid her voice will betray her.

‘And we’re not exactly spoiled with David bringing girls here,’ Olof says, and laughs at his own joke.

Hedda glances at David, unsure of how she should react, but he merely rolls his eyes.

‘You don’t need to worry,’ says Olof. ‘I may be old but I’m not old-fashioned. My own father was homosexual. I’m just glad it skipped a couple of generations.’

He leans forward with both hands on his crutch.

‘The only thing I can’t stand is people of either sex who are bitchy.’

‘That’s enough,’ Leonita says.

But Olof continues to look at Hedda in amusement. A naughty little boy in the body of an old man. A little boy who has been caught out, but has no regrets.

5.

Once Hedda is alone in the room, she starts unpacking her bag. The bulky windbreaker is at the top, and in the all-pervading heat it’s hard to imagine that she will ever want to put it on. The hangers squeal loudly against the bar as she pulls them towards her. She’s just about to hang up her jacket when she gets the feeling that something’s wrong. Something at the end of the long narrow wardrobe, where the light from the windows barely reaches.

Hedda squints into the darkness until her eyes begin to get used to it. A vague discomfort causes the muscles to quiver across her back.

On the far wall, the wallpaper is lighter. It looks newer. Someone has tried to patch it so the clusters of roses line up, but they haven’t quite succeeded.

It’s not at all strange. And yet the skin on her neck is taut. She firmly hangs up her jacket, then continues with a long dress from Acne that was ruinously expensive even though it was second hand, and the back wall disappears from sight. When her case is empty, she rolls it into the wardrobe.

As she changes into a bikini, she glances at the tote bag with its illustrations from Alice in Wonderland. She can see the shape of her book, as if it were hiding behind the curtain that Alice lifts.

Thanks, but I’ve already read it.

Angrily, she pulls on a white sundress with black dots. Then she sits down on the bed with her phone and brings up the Wikipedia entry that disturbs Olof so much, the one about Villa Thamyris.

The photograph was taken from down by the lake. It’s winter, and the ice and snow highlight the steep cliff wall, making it as black as an inkblot on paper. From its elevated position, the house proudly shows itself off to the outside world. There’s a light on in the tower room where Hedda is right now, and she wonders who was here.

Down by the lake is a wooden house, which according to the caption was a coachman’s cottage. There’s a light on there, too.

Villa Thamyris, beautifully located by Lake Aspen, was completed in 1897, she reads. The façade is made of handmade brick, the roof of dark slate. There’s an enormous veranda on the side closest to the lake. She quickly skims through the section about the architect with a penchant for the neo-renaissance and instead focuses on Axel Svantesson, the house’s first patriarch. Olof’s grandfather seems to have begun his career as a highly mediocre painter on the fringes of the group that formed the Swedish Artists’ Union. It was during a visit to Paris that he met Brita, and they married just six months later. The move to Villa Thamyris changed everything, according to the quoted art historian. Axel Svantesson became a master at capturing the tiny details that make us reverent in the face of nature, and the intimate recognition in the everyday. His art was in phase with his natural romanticism and his quest to capture the Swedish idyll.

The page has a whole section about the famous people who visited the house, which is described as an important hub for the cultural life of the period. Both Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn regularly visited on their way to and from Dalarna. Parties and monthly visits are mentioned in the diaries and letters of luminaries like Verner von Heidenstam, Albert Engström, Gustaf Fröding and his sister Cecilia, Oscar Levertin, Ernest Thiel and his wife, Hjalmar Söderberg, Carl Milles, Tyra Kleen, Bruno Liljefors and Eugène Jansson. August Strindberg also visited towards the end of his life, before his and Axel Svantesson’s friendship came to an abrupt end after a quarrel over their life philosophies.

But there’s nothing else about Brita. The sad wife of the great artist doesn’t even get a red link.

Hedda has had enough for now. Instead, she enters Thamyris in the search box, and gets a short article about a singer mentioned in the Iliad. The son of Erato, the muse of lyric poetry.

But do you know the Muses?

She carries on. Wikipedia informs her that the Muses were goddesses in Greek mythology. Nine sisters who inspired artists and scientists and gave us words like museum and music. Hedda goes back to the short text about Thamyris. He challenged the nine sisters in a singing contest and lost. The Muses punished him for his arrogance.

Hedda searches the internet and finds more details about Thamyris. His eyes were gouged out and his tongue was cut off. He lost everything, including his mind.

And he wasn’t the only one. Others who challenged the Muses were flayed alive, or transformed into birds. Plato saw the Muses as a source of madness. They took possession of a sensitive soul and drove it to ecstasy and madness.

But the photographs of pottery shards, paintings and statues show an entirely different kind of creature. The nine sisters are depicted as beautiful, sweet female beings with neat little fingers, seductive glances and pale breasts under thin fabric. They want to please any artist who looks at them, not gouge out his eyes.

‘Are you ready?’

Hedda looks up from her phone. David is standing on the stairs, two bath towels in his arms.

‘I’ve just been reading about Thamyris,’ she says. ‘I understand even less now why the house is named after him.’

‘Remind grandfather to tell you tonight. He’ll love it.’ David comes up into the room and sits on the edge of the bed. ‘And ignore what he said. Your book is good.’

She looks gratefully at him and succeeds in not begging for more assurances. Do you really believe that? Is that really true?

‘It would have sold more if it hadn’t come out in January,’ he added. ‘Nobody buys books then.’

Her gratitude evaporates. She knows he doesn’t mean it, but David has reminded her both how big a failure she is and that she should have listened to her instincts. The publishing company’s plan was to release it in January to avoid competition.

David would never have let them persuade him. But she has to stop comparing herself to him. She won’t survive these few days if she doesn’t.

Hedda reaches for the bottle of sunscreen and squeezes some out into the palm of her hand.

‘It’s cloudy out,’ he says.

‘I’m good at burning myself anyway.’

‘I remember.’

She rubs it into her arms, and the greasy sunscreen mixes with the sweat on her skin, leaving white streaks over wide open pores.

‘What was the point of the song contest?’ she says. ‘What would Thamyris have won?’

David scratches at a mosquito bite on one knee.

‘According to some of the myths, he would be allowed to sleep with all nine sisters.’

‘His mother too?’ She rubs sunscreen over her calves, continues up her thighs. ‘It seems as if all my prejudices about Greek mythology are true.’

David gives a crooked smile, so she can see one of the sharp canine teeth in the corner of his mouth.

‘It’s only in some myths that he’s Erato’s son. The Muses are usually virgins.’

‘So virginity was the most precious thing you had, even if you were a goddess,’ she says, setting the sunscreen bottle on the bureau.

David’s smile becomes wider. Now it’s showing both canines.

‘You sound almost like my mother.’

‘Many people would take that as a compliment.’

He gets up from the bed, handing her one of the towels, with stripes in faded 1980s colours.

‘There’s a version in which Thamyris doesn’t challenge the Muses himself,’ he says. ‘In that one, it was Apollo who set the Muses onto him because he and Thamyris were in love with the same hero.’

‘Are there as many versions of all the myths?’ she asks, inhaling the scent of an unfamiliar detergent from the towel.

‘They were spread orally from the beginning. But they all end the same.’

Hedda lowers the bath towel and looks curiously at him.

‘People who compete against the gods always lose,’ he says.

6.

They walk through a dining room with burgundy wallpaper and dark wooden panelling. The room is still bright, thanks to the large windows facing the lake and the open door onto the veranda. The wall behind the scratched dining table has a hunting scene in intarsia. A woman on a horse aims her spear at a fleeing deer. When Hedda looks closer, she sees that the woman is pregnant. The beautifully carved foliage surrounding the scene extends up to the ceiling. They pass a fireplace so large that the mantelpiece is at Hedda’s eye level. A door stands ajar at the other end of the dining room, and she gets a glimpse of walls covered with bookshelves. It takes a moment before she understands why the lines of the bookshelves don’t seem to be quite right. The walls are rounded, belonging to the lower tower.

They come out on the veranda, which is bigger than her entire flat, and she thinks it must have cost a fortune to build Villa Thamyris. It’s no wonder Axel Svantesson managed to become a better artist here. The wide view of the lake is as beautiful as a painting, framed by decorative woodwork. Olof is sitting at a dining table with a coffee-stained waxed cloth, doing a crossword puzzle with a cigarette in his mouth. His crutch is leaning against the railing beside him. He looks up as he hears their footsteps on the soft wooden floor, and smiles when he sees their towels.

‘It’s probably warm in the water today,’ he says. ‘If I’d had the energy to get down the stairs, I would have jumped in too.’

‘You could take the car, though?’ says David, but Olof has already returned to his crossword.

They go down into the garden that extends right to the cliff edge, where she can see the wooden staircase Olof mentioned. The fresh green lawn is cool under Hedda’s bare feet. In the flower beds are aquilegias and peonies and foxgloves, and a wrought iron table and chairs stands in the shade of a silver birch. At the cliff edge, Hedda turns around and takes a look at the magnificent façade of Villa Thamyris. An important hub for the cultural life of the period.

The man who built the house on the bluff named it after an obscure figure from Greek mythology. And his grandson, Olof Svantesson, had an eager glance in his eyes when he asked if she knew the Muses.

David’s knowledge of antiquity is inherited in many ways. ‘That’s the only good thing I got from my family,’ he said at school, when he no longer wanted anything to do with them.In retrospect, it sounds like a delayed teenage revolt, just as dramatic and intense as anything else was for them back then. And David has come back to the family, to the house where he spent the summer and Christmas holidays as a child.

His first books were praised in the culture pages but went unnoticed in Hedda’s world. Nobody she knew read them. David’s writing was still too cold, too distant. Nothing was truly passionate, and she could see his anguish in every sentence. It made it easier to live with the jealousy.

Everything changed when David released Persephone, which was the year’s most unexpected success – his first novel based on the classic stories, allowing modern humans to meet monsters and gods.

It topped the sales charts and was nominated for the August prize and translated into more than twenty languages. By then, Hedda had cut off contact with him, but he was still impossible to avoid. She saw people reading Persephone on the bus from Kungälv, heard her mother’s colleagues talking about it in the coffee break, saw his grey eyes following her from the windows of every bookshop in Gothenburg. At the book fair, it was a running joke that you always knew where David Ridings was making an appearance – you just had to look for the streams of women with red-rimmed eyes. And the culture pages loved it too. There was so much to write about the book, with references to Pretty Woman and Patti Hearst, Lilya 4-Ever and Natascha Kampusch. There was talk of a film adaptation and one of the streaming services tried to buy the rights, but David revealed publicly that he had he declined. His story deserved more than some mediocre, low-budget production, the film equivalent of fast fashion. This only enhanced the image of a writer with integrity. Hedda watched him talk on morning TV about growing up in the suburbs, telling inspiring stories about how he had struggled, how he had dared to commit to his dream. She desperately wanted him to be found out, for someone to see through him, just once. But David, who already had so much, got everything a writer could dream of. And it was because of her story. Her words. Her life.

Hedda dismisses her thoughts of David’s breakthrough novel. If she has promised to forgive him, she must mean it.

The wooden staircase zigzags down the steep cliff wall, and David’s flip-flops slap against his feet with every step they descend. Below them is a wedge-shaped lawn, with weeping willows growing along the edge of the lake. There are no flowerbeds down there. No patches of colour at all. A rectangular box of glass and greying wood sticks out over the water.

‘Grandfather calls it the terrarium,’ says David. ‘There was an old coachman’s cottage there before that he loved. But he needed the money, so he sold the land to my father.’

Hedda doesn’t mention that she has seen the coachman’s cottage on Wikipedia. The theme of greying wood recurs on the private jetty. A white electric BMW is parked inside the lime-washed wall that clearly encloses the whole bluff.

When they come down onto the next landing, Hedda can see into the building. The rooms are separated by glass walls. A few pieces of furniture are placed as if objects in an unusually sterile museum.

‘What do you think?’ David asks.

‘I’d feel like a greasy patch of dirt in there.’

David grins and continues down the stairs.

‘Now you know why I’d rather live with my grandparents. You get zero privacy in that house.’

Just as he says it, she gets a glimpse of David’s mother, wrapped in a towel. Annika Svantesson moves decisively between the rooms, but the multiple reflections from the glass walls make it impossible to determine her direction.

Hedda is finally enveloped by the lake. The water washes away the salty sweat and bitter thoughts. It’s like waking up from a dream. She kicks her legs and feels her hair billow out behind her, then hangs in the weightlessness beneath the surface until her lungs ache for air. She kicks her legs harder until she comes back up into the light. David is already swimming back to the jetty. Hedda dives beneath the surface again, swimming until her body is fuzzy with fatigue.

Gravity catches up with her as she climbs up the ladder to the jetty. Her bone marrow seems to transform into concrete. She tugs her bikini bottoms into place and looks out over the lake, shivering with pleasure as the damp ends of her hair brush her bare shoulders. David dries his hands on a towel and grins up at her. His hair is darker when it’s wet. It sticks to his skull and highlights his bone structure, making him more like his younger self.

‘I feel like a human being again,’ she says, sitting next to him.

Hedda’s wet footprints have already begun to evaporate in the heat. She turns her face to the sun and closes her eyes, hearing him light a cigarette.

‘What did Johannes say about you coming here?’ David asks after a while.

Hedda keeps her eyes closed, avidly breathing in the smell of his cigarette.

‘I haven’t told him.’

‘Of course you can tell him,’ says David.

She reluctantly opens her eyes, gathers her hair at her neck and wrings it out. The drops patter gently on the jetty.

‘I know. But he gets so annoyed by not knowing what my plans are for Midsummer, and … I can’t help liking it.’

David laughs and takes a deep drag on the cigarette.

‘It’s nice of you to try, but you don’t have to. I get that you don’t want to tell him.’

Hedda puts her feet in the water. They become ghostly and twisted under the surface, pale greenish. Of course David understands. The truth is that she doesn’t want to tell Johannes, because he would see it as a betrayal.

What a fucking joke. Who the hell is Johannes to say anything about betrayal? When David asked for forgiveness, at least it was without self-pity or explanations.

Now he looks at her gravely, shading his eyes with one hand.

‘How are you doing now?’ he asks cautiously.

‘It’s okay.’ She closes her eyes again. ‘Johannes is a good dad anyway. That will have to do.’

It’s only seven hours since she left Hugo in the house she once shared with Johannes. The gruelling morning seems far away, both in time and distance.

Hugo didn’t want to let her go. He’s been more of a mummy’s boy than normal lately, and sometimes she gets the feeling that he’s worried she won’t be able to cope on her own. As if he knows how lonely she is, unlike Johannes.

As if she was his responsibility.

It’s too painful to think about. But at the same time she can’t stop thinking about it.

‘Have you met anyone?’ David asks.

She laughs, as if the thought amuses her.

‘I don’t even know where I’d start with that.’

In fact, she doesn’t miss it at all. Sometimes Hedda wonders if she should be worried by how that part seems to have completely shut down. What Johannes did still affects her after all these years. The thought is unpleasant, and yet there is something comfortable in being freed from at least one of your desires. Not needing.

‘What about you?’ she says. ‘Have you met anyone?’

He bends over and dips his cigarette into the water. It goes out with a sizzle, and he puts the stub in the gap between two boards.

‘I have to focus on myself just now. At least that’s what they say in AA. At least a year of sobriety.’

The water splashes loudly as the jetty rocks beneath them When Hedda turns around, she sees David’s mother coming towards them The black hair is still wet from the shower, but the hard lines of the kohl are already in place around the light grey eyes that David inherited.

‘Hedda!’ she cries.

And Hedda stands up on the jetty and allows herself to be swept into Annika Svantesson’s arms and the expensive scent of her skin cream.

‘It’s been ages! I barely recognised you!’

Hedda’s bikini top has left two wet marks on Annika’s black vest top. It’s hard to imagine that the flat and sunburned stomach is sixty-five years old and has carried two children. Hedda glances towards the edge of the lake, where the sundress with the forgiving cut lies.

Behind Annika, David’s father comes out of the Terrarium, carefully carrying a tray in both hands.

Patrik “Paddy” Ridings. A man who looks simultaneously young and old, with round cheeks and blue eyes, framed by eyelashes as white as the thin hair on his head. Despite the heat, he is wearing linen trousers and a crisp blue shirt. He waves cheerfully with one elbow, and the glasses slide across the tray.

‘We thought we could have a drink before we go up to dinner,’ says Annika.

She takes Hedda by the arm and draws her off along the jetty before David has even managed to get up.

‘It’s so nice that you’re here,’ she says, leaning closer. ‘I don’t know what happened between you and David, but I’m glad you’ve fixed it.’

The last sentence is little more than a whisper. The relief that spreads through Hedda is so great that it’s only now she realises how nervous she has been. David has promised that he hasn’t told his family about Persephone, but deep inside she clearly didn’t quite believe it.

‘You have no idea how important you are to him,’ Annika continues, clinging even more firmly to Hedda’s arm.

7.

They sit on the wooden deck in front of the Terrarium, and Hedda is on her third gin and tonic. A cucumber slice is packed in amongst the ice cubes in the misty glass, and freshly ground black peppercorns bob around on the surface. Paddy has given a long talk about the gin brand he uses, and why it goes so well with the cucumber, but Hedda has already forgotten everything he said. She’s sober enough to know that she should take it easy with the drinking, but drunk enough to ignore her sensible inner voice. The ice rattles in the glass when she takes a sip.

She feels vaguely guilty when she looks at David’s glass. No gin, only tonic.

I don’t need to drink either. It makes no difference to me.

She meant it when she said it. But being here is just so overwhelming. Fortunately, the conversation flows on without any major demands for her participation. It’s enough to smile and nod and ask the right questions. Annika likes nothing more than to talk about her Lars Norén parody Chaos is Gudrun’s Neighbour, the play that was her breakthrough in the 1980s, and Hedda listens with genuine interest.

‘I was carrying David on my hip when I went up to my boss and demanded to do it,’ says Annika, looking warmly at her son. ‘They say that when Norén heard, he was seething.’

She laughs in delight.

‘But it was only because of the excitement around that play that that I got to do The Cherry Orchard afterwards. You know, in the 1980s, women were only allowed to do children’s theatre. If we were really lucky we got to do something socially realistic about glue-sniffing youngsters. But no real theatre.’

Her silver rings clink against the glass. Paddy leans forward in his chair and looks at Hedda, as if he wants to take the opportunity to get a word in edgewise while Annika takes a sip of her drink.

‘The last time we met, you were writing for young people.’

The spotlight is on her now. She stretches in her chair, groping for something to say.

‘You should read them,’ David says.

‘We aren’t really the target audience,’ says Annika.

‘I have a lot of friends who read The Hunger Games,’ Paddy protested. ‘And the ones with the teenage witches, what were they called? They were set around here, weren’t they?’

‘I miss writing for young people,’ says Hedda.

The sharpness in her voice surprises her, and she smiles quickly. Annika looks at her carefully.

‘Why did you stop, then?’

I’ve been asking myself that, too, Hedda wants to reply. Instead, she sips her drink to gain time.

She misses knowing who she’s writing for. Her earlier books were about the sixteen-year-old she once was, who still lives somewhere inside her. Awkward, old for her age and prone to over-analysing. In the books, she finally got the recognition she deserved. She became a little braver, a little more fun. She made the friends she never had in reality. And she succeeded in saving the world.

‘I would have liked to carry on, but I can’t make a living from it.’ She licks the melting ice from her upper lip. ‘Young adult books don’t sell any more. And even when they did, you get much lower royalties for them than for adult novels.’

Paddy looks astonished.

‘But … why?’

‘From what I understand it, it’s to keep prices down. It’s supposed to be democratic, apparently. But it’s just as much work to write them.’

Hedda glances at Annika. Sometimes she thinks that the real answer is that young adult books simply don’t count as real literature.

‘That’s a shame,’ Paddy says.

‘Yes, it’s not a hobby, what you’re doing.’ David turns to his mother. ‘Hedda should have got the reviews that Knausgaard got for his banal shit about the morning star.’

‘I liked that series,’ Paddy says.

David looks at him with distrust, almost contempt. It’s a look Hedda knows well.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘What was that stuff at the end of the first book? He has a character write a 100-page dissertation, just because he wants to jerk off over how clever he is.’

Paddy throws his arms out but says nothing more. He seems to have also learned that the discussion never ends if you try to win David over when he’s calling you an idiot.

‘He would never have had it published if he wasn’t Knausgaard. It’s terrible world building with a few highlights. None of it holds together,’ David continues. ‘It’s science fiction for people who never read science fiction, and don’t know it’s already been done, a thousand times better.’

He turns to Annika, who has been listening with interest.

‘Hedda’s books are much more complex. You should really abandon your prejudices about what young adult novels can be.’

‘It sounds like it,’ she replies and looks at Hedda again.

Those eyes completely devour her, as if Hedda is the most fascinating person in the world.

‘And what about you?’ she asks Paddy. ‘How’s business?’

‘I sold it five years ago,’ he says with a satisfied grin. ‘I became a contented pensioner before I turned sixty.’

Hedda had had no idea, and it’s a reminder of how long she and David were apart.

‘Congratulations, then,’ she says, raising the glass in a toast.

‘Thanks. It’s so nice to get out of the industry.’

Annika glances in amusement as their glasses clink off each other.

‘I still love games, but everything is so fucking corporate these days,’ Paddy says. ‘There’s nothing real left. It’s all about doing things that go viral.’

Hedda takes a sip of her drink and discovers that there’s only peppery iced water left in her glass.

‘But I thought I might build a recording studio here.’ Paddy nods to the glass walls of the Terrarium. ‘Some friends and I did a bit of hip-hop in the 90s. Maybe it’s just a late mid-life crisis.’

He seems to be hoping for protests, but Hedda doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t even dare look at David, because she can see he’s struggling not to laugh.

‘We’d better go up for dinner,’ says Annika. ‘It’s nearly eight.’

They rise from the table, and the decking seems to sway beneath Hedda. She had no idea they had been sitting here so long. The sun is still hovering high above the treetops on the other side of the lake, a fiery orb behind the white screen of clouds. She needs to phone Hugo before he goes to bed. And she must try to sober up.

Halfway up the wooden staircase, the sweat is making her sundress stick to her body, and the bitter taste of gin and tonic is rising in her throat. She tries not to pant, looking longingly down at the cooling waters of the lake.

They finally reach the garden again. The brick of Villa Thamyris seems to glow in the evening light. Olof and Leonita are already sitting on the veranda.

‘I hear you’re in Brita’s old room,’ says Annika.

Hedda’s gaze rises to the Juliet balcony at the top of the square tower. Salt is stinging her eyes, and she wipes away the sweat with her fingertips.

‘Yes. It’s incredible.’

‘Did you know we have her to thank for all this?’

Hedda looks at her in surprise, shaking her head.

‘When Brita met Axel, she had just inherited her father’s fortune. He was one of the richest factory owners in Sweden.’

‘What was she doing in Paris? Did she want to be an artist too?’

‘Yes. But none of what she painted is left. Not even her husband was interested in women’s art.’

‘It’s a real shame,’ says Paddy from behind them

They’re nearly at the house. Hedda looks at the old couple waiting for them on the veranda. The table is already set and a couple of candles have been lit.

‘Olof said she had a difficult life.’

Annika sniggers, as if to say that’s an understatement.

‘They said she had weak nerves,’ she says.

Even though Brita has been dead for a long time, to hear Annika it sounds as if they knew each other well. Maybe that’s how it is in a family like this, thinks Hedda. The stories of previous generations are kept so alive that the dead are ever-present.

She looks at the sketch of Brita again while she talks to Hugo on the phone, following the pencil lines that depict the clasped hands, the lace edge of the high necked dress that touches her chin. The eyes are aimed at something in the distance, or perhaps looking inwards – the most terrifying place of all.

‘It’s very nice here,’ she says.

‘Can’t I see it too?’

‘I can show you tomorrow, but I have to go back to the others. We’re eating now.’

She isn’t about to let Hugo see her when she’s drunk. It’s taking all her energy to control her voice, which has gone fuzzy at the edges. Johannes understood immediately when he answered, saying ‘I think someone’s had one too many.’She turns to face the mirror, scrutinising the shirt dress she has changed into and running her finger beneath one eye where the mascara brush slipped.

‘Who else is there?’ Hugo asks.

This isn’t the first time he’s asked her.

‘A friend and his family,’ she says again. ‘Nobody you know.’

She goes over to the Juliet balcony and looks down at the veranda, where the family are sitting around the table.

‘Will you be able to sleep tonight, do you think?’ she says.

There’s a pause.

‘Don’t know.’

‘Have you been watching scary things on YouTube?

‘That’s not why,’ he says.

And then he starts to tell her about a video anyway. He’s been obsessed with parasites recently, and now he has seen something that eats out the tongues of fish. The story makes her slightly nauseous.

‘Yuck,’ she says. ‘It’s no wonder you have nightmares.’

He’s silent, and she knows that he has pressed his lips together into a narrow line.

‘You know it’s always like this,’ she continues. ‘Remember when you thought there were snakes in the toilet? And before that, you were afraid of comets.’

‘But Mummy, why can’t I be with you instead?’

‘I miss you a lot too, but I’m only going to be working while I’m here. You’re going to have a great time with Daddy and Tessa at Midsummer, and then I’ll be there just a few days later.’

‘But it’s so long.’

Sometimes she wonders if his fears are signs of something deeper, something he can’t yet put into words. The chaos around the divorce began when he was most impressionable, and she hadn’t even had time to recover from that when Persephone happened.

Since then, her father has died and police cadet Nina Ljung has slowly throttled her soul. Naturally Hugo notices more than she wants to believe.

It’s too painful to think about. But at the same time she can’t stop thinking about it.

8.

The bottle of wine that Hedda brought is nowhere in sight, but others are quickly emptied. She tries to show restraint, but Olof is sitting next to her and constantly refilling her glass. It doesn’t make things better that she’s still hungry after the far-too-small portions at dinner.

At least she’s not alone in drinking too much. David glances at his mother every time her thick silver rings clink on her wine glass. Annika is prodding her potato salad with her fork and articulating over-clearly to avoid slurring while she gossips about an acquaintance who has become a conductor at the Swedish Opera. Hedda remembers the first few times she saw David at publishing parties and book launches. How he greeted everyone and made them feel seen. How he understood all the rules and knew everyone’s complicated relationships.

In the flickering glow of the candlelight on the veranda at Villa Thamyris, their faces look like they are lit from the inside. Nobody else has changed for dinner. Of course the family doesn’t dress up here. Why should they? They have nothing to prove. The notion of dressing to impress is probably completely foreign to them.

But there are no wrinkles in Paddy’s blue linen shirt, and the Armani logo is occasionally visible beneath the collar. On the way down to dinner, she googled Paddy’s name, discovering that he sold the game studio to a Chinese investment company for millions of dollars. It feels a bit much for him to complain that the industry has become “fucking corporate”, but then Hedda thinks of his shiny BMW standing at the base of the bluff. The desperately modern house so literally in the shadow of Villa Thamyris, which can never compare to its history and its shabby beauty. Despite Paddy’s millions, he’s the one Hedda has most in common with. In interviews David makes much of his upbringing in the suburbs, but that’s where Paddy is actually from. It doesn’t even help to have married into the family. He’ll never fit in here either. Not really. She finds the thought touching, and that’s what makes her realise exactly how drunk she is.

When Leonita starts collecting the plates, Hedda rises to help, but Olof grabs her by the arm. His grip is surprisingly strong.

‘There’s no need,’ he says. ‘She likes to keep moving.’

‘It’s enough for you to just be here,’ Leonita says.

All the others remain seated. Hedda hesitates but sinks back into her chair.

Leonita is wearing plimsolls, despite the heat, but her steps are silent as she gracefully clears the table. Olof gets a packet of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and uses his thumb to flip open the lid with a practised movement. He pulls out a cigarette with his teeth and offers the packet to Hedda.

‘Thanks, I’m fine. I’ve given up.’

‘Suit yourself,’ he grins, and lights the cigarette.

His entire body radiates utter pleasure as he closes his eyes and takes the first drag. Before the packet goes back into his pocket, Hedda gets a glimpse of the warning text and a photograph of damaged, fleshy organs. But Olof seems to disprove the statistics through his mere existence – almost ninety years old and without a worry in the world.

‘David told us about the exhibition at Moderna,’ she says.

Olof lazily exhales smoke through his nostrils and glances at David.

‘Don’t you have anything more fun to talk about?’ he asks in amusement. ‘Yes, they’re doing some kind of retrospective. As if I was already dead! As far as I’m concerned, you can just heave me into the lake when I’m gone. And burn anything you don’t want to keep.’

‘But you’re painting some new pieces too,’ Annika says, brushing the edge of her glass with her fingertips.

‘Can anyone else see what you’re working on?’ Hedda asks.

Olof leans towards her, so close that she can feel his hot breath on her face, the smell of ash and cold smoked salmon.

‘No, but you can hear a secret. I haven’t even started yet.’

He chuckles happily and takes a new puff of his cigarette. And Hedda wonders what it feels like to be so sure of his place amongst the elite.

‘Father has promised to start after Midsummer,’ Annika says with a decidedly drunken smile. ‘By then I think he’ll have some new inspiration.’

Olof looks at his daughter with displeasure. Something is happening between the two of them that Hedda can’t interpret.

‘About Midsummer,’ she says. ‘What are your plans?’

Something changes around the table. Glances are exchanged.

‘We usually pick flowers down in the meadow and decorate the maypole in the garden,’ says Paddy.

‘And we have herring for lunch,’ David says.

‘Oh dammit,’ says Paddy. ‘We need to go to the off-licence and buy some akvavit.’

Olof takes a long look at Annika’s wine glasses.

‘We probably do, too. We’re starting to run out of everything.’

‘I hope you don’t find it too quiet here,’ says Leonita, who has come out on the veranda again. ‘Is there anything in particular that you like to eat?’

Hedda shakes her head. She can’t get away from the growing feeling that something is going on beneath the surface. But it could just as well be her imagination.

‘We’ve never had much in terms of traditions. My mother was always working at Midsummer.’

‘Here we follow the traditions to the letter. Otherwise there’s no point.’ Annika’s silver rings clink against the glass again. ‘You should have seen the Christmas when Mother forgot the Värmland sausage. Father was so angry that he threw all his Christmas presents in the bin. Unopened.’

The others laugh, but Hedda struggles to see what’s so amusing.

‘Christmas was ruined anyway,’ Olof says with a cackle that sends cigarette ash dancing like fireflies in the growing darkness.

Leonita gives a placating smile. She hovers around Olof like a moon around a planet, never shining on her own, only reflecting.

‘Who would like coffee?’

‘I’d love some,’ Hedda says. ‘I just need to borrow the loo.’

‘If you promise to give it back,’ Paddy says.

She smiles dutifully and hopes nobody notices she has to support herself on the back of the chair when she gets up.

It’s dark inside the house. Leonita turns the lights on as they enter a room, then turns them off again as they leave. In the entrance hall, she shows Hedda to a door squeezed beneath the curved staircase, before continuing into parts of the house that are still unknown to Hedda.

She opens the door and looks into a claustrophobic, cramped space with a steeply sloping ceiling and the water tank on the wall above the toilet. Hedda lifts the toilet lid and discovers a brown stripe in the bottom of the bowl. She quickly looks away and locks the door with the latch on the inside. She bangs her knees on the cupboard under the sink as she sits down.

A pubic hair is adhering to the edge of the sink, and she thinks about how her mother carefully scrubs every surface before the neighbours come over for dinner, as if they were inspectors from some strict authority. How she cooks tons of food, terrified that it won’t be enough, and carries on serving things up long after everyone is stuffed. Hedda has taken after her. But at Villa Thamyris nobody is worried about not being good enough.

She hastily wipes herself and hits her hip on the door handle when she gets up. While she washes her hands with a cheap supermarket brand liquid soap, which seems to have been diluted with water, she glances at the water tank in the mirror. It seems ancient, and she remembers that David spoke of blockages in the pipes.

Hedda makes herself as small as possible to be able to turn 180 degrees. She grabs the wooden knob on the end of the water tank chain. She hesitates for a moment before pulling it.

The chain comes away from the tank and there’s a noise like thunder from deep inside the walls. The sound merges with the panic hammering inside her. The water rises in the bowl, far too much, far too fast, and Hedda squeezes the wooden knob hard while words like flood, water damage and insurance excess circle on the surface of her consciousness. She opens the door and hurries back to the veranda, pursued by the banging noise deep in the walls.

The others look up as she comes back out. Annika seems to be having trouble focusing her eyes.

‘I think the toilet is overflowing,’ Hedda says.

The pipes thump high inside the house as if in confirmation.

‘Did you do a number two on number one?’ Olof asks.

When she shakes her head, he laughs good-naturedly.

‘Then it’s fine.’

‘I shouldn’t have worried you,’ David says.

‘But someone should go and check.’ Her voice threatens to crack, as if the situation wasn’t already humiliating enough. ‘The chain came off.’

She holds the knob out to show them. The other end of the chain is dangling beside her legs.

‘It happens all the time,’ David says.

Olof pats the chair next to him, and Hedda finally sits down. She allows the chain to slither into a small bird’s nest on the tablecloth and places the wooden knob in the middle like an egg. The blood is rushing in her ears.

‘But the pipes really do need to be replaced,’ Paddy says.

‘Thanks, I already know you think that.’ Olof winks conspiratorially at Hedda. ‘Paddy has big plans for Villa Thamyris, you see.’

‘I’ve simply offered to help with the renovations.’

Paddy looks around the table as if seeking support.

‘The house will be ours eventually, after all,’ he continues valiantly. ‘And the longer you wait, the more expensive…’

‘I know you’re impatient,’ Olof says. ‘Hopefully it won’t be much longer before we shuffle off.’

A train is approaching through the woods. It echoes off the mountain on the other side of the lake. David has straightened in his chair.

‘That wasn’t what Father meant.’

Paddy nods gratefully

‘No, it was actually the opposite. You have hardly any hot water in the winter …’

‘… and no wellness centre in the basement!’ Olof turns to Hedda again and holds his chest in a dramatic gesture. ‘Paddy wants to build a home spa, you see.’

He takes it for granted that they agree his son-in-law’s idea is ridiculous.

Fortunately at that moment Leonita comes out onto the veranda with a tray. The fragile cups tinkle against the saucers when she sets it down on the table and gives Olof a stern look.

‘Paddy has already helped us a lot,’ she says. ‘I think you should be a little more appreciative.’

Olof glares at her, but makes no more protest. Leonita distributes the coffee, together with small glasses and a bottle of Calvados. Hedda takes a sip of coffee. It’s unexpectedly hot, and she swallows hurriedly to prevent her tongue from getting scalded.

Silence descends on the table. When the train has passed, the only sound is that of rapid slurping.

Hedda glances at David before turning to Olof.

‘I’ve read up on Thamyris now,’ she says.

He looks at her in surprise, then brings the packet of cigarettes out of his chest pocket again, but Annika grabs it.

‘So you know more about the Muses too?’ he says without taking his eyes from Hedda.

‘A little. But you were going to tell me why the house is named after him.’

‘Now you’re asking for the whole lecture,’ Annika says. ‘As far back as the ancient Greeks …’

Olof continues to look at Hedda, raising an eyebrow in question.

‘I want to hear it,’ she replies.

The old man fills their glass with the apple-scented spirit before he settles back in his chair again. He seems to be thinking about how to start. But Hedda has a feeling that he knows exactly what he’s going to say.

‘These days it’s called flow,’ he says finally. ‘I don’t know exactly what it’s like for a writer, but sometimes when I paint it’s as if someone else is holding the brush. Ideas come from nowhere. Subjects that I didn’t know I had inside me are suddenly there on the canvas. Do you understand what I mean?’

Hedda takes a sip of Calvados that burns all the way down into her stomach. She understands very well what Olof means, but it’s been a long time since she experienced it herself.

‘It doesn’t always happen,’ Olof says, as if he understood what she was thinking. ‘It doesn’t even happen often. But we live for those short moments when we almost … feel the presence of something else.’

Hedda discovers that she is nodding. David listens attentively, though he must have heard this many times before.

‘It happens to actors too,’ Annika says.

Her thin lips smack together as she takes a drag on the cigarette.

‘Exactly,’ Olof says. ‘To enter into a role is to allow yourself to become obsessed. To submit. And in the audience, we know when an actor is no longer acting, but suddenly is his role. It has taken him over.’

‘Or her.’

Olof impatiently retrieves his cigarette packet from Annika.

‘Personally I’ve never understood ballet,’ he continues. ‘But when Leonita danced … sometimes it was as if I knew exactly what she was feeling up on stage. It was as if we shared a body. Not just her and me, but the entire audience. We moved together.’

They smile lovingly at each other. And Hedda thinks it must have been fifty years since Leonita could dance on a stage. What has she filled the void with since then? Is Villa Thamyris her life’s work now, or is it Olof? Is there even a difference?

‘It has nothing to do with technical brilliance. Quite the opposite. Perfection is a cold thing. Dead.’

She nods, not daring to look at David, for fear he’ll understand she’s thinking of his early books. Olof takes the filter of a new cigarette between his teeth and lights it.

‘True art needs passion and fire. When someone succeeds in transcending through art, it is … magic. It is divine. And that’s where the Muses come into the picture.’

Hedda shudders, not really knowing why. Olof takes another drag, looking out into the garden, which has sunk into the violet and grey tones of the June night.

‘Nine sisters. Daughters of Zeus and of Mnemosyne, who was the goddess of memory. It’s hardly a coincidence. Without memory, we wouldn’t be able to turn what we have experienced into art.’

‘And Zeus was the most powerful god of all,’ Annika says. ‘But he was unable to control his divine cock.’

Olof waves impatiently with his hand, and the smoke loops from his cigarette to become spirals in the stationary air. But Annika won’t be stopped. She’s like a rebellious teenager.

‘It’s no wonder Hera always seems so bitter. She couldn’t even long for death to separate them. Because the gods are immortal.’ Annika laughs again. ‘I always tell David that he should write a defence of Hera, but he refuses to listen to his old mother.’

‘Let Olof tell the story now,’ Leonita says.

‘Nine sisters,’ Olof continues emphatically. ‘They bestowed honey on the lips of their chosen ones and gave them the divine power to create. If you had been a writer in ancient Greece, you would probably have had an altar to them in your home. There were priests and rites dedicated only to the Muses. Sometimes they are described as tender, sometimes as harsh dictators. They were always taken very seriously.’

Hedda’s stomach heaves in protest when she takes another sip of her Calvados. She firmly suppresses an inclination to retch, realising that she hasn’t drunk any water since she arrived at the house and promises herself to do so as soon as Olof has finished his story.

‘Homer begins both the Iliad and the Odyssey with prayers to the Muse.’ He pauses dramatically. ‘Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys. And then, in the first song: From some point here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and begin our story. So he appeals to the Muse for inspiration, and lets her decide where the story should begin.’

Olof Svantesson is playing up his role as the cultural patriarch to the fullest. Hedda thinks he’s embarrassing. Self-righteous. Ridiculous. But still she wants to impress him. Despite the fact that the last thing she wants is to want to.

‘It sounds like a good idea to believe in the Muses,’ she says. ‘I mean, that way you don’t get hit with stage fright. If the Muse doesn’t show up, it’s not your fault.’

Olof looks at her expectantly, waiting for more. She can’t help but be flattered that he actually seems to take her seriously.

‘My own work process consists mostly of self-hatred and doubt,’ she continues. ‘It’s so hard sometimes to … convince myself that I have something worth saying.’

Olof is still smiling, but something has changed in his gaze. And Hedda realises that he doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. Not fully.

David looks at her with compassion, but he doesn’t understand either. He may say that he’s stuck with his writing, but he never wonders if he deserves to write.

Perhaps it would be healthy for successful people to believe in the Muses too. If they didn’t assume that they had created everything themselves, they couldn’t succumb to great madness either. Bringing forth whole worlds out of nothing is a godlike act. Perhaps it’s just too much for the human ego to bear.

‘I mean, just think about the 27 Club,’ she says instead, and Olof is suddenly interested again.

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

When Hedda asks David for a cigarette, it’s not a conscious decision. He looks at her in surprise, but hands over the packet.

‘They’re all musicians who died when they were twenty-seven.’ The first lungful of smoke tickles her gag reflex, and she pretends to yawn to hide a new wave of nausea. ‘I think the first ones were Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. And Jim Morrison. If I remember correctly, Kurt Cobain said he would die at twenty-seven. And he did.

I think. If I remember correctly. It bothers her that the words sneak in, even though she knows perfectly well what she’s talking about.

‘Amy Winehouse was one too.’ Hedda takes another drag. ‘There are so many of them that there are conspiracy theories about it. But it’s always been the same, right? Musicians who have died of overdoses. Artists who ended up in mental hospitals. Authors who have taken their own lives. And we believe that the more they burn out, the more genuine their art is.’

She begins to lose her grip on what she’s saying, unsure where she’s trying to go with it. The nicotine makes it feel like ants are crawling into her skull. It feels like her brain is itching.

‘My point is that it would be easier to live in a world where, like … you’re just a conduit for something much bigger than yourself. Where creation comes from the outside rather than from the inside.’

It feels like she’s rambling, but Olof’s eyes are still fixed on her. Hedda raises the cigarette to her mouth again, but she’s definitely going to vomit here and now if she smokes any more. She hastily stubs it out in the metal ashtray. The sound is unnaturally loud in the silence, which is so compact that it seems to be thickening the air itself.

‘Of course you’re right,’ Olof says. ‘To be able to create, you must have a thin skin. You have to both take in your surroundings and have access to your deepest feelings. But the criticism you expose yourself to requires you to have a thick skin. It’s a paradox that can make life very difficult for some artists. My brother was one of them.’

Hedda didn’t know Olof had a brother. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Leonita nodding sadly. But Annika seems to have had enough.

‘Tell her about Thamyris now,’ she says. ‘Otherwise, we’ll be here all night.’

‘My dear daughter can never take a day off from being a director. Go to bed if you’re tired.’ Olof throws another meaningful glance at her wine glass before he looks at Hedda again. ‘But of course you’re wondering how my grandfather could name the house after such a terrible story.’

‘That’s not quite how I’d put it,’ she lies, and lifts the coffee cup to her mouth. ‘But yes. I am curious as to why.’

Olof doesn’t answer her smile.

‘As a reminder that creativity is a gift. And a gift can always be taken back.’ He taps the base of his glass against the table to underline his words, seeming not to notice that the contents splash over the rim. ‘We must create the art to which inspiration leads us. Not the art we think might win competitions.’

Olaf’s eyes bore into her, just as he saw through her book. It didn’t seem like you were so interested in the police work.

He was right. She had tried to win the competition. She sold herself out, but nobody wants to buy what she’s selling.

‘Why did you become a writer?’ Olof asks.

The coffee has cooled in the fragile cup. The instant she swallows a sip, her stomach tries to throw it back up again.

‘I love books,’ she says. ‘That was how it all started. I didn’t have many friends when I was growing up, so books became my friends instead.’

Olof waits in silence.

‘My parents lived so far outside town,’ she continues. ‘There were no other children nearby. I had to use my imagination.’

The familiar words sound unnatural in the face of Olof’s gaze. Hedda has used her standard phrases for so long, so routinely, that she no longer knows what the true answer is.

‘I guess I’m trying to write the books I’d like to read myself,’ she concludes hastily. ‘Sometimes I still feel like I’m making up imaginary friends.’

Olof smiles.

‘It sounds very humble to say that. It’s almost as if you’re apologising for being an artist.’

Calling herself an artist has never even occurred to Hedda. Even writer feels presumptive, because that’s not how she makes a living. Instead, she says she writes books. But how can she explain that to Olof Svantesson?

‘Julie Burchill said something good,’ she says eventually. ‘Something about how starting to write was like discovering your native language, and realising that you’ve been speaking a second language all your life.’

‘Interesting. But those are someone else’s words.’

‘Does that matter, when it’s exactly how it feels?’ Hedda replies, a little too quickly.

‘Grandfather,’ David says suddenly. ‘That’s enough now.’

But he’s just making it worse. She’s even more aware of the others’ eyes on her.

‘Sometimes it’s as if I can only really make myself understood when I write. I can only understand myself when I …’

She loses her train of thought when she thinks of her laptop, up in the tower room.

It’s only through writing that she can control her far too vivid imagination – her ability to always imagine the worst – and channel it into something creative. But she hasn’t opened the Word document for several days. Hasn’t written in it for weeks.

She can’t even blame her father for being dead. When life was at its worst, her writing was always her escape from reality. Her emergency exit.

What will she do if that door is closed for good? Who will she be then?

Tears burn behind her eyelids, and she blinks them away angrily.

‘I have to write. That’s the only way to get away from myself.’

It’s only when she hears herself say it that she realises it’s true. And Olof’s smile is absolutely genuine again. She has passed the test. And the price she paid was merely having to undress in front of the whole family.

More than that. She doesn’t just feel naked, she feels like she’s been flayed.

‘I just don’t want you to apologise for your creativity,’ says Olof. ‘You’re an artist, Hedda. Take yourself seriously, and you’ll see that everything works out.’

She can’t even look at the others. She just nods as if she agrees with him. As if it were as simple as making a decision.

‘You are always welcome here,’ Olof says. ‘I can’t promise that there’s a muse living within our walls, but I want to believe that all the creativity that has been here over the years somehow remains.’

9.

The June sky has gone from dusk to dawn without passing through night. A low light creeps through the gaps around the roller blinds.

Hedda is lying on top of the covers, wearing only her knickers. Sweat has accumulated in a pool in the hollow of her throat. Something cold roils in her stomach, and the taste of ash and the filter from David’s cigarette still emerges from her lungs with every breath. She is terrified of vomiting over the cream carpet, but it’s a long way down to the toilet down in the entrance hall and she doesn’t want to risk meeting anyone on the way there.

Hedda was the first of them to retire to bed. She blamed it on being tired after the long day. Her body is utterly exhausted, but her brain is keeping her awake, her thoughts endlessly chasing their own tails inside her head.

The conversation with Olof has made her realise the truth. Finally. She can’t possibly write even one more book about Nina Ljung, let alone two.

She opens Instagram to avoid having to think, but at the top of her feed the algorithm has spat out an image of one of the queens of crime, her arms full of flowers. Hedda and she have the same publisher, and he’s in the picture, standing with his arm around her majesty, while she holds up a diploma from the publisher announcing that she has sold 100,000 copies of her new book. The sales manager is on her other side, beaming at the camera.

The book is the fourteenth in the series. Hedda tried to read it when she and the queen of crime were on the same panel at a crime festival. Everyone at the publishing company was delighted. It was a great opportunity for Hedda to reach a broader audience. But as she read she was first shocked, then disgusted and finally furious. Everything was so careless. So dull. The same phrases recurred over and over again. The main character appeared to have dementia because he was astonished by information he had already learned at the beginning of the book. The characters were totally unbelievable. The killer’s motive was completely incomprehensible. Hedda was disappointed in her publisher, but the truth was that the queen of crime’s book also gave her self-confidence. If such utter tripe could sell, A Time To Kill should do so too.

Now she knows she was wrong. Perhaps she misunderstood the whole thing. She’s obviously missing something.

When Hedda sat there on the stage, the queen of crime didn’t talk about writing. She didn’t even wait for the chair’s questions, but began to brag about her sales, how she would soon catch up with Camilla Läckberg, how they loved her in Germany. Hedda was ashamed on her behalf – at least until she realised that the audience was laughing and applauding. Like football fans cheering for the winning team.

Olof says that she’s always welcome at Villa Thamyris, and he may mean it. But she doesn’t belong here, nor at any of the crime festivals.

She sets her phone down, disgusted by everything, and particularly by her own self-pity.

Her thoughts starts their endless whirl again. They’ve done the whole circuit now. Back to Persephone.

There’s a scene in Persephone that Hedda knows by heart. A woman named Gabbi is sitting at her computer. She looks up newspaper articles about a brothel raid and reads that all the men chose to pay a fine to avoid a high-profile trial.

Gabbi has found a penalty notice that was sent to her in-laws’ address. With increasing horror, she realises that one of the black silhouettes in the article represents her husband.

When Gabbi confronts him, he accuses her of snooping.

And it wasn’t trafficking, he says. I would have noticed.

He seems to seriously believe that it requires chains and dungeons to prove that someone is being held captive.

Just because you wouldn’t choose to be a sex worker, you shouldn’t look down on those who do, he says.

The articles state that the women were taken to sheltered accommodation after the raid, to prevent their pimps from finding them

It was just an ordinary girl who was studying to be doctor here in Sweden and who didn’t want to take out student loans. He refuses to believe that’s exactly what the woman was instructed to say.

Gabbi was pregnant when he was caught up in the raid. It was in the middle of the day, and he came home as usual that night. She didn’t notice anything. Had absolutely no idea what had happened.

When her husband’s anger doesn’t work on her, he turns to self-pity. You can think I’m a disgusting person if you like, but you can never despise me as much as I do. He says it was the first time he had ever done such a thing. He hides his face in his hands, and she hears him sob behind them. I think deep down I wanted to be caught, he says as if he had just realised it himself.

It sounds false, like lines he has rehearsed, but this is the man Gabbi loves. The man she needs. The man whose child she holds in her arms. He promises over and over again that it was the first time, and she wants to believe him so much, wants to think it matters, that it could have been worse.

It’s like self-harm, he says, rubbing his eyes. And Gabbi’s last defence evaporates, leaving behind only disgust. But it’s not your self you’re harming, she says. You aren’t the victim in this. And his sobs stop abruptly. When he lowers his hands, his eyes are dry. So are you saying I’m a pervert?

Hedda hates the scene. She finds the writing so banal. Everything either of the characters says feels so obvious that it’s not believable.

But reality is rarely believable. It doesn’t have to be. And the reason Hedda knows the scene by heart is that she lived through it.

Hugo wasn’t even six months old when Johannes looked at her with dry eyes. Please don’t tell anyone, he begged her. Promise me. I won’t want to live if this gets out.

And Hedda promised. It was for Hugo’s sake that she protected him. Their son would never know any of this as he grew up.

But all the unspoken things created a wall between her and their mutual friends. She couldn’t answer their questions about why she had left Johannes. Nobody understood. Everyone liked him so much, felt so sorry for him.

She only told her parents.

Gabbi’s mother tries to convince her to stay with her husband. It would have been worse if it was someone he knew, then there could have been feelings involved. But there are worse things to be infected with than feelings. Gabbi got her husband to admit that he paid extra to not have to use a condom. It took her a week to get all the test results and she was constantly terrified, trying to detect symptoms in a body that hadn’t yet recovered from childbirth, a body that still felt foreign to her. She read about neonatal herpes, about how chlamydia can cause ectopic pregnancies. Her husband risked her son’s life.

In one of the key scenes in Persephone, Gabbi’s husband says it would never have happened if he had truly loved her. His new girlfriend has taught him how real love should feel. And Gabbi knows that he has rewritten the story so he doesn’t have to see himself as a villain. Yet it almost completely destroys her. He hasn’t only stolen their future from her, he has stolen their past. And the worst part is that Gabbi hasn’t stopped loving him yet. That’s the darkest secret of all.

There are other scenes too, which aren’t taken from reality. Like the first time Gabbi’s man clicks on the ad he’s seen many times before. A gif with bouncing tits, text that promises horny girls in your area. Suddenly he can’t resist it. Just wants to know what’s behind it. And there’s so much. Everything he dreamed of trying, just once. He finds golden showers and fisting disgusting, but it still makes him excited to know he can, if he wants to.

David describes it well. Hedda has to give him that. But there’s something unpleasant about how enjoyable he finds the descent into the darkness. How he revels in the grime, the stink of the hotel room where Helen’s husband goes with a wedge of cash. There will be more visits to similar rooms and flats over the years. He learns that it’s important to check ratings from other customers to know which girls aren’t careful about hygiene, which ones use too much lube, which ones obviously don’t like it. If the girls rated their customers the same way, he would get good reviews. Many of them say he was their favourite. Some claim to have fallen in love. He believes them, because he knows he never nags, never demands more than what has been agreed. And he’s sure he’s better looking than the majority of their clientèle.

Hedda stopped reading halfway through the book. She couldn’t bear to see Johannes in more scenes from the underworld.

Johannes was furious about the book. He was convinced Hedda was behind it all.

Apart from her parents, David was the only one she told the truth. She had trusted him completely. They were sitting in her new flat, surrounded by moving boxes, and she remembers how grateful she was that David didn’t interrupt her, not even once, how he didn’t give her any good advice. He just listened.

It was a relief. Such a tremendous relief. And it was during that period that she got the idea. If she wrote a novel, she could tell her story, even if it was disguised as fiction. The words would help her to process what had happened. Give her power over her own life again. But David stole her words from her.

In Persephone, he draws a line between three women. They form a sisterhood that spans thousands of years, from social-realistic novel to classical mythology. Persephone is picking flowers in a meadow when she is discovered by Hades. The god of the underworld falls in love and carries her off to the underworld to make her his queen. Her mother desperately tries to get her back. Nobody asks Persephone what she wants. Even Zeus intervenes, but Hades has tricked her into eating a pomegranate that has grown in the underworld, thus binding her to the realm of the dead. The parallels with the prostitute kept locked up and drugged in an Airbnb apartment are simple but effective. But despite the much worse fates suffered by both Persephone and the prostitute, Gabbi is the obvious protagonist. The depressed middle-class woman is the character in whom David Ridings’ readers can recognise themselves. Persephone and the nameless prostitute are only there for Gabbi to reflect herself in.

Hedda started reading the book on the train home, the day after the launch party. She was angry and shocked, but it took a long time before she dared to confront him. Her best friend could become a powerful enemy. She could picture him at the annual book industry party at the large, pretentious house owned by the publishing company. No, we aren’t together any more. Hedda has gone completely mad. Watch out for her. She’s impossible to deal with.

When she finally phoned David, he wasn’t defensive, simply uncomprehending. He might perhaps have used some of her story, but in a completely different context. Who knew where inspiration came from?

You can still write your book. If you publish it as a memoir, it will sell even better.

But he had already used all her words. He must have written them down after every conversation so as not to forget.

‘You could have ruined my life if you told anyone,’ he said when they met over lunch in May.‘I’m so grateful you never did. Even if I deserved it.’

His fear made it easier to forgive. It even made her feel generous. But she would never have been able to accuse him of anything in public. To do so, she would have to reveal what nobody must know.

David has joined AA. Now he understands what he did. He accepted the guilt, without reservation. And she has forgiven him, at least as much as she can.

But that doesn’t mean she intends to stay at Villa Thamyris. This place, this family, aren’t good for her. The insight allows her to feel completely calm for the first time since she arrived.

The sky has lightened to the faintest blue when she opens the SJ app and books a ticket for the 10.28 train. For the first time since she arrived at Villa Thamyris, she is completely calm.

Hedda sets the alarm for half past eight and turns the volume up to max. She needs to come up with an explanation. Perhaps she can blame Hugo. It will be embarrassing, and David will see through her lie, but then it will be over.

10.

Hedda wakes up with the feeling that something heavy has fallen to the floor. The sound still seems to be hanging in the air, but everything in the room seems normal. Perhaps it’s just an echo from a dream she no longer remembers.

She sits up in bed and meets her own haunted eyes in the mirror leaning against the wall. Her skin is pale, almost transparent in the gloom.

She looks over at the wardrobe, and her scalp tightens.

The door is open. But she’s sure it was closed when she fell asleep.

It’s really not at all strange. All sorts of things happen in an old house.

And yet.

And yet her heart beats hard against the inside of her chest. And yet the muscles behind her ears contract reflexively. But she can’t hear anything.

It was just a dream.

She lies down on the bed again, noticing that the fabric is soaked with sweat.

creeak

The shrill little squeak comes from the wardrobe.

She is transformed into a panicked animal, made up only of instincts and muscles that are tense to breaking point when she creeps off the bed.

creeeak

Her clothes are hanging like shed skin inside the wardrobe. The fabric moves almost imperceptibly. Something is moving in there.

creeeeeak

It’s the squeaking sound of hangers moving along the iron rod.

And something else.

Breathing. She hears it clearly now.

wake up Hedda wake up this is just a dream it’s just a dream it’s

it’s the muse who lives in the walls

There’s a faint whimper from the wardrobe, as thick and wet as the soil in a grave. And Hedda rushes down the steep stairs, is close to falling through the door with the stained glass. Something thuds up in her room, and she sobs, emerging into the walk-through room where the dust bunnies swirl silently in the breeze as she rushes past. The pounding of her bare feet echoes loudly in the quiet house as she continues into the upper hall, aiming at the curved staircase towards the ground floor, must get out…

must escape

But the door to David’s room opens just as she sets her foot on the top step.

She screams loudly, gets a glimpse of David’s wild-eyed look before he throws his arms around her and holds her tight

‘Hedda,’ he says. ‘Hedda, what is it?’

Olof and Leonita come running in from the walk-through room. They look at her in shock and Hedda suddenly realises that she’s still half naked. She falls silent abruptly, trying to cover herself with her arms over her breasts.

‘What is it?’ David says.

‘There’s someone up there,’ she whispers and hears how mad it sounds.

The family members look at each other.

‘Sweetheart,’ Leonita says carefully. ‘You’ve had a nightmare.’

‘No,’ Hedda says, shaking her head firmly. ‘I heard her.’

‘Who?’

the muse

But Hedda can’t bring herself to say that. Reality is starting to catch up with her. And yet her heart is still thumping loudly. Her skin is too tight around her flesh.

‘Grandfather and I will go up and check, okay?’ David releases her and looks at his grandmother. ‘Can you make some tea for Hedda in the meantime?

Hedda shakes her head, afraid of what they will find up in the tower room, afraid of what they will not find. But Leonita nods and takes off her dressing gown, putting it over Hedda’s shoulders and leading her down the stairs towards the darkness of the entrance hall.

---

Rights: Lena Stjernström at Grand Agency