“Don’t remember.”
“Was it yesterday?”
“No,” she says, sounding surprised.
“How many days ago was it?”
“What?”
“I asked when you last saw Josef,” says Joona.
“Oh, a long time ago.”
“Has he been to see you at the cottage?”
“No.”
“Never? He’s never been to see you out there?”
A slight shrug. “No.”
“But he knows the place, doesn’t he?”
She nods. “We went there when he was a little kid,” she replies.
“When was that?”
“I don’t know … I was fifteen. We borrowed the cottage from Auntie Sonja one summer when she was in Greece.”
“And Josef hasn’t been there since?”
Evelyn’s gaze suddenly flickers across the wall behind Joona. “I don’t think so,” she says.
“How long have you been staying there?”
“I moved there just after term started.”
“In August.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been living in a little cottage in Värmdö for four months. Why?”
Once again her gaze flutters away, moving behind Joona’s head. “So I could have peace and quiet to study,” she says.
“For four months?”
She shifts in the chair, crossing her legs and scratching her forehead. “I need to be left in peace,” she says with a sigh.
“Has somebody been bothering you?”
“No.”
“When you say that you want to be left in peace, it sounds as if someone’s been bothering you.”
She gives a faint, joyless smile. “I just like the forest.”
“What are you studying?”
“Political science.”
“And you’re supporting yourself on a student loan?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you buy food?”
“I bike to Saltarö.”
“Isn’t that a long way?”
Evelyn shrugs her shoulders. “I suppose so.”
“Have you seen anyone you know there?”
“No.”
He contemplates Evelyn’s smooth young forehead. “You haven’t seen Josef there?”
“No.”
“Evelyn, listen to me,” says Joona, in a new, more serious tone. “Your brother told us that he was the one who murdered your father, your mother, and your little sister.”
Evelyn stares at the table. Her eyelids tremble; a faint flush rises on her pale face.
“He’s only fifteen years old,” Joona goes on.
He looks at her thin hands and the shining, brushed hair lying over her frail shoulders.
“Why do you think he’s saying he murdered his family?”
“What?” she asks, looking up.
“It seems as if you think he’s telling the truth,” he says.
“It does?”
“You didn’t look surprised when I said he’d confessed,” says Joona. “Were you surprised?”