BETRAYAL
KARIN ALVTEGEN is one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed and bestselling crime writers. She was born in Jönköping, Sweden, in 1965 and had a varied career, including work in set design for film and stage, before she started to write. She won Sweden’s most prestigious crime novel award, the Glass Key, for Missing. Her novel Shadow was shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger 2009. She is the great-niece of Astrid Lindgren (author of the Pippi Longstocking series), and lives in Stockholm. Her books have been translated into 27 languages.
STEVEN T. MURRAY has been translating from Nordic languages for over thirty years. He is the prize-winning translator of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander books.
Also by Karin Alvtegen
Missing
Shame
Shadow
KARIN
ALVTEGEN
BETRAYAL
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Originally published in Sweden as Svek in 2003 by Natur och Kultur, Stockholm Published by arrangement with the Salomonssen agency
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011
Copyright © Karin Alvtegen, 2003
English translation copyright © Steven T. Murray, 2005
The right of Karin Alvtegen and Steven T. Murray to be identified as respectively the author and translator of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 164 1
eISBN 978 0 85786 175 7
Table of Contents
‘I don’t know.’
Three words.
Each by itself or in some other context completely harmless. Utterly without intrinsic gravity. Merely a statement that he was not sure and therefore chose not to reply.
I don’t know.
Three words.
As an answer to the question she had just asked it was a threat to her entire existence. A sudden chasm that opened in the newly polished parquet living-room floor.
She hadn’t actually asked the question, she had only spoken the words to make him understand how worried she was. If she asked the question about the unthinkable, then things could only be better afterwards. A shared turning point. The past year had been an eternal struggle, and her question was a way of talking about the fact that she couldn’t cope with being strong any longer, couldn’t carry the whole burden by herself. She needed his help.