Sacrifice Read online

  ‘You can’t know anything for sure until it’s been proven.’

  Monika stopped.

  ‘What?’

  But Vanja said nothing more. She just kept walking and the only thing that came out of her mouth was her white, swirling breath.

  The will to go on is needed even for the smallest steps. She had read that somewhere, but no longer remembered where or when. She was familiar with small steps; that was all she had devoted herself to since everything came crashing down. But she no longer knew what it felt like to have the will to go on. For so many years she had struggled to excel, doing her utmost to decorate the outside with the loveliest mosaic, but along the way she had neglected what was on the inside. She had become her accomplishments and her possessions, and there was nothing else. When the glorious exterior had been peeled away, all that remained was the emptiness from what she had given up. The opportunity she had thrown away.

  She had only one wish.

  Only one.

  To dare to take that step, she needed courage that went beyond reason. But if she didn’t dare, there would never be an occasion to dare to do anything ever again.

  And with the courage that only someone who is truly, truly afraid can summon, she finally picked up the phone.

  ‘It’s me. Monika.’

  For an eternity there was silence before he finally said something, and she could spill out what she needed to say.

  ‘There’s so much I want to tell you.’

  And with all her hopes directed at the secret that she so fervently wished would exist somewhere, she said the words.

  ‘Thomas, I’m longing to come home.’

  About the Author

  Sacrifice

  KARIN ALVTEGEN 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, in 2000 with her novel, Missing, and further acclaim with her next two novels, Betrayal and Sacrifice, which was previously called Shame. She is the great-niece of Astrid Lindgren (author of the Pippi Longstocking stories), and lives in Stockholm.

  STEVEN T. MURRAY is a publisher and translator who 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

  Betrayal

  Shadow

  Copyright

  First published as Shame in Great Britain in 2006

  by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

  Originally published in Sweden as Skam in 2005 by

  Natur och Kultur, Stockholm

  Published by arrangement with the Salomonssen agency

  This digital edition first published in 2009

  by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Karin Alvtegen, 2005

  English translation copyright © Steven T. Murray, 2006

  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 1 84767 691 7

  www.meetatthegate.com