Sandra didn’t recognise the name, but there was something about the environment and human rights that touched on something in her consciousness.

“When and where exactly did this accident happen?” she forced herself to ask, despite something telling her that she didn’t want to hear the answer.

“At Madvar, in January 2014,” Kerstin replied. “On the twenty-third, to be exact. Between half past three and four in the afternoon.”

Sandra instinctively grabbed hold of the armrest on the sofa as it swam before her eyes. A violent wave of emotions flooded through her, beginning in her stomach and welling upwards until her heart was pounding at double speed and her cheeks were flaming red. She was sweating uncontrollably, desperate to end the call and lie down, to wait for the feeling to die down.

“The hit-and-run driver didn’t have any passengers who took the photos,” she heard herself say. “They must have been taken by someone else.”

“How can you know that?” Kerstin asked in bafflement.

“It doesn’t matter, Kerstin—but that’s how it is. Take care, I have to go now.”

Then she ended the call and lay down on the sofa. The sweat poured down her face and blood pulsed through her at a rate that seemed hazardous. She tried taking long, deep breaths, but it didn’t work. Over and over, her lips formed the name of the hit-and-run driver, but her brain was working on just one question:

What should she do with the knowledge?

CAR ACCIDENT AT MADVAR: MALE VICTIM FOUND AFTER FOUR DAYS

A motorist driving along route 145 close to Vejdhem spotted a car deep in the ravine beside the road just before eleven o’clock on Monday morning. The fire brigade, police, and ambulance service responded on site and found a deceased person stuck in the driver’s seat.

The victim was a male in his late forties, and the accident is thought to have happened on Thursday last week. Heavy snowfall is thought to have prevented the car from being found sooner.

There are no witnesses, and it remains unclear what happened, but the roads in the area were treacherously icy at the time in question.

The deceased’s next of kin have been informed.

GOTLANDS ALLEHANDA

JANUARY–FEBRUARY

2014

16

Jan

HE HAD BEEN in a meeting with a customer all morning, and there was nothing new under the sun. They went over same questions again and again, concerning financial and environmental sustainability and green resource efficient finance. Subjects that were certainly close to his heart, but which—despite seeming like buzzwords of the year to the customer’s ear—were frankly hackneyed to him. In his role as an adviser and mentor to the still-fairly-unknowledgeable public, he was always a step ahead.

But you had to take the good with the bad, and the good thing was the long lunch afterwards at the elegant Lindgården Inn. Today lunch was on him, since you could hardly expect the customer to pay, even if the customer was called PayEx and was as rich as Croesus. What was more, there weren’t many people like him who reckoned that if Wednesday was Little Saturday then Thursday was Little Sunday, and what was Sunday without a long, leisurely lunch?