Chapter 2
Each story needs a designated starting point. In some cases, we can all agree on an unambiguous inciting incident, as if it were possible to travel back in time and finally say: here. This is the precise moment when the hands of the clock begin to move.
But here, that isn’t so. In order to uncover what happened to the boys from Skavboke, each of us must settle on a vantage point from which the events can be observed.
Perhaps that vantage point wasn’t with Sander or Killian, or even Jakob Lindell, but with the brothers, Mikael and Filip. Or Madeleine, or even Felicia. After all, someone must be the guilty party.
Or is it all of them? The whole village, in fact. Small towns sometimes have a voice of their own. Perhaps a town can also destroy itself, if worse comes to worst.
The people who move in and out of the pages of this story muddle the picture, disrupt thoughts.
That’s what they’re meant to do, even though we might wish they wouldn’t.
The story doesn’t care about wishes or ideas, none of that.
Instead, it offers a cast of folks who speak and act, who give witness statements both false and true, who reject and elevate one another.
Some withdraw and don’t want to be seen, yet continue to operate in silence.
Their actions, in turn, recur as ripples in the lives of completely different people.
Yes, so it seems.
Might as well start with the interrogation, then, as we’ve done.
Or possibly: somewhere entirely different.
Perhaps at what seems like the outskirts of it all.
Indeed, that too is a beginning. To begin with a missing teenage boy and how Siri Bengtsson, three years after the incident in Skavboke, left the police force.