She backed out through the door.
As soon as she was out of sight he did a little improvised dance in the corridor, to the great astonishment of his colleagues. But his joy was spoiled a bit when he realized how much work it would take to get his house in presentable shape. After Karin left him, he hadn’t really felt like dealing with the housework.
He and Erica had known each other since birth. Their mothers had been best friends since childhood and were as close as two sisters. Patrik and Erica played together a lot when they were small, and it was no exaggeration to say that Erica was his first love. In fact, he believed he was born in love with Erica. There had always been such a natural quality about his feelings for her. As far as Erica was concerned, she had merely taken his puppy-like admiration for granted. Not until she moved to Göteborg did he realize that it was time to put his dreams on the shelf. He had fallen in love with others since then, of course. And when he married Karin he was utterly convinced that they would grow old together, but Erica was always in the back of his mind. Sometimes months would pass without thinking about her; sometimes he thought about her several times a day.
The piles of paper had not been miraculously reduced while he was gone. With a deep sigh he sat down at his desk and picked up the page on top. The work was monotonous enough that he could ponder the menu for Saturday at the same time. Dessert, in any case, was already decided. Erica had always loved ice cream.
He awoke with a nasty taste in his mouth. It had been a real blow-out yesterday. His buddies had come over in the afternoon and together they had kept drinking until the small hours. A vague memory of the police stopping by at some point last night hovered just beyond his reach. He tried to sit up but the whole room spun around and he decided to stay where he was for a while.
His right hand was aching, and he raised it toward the ceiling to look at it. The knuckles were severely scraped and full of coagulated blood. Damn, there must have been a bit of a dust-up last night, that’s why the cops showed up. More and more of his memory began to return. It was the guys who had brought up the subject of the suicide. One of them had started talking a bunch of shit about Alex. ‘Upper-class bitch’, and ‘society cunt’ were words he had used about her. Anders had short-circuited, and after that he remembered only a red haze of rage as he started bashing the guy in a drunken fury. Sure, he had called her a few names himself when he was most furious at her betrayal. But that wasn’t the same thing. The others didn’t know her. He was the only one who had the right to judge her.
The telephone rang with a shrill sound. He tried to ignore it but decided it was less bothersome to get up and answer the phone than to let the noise keep slicing into his brain.
‘Yes, this is Anders.’ He was slurring his words.
‘Hi, it’s Mamma. How are you doing?’
‘I feel like shit.’ He slid down the wall to sit on the floor. ‘What the hell time is it?’
‘It’s almost four in the afternoon. Did I wake you?’
‘Nope.’ His head felt disproportionately large and kept threatening to fall down between his knees.
‘I was in town shopping earlier. There’s a lot of talk about something that I want you to know about. Are you listening?’
‘Yeah, damn it, I’m listening.’
‘Apparently Alex didn’t commit suicide. She was murdered. I just wanted you to know.’
Silence.
‘Anders, hello? Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yeah, sure, I heard you. What did you say? Was Alex … murdered?’
‘Yes, that’s what they’re saying in town, anyway. Apparently Birgit was down at Tanumshede police station and got the news today.’
‘Oh, shit. Look, Mamma, I’ve got a lot to do. We’ll talk later.’
‘Anders? Anders?’
He had already hung up.
With an enormous effort he showered and got dressed. After taking two Tylenols he felt more like a human being. The vodka bottle in the kitchen tried to tempt him, but he refused to give in. He had to be sober right now. Well, relatively sober, at least.
The phone rang again. He ignored it. Instead he took a phone book out of the cabinet in the hall and quickly found the number he was looking for. His hands were shaking as he punched in the number. It seemed to ring a hundred times.
‘Hi, it’s Anders,’ he said when the receiver on the other end was finally picked up. ‘No, don’t hang up, damn it. We have to talk … well, you don’t have that much of a fucking choice, I have to tell you … I’ll be at your place in fifteen minutes. And you’d better fucking be there … I don’t give a shit who else is there, fuck it! Don’t forget who has the most to lose here … That’s bullshit. I’m going now. See you in fifteen minutes.’
Anders slammed down the receiver. After taking a couple of deep breaths, he pulled on his jacket and went out. He didn’t bother to lock the door. The phone in the flat started ringing furiously again.
Erica was exhausted when she got back to the house. There was a strained silence in the car during the trip home, and Erica understood that Henrik was facing a difficult choice. Should he tell Birgit that he wasn’t the father of Alexandra’s child, or should he keep quiet and hope that it didn’t come out during the investigation? Erica didn’t envy him and couldn’t say how she would have acted in his situation. The truth wasn’t always the best solution.
It was already getting dark, and she was grateful that her father had put in outdoor lamps that turned on automatically when anyone approached the house. She had always been terribly afraid of the dark. When she was little, she thought it was something she would grow out of, because adults couldn’t be afraid of the dark, could they? But she was thirty-five years old, and she still looked under the bed to make sure that nothing was lurking there in the dark. How pathetic.
When she had turned on all the lights in the house, she poured herself a big glass of red wine and curled up on the wicker sofa on the veranda. The darkness was impenetrable, but she still stared straight ahead, though with unseeing eyes. She felt lonely. There were so many people grieving for Alex, people who had been affected by her death. But Erica had only Anna now. Sometimes she wondered whether even Anna would miss her.
She and Alex had been so close as girls. When Alex began to withdraw, and finally disappeared completely when she moved, it felt as though the world had ended for Erica. Alex was the only person she’d had to herself, and except for her father the only one who really cared about her.
Erica put her glass of red wine down on the table so forcefully that she almost broke the base off the glass. She felt altogether too restless to sit still. She had to do something. It was no use to pretend that Alex’s death had not affected her deeply. What bothered her most of all was that the image of Alex conveyed by family and friends did not jibe at all with the Alex she had known. Even if people change on the path from childhood to adulthood, there is still a core of personality that remains intact. The Alex they had described to her was a complete stranger.
She got up and put on her coat again. Her car keys were in her pocket, and at the last moment she took a pocket torch and stuffed it into the other pocket of her coat.
The house at the top of the hill looked deserted in the violet light from the street-lamp.
