some indistinct spots of what looked like old dried blood. He wondered where it had come from.
‘I don’t know what it was, Patrik. If I did I wouldn’t be sitting here tearing out my hair.’
She glanced at him in profile. He had wonderfully long, dark eyelashes. His beard stubble was perfect. Just long enough to be felt as light sandpaper against the skin, but short enough not to scratch uncomfortably. She wondered how it would feel against her skin.
‘What is it? Have I got something on my face?’
Patrik wiped his mouth nervously. She quickly looked away, embarrassed that he had caught her out staring at him.
‘It’s nothing. A little crumb of chocolate. It’s gone now.’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘Well, what do you say – we’re not going to get any farther now, do you think?’ Erica said at last.
‘No, probably not. But listen, ring me as soon as you think of what’s missing. If it’s important enough for someone to come here to find, it must be important to the investigation as well.’
They locked up carefully, and Erica placed the key back under the mat.
‘Would you like a ride back?’
‘No thanks, Patrik. I’ll enjoy the walk.’
‘See you tomorrow night then.’ Patrik shifted from one foot to the other, feeling like an awkward fifteen-year-old.
‘Okay, I’ll see you at eight. Come hungry,’ Erica said.
‘I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything. Right now it doesn’t feel like I’ll ever be hungry again.’ Patrik laughed as he patted his stomach and nodded at Dagmar Petrén’s house across the street.
Erica smiled and waved as he drove off in his Volvo. She could already feel anticipation churning inside of her, mixed with insecurity, anxiety and outright fear.
She started for home but hadn’t gone more than a few yards before she stopped short. An idea had come out of nowhere, and it had to be tested before she could let it go. With determined steps she went back to the house, took the key from under the mat, and entered the house again, after first carefully kicking the snow off her shoes.
What should a woman do who was waiting for a man who never showed up for a romantic dinner? She should ring him, of course! Erica said a prayer that Alex had a modern telephone and hadn’t fallen for the trendiness of a ’50s Cobra phone or still had some old Bakelite model. She was in luck. A brand-new Doro hung on the wall in the kitchen. With trembling fingers she pushed the button for the last number called and crossed her fingers that nobody had used the phone since Alex’s death.
The phone rang and rang. After seven rings she was about to hang up, but then the voicemail switched on. She listened to the message but hung up before the beep. Her face pale. Erica slowly replaced the receiver. She could almost hear the clatter in her head as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Suddenly she knew precisely what it was that was missing from the bedroom upstairs.
Mellberg was seething with rage. He strode through the station in a fury. If they could have, the employees at Tanumshede police station would have taken cover under their desks. But grown-ups didn’t do that, so they had to suffer through a whole day of fiery oaths, reprimands and general abuse. And Annika had to bear the brunt of it. Even though she’d developed a tough hide during the months since Mellberg had become boss, for the first time in a long time she felt on the verge of tears. By four o’clock she’d had enough. She left work and stopped at Konsum to buy a large tub of ice cream. Then she went home, turned on Glamour TV and let the tears run down into the chocolate ice cream. It was just one of those days.
It drove Mellberg crazy that he’d been forced to release Anders Nilsson from gaol. He felt in every bone of his body that Anders was Alex Wijkner’s killer, and if he’d only had more time alone with him he would have wrung the truth out of him. Instead he’d been forced to release Anders because of a fucking witness who said she saw him come home just before Separate Worlds started on TV. That placed him at home in his flat by seven o’clock, and Alex had talked with Birgit at a quarter past. Bloody hell.
Then there was that young cop, Patrik Hedström. Kept spouting a bunch of wild ideas that it was somebody other than Anders Nilsson who murdered the woman. No, if there was anything he’d learned in all his years in the police, it was that everything was most often exactly what it appeared to be. No hidden motives, no complicated plots. Just riff-raff that made life unsafe for honest citizens. Find the riff-raff and you find the perpetrator, that was his motto.
He hit the number of Patrik’s mobile.
‘Where the hell are you?’ No pleasantries needed here. ‘Are you sitting around gathering navel lint somewhere, or what? Down here at the station we’re working. Overtime. I don’t know if that’s a phenomenon you’re familiar with. If not, I can fix it so you no longer have to worry about that either. Not here, at any rate.’
He felt a bit better in the pit of his stomach when he’d had a chance to put some pressure on that young whippersnapper. You had to keep them on a short leash, or those young cocks would get too full of themselves.
‘I want you to drive down and talk to a witness who places Anders Nilsson at home at seven o’clock. Press her, twist her arm a little and see what you can find out … yes, NOW, damn it.’
He slammed down the receiver, grateful for the circumstances in life that put him in a position to make other people do the dirty work. Suddenly, life seemed considerably brighter. Mellberg leaned back in his chair, pulled open the top drawer, and took out a packet of chocolate balls. With his short sausage-like fingers he took one out of the packet and blissfully stuffed the whole thing in his mouth. When he finished chewing it he took another. Hard-working men like himself needed fuel.
Patrik had already turned off towards Tanumshede via Grebbestad when Mellberg rang. He pulled into the entrance to the Fjällbacka golf course and turned the car around. He gave a deep sigh. It was getting to be late afternoon and he had plenty to do back at the station. He shouldn’t have stayed so long in Fjällbacka, but being with Erica exerted a particularly strong attraction on him. It felt like being sucked into a magnetic field; he had to use both strength and will power to pull himself free. Another deep sigh. This could only end one way. Badly. It wasn’t so long ago that he finally got over the break-up with Karin, and now he was already going full speed ahead towards new pain. Talk about self-destructive. The divorce had taken over a year to process. He had spent many nights in front of the TV staring blankly at high-quality shows like Walker, Texas Ranger and Mission Impossible. Even TV Shopping had felt like a better alternative than lying alone in the double bed, tossing and turning, while images of Karin in bed with another man flickered past like a bad soap opera. And yet the attraction he felt for Karin in the beginning was nothing compared to the attraction he now felt for Erica. Logic whispered malevolently in his ear: won’t the fall be that much greater?
He drove much too fast, as usual, in the last tight curves before Fjällbacka. This case was starting to get on his nerves. He took out his frustration on the car and was in real mortal danger when he sped round the last curve before the hill down to the place where the old silo once stood. Now it was torn down and instead there were houses and boat-houses built in the old-fashioned style. Prices were around a couple of million kronor per house; he never ceased to be amazed at how much money people must have to be able to buy a summer house at those prices.
