His heart was pounding fast and he braked to a bit below the posted speed limit. That was a close call. A check in the rear-view mirror assured him that the biker was still on his machine and could continue his journey.
He kept going straight ahead, past the minigolf course and up to the intersection by the petrol station. There he turned left to the blocks of flats. He reflected one more time over how horribly ugly the buildings were. Brown and white constructions from the Sixties, like big square blocks tossed near the southern entrance to Fjällbacka. He wondered about the rationale of the architect who designed them. Had he gone in for making the buildings as ugly as possible, as an experiment? Or did he just not care? Apparently, they were the result of the frenzy to build a million housing units in the Sixties. ‘Homes for all.’ Too bad they didn’t say: ‘Beautiful homes for all.’
He parked in the lot and went into the first entrance. Number five. The stairwell to Anders’s flat, but also the flat of the witness Jenny Rosén. They lived two flights up. He was puffing hard when he reached the right landing, reminded that he’d been getting far too little exercise and way too much coffee cake lately. Not that he’d ever been a paragon of physical training, but it had never been this bad before.
Patrik stopped for a second outside Anders’s door and listened. Not a sound to be heard. Either he wasn’t home or he was passed out.
Jenny’s door was on the right, and directly opposite from Anders. She had exchanged the standard name-plate for her own made out of wood, with the names Jenny and Max Rosén in ornate script with decorative roses winding round the plate. So she was married.
She had rung the police station with her testimony early this morning, and he hoped she would still be at home. She hadn’t been when they knocked on all the doors in the stairwell yesterday, but they had left a card and asked her to ring the police station. That’s why it wasn’t until today that they got the information about Anders’s return home on the Friday evening when Alex died.
The doorbell echoed in the flat, followed at once by a loud shriek from a child. Footsteps could be heard in the hall, and Patrik felt rather than saw someone looking at him through the peephole in the door. A safety chain was unhooked and the door opened.
‘Yes?’
A woman with a one-year-old child was standing there. She was very thin with bleached blonde hair. From the colour of her roots, her natural hair colour must have been somewhere between dark brown and black, which was confirmed by a pair of nut-brown eyes. She wore no make-up and looked tired. She had on a pair of worn jogging trousers with baggy knees, and a T-shirt with a big Adidas logo on the front.
‘Jenny Rosén?’
‘Yes, that’s me. What’s this about?’
‘My name is Patrik Hedström and I’m from the police. You put in a call to us this morning, and I’d like to talk with you a little about the information you gave.’
He spoke in a low voice so he wouldn’t be heard in the flat across the landing.
‘Come in.’ She stepped aside to let him in.
The flat was small, a bedsit, and there was definitely no man living there. None older than one year at any rate. The flat was an explosion in pink. Everything was pink. Rugs, tablecloths, curtains, lamps, everything. Rosettes were once again a popular motif, and they were on lamps and candlesticks in a profusion that was both lavish and superfluous. On the walls were pictures that further emphasized the romantic disposition of the occupant. Soft-focus female faces with birds fluttering past. Even a picture of a crying child hung over the bed.
They sat down on a white leather sofa, and thank goodness she didn’t offer him coffee. He’d had plenty of that today. She set the child on her lap, but he squirmed out of her grasp. So she put him on the floor, where he toddled about on his still unsteady legs.
Patrik was struck by how young the woman was. She couldn’t be out of her teens, he guessed about eighteen. But he knew that it wasn’t unusual for girls in small towns to have one or two children before the age of twenty. Since she called the boy Max, he concluded that the father didn’t live with them. That wasn’t unusual either. Teenage relationships often couldn’t survive the stress of a baby.
He pulled out his notebook.
‘So it was Friday the week before last, the twenty-second, that you saw Anders Nilsson come home at seven o’clock? How is it that you’re so sure of the time?’
‘I never miss Separate Worlds on TV. It starts at seven and it was just before that when I heard a lot of commotion outside. Nothing unusual, I must say. It’s always rather lively over at Anders’s place. His drinking buddies come and go at all hours, and sometimes the police show up as well. But I still went to check through the peephole in the door, and that’s when I saw him. Drunk as a lord, he was trying to unlock his door, but the keyhole would have had to be a metre wide for him to find it. He finally got the door open and went inside, and that’s when I heard the theme song for Separate Worlds and hurried back to the TV.’
She was chewing nervously on a lock of her long hair. Patrik saw that her nails were bitten down to the quick. There were traces of hot pink nail polish on what was left of her nails.
Max had steadily worked his way round the coffee table in the direction of Patrik and now took triumphant possession of his trouser leg.
‘Up, up, up,’ he chanted, and Patrik gave Jenny a questioning look.
‘Sure, pick him up. He obviously likes you.’
Patrik awkwardly lifted the boy onto his knee and gave him his bunch of keys to play with. The child beamed like the sun. He gave Patrik a big smile and showed two front teeth that looked like little grains of rice. Patrik gave him a big smile back. He felt a quavering in his chest. If things had turned out differently he could have had a boy of his own on his knee by this time. He cautiously stroked Max’s downy head.
‘How old is he?’
‘Eleven months. He keeps me busy, you’d better believe.’
Her face lit up with tenderness when she looked at her son, and Patrik saw at once how sweet she was behind the tired exterior. He couldn’t even imagine how much work it must take to be a single parent at her age. She should be out partying and living life with her friends. Instead she spent her evenings changing diapers and keeping house. As if to illustrate the tensions within her, she took a cigarette out of a packet lying on the table and lit it. She took a deep, pleasurable drag and then held out the packet to Patrik. He shook his head. He had definite views about smoking in the same room as a baby, but it was her business, not his. Personally he couldn’t understand how anyone could sit and suck on something that smelled as bad as a cigarette.
‘So couldn’t he have come home and then gone out again?’
‘The walls are so thin in this building that you can hear a pin drop out on the landing. Everyone who lives here knows exactly who comes and goes – and when. I’m quite sure that Anders didn’t go out again.’
Patrik realized that he wouldn’t get much further. Out of curiosity he asked, ‘What was your reaction when you heard that Anders was suspected of murder?’
‘I thought it was bullshit.’
She took another deep drag and blew the smoke out in rings. Patrik had to restrain himself from saying anything about the dangers of second-hand
