felt that Julia’s reply contained so little truth as to qualify as a lie, but she reluctantly accepted it.
‘Well, I have to get going now. Thanks for the coffee.’
Julia got up abruptly and went to the kitchen to put her coffee cup in the dish tub. She was suddenly in a big hurry to leave. Erica walked her to the door.
‘Thanks for letting me see the pictures. It meant a lot to me.’
Then she was gone.
Erica stood in the doorway a long time watching her walk away. A grey and shapeless figure who hurried down the street with her arms held tight to her body as protection from the biting cold. Erica slowly closed the door and went back inside where it was warm.
It was a long time since Patrik had felt so nervous. The feeling he had in the pit of his stomach was wonderful and frightening at the same time.
The pile of clothes on the bed grew as he tried on yet another outfit. All the clothes he put on felt too old-fashioned, too sloppy, too dressy, too square, or simply too ugly. Besides, most of the trousers were uncomfortably tight around the waist. With a sigh he tossed another pair of trousers on the pile and sat down in his shorts on the edge of the bed. He immediately lost all sense of anticipation for the evening and instead got a serious touch of good old anxiety. Maybe it would be better if he rang and cancelled.
Patrik lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling with his hands clasped behind his head. He still owned the double bed that he and Karin had shared, and now he stroked his hand over her side of the bed in a fit of sentimentality. It was not until recently that he had begun rolling over onto her side in his sleep. Actually, he should have bought a new bed as soon as she moved out, but he hadn’t been able to face it.
Despite all the sadness he felt when Karin left him, he’d sometimes wondered if it really was Karin he was missing, or whether he missed the illusion he’d had of marriage as an institution. His father had left his mother for another woman when he was ten years old. The divorce that followed had been heart-rending, exploiting him and his little sister Lotta as the primary weapons. He had promised himself that he would never be unfaithful, but above all that he would never ever get a divorce. If he got married it would be for life. So when he and Karin got married five years ago in Tanumshede Church, he didn’t doubt for a second that it would last forever. But life seldom turns out the way one thinks it will. She and Leif had been meeting behind his back for over a year before he caught them. So fucking classic.
He had come home early from work one day because he wasn’t feeling well, and there they were in the bedroom. In the bed he was lying in right now. Maybe there was a masochist somewhere inside of him. How else could he explain why he hadn’t got rid of the bed long ago? Although now it was all in the past. It no longer mattered.
He heaved himself up out of bed, still unsure if he wanted to go over to Erica’s house tonight or not. He wanted to. And he didn’t want to. With one blow an attack of low self-esteem had swept away the sense of anticipation he’d been feeling all day, even all week. But it was too late to decline, so he didn’t have much choice.
When he finally found a pair of chinos that fit well around the waist and put on a freshly ironed blue shirt, he felt all at once a little better. And he began looking forward to the evening again. A touch of gel made his hair look suitably dishevelled, and after giving his reflection in the mirror a good-luck wave, he felt ready to go.
It was pitch-black out although it was only seven-thirty, and a light snowfall made visibility poor as he drove back to Fjällbacka. He had left in good time and didn’t need to hurry. His thoughts of Erica were briefly pushed aside by the events of recent days at work. Mellberg hadn’t been pleased when Patrik could do no better than substantiate that the witness, Anders’s neighbour Jenny, seemed positive about what she had seen. Anders actually did seem to have an alibi for the critical time period. This may not have provoked the same degree of anger in Patrik as it had in Mellberg, but he couldn’t deny that he felt a certain hopelessness. Two weeks had passed since they had found Alex’s body, and they didn’t feel any closer to a solution than they were then.
What was important now was not to lose heart completely. They had to regroup and start over from the beginning. Every lead, every bit of testimony had to be gone over with new eyes. Patrik made a list in his head of what he needed to work on tomorrow. The top priority was to find out who was the father of the child Alex was expecting. There must be someone in Fjällbacka who had seen or heard something about who she was meeting on weekends. Not that it could be ruled out that Henrik might be the father, and Anders was always a possible candidate too. Although somehow Patrik didn’t think that Anders was someone Alex would consider a suitable candidate to father her child. He thought that what Francine had told Erica was much closer to the truth. There was someone in her life who was very, very important. Someone who was important enough that she would be happy to have a child with him – something that she could not, or would not, want with her husband.
Her sexual relationship with Anders was also something he wanted to find out more about. What did a society woman from Göteborg have in common with a down-and-out drunk? Something told him that if he discovered how their paths had crossed, he would find many of the answers he was seeking. Then there was the article about Nils Lorentz’s disappearance. Alex had been a child back then. Why was she saving a twenty-five-year-old newspaper clipping hidden in a bureau drawer? There were so many threads that were so tangled together. He felt as if he were staring at one of those pictures where everything looks like incoherent dots, until you relax your eyes in just the right way and a shape suddenly emerges with unexpected clarity. The only thing was, he couldn’t find that perfect position to make the dots form a pattern. In his weaker moments he sometimes wondered if he was a good enough cop to find it. Perhaps a murderer would escape because he wasn’t competent enough.
A deer bounded out in front of the car and Patrik was yanked abruptly out of his gloomy thoughts. He hit the brake and managed to miss the deer’s rump by an inch or so. The car skidded on the slick road and didn’t stop for a couple of long, terrifying seconds. Then he leaned his head on his hands, which were still gripping the steering wheel, and let his pulse return to normal. He sat like that for a couple of minutes. Then he drove on towards Fjällbacka, but it took a mile or two at a creeping pace before he dared speed up.
When he drove up the sanded hill in Sälvik towards Erica’s house, he was five minutes late. He parked the car behind hers in the driveway and grabbed the bottle of wine he had brought as a gift. A deep breath and a last check of his hair in the rear-view mirror and he was ready.
The pile of clothes on Erica’s bed was about as big as Patrik’s, maybe even a bit bigger. Her wardrobe was beginning to look empty, and hangers were rattling on the rod. She gave a deep sigh. Nothing fitted quite right. The extra weight that had sneaked up on her in the past week meant that no garment sat the way she would have liked. Weighing herself that morning was something she still cursed and regretted bitterly. Erica gave herself a critical look in the full-length mirror.
The first dilemma had arisen after her shower when, like her favourite literary heroine Bridget Jones, she was faced with the decision of which knickers to choose. Should she wear a beautiful, lace-trimmed thong, for the slim eventuality that she and Patrik ended up in bed? Or should she put on the substantial and terribly ugly knickers with the extra support for tummy and backside, which would increase her chances that they might end up in bed at all? A hard choice, but considering the extent of her belly’s bulge she decided after much deliberation on the support variety. Over them she would wear pantyhose with a tummy-flattening panel. In other words, the heavy artillery.
She glanced at the clock and realized that it was time to decide. After another look at the pile on the bed she pulled out from the bottom the first
