up in his eyes again.
‘That won’t work, Erica. I can’t do it. It wasn’t until this thing with Alex that I really understood how much Pernilla means to me. Alex was a passion, but Pernilla and the kids are my life. I can’t do it!’
Erica leaned forward and put her hand over Dan’s. Her voice was calm and clear and showed nothing of the agitation she felt inside.
‘Dan, you have to. The police need to be informed, and you have a chance now to tell Pernilla about it in your own way. Sooner or later the police will figure it out by themselves, and then you won’t have a chance to explain to Pernilla the way you want to. Then you’ll no longer have any choice. And you said yourself that she probably knows or at least suspects something. Maybe it would even be a relief for both of you if you talked about it. Clear the air.’
She saw that Dan was listening and taking in what she said. She could also feel that he was shaking.
‘But what if she leaves me? What if she takes the kids and leaves me, Erica? Where will I go then? I’m nothing without them.’
A tiny, tiny voice inside Erica whispered cruelly that he should have thought of that earlier, but stronger voices drowned it out and said that the time for recriminations was past. There were more important matters to take care of right now. She leaned forward, put her arms around him and ran her hands over his back to comfort him. At first his sobs intensified, then ebbed away. When he freed himself from her embrace and wiped away the tears she saw that he had decided not to postpone the inevitable.
As she drove away from the wharf she looked at him in the rear-view mirror, standing motionless on his beloved boat with his eyes fixed on the horizon. She crossed her fingers that he would find the right words. It wasn’t going to be easy.
The yawn felt like it came all the way from his toes and spread through his whole body. Patrik had never been so tired in his life. Nor had he ever been so happy.
It was difficult to focus on the huge piles of paperwork lying in front of him. A homicide generated incredible amounts of documents, and his job now was to go through everything in detail to find that one tiny piece of the puzzle that could propel the investigation forward. He rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath to gather energy for the task.
Every ten minutes, he had to get up from his chair to stretch, get some coffee, hop a little in place, or whatever would make him stay awake and focused for a little while longer. Several times his hand had strayed towards the telephone to ring Erica, but he checked himself. If she was as tired as he was, she was probably still in bed asleep. He hoped she was. He intended to keep her awake as long as possible tonight too, if he had anything to say about it.
One stack of papers had grown since he last went through them – the documents containing information on the Lorentz family. Annika, assiduous as always, had apparently kept digging for old articles and items mentioning the family, and then placed the papers neatly in the stack on Patrik’s desk. He worked methodically, refreshing his memory by turning over the stack and working up from the bottom so that he first read the articles he’d read before. Two hours later, there was nothing that had set his imagination in motion. Despite a strong feeling that he was missing something, it still seemed to elude him.
The first really interesting new information came a good way down in the pile. Annika had inserted an article about a case of arson in Bullaren, about thirty miles from Fjällbacka. The article was dated 1975 and had been given almost a whole page in Bohusläningen. The house had burned down the night of the sixth of July 1975 in an explosion-like event. When the fire was extinguished there was almost nothing left of the house except ashes, but the remains of two human bodies had been found. The bodies turned out to be Stig and Elisabeth Norin, the couple who owned the house. Miraculously their ten-year-old son had managed to escape the fire. He was discovered in one of the outbuildings. The circumstances surrounding the fire were considered suspicious according to Bohusläningen, and the police called it arson.
The article was fastened with a paper-clip to a folder, and inside Patrik found the police report. He was still perplexed at what the article had to do with the Lorentz family until he opened the folder and saw the name of the Norins’ ten-year-old son. The boy was named Jan. The folder also contained a report from social services in which his foster-home placement with the Lorentz family was mentioned. Patrik gave a low whistle. It was still uncertain what this might have to do with Alex’s death, or with the murder of Anders for that matter, but something began to stir at the edges of Patrik’s consciousness. Shadows which faded and dissolved as soon as he tried to focus on them, but which indicated that he was on the right track. He made a mental note about this and then continued his laborious scrutiny of the material on his desk.
His notebook was slowly filling up. His handwriting was so sprawling that Karin always teased him that he should have been a teacher instead, but he could read it all right, and that was the main thing. Some to-do items took shape, but most dominant among the notes were all the questions that the material had generated, marked with big black question marks. Who was Alex waiting for when she made the fancy dinner? Who was the man she was meeting in secret? And whose child was she expecting? Could it be Anders’s, even though he had denied it? Or was there someone they hadn’t yet managed to identify? Why would a woman like Alex, with her looks, class and money, have an affair with someone like Anders? Why had Alex saved an article about Nils Lorentz’s disappearance in a bureau drawer?
The list of questions grew longer and longer. Patrik was on the third page before he got into the matter of Anders’s death. The stack of paper on Anders was much smaller so far. But the documents would start piling up soon enough. For the moment there were only about ten documents, including the one confiscated during the search of Anders’s flat. The biggest question concerning Anders was the way he had died. Patrik underlined this question several times with furious black strokes. How did the killer or killers lift Anders up to the hook in the ceiling? The autopsy would provide more answers, but from what Patrik had seen there were no marks of a struggle on the body, precisely as Mellberg had pointed out at this morning’s run-through. Someone who is unconscious feels incredibly heavy, and Anders would have had to be lifted up a good distance for someone to fasten the rope to the hook.
He was actually leaning towards the possibility that Mellberg might be right for once – that more than one person had been on the scene. Although that didn’t seem to agree with what happened when Alex was killed. Yet Patrik could swear that it was the same killer they were looking for. After his initial doubt he was now more and more certain that this was true.
He looked at the papers they’d found in Anders’s flat and fanned them out in front of him on the desk. Stuck between his teeth he had a pencil that he had chewed beyond recognition. His mouth felt full of yellow flakes from the pencil. He spat out a few and tried to pick the rest of the flakes from his tongue. It was no use. Now they were stuck to his fingers instead. He flicked them a couple of times to try to dislodge them but gave up and turned his attention back to the papers fanned out on his desk. None of the pages seemed to arouse his interest, so he picked up Telia’s telephone bill as a starting point. Anders made very few calls, but with all the fixed charges the total was still rather high. The details were still attached to the phone bill, and Patrik sighed when he realized that now he would have to do a little old-fashioned legwork. Even though he didn’t think this was the right day for boring, routine tasks.
He systematically rang one number after another on the list. He soon saw that Anders only called very few numbers. But one number stood out. It didn’t appear at all near the top of the list, but after it popped up the first time, it was the most frequently occurring number. Patrik dialled the number and let it ring.
He was just about to hang up after eight rings when he heard an answering machine switch on. The name at the other end made him sit
