the joke had always been at her expense. She wondered whether they were talking about it behind her back. Whether they were laughing at stupid, stupid, ugly Julia.
A discreet knock on the door made Julia curl up in the foetal position. She knew who it was.
‘Julia, we’re worried about you. Won’t you come downstairs for a while?’
She didn’t answer Birgit. Instead she studied with the utmost concentration a lock of her own hair.
‘Please, Julia, please.’
Birgit came in and sat down on the chair by the desk, facing Julia.
‘I understand that you’re angry and that you also probably hate us, but you must believe me, we had no intention of harming you.’
Julia felt a sense of satisfaction that Birgit looked so worn-out and harried. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in several nights. Which she probably hadn’t. New wrinkles had formed as crow’s feet around her eyes, and Julia thought maliciously that the facelift she was planning to give herself next year for her sixty-fifth birthday might have to be done earlier than planned. Birgit moved the chair a little closer and put her hand on Julia’s shoulder. She shook it off at once and Birgit recoiled, hurt.
‘Darling, we all love you. You know that.’
The fuck she did. What good was this whole charade? They were all quite aware of where they stood with each other. Love? Birgit didn’t even know what that was. The only one she had ever loved was Alex. Always Alex.
‘We have to talk about this, Julia. We have to support each other now.’
Birgit’s voice was quivering. Julia wondered how many times Birgit wished that it had been her, Julia, who had died instead of Alex. She saw Birgit give up and how her hand shook when she put back the chair. Before she closed the door on her way out, Birgit gave Julia one last entreating glance. Julia made a point of turning over so that she faced the wall instead. The door closed silently behind Birgit.
Mornings weren’t usually Patrik’s favourite time of the day, and this one was turning out to be particularly miserable. First of all, he’d been forced to get up from Erica’s warm bed and leave her there to go to work. Second, he’d had to shovel for half an hour to dig out his car. And third, the bloody car wouldn’t start after he’d dug it out. After repeated attempts he had to give up and go back inside to ask Erica if he could borrow her car instead. That was fine, and luckily it started on the first try.
He dashed into the office a half hour late. The shovelling had soaked him to the skin with sweat, and he tugged at his shirt a few times to try to fan himself. The coffeemaker was a necessary first stop before he could start work. Not until he was seated at his desk with coffee cup in hand did he feel his pulse begin to slow down. He allowed himself to daydream for a moment, sinking into the feeling of reckless, senseless love. The night before had been just as wonderful as the first. They had even managed to muster a tiny bit of good sense and made sure they got a few hours’ sleep. To say that he was rested would have been an exaggeration, but at least he wasn’t in a coma like the day before.
The first thing he dealt with were the notes from his meeting with Jan the day before. It hadn’t produced any new details that aroused his interest, yet he didn’t consider the interview wasted time. It was just as important for the investigation that he get a feeling for the people who were, or could be, involved. ‘Homicide investigations are about people,’ one of his instructors at the Police Academy had often said, and those words of wisdom had stuck in Patrik’s mind. Besides, he thought he was a good judge of people. During interviews with witnesses and suspects he always tried to disconnect from the cold facts for a while and concentrate on soaking up impressions from the person facing him. Jan had generated no directly positive feelings in Patrik. Unreliable, slippery, and hedonistic were words that popped up in his head when he tried to gather his impressions of Jan’s personality. It was quite obvious that the man was hiding more than he revealed. Once again, Patrik picked up the stack of papers dealing with the Lorentz family. He still could show no concrete link between them and the two homicides, except for the phone calls from Anders to Jan. But he couldn’t prove that Jan’s story about wrong numbers coming to his answering machine was not correct. Patrik picked up the folder on the death of Jan’s parents. Something in the tone of Jan’s voice when he spoke about the incident bothered Patrik. There was something that rang false. He had an idea. Patrik picked up the phone and dialled a number he knew by heart.
‘Hi, Vicky, how’s it going?’
The person on the other end of the line affirmed that it was going well. After the introductory pleasantries Patrik got down to business.
‘Vicky, I wonder if you could do me a favour. I’m checking on a guy who must have entered the rolls at social services in about 1975. Ten years old, called Jan Norin back then. You think you might have anything on the case? Okay, I’ll hang on.’
He drummed impatiently with his fingers on the desktop as Vicky Lind at the social services office checked her computer records. After a while he heard her come back on the line.
‘You have the data there? Fantastic. Can you see who the social worker was on the case? Siv Persson. That’s great. Do you have her phone number?’
Patrik quickly wrote down the number on a Post-It note and hung up after promising to take Vicky to lunch one day. He punched in the number she’d given him and instantly heard a brisk voice on the line. It turned out that Siv did remember the case of Jan Norin, and it was fine if he came over right away.
Patrik grabbed his jacket from the coat rack with such eagerness that he managed to tip over the whole rack in the process. Even worse, on its way to the floor the rack had pulled down both a picture from the wall and a vase of flowers from the bookshelf, all of which created a tremendous crash. For the time being Patrik left everything where it landed. When he got to the corridor he saw heads poking out of every doorway. He just waved and ran out the front door as curious pairs of eyes stared after him.
The social service office was no more than a couple of hundred yards from the police station. Patrik trudged through the snow down the main street. At the end of the street he turned left at Tanumshede Inn and continued halfway down the block. The office was in the same building as the community administration, and he took the stairs. He was shown into Siv’s office after cheerfully greeting the receptionist, a girl from his class in high school. Siv Persson didn’t bother to get up to shake hands when he came in. Their paths had crossed many times during Patrik’s years as a cop, and they respected each other’s professional expertise even though they didn’t always share the same opinion on how best to handle a case. Part of the reason was that Siv was one of the nicest people he knew, but social workers couldn’t always get by with seeing only the best in people. At the same time he admired her for being able to retain her basically positive view of human nature despite all examples to the contrary that she had encountered over the years. Patrik felt that he seemed to have gone in the opposite direction.
‘Hi, Patrik. So you managed to make it here in spite of all the snow.’
Patrik reacted instinctively to the unnatural cheerfulness of her voice.
‘Yes, but a snowmobile would have helped.’
She raised her eyeglasses dangling on a cord around her neck and set them on the tip of her nose. Siv loved bright colours, and today her red glasses matched her clothing. She’d had the same hairdo as long as he’d known her. A page-boy style cut straight as an arrow that reached to her jawline, and a short fringe cut just above the eyebrows. Her hair was a shiny copper-red, and the
