In the dining room Kristina had laid out cups and saucers and a plate of ginger biscuits and some raspberry cakes. She was pouring the sugar into a bowl.
'You hardly ever come up here nowadays, Seja,' she said, lowering herself laboriously into the armchair at the end of the table. 'It's mostly you and Åke who meet up. I think one should take care of one's neighbours.'
Seja didn't reply. She had made a couple of dutiful attempts to invite Kristina over to her cottage but she had refused politely but firmly, blaming her aches and pains. Seja had the feeling that her resistance went much deeper; Kristina simply preferred not to leave her own home.
Kristina wiped an invisible drop of sweat from her brow as she caught sight of the coffee pot, still standing in the kitchen. Seja stopped her as she moved to get up.
'It's OK, I'll get it.'
By the sink she drank a glass of water. There was a pot plant in full flower standing in the bowl, a wax plant. She followed a trickle of muddy water with her eyes.
'The police phoned,' she heard Kristina's voice behind her.
This was it.
'They… they wanted to speak to Åke.' The voice had a falsetto tone.
Seja turned and leaned against the draining board. There was a serving hatch between the kitchen and dining room, which framed Kristina as she sat at the table.
So this is what I'm supposed to do now, Seja caught herself thinking. Is it my job to calm this woman? Haven't I got enough, dealing with my own anxiety?
Kristina Melkersson's expression was pleading. The chubby thighs spread wide apart, the hands clutching at the kneecaps, the double chins wobbling - her whole posture suddenly seemed entreating.
'Åke, he… he doesn't tell me anything.'
Seja walked slowly back into the dining room. 'There's nothing to tell.'
A little too brusque. She poured coffee and cream into both cups and pushed one over to Kristina. 'There was a man at a car repair workshop. He was already dead when Åke got there. Åke called the police. That's all.'
'But he'd been murdered!'
Seja avoided Kristina's agitated gaze and fixed instead on a framed photograph that stood on the sideboard: a young woman with her hair piled high, a bouquet held just beneath her chin. A wedding photo. The dimples, Kristina still had those. Apart from that, the years and the drugs she took for her aches and pains had made her face unrecognisable.
Seja tried to quell the impulse to pull away as a swollen hand was placed on top of her own.
'But what do they want with Åke?'
Seja freed her hand on the pretext of taking a sip of her coffee. She had worked hard to leave the image of the dead man in a closed room, carefully separated from everyday life. In time, through the written word, the crime scene would reappear so that she could work on it. Could put it behind her. The synonyms became a constant mantra: isolate it, put it behind you, deal with it. Until it was no longer dangerous. She had already established a routine for her work: research through other crime reports. In the early morning when the approaching daylight brought a sense of security. A cup of steaming Rooibos tea, the warmth of the cat on her knee. All the lamps lit. The words tumbling easily across the screen.
Now Kristina's anxiety was upsetting this hard-won balance, touching Seja's shoulders and the back of her neck like a cold gust of wind. The empathy the older woman's fear usually aroused in her dissipated.
'It's just police routine, that's all. He found the body. I should think they just want to go over how it happened. There's nothing strange about it, that's what they do.'
She no longer cared about the sharpness in her voice. She wanted to get out of there, so she stood up and forced a half-hearted smile.
'Seriously, Kristina. You need to talk to Åke about this.'
'But he won't say anything! He doesn't want to worry me, but nothing worries me more than not knowing because then I imagine the worst. And because I know that if the worst did happen, he still wouldn't tell me anything!'
'Like what?' Seja said involuntarily. She stopped and made herself sit down again.
Kristina Melkersson's frown drew a line across the bridge of her nose.
'Anyway, what were you doing there?'
'Kristina…'
There was something touching about the woman's utter confusion. It was clearer than ever, the way her fear of a world that was rapidly changing had eaten into her. Seja looked at the wedding photograph again, at the dimples. The timidity.
'Death-watch beetle,' said Kristina Melkersson. 'No, a world war. Cancer, or the lad dying in a car accident. Or the grandchildren.'
'What?'
'You asked me what the worst thing would be.'
Seja sighed again. 'I really do have to go now. I've got a lot to do. But I can come again. Give me a ring if you need help with anything.'
She felt inadequate, but Kristina Melkersson merely shrugged her shoulders. All of a sudden she seemed distant, as if she no longer cared.
Seja rinsed the cups under the tap and put the carton of cream in the fridge before she left. By the time she walked past the dining-room window, Kristina had drawn the flowery curtains, as she always did when night began to fall. It was because of the chandelier. So it wouldn't be seen from outside.
Seja took a short cut across the lawn.
* * *
Chapter 17
Beckman tossed the morning paper aside. There was nothing about the murder in Björsared apart from a vague item about a farmer who had been found dead at a garage in Olofstorp and was presumed to have been murdered.
She poured the first cup of coffee of the day in the hope that it would perk her up. Today was not a good day. A miserable drizzle became apparent as the sky lightened, lying like a damp mist over Fiskebäck and the neglected patch outside her kitchen window. She hadn't bothered switching on the rope light running around the patio fence for several days. In addition, the tension pains had come back, shooting out from her spine like poisonous arrows, up between her shoulder blades and across one side of her face, over her jaw and temples, concentrating beneath her left eye. She massaged her temples for a long time, but only managed to achieve a very temporary numbing of the pain. She was coming down with something, all because Karlberg hadn't had the sense to stay at home with his cold.
True, she had been putting up with the pain in the back of her neck and her shoulders for a long time. Far too long. She could no longer remember when she first began to experience the long drawn- out process of writing reports as torture, or to put it more accurately, even more of a torture than it had been without the pain. Meetings that went on and on often found her sitting there, working out an excuse to leave before they were over. Sitting still was the worst, but if she was particularly stressed, even her coat resting on her shoulders felt as heavy as lead. As if the stiffness had made her skin sensitive too.
The police physiotherapist was just about ready to retire, an old- fashioned severe woman in a white coat with an unpleasant way of seeing right through a person, in Beckman's opinion.
'It's as if your head is completely separate from your body,' she had said as Beckman lay on her stomach, naked to the waist. 'You seem to live in a completely theoretical zone. As if you have no contact at all with this body of yours. As if you don't want to acknowledge it. That's why it's protesting.'
Beckman had felt embarrassed and annoyed. Was this woman a physiotherapist or a fortune teller? And it got worse as she massaged Beckman's wronged body with alternate hard and soft strokes.
'Unspoken truths often settle in the muscles and turn into pain. Things you want to say, but don't have the courage. Particularly in the musculature at the back of the neck and in the face. Many people experience pain in the jaw and even the teeth. When the mouth refuses to form those liberating words, they gather around it like an indefinable pain that refuses to go away. There are tensions in your body that have turned into inflammations. If you're not careful, you could end up with a chronic condition. It's also
not unusual for a person to burst into tears when someone touches them, if they're not used to it. Linking the body to the brain.'
Beckman never went back. Instead she went to a doctor and got a prescription for Diclofenac.
'Start doing some exercise,' he advised. 'It's the only thing that will help. Go to the gym or take up swimming.'
She had swum a few lengths after work on a couple of occasions, but concluded that feeling guilty about yet another thing she hadn't got around to was hardly likely to have a positive influence on her symptoms. She had, however, thought about playing tennis with someone, combining usefulness with pleasure and thus avoiding the aerobics culture that frightened her.
Beckman had played a lot of tennis when she was young and sometimes she missed that feeling of physical exertion. The feeling of being right there in the moment. She could ask someone from work, but most of her colleagues' activities seemed to be firmly established.
She couldn't help wondering if Christian Tell played tennis. She really liked him as a colleague. They were compatible, so to speak. Despite the fact that he could sometimes walk all over her, she was aware that he respected her. However, the idea of spending time with Tell outside work bordered on the absurd. It was probably the very concept of Christian Tell as a real individual that seemed absurd, if he even existed. He never talked about his private life at work and it was easier to believe that he didn't actually have anything significant in his life apart from the job. Then again, what did she know?
She wondered for a moment what her colleagues imagined her private life to be like. Presumably she too was perceived as fairly reticent. Had she always been that way? She was suddenly unsure, just as she felt unsure about most things that had happened before she met Goran - had they really happened, or were they just part of a diffuse and distant dream she thought she recalled because others reminded her of it from time to time? And now, since her mother had begun to disappear into the incomprehensible world of dementia for long periods, there was no longer anyone who reminded her directly of these things.
Beckman had got to know the few friends she spent time with after she and Goran had got together ten years ago. At least she had started to spend time with them before she had children and life was transformed into a totally unrealistic timetable with no margin for error.
So she probably was seen as closed in on herself at work. Integrity was an epithet she had often heard said about herself. And she liked hearing it - it sounded dignified. But it wasn't a question of character; she had simply never thought that her private life corresponded with the professional person she regarded herself to be, the person she knew others perceived her to be. And the facade rarely cracked.
Once, before she had the children. Renée Gunnarsson had come into work at the crack of dawn and found Beckman in the staffroom, her eyes red from weeping. Goran had been gone for a couple of weeks following a heart-rending quarrel, and in order to avoid being alone in the house Beckman had been coming into work every morning before dawn. She had sat there in the office in the darkest hour, staring at divorce papers.
When Renée turned up with a hug and words of consolation, she had broken down completely. They went to a nearby cafe before the rest of their colleagues arrived, and Beckman had wept for hours. She explained how lonely she had felt during the years she had lived with Goran, how she had grown less and less like the person she believed herself to be, and turned into someone she neither knew nor particularly liked.
Afterwards she was embarrassed, not because she had shown weakness, nor because she had wept. She was embarrassed because Goran had moved back home again after a few weeks. Because life had gone on just the way it had been before he moved out. And because it was neither the first nor the last time.
No, she would never be able to entrust someone with her private life, except in very small chunks. At least not someone she wanted to go on respecting her. A woman with inner strength - because that was how she wanted to be regarded - was not a reed, bending in the wind, nor a magnet for another person's mood. A person with integrity came to a firm decision and then stuck to it, however lonely she might feel. However much it hurt to have a shared history that suddenly exists only in the past.
Her mobile rang in her handbag. She ran into the hallway and swore as she missed the call. It was high time to wake the children, according to the plastic kitchen clock. The antique wall clock she had inherited from her grandfather had remained packed in a box in the cellar for most of the time she and Goran had been together, because Goran insisted it was ugly. The clock was the first thing she turned to during those periods when he wasn't living at home. As soon as he left the house in a rage with his suitcase, burning rubber as he screeched away in the car, and while she was still more angry than upset, while the feeling of freedom was still more powerful than loneliness, she would hang up her grandfather's clock.
When she thought about it, this silent victory seemed ridiculously sad. Many times she had considered throwing the clock away, just to break the pattern, but she had never done it. The pathetic aspect was not the clock in itself, but the role it played in her inhibited emotional life. She had once screamed so loudly at Goran that the neighbours had called the police, and she had to run and hide in the cellar, terrified that the officers in the patrol car would recognise her.
Evidently these unspoken truths had welded the length of her spine into aching knots.
On the way upstairs she heard loud snores coming from the spare room. He wouldn't be able to take the kids to nursery today either. She would have to take them, and be late for work.
Standing outside Julia and Sigrid's room, she saw that the missed call was from Andreas Karlberg. She rang him back.
'I'm on the way out to Björsared to interview the neighbours,' he said over a crackling connection.
'OK, I'll be a bit late.'
She closed her eyes. From the children's room Sigrid, the two-year- old, let out a scream of rage. She hated the transition from dreams to reality.
'I'll meet you there,' Beckman managed to call out before the connection was broken.
She pushed open the door and was dazzled by the warm golden light of the Advent star. The room smelled of small children.
When they came in out of the cold, the heat hit them like a wall. As they sat on the well-used moss-green sofa, both ailing police officers enjoyed the warmth from the open fire. The Molins' home was just the way the homes of the elderly tend to be: tidy but over-furnished. Full of ornaments that perhaps had sentimental value or just happened to be there. Furniture in varying styles and from different periods. Standard lamps with low-watt bulbs and faded shades. Christmas decorations and a thin layer of dust covering everything. As if the memories of an entire lifetime had been gathered together in three rooms, plus the kitchen and the upper floor. And that's just how it was, in all probability.
The early hour did not deter fru Molin from ceremoniously producing a three-tier cake stand, laden with ginger biscuits, Lucia saffron buns and pastries. She had baked the marble cake herself. Karlberg accepted a slice out of politeness and was just about to take a bite when he detected the faint but unmistakable smell of mould. He put the cake back on his plate and thought it wouldn't be the first time he had spirited away some inedible delicacy while the hostess excused herself on some errand in the kitchen.
Dagny Molin drew her knitted cardigan more tightly around her shoulders as she lowered herself into the armchair opposite Beckman.
'It's cold in here, isn't it? I'll ask Bertil to turn up the heating.'
'No, there's no need,' said Karlberg, feeling the sweat break out on his upper lip. The fire, which had seemed so wonderfully welcoming at first, was now beginning to eat up the last of the oxygen in the room.
Bertil Molin shuffled forward out of the shadows. He turned up an electric radiator, strategically placed next to the sofa where Karlberg was sitting. Karlberg removed his jacket.
'I didn't think for a minute Lars would be
dead,' said Dagny Molin when her husband had settled himself in a wicker chair right next to the door, as if he needed an escape route. 'When you were here the last time, I mean.'
'Well, the picture has become somewhat clearer to us as well since I was last here. But there are still a number of question marks. You already know that Lars Waltz was murdered. We know that the perpetrator arrived by car, which means he must have travelled along this road at some point during the evening or night of the nineteenth. You can actually see the Edell farm from your veranda so we just want to be sure that you didn't see or hear anything you didn't remember the last time I was here.'
He spoke slowly and clearly to emphasise the significance of his words. Dagny Molin shook her head.
'As I told you, we were asleep. Our bedroom upstairs is at the back of the house, so we don't hear or see cars on the road. And even if we had, Waltz ran a car repair workshop. We wouldn't notice every single car.'
Karlberg had to accept this, of course. He tried another tack.
'Last time you said you knew Edell well. Lise-Lott's first husband.'
'Thomas, oh yes! He often spent time down in our basement in years gone by. Sven, our son, had his den down there, next to the boiler room. That's where they used to go. You know how it is: youngsters want to be left in peace. At least when they're growing up. It's the first step away from you - you know you're starting to lose them. And we don't see him often enough these days. Do you have children, officer?'
'Er, no. So you're saying that your son used to go around with Thomas Edell? When was this?'
Dagny Molin smiled, as if she found the question ridiculous.
'Well, they were neighbours. They were the same age, so it was only natural for them to spend time together. When they were little they didn't have much choice, really. It was a long way to the nearest house, and in the old days we didn't drive kids here and there so they could play with somebody else. No, in those days you had to play with what was to hand. In Sven's case that was Thomas, and it was probably no bad thing. They used to love playing out in the fresh air. On their bikes. Making go-karts. You know the sort of thing.'
Frozen Moment Page 10
