Julia gave an odd little laugh that Erica found surprising and misplaced. She recalled the document she had found in the wastebasket at Nelly Lorentz’s house and wondered how the pieces fit together.
‘You’re probably wondering why I’m here.’ Julia looked at Erica with her strange, steady gaze. She blinked very seldom.
It struck Erica again how diametrically opposite she was to her big sister. Julia’s skin was pitted with acne scars, and her hair looked as if she’d cut it herself with nail scissors. Without a mirror. There was something unhealthy about the way she looked. A sickly pallor had settled like a dirty grey film over her skin. Nor did she appear to share Alex’s interest in clothes. Her outfits looked as though they had been bought in shops catering to little old retired ladies. Her clothes were as far from the style of the day as they could get without crossing the line to become masquerade costumes.
‘Do you have any photos of Alex?’
‘Excuse me?’ Erica was startled by the direct question. ‘Photos? Yes, I suppose I do. Quite a few, even. Pappa loved taking pictures, and he took a lot of us when we were kids. Alex was over here so often that she’s probably in a lot of the pictures.’
‘Could I see them?’ Julia gave Erica a reproachful look, as if admonishing her for not going to fetch the photos already. Grateful for any excuse to escape Julia’s penetrating gaze for a moment, Erica went to get the photo albums.
The albums were in a chest up in the attic. She hadn’t had a chance to clean there yet, but she knew exactly where the chest was. All the family photographs were stored inside; she had shuddered at the thought of sitting down to go through them. A large part of the photos were in unsorted piles, but she knew that the ones she was looking for had been carefully put into albums. She paged through them systematically, starting at the top of the stack. In the third album she found what she was looking for. The fourth album also had pictures of Alex, and clutching both albums she cautiously climbed down the attic stairs.
Julia was sitting in exactly the same position as before. Erica wondered whether she had moved at all while she was gone.
‘Here’s something that should interest you.’
Erica was out of breath. She dropped the thick photo albums on the coffee table so hard that dust flew.
Julia eagerly began looking through the first album while Erica sat down next to her on the sofa to describe what was in the pictures.
‘When was this one taken?’
Julia was pointing at the first photo she found of Alex, two pages into the album.
‘Let me see. This must be…1974. Yes, I think that’s right. We were about nine then, I think.’
Erica ran a finger over the photo and felt a strong sense of melancholy in her stomach. It was so long ago. She and Alex stood naked in the garden on a warm summer day. If she remembered correctly they had been naked because they were running back and forth through the water spraying from the garden hose. What seemed a bit odd about the picture was that Alex was wearing winter mittens.
‘Why does she have mittens on? This looks like it’s in July or something.’ Julia turned an astonished face to Erica, who laughed at the memory.
‘Your sister loved those mittens and insisted on wearing them, not only all winter long but also for large parts of the summer. She was as stubborn as a mule, and nobody could convince her to put away those darn disgusting mittens.’
‘She knew what she wanted, didn’t she?’
Julia looked at the picture in the album with an almost tender expression. The next second it was gone, and she impatiently moved on to the next page.
The photos felt like relics from another lifetime for Erica. It was so long ago, and so much had happened since then. Sometimes it felt as if the childhood years with Alex were only a dream.
‘We were more like sisters than friends. We spent all our waking hours together, and we often slept over at each other’s house too. Every day we used to compare notes on what was for dinner and then we picked the house with the best food.’
‘In other words, you often ate here.’ For the first time a smile crept onto Julia’s lips.
‘Yes, say what you will about your mother, she could never have made a living on her cooking.’
One particular photo caught Erica’s eye. She touched it gently. It was an incredibly lovely photograph. Alex was sitting in the stern of Tore’s boat, laughing boisterously. Her blonde hair was flying round her face, and the silhouette of all of Fjällbacka was spread out behind her. They must have been on their way out for a day of sunshine and swimming on the skerries. There had been many such days. Her mother had not come along, as usual. She had always blamed a host of small matters she had to attend to, and chose to stay home. That’s how it always was. Erica could easily count on the fingers of one hand the excursions that had included her mother Elsy. She chuckled when she saw a picture of Anna from the same boat trip. As usual, she was playing monkey; in this picture she was hanging daringly outside the railing and making faces at the camera.
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes, my little sister Anna.’
Erica’s tone was curt, indicating that she didn’t want to discuss that subject any further. Julia got the message and kept paging through the album with her short fat fingers. Her nails were bitten to the quick. On some of her fingers she had bitten the nail so much that sores formed around the edges. Erica forced her gaze away from Julia’s wounded fingers and looked instead at the pictures flipping past in her hands.
Towards the end of the second album Alex was suddenly no longer included in the pictures. It was quite a sharp contrast. Before she was on every page; now there were no more pictures of her. Julia carefully stacked the albums on the coffee table and leaned back in the corner of the sofa with her coffee cup in her hands.
‘Would you like some fresh coffee? That must be cold by now.’
Julia looked at her cup and saw that Erica was right. ‘Yes, if there’s more I’ll take some, thanks.’
She handed over her cup to Erica, who was happy for a chance to stretch her legs a bit. The wicker sofa was lovely to look at, but after sitting on it a while both her back and her bottom were protesting. Julia’s back seemed to share this opinion, since she got up and followed Erica into the kitchen.
‘It was a nice funeral. Lots of friends for the reception at your place as well.’
Erica stood with her back to Julia and poured fresh coffee into their cups. A noncommittal murmur was the only reply she got. She decided to be a little nosy.
‘It looked as though you and Nelly Lorentz were quite well acquainted. How do you happen to know each other?’
Erica held her breath. The paper she had found in the wastebasket at Nelly’s house made her very curious about Julia’s answer.
‘Pappa worked for her.’ The reply came reluctantly from Julia. She put a finger in her mouth without even seeming to be conscious of it and began gnawing at it frantically.
‘Yes, but that must have been long before you were born,’ said Erica. She was still fishing for information.
‘I had a summer job at the cannery when I was younger,’ said Julia.
Her replies still came like pulling teeth. She stopped biting her nails only long enough to answer.
‘You looked like you were getting along well.’
‘Well, I suppose that Nelly sees something in me that nobody else does.’ Her smile was bitter and introspective. All at once Erica felt great sympathy for Julia. Life as the ugly duckling must have been hard. She said nothing, and after a while the silence forced Julia to go on.
‘We were here every summer, after all. The summer after tenth grade Nelly rang Pappa and asked if I’d like to earn a little extra and work in the office. I could hardly turn it down, so after that I worked there every summer until I started at the teachers’ college.’
Erica understood that this answer left a good deal unsaid. But it would have to do. She also understood that she wouldn’t get much mo
re out of Julia about her relationship with Nelly. They sat down on the sofa on the veranda again and drank a few sips of coffee in silence. Both of them gazed blankly out across the ice that stretched towards the horizon.
‘It must have been hard for you when Mamma and Pappa and Alex moved away.’ It was Julia who spoke first.
‘Yes and no. We were no longer playing with each other by then, so of course it was sad, but it wasn’t as dramatic as if we’d still been best friends.’
‘What happened? Why did you stop hanging out together?’
‘If I only knew.’
Erica was astonished that the memory could still hurt so much. That she could still feel the loss of Alex so strongly. So many years had passed since then, and it was probably the rule rather than the exception that childhood best friends often slipped away from each other. Maybe it was because there had never been any natural ending and above all no explanation. They didn’t have a disagreement, Alex didn’t find a new best friend; none of the reasons why a friendship usually dies. She simply withdrew behind a wall of indifference and vanished without saying a word.
‘Did you have a fight about something?’
‘No, not that I know of. Alex just lost interest somehow. She stopped ringing me and stopped asking if we should think up something to do together. If I asked her to do something she wouldn’t say no, but I could tell that she was utterly uninterested. So finally I stopped asking.’
‘Did she have new friends she hung around with?’
Erica wondered why Julia was asking all these questions about her and Alex, but she had nothing against reviving old memories. She might be able to use them in the book.
‘I never saw her with anyone else. At school she always kept to herself. And yet…’
‘What?’ Julia leaned forward eagerly.
‘I still had a feeling that there was someone. But I could be wrong. It was just a feeling.’
Julia nodded thoughtfully. Erica had the feeling that she had merely confirmed something that Julia already knew.
‘Excuse me for asking, but why do you want to know so much about when Alex and I were kids?’
Julia avoided looking her in the eye. Her answer was evasive.
‘She was so much older than I was, and she’d already left the country by the time I was born. Besides, we were really different. I don’t think I ever really got to know her. And now it’s too late. I looked for pictures of her at home, but we have hardly any. So I thought of you.’
Erica 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 tog
ether. 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.
Patrik Hedstrom 01 - The Ice Princess Page 20
