‘You’re referring to Disa Brinckmann?’
Karen nods mutely.
‘You could hardly be expected to foresee that she was going to be killed.’
‘No, I realise that. But, you know . . .’
She spreads her hands in a gesture that’s intended to encompass everything she knows Karl is already familiar with. Lingering regrets about the ones you might have been able to save. If you’d just done things differently.
‘You have too much time to dwell on stuff,’ he says. ‘Speaking of which, how long are they going to keep you here?’
‘At least two more weeks, they’re telling me.’
‘Well, at least you have plenty of visitors,’ Karl notes, with a nod at the pile of grapes.
Karen smiles wanly.
‘Yes, even Johannisen stopped by the other day.’
‘So, truce?’
‘At least for now,’ she says. ‘He’s a good detective, despite being a prick. If he hadn’t put two and two together, I probably wouldn’t be here.’
‘Sigrid’s the one who found you,’ Karl points out.
‘Yes, but she would probably never have come looking for me if she hadn’t heard them calling out for me over the speakers.’
‘What does she say about it all?’
‘I haven’t talked to her.’
Karen winces in a way she knows Karl’s going to interpret as her being in pain. That wince has become her way of making visitors get up and leave her alone.
A few minutes later, when the door slides shut behind Karl Björken with a faint whoosh of air, Karen turns back to the window as grief sears her throat. She has no right to feel this way. No right to think Sigrid would want anything to do with her. No right at all. The grief of one lost child can’t be lessened by another.
She recalls Susanne Smeed’s words.
‘She’s not your daughter. Don’t you forget it.’
91
On the eighth day, Jounas Smeed appears on the threshold to her room. Karen has dozed off after lunch and is roused by his voice from the doorway.
‘So this is where you’ve been hiding?’
Without replying, she reaches for her glass of water and realises she was probably snoring loudly. The cage around her leg forces her to lie on her back and her mouth feels dry as sand. She drinks silently and greedily while she waits for a comment, but something about Jounas indicates that he’s not in the mood for put-downs.
His face is pale and the dark circles under his eyes prominent in the harsh light streaming in through the windows. For a moment, Karen imagines she can see every contradictory feeling inside him: relief, irritation, concern, anger. And something she’s never seen in her boss before. Uncertainty. A kind of awkward embarrassment that anxiously moves between the events that led to him standing here now.
For the first time ever, Karen feels she has the upper hand, despite the snoring and her bedbound state. She knows and he knows. His assessment of the case and his decisions are partly to blame for her lying here. Only partly, but that’s enough to fill the room with unspoken guilt. She silently watches as he moves away from the door and walks around the foot of the bed.
He hasn’t brought grapes – he would never go that far – but he places an evening paper on her bedside table before sitting down in the visitor’s chair and crossing his long legs with practised casualness. A shadow of discomfort passes across his face when he studies her bruises and the metal scaffold around her leg.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asks, wincing.
‘I’ve been better,’ she replies and watches him nod. Now with the appropriately concerned look of a manager.
‘Been worse, too,’ she adds with a wry smile.
He returns the smile briefly, almost absently.
‘So how long are they keeping you here, do you know?’
She recounts what her doctors have told her about the next few weeks and the sick leave and rehab that will follow.
‘I guess you won’t be back this side of New Year’s, then,’ he says.
She hears the underlying question and responds with silence. In an effort to delay, she reaches for the water glass again and feels his eyes on her. Then Jounas takes a deep breath and asks straight out.
‘Because you are coming back, aren’t you, Eiken?’
It would be easy to postpone the decision, to take the next few weeks to decide. But something in his voice makes her answer frankly. An unspoken plea for reconciliation. A hint of worry.
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ she says honestly. ‘Before I went on vacation, I had pretty much decided to apply for a transfer.’
‘And now? Have you changed your mind?’
‘I’m considering giving it a second chance,’ she says curtly. ‘But there’s going to have to be some fucking changes in your management style. A bit less adolescent bullshit, to put it plainly. And I don’t want to be passed over when there are serious cases,’ she adds.
‘You’re ballsy,’ he says. ‘Well, I guess I would be too, if I were you. And how long are you going to torture me about being right?’
‘That’s for me to know.’
This time, she allows herself a small smile. Jounas Smeed shakes his head and sighs.
‘Fine, I guess I deserve that.’
‘How are you getting on with the attacks in Moerbeck and Odinswalla? Do you have anything?’
‘Nothing at all,’ he admits dully. ‘On the other hand, the guy seems to have either taken a break or to have stopped completely. No new cases since the one on Atlasvägen. I suppose it’s the cold,’ he adds. ‘Even bastards like him can usually manage to keep it in their pants when the temperature dips below freezing.’
Karen thinks about the cases she read about when she studied criminology.
‘It can be months between recurrences,’ she says. ‘There was this one bloke in Sweden a few years ago who shares some similarities with our cases. He went at it for years before they caught him.’
Jounas nods but doesn’t speak; Karen continues.
‘It’s probably just a matter of time before our guy strikes again, and when he does, I’m going to be there to catch the prick.’
Jounas gets to his feet and stares out the window. He says nothing; she waits. She instinctively knows his thoughts have already moved on from both closed and ongoing cases. And his real reason for coming here has nothing to do with checking on me, she thinks, studying his back.
‘You’re thinking about Sigrid,’ she says and notes that he stiffens before he turns around.
For a split second, he looks like he’s about to put words to the anger and frustration he must feel at Sigrid being on the ferry. At Karen bringing her along on her vacation without telling him. At Karen being on better terms with his daughter than he has been in years.
‘I haven’t talked to her either,’ she says quietly.
His eyes are cold now, frosty and doubtful.
‘Oh really? Because I got the impression you were real fucking close all of a sudden. United in your hatred of me, I suppose.’
She has an urge to be mean. To cut him, hurt him deeply and irrevocably. To unleash her own grief. And she knows she has no right.
‘Believe what you want,’ she says, ‘but she hasn’t been in touch with me, either. And she won’t take my calls. Maybe she blames us both for Susanne’s death.’
She can tell he realises she’s right and she watches him steel himself to make one final, desperate attempt.
‘You call me immediately if she gets in touch. If she tells you where she is. That’s an order, Eiken. Are we clear?’
Karen looks him straight in the eyes.
‘I can’t promise that. Not if she doesn’t want me to.’
She holds his gaze and sees the anger drain out of him, as though the effort of keeping it alive has become unsustainable. His chest seems to deflate and all expression leaves his face. The only thing left is bottomless grief. And she realises she’s no lon
ger looking at her boss, she’s looking at Sigrid’s father.
‘I can promise you one thing,’ she says. ‘I would never say anything bad about you to Sigrid. I like her far too much to bad-mouth her dad.’
EPILOGUE
Two weeks later, Eleanor Eiken pushes the wheelchair with her daughter in it through the glass doors of the hospital. Karen wants to go home. Since the first week, when she was still drugged and in pain, her homesickness has grown stronger with each passing day. She longs to be in control of whether her door is open or closed, of whether there are visitors or not. Of what and when she eats. She longs to get away from the smell of disinfectants and the sound of ambulance sirens. To cry in peace.
And more than anything, she longs for a glass of wine or two and a cigarette.
*
She would prefer to be alone in her house, but realises she’s going to need her mother’s help, at least at first. That’s why she’s both surprised and relieved to hear her mother announce in a carefree voice that she will be hopping on a plane back to Spain the day after tomorrow.
‘Harry’s calling every day, asking when I’m coming home,’ she says, pushing the wheelchair toward the exit. ‘He sends his love, by the way. I’m going to have to bring him to Langevik as soon as you’re feeling better. And, well, we’ll be up for Christmas, of course, if not sooner.’
Karen doesn’t know what to say. She’s longed for this moment for two weeks, but now that she’s catching a first glimpse of the real world out there on the other side of the glass doors, she wants to turn back to safety.
‘You’re going to be fine. And it goes without saying I’ll be calling you every day to see how you’re getting on,’ Eleanor assures her as the doors to Thysted Hospital slide shut behind them.
*
The air outside the hospital is clear and fresh. Karen takes a few deep breaths and braces herself to switch to crutches and hobble the last few feet to one of the taxis lined up outside the entrance. But instead of stopping, Eleanor Eiken keeps pushing the wheelchair toward the car park further on.
Karen’s chest contracts when she spots her own car. But it’s not the sight of the dirty green Ford that makes her press her lips together to stop herself from crying with relief.
Standing next to the car is Leo Friis, taking one last drag on a cigarette before dropping it on the ground and grinding it out with his heel.
And behind the wheel is Sigrid.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria Adolfsson (b. 1958) lives in Stockholm where she, until recently, worked as a communications director and now writes full-time. The Doggerland series has been sold into 18 languages to date, and has sold over 160 000 copies in Sweden alone.
If you enjoyed Fatal Isles, don’t miss the next in the series
AFTER THE
STORM
Coming 2022
First published in the UK in 2021 by Zaffre
This ebook edition published in 2021 by
ZAFFRE
An imprint of Bonnier Books UK
80–81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE
Owned by Bonnier Books
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden
Copyright © Maria Adolfsson, 2021
Cover design by Dominic Forbes
Cover photographs © Tony Woroblec/Trevillion Images (beach scene);
Shutterstock.com (all other images)
The moral right of Maria Adolfsson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78576-839-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78576-837-8
This ebook was produced by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd
Zaffre is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
Fatal Isles Page 41
