Liv

by Mikaela Bley

  She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting like that when the phone rang.

  ‘Ove.’

  ‘I’ve been checking up a little, and those bastards have messed up. I’ve known Börje a long time, and he’s not like that, he’s a good friend of mine and a really capable policeman.’

  You’re all cut from the same cloth, she thought.

  ‘But I have someone here with me who is going to relieve the Nyköping police of press questions during this investigation so that they can focus on the right things.’

  ‘And …’

  ‘Yes, you’re going to be taken very good care of and you’ll get sufficient insight into what’s happening in the investigation so that you’ll keep quiet about your audio file.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘If I hear talk about Börje and his colleagues’ little misstep, I have plenty that I can disclose concerning you, too. You can’t get this information confirmed by anyone in the police force. Do we understand each other? Listen then, because I’m only going to say this once.’

  ‘Mm, I’m listening.’ She pulled down the sun visor and looked into the mirror. Slowly formed her lips.

  Fuck. You.

  ‘I can confirm that it is Liv Lind, forty-one years old. She was beaten to death and died as a result of the injuries. Assault.’

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘Sometime between eleven o’clock and five in the morning, we think.’

  ‘Give me something else.’

  ‘She was pregnant.’

  ‘What?’ Ellen sat up. ‘Who’s the father?’

  ‘Bring that up with your new contact. She’ll be in touch with you before long.’

  ALEXANDRA

  2.00 P.M.

  Alexandra looked out over the garden and noted that the beauty bush by the entry needed pruning — it was a little higher than the left side of the gate.

  From the time Alexandra and her parents moved from Poland, she had always dreamt of a kitchen sink by the window, where she could stand and look out over her garden.

  She spent many hours there. Sometimes she could tell that stress was getting to her when she realised she was staring her time away. Even so, it was the only place where she could truly disconnect and relax. She often drank her tea standing by the sink. She cultivated herbs in the window. They were sun-worshippers, just like her, and she soaked in the lovely aromas of basil, oregano, chives, and parsley. In the garden, where she had more herbs and flowers, she could stroll around on the crunching gravel paths for hours — until someone or something disturbed her.

  Now, her eyes fastened on the dirt on the windowsills. She started feverishly rubbing with the dishcloth, but the paint had already flaked in several places, and she didn’t want to make it worse than it already was. And it wasn’t visible from outside yet.

  Instead, she noted that the garden had never been so beautiful as it was now and felt a touch of pride about that. That was something she had succeeded at anyway. She pulled a few tired leaves off the basil.

  The rainy summer had made the plants flourish, but when the heat came, most people had had problems with the drought. She, on the other hand, had managed to keep the greenery alive. She’d spent whole days watering. The hydrangeas were statelier than ever, even though they were the thirstiest flowers there were. They needed her, and perhaps that was just why she liked them so much.

  Märtha was playing in the water sprinkler. The first thing she did when she came home from school was to put on her bathing suit. Even though they had a pool, the water sprinkler was her favourite. Presumably because she could play there by herself without any adult having to mind her.

  The sound of an engine disturbed the peace, and Bea drove right into the gate with the moped, even though Alexandra had asked her countless times to open it first, as there were marks on the white-painted fence and too much strain on the fence posts. She didn’t have a helmet on either. Alexandra swore silently.

  The anger always came so suddenly; so little was needed for it to spike. But she wouldn’t argue with Bea about it. Not now. Didn’t have the energy for yet another quarrel. What if something were to happen to her? If she got run over. For a hundredth of a second, she tried to imagine how that would feel. Relief? She quickly dismissed the thought and was frightened that she’d even let it pass.

  She looked at her oldest daughter, who had got so tall and slender. Her body sinewy and muscular. Alexandra only wished she wouldn’t dress so provocatively and couldn’t bear to think about how her parents would have reacted if they’d seen their grandchild in such a short jumpsuit. At the same time, she knew that that boundary had already been crossed, considering how Alexandra had chosen to live her life.

  Bea took out her phone and started talking into it. Alexandra would have liked to know whom Bea was calling, or in any event have a sense of who it might be.

  They’d stopped talking to each other long ago. When, on various occasions, she’d tried to make contact with Bea, it just ended with them screaming at each other.

  She knew that her daughter was seldom at school and that when she was there she mostly sat in the cafeteria or carried on with some other shit that Alexandra couldn’t bring herself to think about.

  She’d almost picked off every leaf on the basil when Bea got on her moped again. Just as quickly as she’d arrived, she was gone.

  As usual, Bea didn’t bother to close the gate behind her. Alexandra felt her cheeks burning and tore herself away from her place in the kitchen, went out, and closed the gate, while she looked for her daughter who had turned towards town. At the same moment, Alexandra caught sight of a pink car a little further up the street. Märtha would like that, she thought as the car slowly started moving. She followed it with her eyes, and as it passed their house, she saw the TV4 logo pasted on the back window. She couldn’t see who was driving, but it looked like a woman with long hair.

  She called to Märtha to come in and hurried into the house.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Her mother-in-law, Eva, came in from the patio. She sounded irritated. ‘Why are you so hysterical and running around here like a crazy hen?’

  ‘I saw a reporter on the street,’ she answered, wiping her forehead.

  ‘Well?’

  Eva was dressed in khaki-coloured trousers and a white shirt that accentuated her tanned lizard skin. Her grey hair was in a short pageboy cut and she had her indoor shoes on, despite the heat. She looked stronger than ever. Every day the paper warned about the risk to old people of dying from the heat, but the heat didn’t even seem to bother her.

  Märtha came into the kitchen with water running off her body. There were big pools with every footstep and Alexandra felt the effort it took her not to say anything.

  ‘I want you to go and get dressed now, honey. Daddy is coming soon, and then we’ll eat.’

  ‘Are we going to eat already?’ Eva sounded accusatory.

  ‘Yes, we’re having a late lunch or so-called early dinner today. Patrik wasn’t able to work the whole day.’ She herself barely had the energy to make dinner, but someone had to try to keep this house of cards together.

  ‘Quite, I understand that. He has so much going on, my boy.’ She looked worried.

  Alexandra didn’t comment on the criticism, which she knew was directed at her.

  Patrik was a plastic surgeon at the City Clinic in Stockholm and commuted every day. Sometimes, he slept over. But a week ago, Alexandra had found out that there was something else that was also enticing him to stay in the capital. Today, he’d cancelled the afternoon appointments, actually for the same reason that he’d been spending more time in Stockholm recently, although now the situation was quite different.

  Everything had happened so fast. And exactly like the last time he had put her in a frightful situation.

  The food was prepared. The me
at was sliced and ready to be tossed on the grill along with the sausages; the salad was cut up. She had put the different kinds of cheese in the pantry to let them soften up a little. The wine was decanted, and she had set the table nicely on the patio.

  She had no appetite, herself.

  Suddenly Patrik slipped up behind her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. He smelt of disinfectant. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. Alexandra wished he would ask her the same thing, but he didn’t. Everything was about him. Fury bubbled up inside her, but she swallowed it.

  ‘There was a journalist here just now,’ she said. ‘I saw her in the car — I think it was a woman anyway. From TV4, she had the logo on the car, a pink Porsche. It felt like she was snooping around.’

  Patrik was silent a long time. ‘I think that’s von Platen’s daughter. She works for some TV channel and was probably just here to visit her dad. Definitely nothing to worry about. I’ll go up and change, then we’ll eat.’

  How could he be so calm? As if he hadn’t understood what had happened. Alexandra straightened the pillows on the couch and went back to the kitchen sink and the window. The pink car was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘He certainly is handsome.’

  ‘Who?’ she asked, turning to her mother-in-law, who’d taken down one of the photos from the fridge.

  It was a photo of Patrik, who was swimming in the pool. She took the picture from her mother-in-law’s hand and put it back on the fridge.

  ‘You know that’s your son you’re talking about.’ Eva was out of her mind. How long would she stay? She’d already been there for over a week and it felt like several months.

  Patrik and his mother had always had a strange relationship. If Eva could have chosen, she and Patrik would have stayed living on the farm up in the forests of Värmland. Just the two of them.

  ELLEN

  3.00 P.M.

  Instead of going home, Ellen drove to Culturum, the library in Nyköping, to use a computer. Her phone had died, and she figured she might as well take the opportunity to do a little research now while she was in town and didn’t have her mother hanging over her.

  As she walked into the library, she started to feel nostalgic and realised that she probably hadn’t been there since she was in elementary school. It was strangely the same, and it almost felt as if she was about to sit down to start on one of all those school essays about death.

  As luck would have it, Ellen was able to borrow a charger for her phone from the pleasant receptionist. The only computer available was one of the two drop-in computers, which you could only use for fifteen minutes, and which didn’t require a library card. Ellen sat down.

  It was cool and pleasant. And quiet. When a chair was pulled out or someone coughed, it echoed between the bookshelves. All around her sat schoolchildren and retirees with their attention wholly focused on what they were occupied with. No one gave her any notice.

  Ellen started going through her email. Still no reply from Agatha. She couldn’t help feeling slightly irritated as she knew that her colleague was always quick to respond, and she sensed how she must be being talked about at the office.

  She surfed around on various news sites, but no one had written anything about Liv Lind being pregnant. It was presumably her first child, Ellen thought, based on the fact that she hadn’t seen kids’ pictures on Facebook — but she would check that out properly. Maybe Liv had been trying to have a child for a long time and this, considering her age, was her last chance. That cursed clock, always ticking … Ellen typed up the little information she had about the murder and listed her questions about whether Liv had children from before and who the father of this child was, and emailed it to herself.

  Her inbox had over two thousand unread emails. It was impossible to go through them. The easiest thing was to delete them in one swoop. But before she marked all the emails to put them in the trash, she typed ‘Jimmy’ into the search field, even though she shouldn’t have.

  Just over a year ago, she’d had a relationship with Jimmy. It was before he became her boss. At the time he was working at a competing TV channel. She’d never felt that strongly about anyone, and it had been the best time in her life. But one day, he’d just disappeared, stopped calling, and Ellen had been crushed and unable to understand what had happened. She’d cursed herself for finally having let someone get so close to her and having allowed them to convince her to expose herself and her history. After all, who would want to be with someone as dysfunctional as her? She should have known that it wasn’t going to be different this time, but she hadn’t been able to resist.

  When Jimmy started at TV4 in May, she’d tried to convince herself that she’d moved on, but when he walked into the editorial office, everything flooded over her again. It got complicated, not just because he was her boss, but because they’d both had a hard time staying away from each other, even though she was scared to death that he would hurt her again.

  Which he did.

  Once again, he’d stormed into her life, and then disappeared. And she hadn’t understood a thing. When she’d confronted him at last, he’d told her that he had a little daughter with a woman he couldn’t leave.

  It could never be him and Ellen.

  However she twisted and turned it, she couldn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand. It hurt too much, and she was inconsolable. Since then, they hadn’t spoken, but not a day went by that she didn’t think about him.

  In the search results, several emails from Jimmy showed up, but they were directed to the whole editorial team. Viewer numbers, shout-outs, and other nonsense.

  She bit her lip.

  She had to stop.

  Time ticked on; in five minutes her allotted time for using the computer would be up.

  She scrolled down the list of emails from Jimmy and was startled when she saw one with no subject, sent at the end of July. She clicked on it.

  Thinking about you. Won’t you answer? I’m worried.

  At first, she felt a tingling in her belly, then she read it again. And again. What did he really mean? He was thinking about her, but in what way? Was it perhaps just because he wanted to relieve his guilty conscience? But he’d sent it at one o’clock in the morning. Presumably, he’d been drunk. She read it one more time and tried to analyse every letter.

  Ding. Your time is up. Thanks for visiting Culturum.

  Ellen leant back in the chair and rocked on the back legs.

  A gang of youths had gathered around a computer a little further away and were giggling loudly together at something on the screen. She couldn’t help eavesdropping and strained to hear what was so funny, but it was hard to make out. They looked like they were in high school: skinny, with too much make-up and colourful hair. They hadn’t yet learnt where the boundary for too much was.

  Ellen picked up her phone and called Agatha, who answered straight away.

  ‘Ellen? Aren’t you on sick leave?’ Her voice sounded uncertain. As if they weren’t allowed to talk to each other.

  Yes, you little bureaucrat … She could picture Agatha. Her colourful glasses, like an attempt to live up the little there was to be happy about in life. Even though she was the same age as Madonna, she looked twenty years older.

  Ellen thought there probably weren’t many who missed her in the editorial office. Her TV4 colleagues had never liked her, or the world she came from. They thought she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth because her last name was Tamm and she grew up at Örelo Castle in Södermanland. She would never be able to gain the trust of the old guard. Even though Ellen had been in the newsroom for almost four years, they thought she was ‘new on the job’ and maintained that she still couldn’t handle the police department’s information and do a good job. Sometimes she wondered when, or if, she would ever be an ‘established’ journalist and co-worker. And now, when they’d
found out about her twin sister and that she was mentally unstable (or whatever they were saying about her now), it would be even harder for her to fit in at Editorial.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Agatha asked.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ She didn’t want to give Agatha’s fire any extra oxygen. ‘And you?’

  ‘Fine, I guess. A lot of work. We’re short-staffed and a lot of these summer interns don’t know what they’re doing.’

  ‘Do you have anyone covering the Stentuna murder?’

  ‘Yes, or we’re doing the best we can. There’s quite a lot of attention on the fatal assault on Sveavägen.’

  ‘The Stentuna murder is a fatal assault too.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but as I said, aren’t you on sick leave?’

  It was the tone of voice that Ellen dreaded, the reason she didn’t tell her story to anyone. How was she going to manage the image they had of her now? Before Lycke disappeared, no one at the editorial office had known that Ellen had a twin sister who drowned. If she’d only spoken up in time about Elsa being missing, perhaps she’d be alive today. Ellen couldn’t bear to see the change in the way people looked at her once they knew about her past, and she could hear the judgement in Agatha’s voice. Everyone who knew kept their distance.

  ‘Did you check the licence plate that I emailed you about?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, I didn’t know …’

  ‘What information do you have?’

  ‘About the murder, you mean? Unfortunately, not much. We did a phone interview with the police, but there doesn’t seem to be much more, or else they’ve put the lid on it — it’s Leif who’s the most informed. Wait, let me see … yep, exactly. This is what they say: We never comment on findings or confiscation, says Börje Swahn. The police’s hunt for the suspected murderer is in full swing. It will intensify during today. Yeah, that’s about it. Maybe Internet knows more.’

  They called anyone who worked with TV4’s website ‘Internet’. They were so young, modern, and interchangeable that the older guard didn’t even bother to learn their names.