‘No problem, no problem at all. It was nice to meet you.’
Ingratiating as hell, thought Patrik. He followed Jan up the stairs, close on his heels. The contrast was sharp when he reached the extremely tasteful furnishings of the main floor. Too bad that Jan’s wife never got the number of Nelly’s interior decorator.
He thanked Jan and left the house with a feeling of having strained gnats and swallowed camels. For one thing, he felt as though he’d caught a glimpse of something in Jan that he should have been able to decipher, something that didn’t fit in with that lavishly decorated flat. For another, there was something not quite right about Jan Lorentz. Patrik returned to his previous thoughts. The guy was just too perfect.
It was almost seven o’clock and the snowstorm had gathered force by the time Patrik finally stood on her doorstep. Erica was surprised at how strong her emotion was when she saw him and how natural it was to throw her arms around his neck. He set down two grocery bags from ICA on the floor in the hall and returned her embrace, holding her close for a long time.
‘I’ve missed you.’
‘Me too.’
They kissed tenderly. After a while Patrik’s stomach began to growl. They took that as a signal to take the bags into the kitchen. He had bought far too much food, but Erica put the extra things in the fridge. As if by tacit agreement, they didn’t talk about what had happened that day while they fixed dinner. Not until they had satisfied their hunger and were sitting facing each other at the table did Patrik begin to tell her what had happened.
‘Anders Nilsson is dead. His body was found in his flat this morning.’
‘Were you the one who found him?’
‘No, but I got there soon afterwards.’
‘How did he die?’
Patrik hesitated. ‘He’d been hanged.’
‘Been hanged? You mean he was murdered?’ Erica couldn’t conceal her agitation. ‘Was it the same person who killed Alex?’
Patrik wondered how many times today he’d heard that question. But it was undeniably key to the case.
‘We think so.’
‘Do you have any more leads? Did anyone see anything? Did you find any concrete evidence tying the murders together?’
‘Hold your horses.’ Patrik held up his hands. ‘I can’t tell you any more. We could talk about something more pleasant, you know. How was your day, for instance?’
Erica gave him a crooked smile. If only he knew how unpleasant her day had been too. But she couldn’t tell him about it. She had to let Dan tell the story himself.
‘I slept fairly late and then I wrote most of the day. Considerably less exciting than your day.’
Their hands sought each other across the table. Their fingers intertwined. It felt so lovely and safe to sit there together as the darkness enveloped the house. Huge snowflakes kept floating down like tiny falling stars against the black night sky.
‘I spent some time thinking about Anna and the house as well. I really let her have it on the phone the other day, and I’ve felt bad about my outburst ever since. Maybe I was being selfish. I was only thinking about how it would affect me if the house were sold, about my loss. But thing aren’t easy for Anna right now either. She’s trying to make the best of her situation, and even though I think she’s doing the wrong thing, she’s not doing it to be mean. Sure, she can be both thoughtless and naive sometimes, but she’s generally a considerate and generous person, and I’ve been venting my sorrow and disappointment on her lately. Maybe it would be best to sell the house after all. Start over. I could even buy a new, though much smaller house for the money. Maybe I’m being too sentimental. It’s time to move on, to stop regretting what could have been and instead take a look at what I actually have.’
Patrik understood that she was no longer talking about the house.
‘I’m sorry I have to ask this, but how did the accident happen?’
‘That’s all right.’ She took a deep breath. ‘My parents had been in Strömstad visiting my father’s sister. It was dark and rainy, and the cold had formed black ice on the roadway Pappa always used to drive carefully, but they think an animal jumped out in front of the car. He turned hard, went into a skid, and the car slammed right into a tree by the side of the road. They probably died instantly. At least that’s what Anna and I were told. There’s no way to know whether it was true.’
A solitary tear trickled down Erica’s cheek, and Patrik leaned forward and brushed it away. He took hold of her chin and made her look straight at him.
‘They wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. I’m sure they didn’t suffer, Erica. Completely sure.’
She nodded mutely. She trusted what he said, and it felt as if a huge burden was lifted from her chest. The car had caught fire, and she had spent many sleepless nights, wondering in horror whether her parents might have lived long enough to feel the fire burning them. Patrik’s words quelled her anxiety, and for the first time she felt a kind of peace when she thought about the accident that had killed both her parents. The grief was still there, but the anxiety was gone. With his thumb Patrik wiped away some more tears that rolled down her cheek.
‘Poor Erica. Poor, poor Erica.’
She took his hand and held it against her cheek.
‘There’s no reason to feel sorry for me, Patrik. I’ve actually never been as happy as I am right now, at this moment. It’s strange, but I feel so unbelievably safe with you. I don’t feel any of that uncertainty I usually feel when I’ve just slept with someone. Why do you think that is?’
‘I think it’s because we’re meant for each other.’
Erica blushed at the magnitude of his words. But she couldn’t get away from the fact that she felt the same way. It was like finding her way home.
As if on cue, they got up from the table, left the dishes where they were, and went up to the bedroom arm in arm. Outside a full-blown snowstorm was under way.
It felt strange to be staying in her old room again. Especially since her taste had changed over the years, but the room was still the same. A lot of pink and lace was not really her style any longer.
Julia lay on her back on her narrow childhood bed and stared at the ceiling with her hands clasped on her stomach. Everything was about to disintegrate. Her whole life was falling apart all around her and piling up in a drift of shattered fragments. It was as though she had lived her whole life in a funhouse, with trick mirrors in which nothing was what it seemed. She had no idea how things would go with her studies. All enthusiasm had been drained out of her with one blow, and now the school term was going on without her. Not that she thought anyone would notice that she was gone. She had never had an easy time making friends.
As far as Julia was concerned, she might just as well lie here in her pink room and stare at the ceiling until she got old and grey. Birgit and Karl-Erik wouldn’t dare do anything but let her have her way. She could live off them for the rest of her life if need be. A guilty conscience would keep their wallets open forever.
It felt as if she were moving through water. All her movements were heavy and difficult and all sounds reached her as if through a filter. At first it hadn’t been like this. She’d been full of righteous indignation and a hatred so strong that it scared her. She still felt that hatred, but mixed with resignation instead of energy. She was so used to despising herself that on a purely physical level she could feel how the hatred had changed direction. Instead of being directed outwards it had now turned inwards and was eating huge holes in her chest. Old habits were hard to break. Hating herself was an art form she had learned to practise to perfection.
She turned over on her side. On the desk stood a photo of her with Alex; she reminded herself to throw it out. As soon as she could get up she would tear it into a thousand pieces and get rid of it. The look of adoration she saw in her eyes in the picture made her wince. Alex was cool and beautiful as usual, while the ugly duckling beside her turned her round face towards her with a worshipful expression. In
her eyes, Alex could never have done any wrong; Julia had always harboured a secret hope deep inside that one day she would hatch from her cocoon and climb out looking just as lovely and self-confident as Alex. She scoffed at her own naïveté. What a joke. And 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 bright colours made Patrik feel more lively just by looking at her.
‘It was one of my old cases you wanted to look at, you said? Jan Norin?’
Her voice was still sounding strain
ed. She had already fetched the material before he arrived, and a thick folder lay on the desk.
‘Well, we have a good deal of material on this individual, as you see,’ she went on. ‘Both parents were addicts, and if they hadn’t died in an accident we would have had to intervene sooner or later. They let the boy run wild, and he basically had to raise himself. He showed up at school in dirty, ragged clothes and was bullied by his schoolmates because he smelled bad. Apparently, he had to sleep in the old stable and then go to school in the same clothes he slept in.’
She looked at Patrik over the top of her glasses.
‘I assume you’re not coming here to abuse my trust, but to procure the requisite authorization, if only after the fact, so that you can acquire the data on Jan?’
Patrik merely nodded. He knew that it was important to follow regulations, but sometimes investigations required a certain efficiency, and then the wheels of bureaucracy would have to turn after the fact instead. Siv and he had always had a good, pragmatic working relationship, but he knew she had to ask that question.
‘Why didn’t you step in earlier?’ Patrik asked. ‘How could the situation have been allowed to get so bad? It sounds as if Jan had been neglected since birth, and yet he was ten years old when his parents died.’
Siv gave a deep sigh. ‘Yes, I know what you mean, and believe me, I’ve had the same thought many times. But times were different when I started working here, no more than a few months before the fire actually. It took extreme circumstances before the state would step in and restrict the right of parents to raise their children as they saw fit. Many people were advocating a liberal form of child-rearing as well, and unfortunately it was children like Jan who suffered. There were never any traces of physical abuse found on him. To be crass, perhaps the best thing would have been if he were beaten, so that he could have gone to the hospital. Then at least we would have started to keep an eye on the family situation. But either he was abused so that it was never outwardly visible, or else his parents “simply” neglected him.’ Siv wiggled her fingers to indicate quotation marks around the word ‘simply’.
Patrik Hedstrom 01 - The Ice Princess Page 28