The Department of Sensitive Crimes

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Female friends proved easier to find. By the end of her first year, Bim was a member of a group of young women who did just about everything together. There were three others in this group: Linnea Ek, Signe Magnusson, and Matilda Forsberg. These three were students of English, Swedish literature, and earth sciences respectively. All three had boyfriends of varying degrees of seriousness: Signe had, in fact, two boyfriends, not out of any inherent lack of fidelity, but because she could not bring herself to choose between them, and liked them both. She was also concerned about hurting the feelings of the one whom she eventually dismissed, and so she ran these two young men in parallel, avoiding any meeting between them or any slip-up that might reveal that they did not have as exclusive a claim on her affections as they imagined.

  “Don’t ever, ever tell anybody,” Signe begged Bim. “The last thing I want—the very last thing—is for people to think I’m, well...” She became silent in an evident search for the right word. Eventually she decided: “Greedy. I wouldn’t want people to think I was greedy.”

  “Of course you’re not,” said Bim. “You’re just generous-hearted. Or is it warm-hearted and generous-spirited? Anyway, you’re both of those.”

  Signe was grateful. “That’s good of you, Bim. And you know something, having two boyfriends is rather fun. You should try it.” She was not serious, but she immediately regretted the remark. Bim did not have even one boyfriend, let alone two.

  “I’m sorry,” Signe continued. “That’s tactless of me. I’m sure you’ll find a boyfriend at some point.”

  Bim sighed. “I wish I could,” she said. “I’ve tried, you know.”

  Signe looked at her friend with interest. “I’m surprised you haven’t got somebody,” she said. “You’re very attractive, Bim—you really are. Why do you think boys don’t like you?”

  Bim’s face fell, and immediately Signe felt guilty again. “I didn’t mean to say that. I’m sure that boys do like you.” And then she added, “But maybe not in that way.”

  Bim looked away. “Well, if they do, why do I never get asked out? Never.”

  “Do they know how to get in touch?” asked Signe.

  “I do all the things you’re meant to do,” said Bim. “I go on social media. I’ve tried internet dating—nobody responded, except some horrible scumbags. One of them was actually in prison, and the other had an electronic tag. There were no nice boys, anyway—or none that I could see.”

  “Don’t give up,” said Signe, and changed the subject. She now had an inkling as to why her friend had met with no success. Men could tell when a girl was desperate, and if there was one thing that put them off, it was any sign of desperation. She had never been able to work out why this should be, and had ended up with a shaky socio-biological theory that desperation signalled a lack of breeding competitiveness that made males instinctively look elsewhere. Or was it something to do with Bim’s essential domesticity—with her herb window boxes and her home cooking? These were most likely not things that young males valued. They wanted a girl who would go clubbing, who would smoke herbs rather than grow them.

  The conversation with Signe depressed Bim. She now looked for signs in her friends’ attitude that they pitied her, and when the other three stopped talking about their boyfriends, she interpreted this—correctly, as it happened—as their trying to avoid drawing attention to her boyfriend-less state.

  This made it all the worse for Bim, and one weekend she decided that she could bear it no longer. She would make up a boyfriend for herself—she would create one. She would tell the others all about him, and that would end her sense of being a social and emotional failure. Obviously, she would not be able to produce this newly acquired boyfriend to show them, and so she would need to explain that Sixten—his name had already come to her—had a job that required him to keep unusual hours. He would be a paramedic, she decided. He would save lives daily. He would be strong. He would be decisive. He would drive an ambulance. He would be the best-looking ambulance driver in Malmö—by far. Such a man would rarely find the time to socialise with others: he would have far more important things to do with his time.

  Chapter Five

  HE WENT TO THE NORTH POLE

  “A boyfriend!” exclaimed Signe. “I never thought you’d manage it.”

  She immediately apologised. “Sorry, Bim. I meant: Where did you find him?”

  Bim waved a hand in the air. “Oh, we just bumped into each other—started to chat. One thing led to another.”

  This did not satisfy Signe. “But where? Where did you meet this...what did you call him again?”

  “Sixten. He’s called Sixten.”

  Signe nodded in encouragement. “And?”

  “Well, that’s what he’s called.”

  “No, silly: What I want to know is, what’s he like? Is he...is he hot?”

  Bim smiled. “I don’t kiss and tell, Signe. I don’t ask you if your boyfriend...boyfriends...are hot, do I?”

  Signe understood. “All right, not that. But is he good-looking?” She did not give Bim time to respond, but answered the question herself. “I bet he is.”

  “Yes,” said Bim. “He’s good-looking.”

  “Have you got a photograph?” asked Signe.

  Bim hesitated. “Not on me,” she said.

  “But you will get one, won’t you?”

  Again Bim hesitated. Then she replied, “Yes, I’ll get one.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  Bim’s silence was interpreted as agreement. She had not thought about that; she had not really thought about any of the implications of Sixten’s creation. She had imagined that she would be able to keep him in the background and that the others would understand that he was too busy to get involved in their social circle. But here was Signe asking for a photograph—and here she was promising to get one, and tomorrow at that.

  Later, as she sat with her mother on the balcony after dinner—it was a fine, warm evening—she came to a decision on the photograph. It was simple, really: she could take a selfie with a boy—any boy—and then claim that was Sixten. If she went downtown and asked a passing boy if he minded doing a selfie with her, he would probably be bemused and agree. Why should he refuse?

  She told her mother that she was going out for an hour or so. “I just want to get out. Nowhere in particular, but it’s such a lovely warm night and...”

  “You don’t have to explain, Bim,” said her mother. “Go off and enjoy yourself.”

  She travelled into town by bus, and then made her way on foot to Lilla Torg. The restaurants and bars were busy, and there were crowds of visitors milling about. This was exactly what she wanted, and soon enough she had identified a young man who would make an ideal Sixten. He was roughly her age, tall, and certainly good-looking. In fact, she wondered whether he might not be just a little bit too good-looking for the purpose; she did not want Signe to think that he was simply too good to be true. But he was immediately appealing, in an open-faced, wholesome way, and he was just the sort she would choose anyway. As to his appearance—she wanted them to think that she had landed a film-star-handsome boyfriend; that would teach them to pity her, to think her incapable of finding a man, let alone one who could stop the traffic with his looks.

  The young man was with two friends, and they were standing outside a bar, as if they were waiting to meet others. One of the friends had angry-looking skin; the other, who was shorter than his companions, had a cherubic face, fringed with fair curls, making him look like a fourteen-year-old choirboy. Neither of them would do: it had to be the young man she had identified as Sixten.

  She approached them, her phone in her hand, as if about to make a telephone call. As she got closer, they noticed her, and she took a deep breath and stepped towards them.

  “Hi, do you think you could help me with something?”

  She addressed her reque
st to Sixten, and it was he who replied. “Yes, of course.”

  She was pleased that he spoke Swedish; her English was strong, but she felt more comfortable doing this with a Swedish boy. Sixten—the imaginary one—was certainly Swedish.

  “I want to test my phone. It was taking things out of focus.”

  The young man reached out. “Give it to me. I don’t know much about these models, but let’s see.”

  She stepped forward and stood beside him. “Try a selfie,” she said.

  Sixten was slightly taken aback, but after a moment’s hesitation he smiled. “All right, a selfie then. You and me. Get in a bit closer.”

  She did as he suggested. The flash went off, although she did not think it strictly necessary.

  She held out her hand for the phone, and he gave it back to her.

  “Perfect,” she said. “I think it’s working now.”

  One of the other boys—the one with the angry skin—made some remark out of the side of his mouth. The choirboy muttered something in reply. She did not hear what they said, and it did not bother her anyway. She had what she needed.

  * * *

  —

  She showed the photograph to Signe the next day. Her friend took the camera and peered at the picture of the boy from Lilla Torg. For a few moments she studied the screen, before turning to Bim with a look of unconcealed admiration. And envy.

  “I can’t wait to meet him,” she said.

  Bim had noticed the envious look. Sixten’s photograph was having the desired effect: there was no doubt that Signe had received the desired message—Bim, poor, mousy Bim, who lived with her mother and who had never had a boyfriend, now had the sort of boy whose photograph one saw in the magazines, who had to do nothing more than stand there, breathing, to look drop-dead sexy. She, Bim, whom Signe had felt moved to comfort and console in her single state, she now had him.

  At the same time it was surprising that Signe should be envious. She already had two boyfriends; did this mean she wanted a third? Or was it that people, for all they wished their friends well, never actually wished them that well? Some relationships, of course, depended on the superiority of one party, and a change in the balance of advantage could destabilise them. That, she decided, was happening here. Signe wanted her to feel inferior because that somehow made her—Signe—feel better about herself. She was the big, more successful sister; she was the popular one; she was the one who could dispense advice and crumbs of comfort. She did not want an equal relationship, and she certainly would not want to be eclipsed.

  Signe was looking at her. “When can I meet him?” she asked.

  Bim affected nonchalance. “Sixten is pretty busy,” she said. “As I told you, he’s a paramedic.”

  “Yes, but surely he doesn’t work all the time. Even paramedics get time off.”

  Bim agreed that this was so. “Yes, he does get some time off, but he’s studying at the moment. He’s planning to go to medical school.”

  Signe bit her lip. Quite unintentionally, Bim had said the one thing that would be guaranteed to cause her friend pain. It would be some years before Signe would want to commit to marriage. After all, marriage would be a problem for somebody with two boyfriends; one cannot marry two men—one would have to decide. But marriage was nonetheless an inevitability in her mind—perhaps one of the boyfriends would die, one never knew—and in so far as it would eventually happen, then she had always imagined it would be with a doctor. She would be married to a doctor who would be kind and gentle, but at the same time firm, sympathetic, and good-looking. He would be a surgeon, perhaps. Yes, a surgeon would be perfect. And while she was prepared to imagine Bim being involved with somebody on the fringes of medicine—in a strictly subsidiary role, a male nurse, perhaps—she found it difficult to see her with a professional equal to her own, as yet unidentified, surgical boyfriend.

  Signe looked away. “Medical school’s pretty competitive,” she said. “I know lots of people who haven’t got in.”

  Bim was not ready for this, but with the confidence of her new status, she worked out the rebuttal.

  “Sixten already has a place,” she said. “He’s been told that provided he passes this exam he’s doing—and a bare pass will be enough—then he’s in. They really want him, you see.”

  Signe pouted. “Why?”

  “Because of his experience,” said Bim. “He’s seen so much while he’s been working on the ambulances. He’s saved a lot of lives, you know. There are probably hundreds of people walking around just because of him.”

  Signe said nothing. One of her boyfriends worked in a tax consultant’s office; the other had a job as a barista in a coffee bar. She shuddered. “I suppose somebody has to do that sort of work,” she said. “Not for me, though. All that blood and screaming and so on. Not a chance.”

  “It’s a good thing,” said Bim firmly, “that we have people like Sixten, then. If everybody had your attitude, what would people do?” Then she answered her own question. “I suppose they could get jobs as baristas.”

  Signe looked sour. She tried to smile. “I’m really pleased for you, Bim,” she said. “A boyfriend at long last.”

  * * *

  —

  Bim had not intended to tell her mother about Sixten, but then she lent her her telephone. She had not been thinking at the time, and when Elvinia left her own phone at a friend’s house, Bim did not hesitate to offer her mother the use of her own. Elvinia needed a telephone for business calls—she was expecting the confirmation of an important restoration contract to repair the Persian carpets of a luxury hotel in Copenhagen, and the Danish agent who secured the business for her said she would be calling that day. Since she was going to be in and out of the office, Elvinia would need to give her a mobile number: “I know you need your phone, Bim, but could I use it just for one day? You’ll get it back this evening when I can get out to Katerine’s place and get my own phone back—I promise, promise.”

  “Of course,” said Bim, handing the phone over to her mother. “Keep it charged—the battery doesn’t last very long.”

  Bim thought nothing more about it at the time, and it was only in the middle of the day, when she was sitting through a lecture on the psychology of the interview, that she remembered the photograph. Lending a phone to somebody is not lending her your life, she thought, even if the borrower is your mother. You don’t expect your mother to read your emails or look at your photographs—unless she should press the wrong button, of course, and that was exactly the sort of thing that a mother might do. What’s this button, darling? Oh, photographs...

  Bim knew the moment she saw her mother that evening that she had found the photograph. As she handed the phone back to her daughter, Elvinia gave her a look that Bim understood perfectly. It was the look that she had always given her when there was cause for reproach—and often that reproach was associated with an implicit accusation of exclusion. “We should have no secrets from one another,” the look said, “and yet...”

  But the reproach was short-lived, and was almost immediately replaced with a conspiratorial look—such a look of understanding and delight as might cross a parental face when the parent discovers her child has done something immensely distinguished and has been too modest to boast about it. So might a parent look on finding out that her daughter has been chosen for a university ski team, when she thought all along that she was only a moderately competent skier; or if she discovered that her daughter was in the running for a “Young Woman of the Year” award and had said nothing about it; or when, as in this case, she found out that her daughter had at last managed to find a nice-looking boyfriend with no visible tattoos or facial piercings.

  “Tell me,” said Elvinia coyly, “what’s his name—this new friend of yours?”

  Bim looked away. She was by nature truthful and she would never lie to her mother. Yet she could not brin
g herself to tell her the full story of what she had done—it would sound so odd, so childish. She told herself that she should never have done it in the first place, and that it would inevitably become complicated and, with equal inevitability, lead to embarrassment. But it was too late for that now—she had done it—and whatever she said, short of a confession, would be a lie. So if she said that it was just a boy she had met by chance and that there was nothing more to it, then that would be in a superficial sense correct but, at the very least, completely misleading.

  “Sixten,” she said. “He’s called Sixten.”

  She had not really intended to say this, but it followed as inexorably as a railway carriage, if pushed by an engine, will follow the rails set out before it.

  Her mother smiled. She was about to say, “Now, that’s a coincidence,” but she stopped herself. She wanted to play this carefully. So she asked, instead, “And what does Sixten do? Did you meet him at the university?”

  “He’s a medical student,” muttered Bim. And then she added, “It’s nothing serious, Mother. We’re just good friends.”

  Elvinia nodded. “Of course, of course. Early days. But I must say I’m so pleased you’ve found...a friend. Will you bring him here some evening? For dinner perhaps?”

  “He works very hard. Medical students have to.”

  Elvinia was quick to agree. “I know that. I went out with a medical student once—a hundred years ago, of course; well before I met your father. He was always working. When we went out on a date he sometimes took his books along with him.”

  Bim, being keen to change the subject, welcomed the direction in which the conversation was going. “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “He became a cardiologist, I believe. I saw him at a gallery opening—one of the textile shows. He had his wife with him. She teaches art, I think. She’s a nice woman.”