The Ice Beneath Her

by Camilla Grebe

  It’s at this point that the familiar feelings of boredom and resignation start to sneak up on me. I’ve grown tired of these plodding murder investigations. If someone had asked me ten years ago, I would have said this was the most exciting and challenging task a skilled investigator could sink his teeth into, but all I feel now is paralyzing fatigue. What I want more than anything is to buy a six-pack, go home, collapse on the couch, and watch sports. I don’t think anyone who’s not a police officer could understand how much work it takes to map out a person’s life. How many hundreds of hours of interrogations, research, and paperwork have to be trudged through before the picture becomes clearer and the essentials start to emerge.

  And then there’s Hanne.

  In a way, it was good we had a chance to talk, even though I didn’t say much. But nothing has changed between us since. I feel it clearly, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. Like a deep, vibrating tone that’s always present when she’s here. Almost like tinnitus. And I don’t have a fucking clue how to get rid of it.

  Sometimes I find myself looking at her when she’s sitting at her desk in her wrinkled shirt, her graying hair pushed up in a sloppy ponytail. Sometimes my thoughts escape to that forbidden place where we’re together again. Yesterday, when I put my hand on her forearm, I found myself thinking that she’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. And the only one I could ever really talk to.

  I don’t know why, but I find it so damn hard to talk about important things to anyone, and especially to women. Maybe I’m too scared to let anyone in, as Janet always claimed. Or maybe I don’t have much to say, because I’m basically uninteresting.

  But with Hanne I always had things to talk about. Back then, when we were together. We could lie for hours in bed talking about politics, or love, or silly things, like why a certain kind of cheese slicer exists only in Sweden. And sometimes she’d tell me about Greenland and about the Inuit who’d lived there for thousands of years in perfect balance with nature. She dreamed of traveling there, kayaking between drift ice and hunting seals.

  The Inuit apparently didn’t have special wedding ceremonies. They just got together and that was that. We used to joke that we’d probably be considered married from an Inuit perspective.

  I remember I thought she was so positive and, well, mischievous, especially being as old as she was.

  Ten years older than me.

  It never bothered me, even though she didn’t seem to believe me when I said so. Instead, she told me I had to think about how we could never have a child together, how she’d get old long before me. Did I really want to be with an old lady?

  Yes, I did. And I said so, too.

  And yet I couldn’t go through with it. I left her waiting on the street that night. I sat frozen on my bed, clutching my car keys with a vodka bottle between my knees. Petrified and covered in a cold sweat. And when she called me, I couldn’t even answer. Couldn’t pick up the fucking phone and tell her what was going on. Tell her I wasn’t ready for the commitment.

  Not ready to commit.

  What a fucking expression, by the way. What an indescribably lame excuse for what was chafing and twisting and pulsating inside me. The monster and the fear that could not be named.

  Afraid. I was, quite simply, afraid.

  I just wish I’d been able to say it. To explain in simple words and without euphemistic terms what was eating at me.

  Then maybe my life would be different today.

  —

  Manfred shows up at my desk and frowns at me. “You look like shit, Lindgren.”

  “Thank you, thank you very much. And you’re headed out on a fox hunt, I see.”

  He grins and adjusts his checkered vest. As usual, he’s impeccably dressed—a living anachronism on the third floor of the police station in a three-piece tweed suit with a silk scarf in his breast pocket.

  “I do what I can.”

  “Anything new?” I ask.

  “We received a ton of tips from that drawing of the victim; Bergdahl’s team is helping us sort through them. But Orre is still missing without a trace. Oh, another thing. A guy who works as a glazier in the Mörby shopping center called us. Apparently he fixed a basement window at Orre’s house recently. According to Orre, he’d had a break-in, but nothing was stolen. Which is probably why he never reported it.”

  “We’ll have to look into that. Ask Sanchez to meet with him,” I say.

  “My God, what would we do without Sanchez?”

  Manfred sings her name with a heavy vibrato, like an opera singer, and raises his right arm above his head theatrically.

  Sanchez throws us a surly glance from her desk, but refrains from saying anything.

  —

  I leave the police station around eight o’clock. There are limits to how much overtime I am willing to put in, even though we’re in the middle of a major investigation. Nobody thanks a cop for sacrificing his life to the job.

  When I park outside the apartment building where I live, I get the strange feeling that something’s wrong. The lights in the stairwell are lit, and the door is slightly ajar, as if someone didn’t shut it firmly behind them. I take out the pizza I picked up on the way home, go in, and start walking up the stairs.

  The building was built in the fifties and has glaring pistachio-green walls and a speckled floor. It looks like someone scattered small black and white stones at random over the cement. Each floor has three apartment doors and the mandatory garbage chute. I live on the top floor, which seemed like an advantage until I broke my foot three years ago and had to jump all the way up with crutches.

  Outside my door, Albin is sitting with skateboard in hand. He’s wearing a way too thin hoodie and jeans that hang low on his hips. He’s holding a torn plastic grocery bag in his other hand. His thin blond hair hangs down in front of his face, and his ears, which he inherited from Janet, protrude slightly.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi,” I say. “What are you doing here?”

  “Had a fight with Mom. Can I crash at your place?”

  I’m disconcerted. Albin has never slept at my place before.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I better call your mom,” I say as I take out my keys and unlock the door. On the floor inside is a pile of dirty laundry: underwear and T-shirts I planned to wash this evening. I shut the door again.

  “Aren’t you gonna let me in?”

  Albin stands up and meets my eyes. He looks confused and anxious. Understandably unsure of whether or not he can trust his father.

  “Yes. Of course. It’s just that…it’s messy.”

  “Like I care.”

  “No, of course.”

  I open the door, and we go in. Albin’s slim figure glides past me into the living room like a shadow and sinks down into the sofa.

  “Albin,” I say. “It’s nice to see you, but I don’t know if it’s such a good idea for you to stay over.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t have a bed for you.”

  “I can sleep here,” Albin says, patting the couch. Then he lies down, pulls off his sneakers, and puts his feet up on the armrest. I note how skinny he is, and wonder if I should ask him if he’s eating properly. Isn’t that something parents do?

  “I have to get up early tomorrow, so the timing isn’t great,” I say instead.

  “So what? I can just stay here when you leave. Mom’s totally lost it; I can’t go home.”

  “Besides, I have to work tonight.”

  “I won’t bother you.”

  I pace back and forth across the room, not knowing what to do with myself. Then I put the pizza down on the coffee table.

  “And Janet? Does she know you’re here?”

  Albin puts his arm over his eyes, as if he can’t cope with any more questions. “Nah.”

  “Then I bet she’s worried sick. I’m going to call her.”

  —

&n
bsp; Janet shows up an hour later. She’s in a better mood than I’ve seen her in for a long time, chirpy even. She seems to love studying to be a nail technician. She shows me her new, long, hot-pink nails, and I say that they look good, even though I don’t think so.

  Janet and Albin whisper to each other for a while. Then she gives him a tight hug, and I assume they’ve reconciled.

  It wasn’t difficult to persuade her to come over. All I had to do was explain that I didn’t have room for Albin, not tonight. She sounded neither surprised nor upset. Why would she be? I’ve never had room in my life for Albin before.

  I stand at the window and watch them head over to her little red VW Golf. Just before Albin gets in, he turns and meets my gaze. Without really understanding why, I take a step back behind the curtain. Shut my eyes tight, until I hear the car drive away.

  —

  Sometimes when Albin was younger I played around with the idea of actually spending time with him. Maybe taking him to an amusement park or a football game. But as soon as I tried to imagine us together, something inside me knotted up. I didn’t know how to act when I was with him.

  I told myself it was probably better to wait until he was older and understood more. At least I know how to talk to adults.

  But with each passing year it became more and more difficult. How do you even start to spend time with your child, whom you don’t really know, after so many years? What the hell are you supposed to say to a stranger, who happens to be your flesh and blood, and who might hate you because you’ve never been around? Not even football felt like an option anymore. Would we stand there with some forced feeling of solidarity, a beer in our hands, pretending like we’re buddies or something? Or was I expected to break down sobbing and explain why I never wanted to have him in my life?

  There never was any football game, of course.

  —

  The following morning I drive out to Jesper Orre’s house with Manfred. It’s still cordoned off with police tape, which flutters and rustles in the heavy wind as we walk the short distance from the gate to the front door. Manfred finds the right key from the pile we got from the technicians, opens the door, and turns on the hall light.

  The blood is gone; it appears an ordinary hallway. Only if you look carefully can you make out the faint traces of rust brown in the seams between the stone tiles on the floor and between the molding and the walls. Death has a tendency to soak into things, I think. As if it doesn’t want to let go of anyplace it’s visited. It bores its way into walls and floors, leaving behind the distinct whiff of transience, which cannot be washed away. Most people actually choose to renovate a house after something like this happens.

  “What are we looking for?” I ask.

  “No fucking clue. Anything the technicians might have missed.”

  We start searching the house methodically. Going from room to room, taking pictures, rooting around in clothes and china and old medications. We take pictures for our own use—the official crime scene photos have already been taken by the technicians.

  It’s a neat and orderly home, bordering on sterile, and contains very few personal items. The only photo we find—of Orre and a few women on a beach—is standing on a shelf in the living room.

  Manfred nods at it. “They’ve got that in their report. You don’t need to take a photo.”

  “Why is the glass broken?” I ask, and run a finger across the few shards that still sit in the frame.

  Manfred shrugs. “No fucking clue.”

  “Maybe one of the women in the photo is the victim.”

  “Maybe. It’s impossible to say; the photo’s too blurry.”

  As usual during our house searches, I feel weirdly ill at ease. Like I’m an intruder. There’s nothing like rooting around in somebody’s old underwear and groceries to make you feel like a vulture, even though I know it’s necessary.

  Manfred goes through the bookshelf, which contains only a few books, some decorations, and a lot of business magazines. He lifts out a stack of books and leans into the shelf.

  “Look what I found behind the books, Lindgren!”

  I go over to him. He’s got a DVD in his hand. On the cover a naked, bound woman lies on her back with her legs splayed in a parking lot. A man with a whip in his hand stands next to her with his back to the photographer.

  “Damn…”

  “I told you he was disturbed,” Manfred mumbles.

  “You gonna take that home with you?”

  He smiles at me crookedly. “To tell you the truth, Afsaneh would castrate me if she found this in my stuff. Maybe you should take it instead? You seem like you need some cheering up.”

  “Sure. Violent porn always puts me in a good mood.”

  We put the movie back and go into the kitchen. The glossy black cabinets and stainless steel counters remind me of the autopsy rooms in Solna. Even the sink and faucet with adjustable showerlike nozzle feel institutional.

  “Not exactly cozy,” Manfred says, and frowns.

  I agree with him, but I’m grateful that, even after working together for so long, he’s never seen my apartment. I can guess how depressing he’d find my home. Manfred and Afsaneh live in a beautiful turn-of-the-century apartment with a tiled stove and art on the walls. They have curtains, pillows, colorful carpets, books, and all that other stuff I’ve never managed to acquire. Pie forms, baby bottles, ice cream makers, and juicers are crowded into their kitchen cupboards. Invitations to various events hang on the mirror in the hall, screaming out how popular they are.

  “Should we check out the basement?” Manfred asks, and starts walking toward the hall without waiting for an answer. I follow him down stairs that creak under our weight.

  A faint scent of mildew and detergent. A humming sound coming from the boiler room. For some reason, I start to feel dizzy and weak, have a sudden urge to sit down. But I follow Manfred obediently into the laundry room. He turns on the lights and opens the cabinets. Towels and sheets are folded neatly beside the basket of women’s underwear that the technicians found hidden in a cupboard. He carefully empties the garments onto the counter next to the washing machine. Black lace and red silk, roses and glittering rhinestones. Here they are—Jesper’s hunting trophies.

  “Look,” Manfred says, holding up a pair of tiny panties with pearls sewn into the crotch. “These look damn uncomfortable. Are you supposed to have this…pearl necklace in your…ass? Between your butt cheeks or something?”

  I don’t respond. I think about how I’ve never seen Hanne in something like that, and how I probably never will.

  We put back the underwear and go over to Jesper’s dirty-laundry hampers. Identical white shirts and underwear are crammed in with towels and workout clothes. I pull out a pair of jeans and hold them out in front of me. They appear to be of normal size, with no weird damage or stains that speak to anything suspicious. Just as I’m putting them back, I feel something in the back pocket. A small bulge, as if someone had forgotten some cash or a receipt.

  I take out a handwritten note and unfold it. It’s about half a normal page, and the handwriting is soft and tilts backward a little. It looks almost childish.

  Jesper,

  I’m writing to you because I think you owe me an explanation. I understand that love can end, I truly do. But abandoning me the night of our engagement dinner, without any explanation, is not okay. And then to pretend like I don’t exist when I try to get hold of you—how do you think that makes me feel? If you wanted to hurt me, you’ve certainly succeeded.

  What you don’t know is that I’m pregnant with our child. And no matter how you feel about me, we have to talk about the baby. I don’t expect you to be a father, but I have to discuss the situation with you. I think you owe me that much at least.

  Emma

  EMMA

  ONE MONTH EARLIER

  I lie in bed with my aching stomach, thinking about Woody. About the day Elin walked in on us.

  He and I were standing in the storage r
oom when I asked Woody:

  “Have you ever felt like none of this is real. Like your life is just a movie?”

  “That’s a strange question. What do you mean?”

  He hung his hammer on a hook on the wall. The hall outside was empty; it was half past twelve and all the other students were either in the cafeteria or outside in the schoolyard.

  “I just mean that life feels sort of unreal sometimes. You never feel that way?”

  “No.”

  He gave me a long, searching look.

  “Maybe that’s because you just lost your dad,” he said more softly.

  I didn’t respond. Didn’t want to think about Dad. About the men who came and carried him out or about Mom, who’d been sleeping on the bathroom floor since he disappeared.

  Woody took out the broom, started sweeping the floor in silence. His key ring rattled slightly as he leaned forward. I took a step back until I was standing against the wall, trying my best to take up as little space as possible, feeling the cold concrete on my shoulder blades. Then he put the broom against the wall, leaned back against the bench, looked at me, and gently shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’ll get easier.”

  “How do you know that? Everybody says that, but how do they know?”

  Woody brushed a little sawdust from his jeans. “I know. My dad died when I was your age. He survived a dictatorship, but died of a heart attack when we got to Sweden. Stupid, right?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I thought I was so strong,” he continued. “Thought I could handle it, but I ended up in a really bad place. I wish I’d had someone to talk to. Someone who’d have listened to me and understood.”

  “What happened?”

  Woody looked at his hands. Inspecting them as if he wanted to make sure they were clean. He had an ugly gash on one thumb, which had started to heal. There was a dirty Band-Aid on the little finger of the other hand.

  “I messed up.”