The Ice Beneath Her

by Camilla Grebe

  I try to look worried, shrink a little on my chair. “But it doesn’t really feel right telling you all this.” He widens his pale eyes, touches my arm lightly.

  “Your loyalty is admirable, but you have to think about your colleagues now. You have to think about them, because he won’t. The only thing Jesper Orre cares about is money. He doesn’t give a damn about any of you. Never forget that. Jesper Orre doesn’t give a shit about you, Emma.”

  I sigh. Nod slowly. He doesn’t know how right he is.

  “Okay. I’ll tell you. Everyone’s talking about it anyway. His house burnt down yesterday, or maybe it was his garage. And apparently the police think he started it himself.”

  There’s a twitch in the corner of his eye as he leans closer toward me. Something has sprung to life in his gaze. He’s very animated now, seems to have forgotten about his bun. He’s laid it on his plate and pushed it aside. He still has his hand on my forearm, and I gently twist out of his grip.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles when he realizes that he’s been holding on to me. “Do you know why he did it?”

  I shrug and look at him with what I hope is an innocent expression. “No clue. But the garage was apparently full of expensive cars.”

  “So an insurance thing, then?”

  I shake my head slowly. “I don’t know. It sounds a little weird that he would have done it himself. Especially if he had his cars in there.”

  He smiles indulgently, and I realize he’s buying my naïve act—hook, line, and sinker. “Do you know if anyone can confirm this?”

  “No, but the police surely know about the fire.”

  He nods silently.

  “Emma, this is important. If you know anything else about Jesper, you should tell me now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, does he have any other problems?”

  I try to look like I’m thinking hard, searching every corner of my memory. Then I nod. “Well, maybe the investigation.”

  “The investigation?”

  “Yeah, C&M’s finance department is investigating him.”

  “Do you know why?”

  I tilt my head to one side. Widen my eyes and twist a long strand of hair between my fingers.

  “They say he let the company pay for his private birthday party. But that’s probably just BS. I mean, I’m sure he could afford to pay for it himself?”

  —

  I treat myself to wine and take-out pizza that night. Light the candles—the same candles I lit for our engagement dinner. I put on music, too, and suddenly everything feels easier. More manageable, maybe. I have a clear mission now: seeking justice. Like I’ve become a kind of instrument. There’s something liberating about that. Surrendering to something larger and more important than yourself is freeing. To live for only one thing means you no longer have to make decisions—the road ahead is already mapped out.

  I can’t drink too much, I think. Can’t risk being hungover, slow and stupid. Not now. Every hour, every minute, even every second is important if I’m going to be able to carry through on what I need to do.

  Discipline. Restraint. Self-control.

  Justice.

  I press the cork back into the wine bottle after the second glass. Lean over the kitchen sink and drink cold water from the tap. My hair falls down into the sink. It glistens under the overhead light. What beautiful hair I have, I think.

  I go into the bathroom. Meet my reflection and almost lose my breath. My hair glows; my skin is so pale it almost shimmers. And I see it: I’m beautiful. I am truly beautiful. Why have I always thought I was chubby and boring and childish when I looked at myself in the mirror? Why have I never seen myself clearly? It didn’t matter how many times Jesper said it to me, I never believed him. But now I can see it for myself.

  I’m strong. Beautiful. And I don’t need anyone. Not even Jesper. Especially not Jesper.

  —

  The subway is running late, but I barely notice. Instead, I sit on the platform with my nose buried in a newspaper, tracing the text with my index finger, as if afraid to miss a single word. “Controversial CEO Suspected of Arson and Breach of Faith,” I read. The story describes a number of abuses that the journalist believes have been committed by Orre and discovered by the company. “The controversy surrounding the fashion king intensifies,” he writes, before concluding the article by speculating on how long the shareholders and board will allow Jesper Orre to remain in charge. A graph next to the text shows how the company’s stock prices have plummeted in recent months. At the bottom of the story is a small picture of the man I met yesterday—the journalist with the crumbs around his mouth who listened so intently to my story.

  It was almost too easy, I think. He ate it up, wanting so desperately to believe every word I said. Or?

  Cosmic balance?

  Maybe there is some kind of higher power at work after all.

  As I cross the square, my steps grow lighter. An almost warm breeze caresses my hair. The clouds chase one another above my head, and between them I catch glimpses of blue. Outside the store, the bums are already in place, sharing the day’s first bottle of something strong. When I look at them, I see people who never took control of their lives, who surrendered to their fate rather than standing up and fighting back. If I hadn’t taken my revenge on Jesper, I might have become one of them: downtrodden, crushed. A human wreck with no goals or purpose, swirling as aimlessly as leaves in the wind.

  —

  When I arrive at the store, Olga is standing outside smoking. There’s something odd about her posture, the way she moves her cigarette to and from her mouth. Something jerky and stiff. She looks nervous. Also, she almost never smokes outside the entrance; she always goes to the garbage room in the back. According to the manual from the corporate office, we’re not allowed to stand outside the store smoking. Apparently, it looks bad.

  When she sees me, she waves her arms over her head as if she’s been waiting for me. She flicks away her cigarette, and the wind catches it immediately, carrying it past the vodka-drinking men in their ratty jackets and toward the broken fountain in the center of the square.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “The police are here,” she stage-whispers to me as her light blue eyes widen. A gust of wind catches her thin hair, exposing her dark roots.

  “The police?”

  “They want to talk to you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You.”

  “About what?”

  “No clue. I thought you knew.”

  I shrug, trying to look unconcerned, but as I enter the store, my pulse starts to race and a drop of sweat slides down between my shoulder blades. I can feel Olga’s eyes burning into my back. It wasn’t nervousness that made her stand outside waiting for me, I realize now, but impatient curiosity.

  They’re standing with Mahnoor at the checkout counter. A man and woman in their forties, wearing plainclothes. They could be customers, that’s how normal they look. The man is short, stocky, with close-cropped, graying blond hair. He’s haggard in a handsome way. Like a villain in an action movie. The woman is tall, thin, and stooped over. Her hair is ash blond, ratty, and long. It lifts from her shoulders as she turns and examines me with a critical eye.

  “Emma Bohman?” she says, and extends a bony hand that squeezes mine with surprising strength. “My name is Helena Berg, and I’m with the police. We’d like to talk to you.”

  Her colleague has crept up on my left side without my noticing it.

  “Johnny Lappalainen,” he says. Then silence. Nothing else. No title, no further explanation.

  Behind Johnny’s shoulder I glimpse Mahnoor. Her eyes are big and black, and I can see she’s curious as to what this is all about. I shake my head slowly at her: No, I don’t know what they want.

  “We’d like you to come with us down to the police station for questioning,” the skinny woman says, and looks at me with an expressionless stare. I’ve already forgotten her name. There�
�s no room for her name in my consciousness right now; every nook and corner is occupied. I desperately try to sort out the events of this last week. To go through every critical moment. Did someone see me outside Jesper’s garage that night? Could the man in the paint store have contacted the police? Did Olga say something? But she doesn’t know what I’ve done. She only knows what Jesper did to me. Hardly that even, because I didn’t tell her everything.

  “Do I have to?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says the man abruptly, “but it won’t take long.”

  I look at Mahnoor again. She says nothing, but nods to me, as if she’s anxious for me to do what they say.

  —

  The policewoman with straggly hair sits opposite me in a small, white room with white furniture. There’s a laptop on the table between us, but nothing else. Up close, she looks older. Deep lines run from the corners of her mouth down to her chin, and there are streaks of gray at the roots of her hair.

  The man sits silently beside her. He strokes his short hair, as if wanting to ensure that every sparse strand is in place, and stares out the window. I follow his gaze. A pale autumn sun shines down onto the square and the empty fountain. Dead leaves fly around in the small whirlwinds over the pavement.

  “Do you recognize this?” the policewoman asks, opening a brown envelope. Something falls onto the white table with a bang: a tiny plastic bag with a small object that looks like a metal button. I pick up the bag, weighing it in my hand, and open it.

  It’s the ring.

  My engagement ring.

  “Yes,” I say. “This is my engagement ring.”

  “Are you sure?” the man asks.

  I nod.

  “Pretty sure. We never engraved it, but it looks like my ring, yes.”

  “When did you see it last?” he asks, and leans back until the chair makes a squeaking sound, as if protesting against his weight.

  “When I left it at the pawnshop on Storgatan. I needed the money.” The man and woman opposite me exchange a quick glance.

  “When and where did you buy it?” asks the woman, leaning over the table.

  “It’s an engagement ring, like I said. I didn’t buy it; it was given to me.”

  “Okay, just so we understand. When and where did you get it? And from whom?”

  I sigh. I don’t understand what they’re getting at. I look through the window, suddenly wishing I was sitting on that park bench outside in a dirty quilted jacket with a bottle of liquor in my hand. Like the bums outside the store this morning. Anything would be better than this.

  “I got it from my boyfriend, or fiancé. Two weeks ago. But then he broke up with me. I needed the money, so I left it at the pawnshop. That’s not illegal, is it?”

  The man shakes his head. “Of course not. But this ring was stolen from a jewelry shop on Linnégatan just over two weeks ago. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Stolen?”

  “Yes. It was stolen from the store. Pawnbrokers check every object they acquire against our list of stolen goods, so the ring was identified pretty quickly. And the pawnshop had your personal information. So now here we are.”

  A cold sensation starts to spread through my body. It creeps up from my feet, to my chest, and then to my head, until my whole body is in its iron grip. Did Jesper steal the ring? And if so, why? Did he simply not want to spend money on me, or is this also part of some sort of sick plan I couldn’t foresee?

  The woman leans over the table, fixing me with her eyes, and looks even more forbidding than before. I can see tiny, tiny hairs on her upper lip. I want to tell her to back off, don’t get any closer. With every inch she moves closer to me, the lump in my stomach grows. The whole situation is too close to the bone for me. I need distance. Space. I can’t take this intrusive closeness.

  “We think you stole the ring from the store, Emma.”

  I can’t answer, my mouth is so dry, like it’s full of sand. My tongue grates against the roof of my mouth. All I can do is shake my head. The man with the Finnish last name sighs deeply. I guess he’s heard every excuse imaginable in his career. He doesn’t believe me, I think. Neither of them believes me.

  “Emma. Look at this.”

  He turns the computer standing between us on the table toward me, and I see a grainy black-and-white picture. At first, I don’t know what it’s from, but then I recognize the interior of the jewelry shop. Small white text in the right corner displays the date and time. The policewoman presses play, and the image comes to life. A female clerk is talking while standing with her back to the camera. Her movements are jerky as she gestures and lifts up a small box. Then she points to a small table with two chairs and sits down at one of them with her back to the camera. The other person, the customer, follows her, sits down on the other chair, and takes off her gloves and hat.

  It’s me. The customer is me.

  The woman sitting opposite the clerk is me.

  Then the one that’s me touches the rings. Tries them on one after the other. I seem to smile, as if I’m enjoying the situation.

  “I’m trying on rings,” I say. “Jesper and I are trying on rings.”

  “We see that,” the man replies. “But from what I can see, you’re the only one in the store.”

  I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense. “Wait, stop,” I say.

  He shrugs. Stops the video. “We’ve looked at this several times.”

  “Rewind a few seconds.”

  He does as I say and starts the video again. “There,” I say. “Stop.”

  Behind me I see a grainy shadow moving toward the center of the picture. “There he is,” I say. “That’s him.”

  The police officers look at each other. Exchange a long, expressionless stare. When the woman begins to speak, I sense weariness in her voice.

  “You claim there was someone else with you at the store?”

  “Of course. You don’t try on engagement rings by yourself.”

  “And this other person was…?”

  “Jesper Orre. My fiancé.”

  “The Jesper Orre?”

  “Yes. The Jesper Orre.”

  PETER

  Hanne, Manfred, and Sanchez follow me into the small conference room and say hello to Helena Berg. She introduces herself and tells them she works at the Östermalm police station. There’s something vaguely familiar about her skinny body, her sharp features, and her thin, light brown hair. I wonder if we might have met before, but she doesn’t seem to recognize me.

  I wonder sometimes if there’s something about the way I look that makes people fail to notice me. Maybe I’m just too ordinary to make an impression on the people I meet. One of those guys you sit opposite from on the bus for a week without remembering. Not like Manfred, whom everyone in the building knows, which I guess is exactly why he dresses the way he does.

  Hanne and Manfred sit down next to Helena, and Sanchez and I sit opposite. I glance at Hanne. She looks just like always: calm and collected, with a notepad in her lap. Her facial expression is impassive. No trace of yesterday’s intimacy is left—she could have been a fellow passenger on the bus, one of those who doesn’t see me.

  Janet did that sometimes—ignored me, as if I weren’t there. Mostly when she wanted to punish me for something, like forgetting her birthday or not wanting to spend the whole weekend going to open houses.

  But Hanne’s not Janet.

  In fact, Janet and Hanne are just about as different as two people can be. There’s really no reason to compare Hanne’s behavior with Janet’s. At least not if I actually want to understand what Hanne is thinking.

  I turn toward Helena, who’s here to tell us about her meeting with Emma Bohman.

  “Thanks for coming,” I say.

  She shrugs her shoulders and smiles wryly.

  “Of course. I just wish I’d put two and two together earlier. But you know how it is—we meet so many people. So many nutcases…”

  I nod. The others at this table know exactl
y what it’s like to be a neighborhood police officer—we’ve all been there. Except Hanne.

  “Go ahead and tell them yourself,” I say. “Hanne and Manfred are participating in the investigation, and they haven’t heard anything about your interview with Emma Bohman.”

  “Okay,” Helena begins, nods thoughtfully, and says: “A little more than two weeks ago, we were contacted by a pawnshop in central Stockholm. Someone had brought in a pretty valuable diamond ring. An engagement ring. And when they checked it against our catalog of stolen items, they discovered the ring was taken from a jewelry store on Linnégatan a few weeks earlier. The ring had been left at the pawnshop by an Emma Bohman, who lives on Värtavägen, which is right next to Karlaplan and the jewelry store. My colleague Johnny Lappalainen and I interrogated Emma Bohman two weeks ago, and during our interrogation we also showed her a surveillance tape that places her at the jewelry shop at the time of the theft.”

  “And what did she say to that?” I ask.

  “She said she’d been in the shop, but she wasn’t there alone. According to her, she visited the store with her boyfriend, Jesper Orre, to look at engagement rings. And then she said that she’d neither stolen nor bought the ring—Orre had given it to her later.”

  “Could she prove it?”

  Helena shrugs slightly. “Not really. She pointed out a glimpse of someone else on the surveillance video and said it was Orre. But it was impossible to determine whether or not that was true. The film was poor quality and the person she pointed out could only be seen on the edge of the image. Anyway, we contacted Orre by phone to check her details, and he said he’d never heard of her, and certainly hadn’t bought a ring for her. He told us weirdos accuse him of things all the time, and said he was damned tired of being a public figure. And so…I guess that was all. Our workload is heavy, so the investigation hasn’t progressed any further. But when I saw the pictures of the murdered girl on TV and heard Orre was missing, I thought I’d better contact you. I’ve emailed you the interrogation report and surveillance video, in case you want to see them.”

  I take out the drawing of the dead woman. Put it on the table and flatten it with my hand.