The Ice Beneath Her

by Camilla Grebe

  When I go back to the basement windows on the short side, I note that they’re completely hidden from view. This side of the house is obscured behind a hillock of sprawling pines. The full moon shines between the branches. It provides just enough light for me to see what I’m doing. I look in through the window again. The washing machine is conveniently placed beneath the window; it should work as a landing surface. Cautiously, I take the chisel and hammer from my bag and realize I don’t have the faintest idea how to break in through a window. I try using the chisel and hammer to pry the window open.

  It doesn’t work. All I do is make an ugly gash in the wood.

  I wipe the sweat from my brow. Then lift up the hammer and hesitantly pound it into the middle of the glass. The glass tumbles down onto the ground and into the basement. I lift up my hammer again and again. Knocking away every single piece of glass from the window frame. Then I sink down on my haunches and hold my breath, listening for approaching steps or angry voices.

  Nothing.

  It’s just as quiet and still as before. The full moon is reflected in the shards of glass scattered on the ground in front of me, as if the sky broke into a thousand little pieces and fell at my feet.

  I sit down next to the window and peer into the dark room. All I have to do is step in and jump down onto the washing machine. After some hesitation, I put the chisel and hammer back in my bag and throw it into the basement. It lands with a dull thud on the floor. Then I crawl inside, sit on the ledge, bracing myself against the window frame, and jump.

  It goes much smoother than I expected. Standing in Jesper’s basement, I regret not coming here earlier. It smells faintly of detergent and mildew. A dryer sits next to the washing machine and a pile of dirty laundry lies in a corner.

  Not especially glamorous.

  When I open the door, I see I’m bleeding from a wound on my hand. I must have cut myself without noticing it as I climbed in through the window. It doesn’t drip, it flows, and I see a deep gash between my thumb and forefinger.

  I go over to the cabinet next to the washing machine, open it, and see a basket inside. It seems to be filled with dirty laundry. I choose a small white item. It’s only when I wrap it around my injured hand that I realize what it is: a pair of women’s panties. I shudder, but decide they’ll have to do. Then I head into the house.

  I’m a little surprised. The house seems a little worse for wear. The white walls are discolored and the hardwood flooring is scratched, and here and there missing a piece. But the decor is typical of Jesper: severe Danish furniture and lamps that I recognize from interior design magazines. The shiny chrome and lacquered surfaces reflect the moonlight. Large black-and-white photos of animals and naked women illuminated in backlight hang on the walls. It’s like a stab to the heart. This could have been our home.

  I’m suddenly overpowered by the tears that have been lodged somewhere in my throat since I climbed into this house. I sink down onto a black leather sofa and let them flow. The moon’s soft light spills across the floor. A damp scent of stale cigarette smoke hovers in the air. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come here, after all. Everything feels so much more pronounced here, in his home. His betrayal feels so much bigger, and so impossible to understand.

  I look around the room. A photograph stands in the bookcase: Jesper and a group of women on a beach. The women, all in bikinis, are slim and beautiful and have small, shapely breasts—completely unlike my udders. A dark-haired woman stands very close to Jesper. Too close. So close I know she has to be more than a friend.

  I turn away, and my stomach cramps up again.

  Does she know—that dark-haired woman—that he’s cheating on her, or was she also deluded into thinking she’s the only one? Maybe I should tell her? Then it strikes me: She might know about me; Jesper might have even left me for her. Maybe she knew exactly what she was doing when she got together with Jesper. She might even have knowingly maneuvered me out.

  The other woman.

  This could also explain the hasty breakup and lack of explanation. Suddenly, I know it had to be so. The beautiful dark-haired woman must have taken Jesper from me; whether she knows it or not, she’s the reason I lost him. I feel a sudden fury toward her. I knock the picture down from the shelf, and it falls to the floor. As the sound of breaking glass echoes through the room, I walk away without turning around.

  Everything in the kitchen is new and glossy. The black lacquered kitchen cabinets have no handles, and it takes me a while to figure out that you open them by giving them a light nudge. The dishes are black, too, and the slender wineglasses are pushed in between plates and bowls. Two black trays with small white elephants on them lean behind the chrome tap, which resembles a shower hose.

  I run my hand over the stainless steel counter. Not a crumb, not a speck of dust. Just that cold, clinically clean metal sheet. The only thing that distinguishes this kitchen from an autopsy room is the black dining table and the drawing hanging on the wall above it. My guess is that it’s of a snowman, but I’m not sure. It’s not very good. You’d have to be a parent to love a drawing like that. “For Jesper” is scrawled above the snowman in straggly blue letters.

  Of course. That’s how it is. The other woman has a child, but Jesper’s not the father. They must have met later, when Jesper and I were together. And then he left me for her.

  For them.

  A refrigerator is hidden behind one of the glossy cabinet doors. I inspect its contents: milk, juice, butter, eggs, and half a bottle of white wine with the cork pressed down. Nothing particularly exciting. On the bottom shelf stands a plastic container of leftovers. I gently lift off the lid: meatballs and macaroni, with a dry lump of ketchup in the corner.

  I put the plastic container on the table, go back to the refrigerator, and take out the bottle of wine. I set it down next to the macaroni and think for a moment. In the window, next to a drooping ivy tied up in a bow, is a small stereo with an iPod on it. I turn it on and scroll through the playlists, select a song at random and push play. Then I sit down at the table.

  Frank Sinatra sings Christmas carols for me while I eat cold meatballs and drink Jesper’s chardonnay. When he sings about “the happy season,” I feel the rage inside me come to life again. I have never seen it so clearly before, how much his glossy, prosperous life differs from my hermitlike existence in my small apartment. It’s not fair, and someone has to make him understand that. And that someone is me.

  —

  His bed is wide and soft and feels luxurious. I try it out, and find that it’s wide enough to lie on both lengthwise and crosswise. The sheets smell faintly of soap or some sort of perfume. On the bedside table lie a few paperback mystery novels and a couple of business journals. I gently pull out the bedside drawer and look inside: a cellphone charger, lip balm, and some lube.

  Once again, I feel something cramp inside. My stomach contracts, and that familiar lump parks itself in my throat. I’ve gotten too close to the truth I was searching for, and now I have to pay the price for my curiosity. The knowledge is more painful than I ever imagined. Of course, I wanted to know where Jesper was and why he didn’t get ahold of me. But I didn’t want to see the pictures of him and the other woman, didn’t want to smell their sheets or rummage in their dirty laundry.

  The tears press behind my eyelids, and I let them come. I bury my face in a down pillow and sob. Unleashing the despair I’ve carried for so long.

  —

  When I wake up it’s light outside. At first I don’t know where I am, then I see my hand. The white panties wrapped around my wound are almost completely soaked with dried blood.

  I sit up, gently unwind the makeshift bandage. At least it’s no longer bleeding. I poke the bloody panties down behind the headboard with a vague feeling of revulsion, but also with sadness—they remind me of the baby I lost.

  When I stand up, I feel how stiff I am. It’s as if my body doesn’t really want to obey me as I walk over to the window. I have n
o idea what time it is or how long I slept, but the sun is up, and the world outside is a shimmering white. A thin layer of snow covers everything in sight. In the distance, I see a car approaching.

  I stand there a few seconds before I understand what’s about to happen. The car, now less than a block away, is a black SUV that I recognize as Jesper’s. I panic, looking around the room, scrambling for my bag and coat, and run down the stairs and back into the basement. I don’t know how much time I have. One minute? Thirty seconds? Without turning around I throw my bag out the window, then jump out myself. Maybe I imagine it, but at the moment I stand up, I think I hear a door slam.

  I turn and run between the pine trees and houses, down toward the water. After a minute, I see a shed on a small hill, with an unobstructed view of Jesper’s house. I run to it and look in through the dirty windows. Garden furniture is piled up. A broken barbecue stands in a corner. An old sofa stands alone in the middle of the floor. I turn around, looking at the house the shed belongs to. It seems abandoned. The windows on the lower floor are boarded up, and under the snow I see what I take to be the outline of a gutter that’s fallen off the side of the house onto the overgrown grass.

  As I leave the abandoned house behind me, I know I’ve just made an important discovery.

  —

  There are new bills. I sit at the kitchen table, looking at a pile that in just a few days has grown almost twice as big as it was. I don’t know what to do. I have no jewelry or any other valuables left to sell. Even the painting that used to hang above my bed, which for some reason was valuable, is gone. I think of those childish football players in pastel colors gathered around the football. If what I was told when I inherited it is right, it was worth at least three hundred thousand kronor. But that doesn’t matter now, since Jesper took it. It strikes me that I should have been searching Jesper’s house for it while I was there, instead of eating mealy comfort food and crying myself to sleep in his bed.

  Outside my window, snow is falling. Christmas will be here soon. This will be the first Christmas without Mom, and I still have no idea how to celebrate. Christmas isn’t really that important to me: As far as I’m concerned, bringing home pizza and renting a movie work just as well as a traditional celebration. Maybe even better, because there’s something about Christmas that induces a slight, but still perceptible anxiety. I think I felt it as a child too, but then the anxiety was about other things: how to appreciate my gifts enough to keep Mom and Dad from getting sad and, even more important, how to become invisible by the time they got drunk and loud and erratic.

  I weigh the bills in my hand, thinking for a moment, then put them back in the bread bin. The lid closes with a screech that sounds like a sob.

  I go into the bathroom, pull the brush through my long hair, and realize I don’t recognize the woman staring back at me from the mirror. She looks older than me. Bitter. Weak, in a feminine, subservient way. Like a woman in a costume drama who has to be saved and protected. It pisses me off, because the last thing I want to be is weak. I close my eyes and remember the feeling of control and power I had after the fire, and I know I have to get it back: strength, focus, fearlessness. I have to change, on the inside and maybe on the outside too.

  There’s a pair of nail scissors under the mirror, old and warped and so dull the nails just fold when you use it. But I pick them up anyway, grab ahold of my hair, and start to saw my way through it. It falls onto the floor like the snow outside my window. I cut through one lock after another. Hair slowly covers the floor, and the woman in the mirror changes before my eyes.

  At first I don’t like it. It starts out as a pageboy cut that I think makes me look like an old lady librarian. I decide it has to be shorter. Carefully, I work my way around my head again with those little scissors. My thumb and forefinger burn from the effort. But in the end I’m satisfied.

  I have finally become someone else.

  PETER

  Darkness falls quickly over Stockholm, and the traffic gets worse as I drive from the Djursholm suburb toward the police station on Kungsholmen. I’m thinking about Jesper Orre’s frozen body in the green sandbox. About that bloody face covered with frost. And as usual when I run into death, the image of my sister, Annika, appears before my eyes: Annika basking on the rocks that summer so many years ago. Her lean body that had just started to curve, the smell of cigarette smoke hovering over dry heather, and the feel of sharp needles under my thin-skinned feet.

  What would have happened if I hadn’t told my mother about Annika’s sneaking a cigarette down by the cliffs? Would she be alive today?

  I think my mother suspected I felt guilty for Annika’s death, because she told me again and again that it was an accident no one could be blamed for. She repeated it almost like a mantra. Though maybe that was because it was too painful to admit that Annika swam to her death of her own free will.

  Annika was the first. She taught me that life was not forever. Others followed: Petter, the red-haired boy in 7B, drove his moped into a tree and was brain-dead for four weeks until his father turned off the respirator, packed a bag, left for Thailand, and never came back. Marie, who was at the police academy with me, got cancer at twenty-five. She promised everyone she’d be back soon, even when she was lying in hospice.

  And then my mother, of course.

  After her, I stopped counting. It seemed like everyone around me died—a terrible feeling. It made me feel like my turn was next. And like everything that I spent my time on—murder investigations, take-out pizza in front of the TV, or dreary Internet porn—was meaningless. And like I might as well jump off the West Bridge, because no one would miss me anyway—as soon as the ripples on the water ceased, I’d be forgotten.

  It’s true: No one on earth depends on me. No one really needs me. Not my colleagues, not Janet. Not Albin.

  Not really.

  Still. You could kill yourself, or you could have a beer. And when the choice was between the bridge or the pub, I always chose the pub.

  —

  Sanchez stands in front of the evidence wall, pulls her hair into a ponytail, and says:

  “We got the call just after three from someone named Amelie Hökberg, who lives on Strandvägen in Djursholm. She’s the mother of Alexander Hökberg, ten years old, who, along with his friend Pontus Gerloff, found Orre’s body in the sandbox. Apparently, the boys had been playing all afternoon, and Alexander was about to hide in the box when he found Orre.”

  Sanchez points at the map pinned to the board. “The sandbox is four hundred yards west of Orre’s house, and stands in a wooded area. It takes about seven minutes to walk there from Orre’s home.”

  “How long had he been lying there?” Manfred asks.

  “The coroner can’t say yet. There has to be an autopsy first, and the body has to thaw before she can do that. It will take at least a day.”

  “What can she say?” I ask.

  “He had injuries on his head and forehead. He received a blow or suffered some other form of trauma. And he probably froze to death.”

  I look at Hanne. She seems strangely calm, almost serene, sitting next to the small window with its Advent candles. She doesn’t seem at all sick, I think, and remember my mother’s emaciated, cancer-ravaged body.

  “Okay. Orre murders Emma Bohman,” Manfred says, and stretches his huge body so that his vest tightens precariously over his stomach. “So how in the hell did he end up in the sandbox?”

  The room is silent for a moment.

  “Maybe he was hiding?” Sanchez suggests. “He was on the run from a crime scene, injured, and confused. Maybe he ran into someone and hid in the sandbox. And then…”

  She falls silent. The only sound is the hum of the ventilation system. It’s eight o’clock and most of our colleagues have already gone home. A lone detective is sitting at the far end of the room in front of his computer, seemingly engrossed in something. Outside, the lights of Kungsholmen glitter against the black winter sky.

 
“So Orre kills Emma Bohman, that’s our theory,” Manfred continues. “He chops off her head. Props open her eyes with matches and flees without a wallet, phone, or coat. Doesn’t even take a pair of used lady’s panties to sniff on. Then he climbs into a sandbox and dies. Glad we have the sequence of events cleared up. Who wants to call the prosecutor?”

  Sanchez sighs loudly.

  “Do you have to be so…fucking critical all the time? I didn’t say that’s the way it happened. I’m just trying to find an explanation that fits the evidence…”

  “The problem is that we don’t have any evidence. We don’t even know the identity of the woman in Orre’s house. How the hell can we say what really happened? Can you answer that?”

  Sanchez crosses her arms and pinches her lips. Looks up at the ceiling. Blinks. For a moment it seems like she might start crying. I know how much pressure we’re all under, and I feel sorry for her. She’s doing her best. She always does her best; that’s who she is. A dog can’t be anything other than a dog. And Sanchez can only be Sanchez. One day she’ll be a brilliant detective, and maybe that’s what irritates Manfred.

  “You know what? I don’t need to take this shit from you, Manfred. I’m going to drive to Forensic Medicine in Solna right now and find that odontologist. Call me if you need anything.”

  She turns around and disappears down the hall. The sound of her sharp heels fades away.

  “Was that necessary?” I ask, and meet Manfred’s eyes.

  “Jesus Christ, Lindgren. Don’t tell me you buy that theory?”

  “She’s doing the best she can.”

  Manfred shakes his head slowly. “I’m sorry, but that’s not enough.”

  He stands up, reaches for the coat hanging on the back of his chair, and says:

  “I have to go home for a few hours and relieve Afsaneh. Call me if something happens. Otherwise, I’ll be back in two or three hours.”