The picture was on the kitchen table. He picked it up and looked at it. Who had done that? Who could do anything like that? Put up your hand, whoever did it. Come on, hands up!
He put up his right hand, and held the Polaroid photo in his left, as he was left-handed. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Why should he do it any differently? Hold the photo in his right hand? He shook his head, and wondered what to do with the picture. He couldn’t make up his mind. As usual.
But he had made up his mind, hadn’t he?
He lowered his right hand and pinned the photo to the wall using a thumbtack with a black head. He took a close look at it. They were looking back at him, but something wasn’t right. The guy on the sofa seemed to be about to nod, but evidently he’d prevented his head from falling forward at the last minute. That was cleverly done. The same applied to her. C-l-e-v-e-r.
He was crying now. Apart from that it was quiet everywhere. Quiet. Snow quieted everything down. He was crying, and could hear his own misery. He knew there was somebody listening, but that devil hadn’t put in an appearance yet.
He didn’t want it to be quiet. He went to the record player and chose an LP, put it on, and hummed along with the music-the old hometown looks the same, as I step down from the train-now that was real music, he’d had the feeling that she would like it when he played Tom for her the first time, but she’d laughed at him. Not like later, when she did that terrible thing to him. “Switch it off.” She’d laughed. “It reminds me of home. For God’s sake, ha ha ha, switch it off before it kills me.”
She’d looked through his records, and laughed even more.
“Is this what you listen to? Oh no, I don’t think I can survive this.”
Ha ha ha. H-a h-a h-a.
Almost like when it happened. He ought to have realized.
“What’s the matter?” his father had asked on one occasion. “There’s something the matter with you.” The next time he went home he hadn’t said anything at all, because there was nothing more for him to say, was there? Never again.
The sun came out and the whole room was lit up. The photograph melted into the light. Burned up. I can forget it now, he thought.
Fredrik Halders and Aneta Djanali went to Hair.
“Unisex,” Halders said. Young men and women cut the hair of young men and women. Halders had put all that behind him. He eyed his crew cut in the mirrors on every side. Nothing for an artist of hirsute inclinations to exploit, but at least he still owned his own skull.
“Do you patronize places like this?” he asked.
“Eh?”
“Do you come to places like this to get your Afro curls straightened out?”
“Shut up,” Djanali said to Halders, via one of the mirrors.
They were an odd couple. It wasn’t the first time she’d made that observation.
“What can I do for you?” asked a woman in her thirties who emerged from a room on the left and stationed herself behind the counter and the cash register where they were standing. She was very tall, not far short of six feet, wearing a black blouse and a black skirt. Her hair was parted, an apparently simple style. Halders breathed in all the pleasant perfumes and listened to the music from the local radio station. He felt out of place, and no doubt all the others present felt that he was out of place as well. Come on, get a grip. You are with Aneta. You have to show her what you can do. Screw all the fags.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions about Louise Valker,” said Djanali, producing her ID card. “We’re from the crime unit.” The woman nodded, poker-faced. “Are you the owner of this establishment?”
“Yes. My name is Irma Fletcher.” She looked at the doorway she’d just come through. “Perhaps we could go to my office.”
Once there, they sat around an oblong table with a glass surface. There were several glossy magazines strewn over it. All Halders could see on the covers were female heads; he closed his eyes, then looked at the walls, where he found a number of black-and-white fashion posters depicting women in clothes that had been torn to shreds. They looked as if they’d been splattered with blood. One woman was lying on the floor, her eyes staring. In the background was a man in an overcoat and hat carrying a machine gun. Halders looked at the outline and guessed that it was a dummy Uzi.
“What the hell is that?” said Halders, gesturing toward the wall.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s that? Have you been swiping pictures from the forensic lab? Photos from a murder scene?”
The woman looked at the wall and started to blush. She’ll soon be so hot that her makeup will melt, thought Djanali. “Oh, I thought we’d taken them down. I suppose it’s been overlooked. They’ve been hanging there for a while and then, well, after a while people only see the wall.” Her face was still scarlet. “But they are very unsuitable.”
“What are they?” Halders insisted.
“Er… well… they are a series of new fashion photographs.” She looked at the wall again. “We’ve had quite a few like that this autumn.”
“Is this the fashion for the new millennium?” Djanali wondered.
‘A rush of blood to the head,“ Halders said. ”Brave New World.“
Irma Fletcher looked as if she were shouldering the shame of the whole planet. She leaped to her feet, pulled down all three of the posters, crumpled them up, and stuffed them into a wastepaper basket next to the door. Then she sat down again.
“As far as we can make out, Louise Valker hasn’t been working here for the last couple of months?” Aneta Djanali was checking her notes.
“No. She worked sort of seasonally. I mean, she came to help out when we needed her. No regular pattern to it, in fact.”
“It sounds a bit shady.”
“That’s what I meant when I said ‘no regular pattern.’ But that seemed to be how she wanted it.”
“That’s how she wanted it?”
“I offered her a part-time job with regular hours a year or so ago, but she turned it down.”
“Turned it down? That must be unusual.”
Irma Fletcher shrugged.
“She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask her.”
“Was she any good?”
“Yes. She was competent enough. Maybe not too keen to learn anything new. But, there again, I suppose she wasn’t exactly a youngster anymore. I don’t know. And I’d rather not speculate.”
“Did she socialize with any of the other hairdressers here?”
“Not as far as I know. Feel free to ask them, but I don’t think so.”
“So she kept to herself.”
“We all work hard here, and you could say that we all keep to ourselves. Some of them have their own chairs, and they’re running their own business under my umbrella. And then everybody goes home when we close up shop.”
“Did you get to know her at all?”
“No, not really. We once had a coffee together at the café next door-that was when I offered her the job. I think that was the only time.”
“Can you tell us anything about her? What she was like?”
“She liked men.”
“Excuse me?”
“I had the impression that she was very interested in men. A bit of a flirt, you might say. That’s something you tend to notice.”
“Christian was a good salesman. What a tragedy.”
It was afternoon. They were sitting in an office with a view over Gothenburg-apart from Halders, who preferred to stand.
Comec’s open-plan office was on the twelfth floor. People were leaning over computers and conducting conversations. They’re talking over the computers’ heads, thought Halders. I’d better stop thinking along those lines.
Comec’s head of sales and personnel was sitting in front of them, looking serious at one moment and cheerful the next. He keeps forgetting himself, Djanali thought.
It was early afternoon on Friday, and all the men were casually dressed in checked shirts, T-shirts under comfortable tweed, polo shirts. The few women Halders could see were dressed normally. Maybe the occasional one in jeans. The sales boss was dressed in a black T-shirt under a black single-breasted jacket, boots, black jeans.
Casual Friday, Djanali thought. When Comec becomes Comic.
“In what way was he good?” Halders asked.
“Knew what he was doing. Conscientious. Got results.”
“Why didn’t you miss him, then?”
“Excuse me?”
“He was absent for ten days. Why didn’t you miss him?”
“In the first place that’s not how we work here,” said the man, crossing his legs. “We don’t keep a daily check on our workforce in that way. They are highly qualified people who take care of themselves.”
Highly qualified, my ass, Halders thought. The only thing…
“And in the second place, Christian had taken a week’s vacation around that time. I didn’t know about it until later.”
“But that was only a week.”
“As I said, our staff take care of themselves. Perhaps he hadn’t booked anything for the days before and after his vacation. I haven’t checked that. Yet.” He looked at Halders, perhaps somewhat arro gantly. Halders wasn’t sure, and couldn’t be bothered to find out.
“Did you know Christian?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did you know him socially? Did you mix in your private lives?”
“No. Maybe the occasional beer with the guys,” he said, and looked at Djanali. “With the team, I mean.”
“Okay. Anything else?” asked Halders.
“What do you mean?”
“Can you tell us anything about his personality? Did he ever talk about his friends? Or his wife? Anything at all apart from Comec?”
“Only the usual.”
“What’s the usual?” Djanali asked.
“You know, girls, that sort of thing.”
They took the number-four tram to Hagen. Angela had been surprised when he suggested it.
“I thought you never went by tram.”
“I am tonight.”
“Why?”
What could he say? That he wanted to see the town in the same way as most people see it? Huh. He simply didn’t want to take a taxi, or to drive himself. He also wanted to walk a bit.
“I feel like walking. Let’s walk as far as the Avenue and take the tram from there. Are you ready?”
“Surely you can see that I’m not ready,” she said from the bathroom.
“Okay. I’ll wait.”
She brushed her hair and put a bit of gloss on her lips. She looked in the mirror and opened her eyes wide. The light in the bathroom wasn’t good. She had bags under her eyes in there. They weren’t there when she looked in a mirror at the hospital. She made a face at the mirror. It’s not the light. You want a house. Your apartment days should be over. A house by the sea.
Winter had gone to the living room and was standing by the window. Coltrane was playing with Red Garland. “Soft Lights and Sweet Music.”
The city was wrapped in gauze. Soft light shone out through the bandages. Lights blinked on top of high buildings. Gothenburg had acquired a different topography in recent years. It was reaching up to the sky. Airplanes cruised between its arms on their way down.
He looked down. Down there. Somewhere. How many times have I stood here and thought: the answer is down there, the solution. The man I’m going to meet is down there somewhere, perhaps he’s walking past at this very moment. He’s walking through the park. Now he’s passing the obelisk. I’ve done that as well. I’ve kept meeting him.
“Ready,” Angela said from the hall. The music came to an end at the same moment, and it was the last track. He switched it off and left the room.
As they were waiting for the elevator an elderly man came out of Mrs. Malmer’s flat and closed the door carefully behind him. He hesitated when he noticed them, but nodded and stood alongside them to wait. He was tall, graying hair, moles on his face.
“Who was that?” she asked when they left the building and started walking toward the Avenue. The stranger had disappeared in the opposite direction.
“Never seen him before.”
“Hmm.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
There were a lot of people waiting at bus and tram stops in Vasaplatsen. Their breath came out of their mouths like smoke. Angela could feel the cold through her coat and wished she was wearing a hat. Her ears were freezing cold already. Twenty degrees, and it was still only November. Perhaps it will be up to fifty on Christmas Eve.
“There’s a colleague of yours there,” she said.
“Where?”
“In the police car on the other side.”
“Yes, I can see it.”
“It’s not moving.”
“Well…”
“Can you see what it is?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where it comes from.”
“The district? I suppose it ought to be from Lorensberg. Why?”
“Noth-”
“Now I remember. We can…”
The car started moving and passed by them. Winter waved at it.
“Simon Morelius,” he said.
“Was that the driver? Do you know him?”
“Only by sight.”
The tram was full when they eventually got on, and they stood in the middle, holding on to the straps. Angela was standing with her legs apart so as not to lose her balance, and seemed to be protecting her stomach. Not such a bright idea after all, Erik, he thought.
A lot of passengers got off at Kungsportsplatsen and Angela was able to sit down. It was quiet where they were, but somebody was muttering away and occasionally shouting threats at the back. Everybody looked the other way. Several drunks came on board at Brunnsparken. Winter had to move.
After two more stops the seat next to Angela became vacant. There was a smell of smoke and alcohol in the tram, and sweat from the fat man in front. Some teenage girls were staring at Winter. A black man was playing something on his Walkman that was making him jerk his head from side to side. At Järntorget a group of young men got on. They were all wearing black leather jackets covered in names and symbols. A devil, two witches. An ax dripping with blood. There was a clanking noise from the shopping bags full of beer cans when they put them on the floor, which was covered in black slush. A teenage couple three rows ahead of them kept turning around, apparently to look at him, or at Angela. There was something vaguely familiar about the girl. He looked out the window. A police car overtook them as they approached Stigberget. The long arm of the law again, he thought.
Lotta Winter welcomed them in a cloud of garlic and herbs.
“Where are the girls?” asked Winter.
“It’s Friday night. Eight o‘clock. They won’t stay at home anymore, not even for you, Erik. Let me give you both a hug!” She embraced them. “You’re FREEZING!”
“They’ll be back before eleven, won’t they? The girls?”
“Grow up.”
“He’ll find out eventually,” Angela said.
“What can I get you to drink?” Lotta asked.
“I’ll have some wine, please. Angela will just have water.”
“Have you spoken to Mom?”
“Yes.”
“How was she?”
“Still says she’s coming for Christmas.”
“How was she otherwise, did you think?”
“As you said, she seems to be… strong. Let’s hope she can keep it up.”
Let’s hope she can, for all our sakes, thought Lotta, as she poured the drinks.