Sun and Shadow Page 2

  The fridge was humming away. There were wineglasses on the kitchen table, and an empty wine bottle. On the work surface next to the cooker was an oblong dish with some dried-up lumps of tagliatelle. Next to it was a pan with the dregs of some mushroom sauce. The sauce had turned black. Three slices of tomato were slowly decomposing on a wooden chopping board.

  Three dinner plates were in the dishwasher, with some side plates and more glasses, cutlery, another saucepan.

  The tap was dripping; it needed a new washer. The sound could be heard throughout the apartment, day and night, but the couple on the living room sofa didn’t hear a thing.

  Items of clothing were strewn around them and traced a line from the kitchen and through the hall to the living room: men’s socks, a couple of pairs of trousers, a pair of stockings, a skimpy sweater. Near the sofa were‘a blouse, a shirt, some underwear. The sounds of the night drifted in through the window. Trams. A few cars. A sudden gust of wind. A laugh from somebody on the way home from a restaurant.

  The man and woman were naked. They were holding hands. They were turned toward each other. There was something odd about their heads.

  Was that right? Was that how it should be? Was that the image? He tried to conjure it up, tried to envisage it.

  He was in the kitchen. He walked through the hall. The clothes were on the floor. He put his hand over his eyes as he approached the sofa. Then he looked. Nobody there. He looked again and there they were, facing each other. Her face was so familiar.

  Their heads. Their HEADS.

  He rubbed his eyes. Now he could hear the street noise as he opened the car door. He could feel the rain on his face as he got out of the car and stood in the street in front of the building.

  He wished he could put the clock back. The people strolling down the street didn’t know, they knew nothing. Nothing. They didn’t know they were living in paradise.

  OCTOBER

  2

  Winter stood in the hall without switching on the light. Angela would be home in an hour, if not sooner.

  How long had he been living here? Ten years? Was it really ten years? Something like that. How many women had he brought back to his apartment during all that time? He preferred not to think about it. He could hold up both hands and count his fingers: that would probably be enough.

  He walked through the rooms illuminated by the light from the city streets. He smiled. Soon he’d have to wade through piles of underwear in the hall. A stocking draped over the back of the sofa. He knew Angela. You need a bit of untidiness in your life, she’d said. You’ll bring chaos, he’d said. About time, was her reply.

  What if she says no in the end? he’d thought not very long ago. Grown tired of him?

  The trams came and went in Vasaplatsen down below. The wall opposite the big window in the living room was white in the evening glow. Just to the side was the shiny red dot on the CD player. Winter went over to it and took out the Springsteen box he’d been sent at great expense last autumn by his London friend, DCI Steve MacDonald. He’d done it so that Winter would be impressed by how much the postage had cost and listen as seriously as he could. Winter liked jazz and MacDonald accepted that, but he’d damn well see to it that Winter got a decent education in all the good things he’d missed during his sheltered youth, growing up with John Coltrane.

  The strange thing was that he listened to even more jazz now that he’d started listening to rock as well, and he could hear different nuances in Coltrane, a new dark side. To his surprise he’d also discovered things he liked in simple rock. Perhaps that was just it. The simplicity.

  As you grow older you search for simplicity. I’m getting older. I’ll soon be forty. That’s old, relatively speaking. Maybe I’m not a simple person, but I can learn, still. Or perhaps I’ve always been a simple soul. Angela has noticed that. That’s why she’s picked me out of ten thousand others.

  He put the fourth disc into the CD player and selected the tenth track, his favorite all this last month, or at least ever since the decision was made. The decision. I’m happy with you in my arms, I’m happy with you in my heart, happy when I taste your kiss, I’m happy in love like this. The simple life. Angela had understood. Maybe he would find happiness.

  The ballad oozed through the room as he got undressed, happy, baby, come the dark, and suddenly he was in the shower thinking of nothing. He could hear the music through the water, and then the sound of a key as Angela let herself in.

  Lars Bergenhem drove over Älvsborg Bridge. The car was rocking in the wind. He was off duty, and when he came to the tunnel he wondered what the hell he was doing there. In the tunnel. In the car. He could be sitting at home, watching his two-year-old daughter as she slept. That’s what he used to do. Ada would sleep, and he would watch. He could be watching Martina cleaning up the kitchen after Ada’s evening meal. He could be doing the cleaning up himself.

  It had started the way it always did. A word neither of them understood. After Ada had fallen asleep it was so quiet that he didn’t have the strength to try to find words that wouldn’t make everything worse. He was used to investigations, but this was too much for him. He was a detective, but he wasn’t a detective of love. Didn’t that come from some song or other? “Detective of love?” Elvis Costello? “Watching the Detectives.”

  He turned northward when he came to Frölunda Torg, heading back. A drive he’d done before, but not for a long time.

  Everything had been fine. The apprehension inside him had long since died away. Had it come back? Was it his fault? Was it to do with him or Martina? Those words that neither of them wanted to understand. Where did they come from? It was like a headache.

  His townhouse looked cozy when he got out of the car. Cozy. There were more lights on than necessary.

  Martina was in the kitchen with a cup of tea. She’d been crying and he felt guilty He had to say something.

  “Is Ada asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “What is?”

  “That she’s asleep. Ada.”

  “What are you talking about? You just march out of the house and drive off, then come back home as if nothing had happened.”

  “What did happen?”

  ‘And you need to ask?“

  “Was it me who started it?”

  She didn’t answer. Her head was bowed but he knew she was crying again. He could do one of two things. Either say something sensible or go out to the car and drive over the bridge again.

  “Martina ...”

  She raised her head and looked at him.

  “We’re both tired,” he said.

  “Tired? Is that it? We should be merry and bright and be thinking about Christmas that’s just around the corner. Ada has started talk ...” She let her head sink down toward the table again.

  He was searching for words. The wall clock was ticking louder than before.

  “Is it going to be like this until I go back on duty?” he said.

  She muttered something.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Not everything is about you going back on duty again,” she said. “Does everything have to be calm and quiet so that you have enough strength to work as a detective?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I won’t know anything at all soon.”

  He stood up and went to Ada’s room and watched the girl sleeping with her thumb in her mouth. She didn’t make a sound. He bent down over her face and listened for her breathing, and heard a faint peep as she breathed in through her nose.

  They had let things calm down as far as was possible. He was drinking coffee in the living room and Martina came in from the kitchen.

  “Winter and Angela are going to live together,” he said.

  “Why do you call him Winter when his name’s Erik? People don’t refer to us as Bergenhem and Martina, do they?”

  “No, of course not, but people just usually call him Winter.”

  “It’s not so
personal that way, is that it? Does that make it easier? Is that what it’s all about?”

  “I ... I really don’t know.”

  Martina had met Angela for the first time nearly two years earlier, just before Ada was born. It had been pretty dramatic. Bergenhem had been badly injured and had disappeared and Winter had asked Angela to go with Martina in the ambulance while he searched for his colleague.

  “I hope it turns out well,” she said as he sat, lost in thought. “I think it will.”

  “What?”

  “The move. Moving in together. Erik and Angela. I hope it goes well.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are they going to live?”

  “I haven’t asked. But I ... well, I suppose the obvious place is his apartment. It’s bigger than hers.”

  “How do you know?”

  He looked at her. She was smiling now.

  “I don’t know, to tell you the truth,” he said. “It’s funny. I just took it for granted.”

  “Perhaps they’ll buy a house.”

  “I can’t imagine Winter in a house.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.... He seems part of the city somehow. High-rise buildings, squares, taxis.”

  “I don’t think so. He’ll buy an old house in Långedrag and fill it with his family.”

  “That sounds like Utopia.”

  “It will soon be the year 2000,” she said. “Anything can happen.”

  Not quite anything, he thought. Some things mustn’t happen. It would be best if everything stays as it is, as it is just now.

  “There might be a moving-in party,” she said. “When’s it happening?”

  “What?”

  “Them moving in together, into wherever it is they’re going to live?”

  “Before Christmas, I think.”

  “Good. I’m happy for them.”

  3

  Angela arrived before eight. Her hair was down and gleamed in the light from the staircase following her in through the open door. Perhaps she had a new expression in her eyes, something he hadn’t previously noticed: a conviction that there was a future for them despite everything. But there was something else as well. The other thing. It appeared as a different sort of light in her eyes, as if the strong lamps on the staircase had shone through the back of her head and given them a special glow.

  She pulled off her boots and dirty water splashed onto the parquet floor. Winter saw, but made no comment. Angela knew that he had noticed. She raised both hands over her head.

  “It won’t happen again,” she said.

  “What won’t?”

  “I saw you looking.”

  “And?”

  “You were thinking at that moment: what the hell is going to happen, what will my floor look like once she’s moved in.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s something you’ll have to work on,” she said.

  “Meanwhile I suppose I’d better go around to your place with muddy shoes and wander around the apartment with them on and jump up onto the bed and the armchairs. Get it out of me, as it were.”

  “As I said. Work on it.”

  He took her hand and they went into the kitchen. There was a smell of coffee and warm bread. On the table was a tub of butter, Västerbot ten cheese, radishes, coarse liver pate, cornichons.

  “A banquet,” she said.

  “Rustic and simple. But elegant even so.”

  “You mean the liver pâté?”

  “That’s the rustic bit. Here comes the elegance,” Winter said, going to the work surface and fetching a glass dish.

  “What is it?” she asked, going to the table. “Ah. Pickled herring. When did you find the time to make this? I assume you made it yourself?”

  “Don’t insult me.”

  “When did you find the time?”

  “In the early hours of yesterday. Just before two in the morning. And now it’s perfect.”

  “Now it’s perfect,” she repeated. “All that’s missing is the schnapps, but we’re not allowed to have any of that, are we?”

  “You are not allowed to have any of that,” he said. “I could indulge, but I’ll display my sympathy for your situation. For tonight, at least.”

  “It’s quite usual for men to show their sympathy for their women in a situation like this.”

  “Really?”

  “Some of them even put on weight.”

  “You can count me out on that score.”

  Morelius felt stiff. He’d felt stiff before setting out for work, and it hadn’t gone away as a result of the routine workout before the upcoming night shift.

  Afterward he sat on the bench in front of his locker, massaging his neck and looking at the pictures of naked women taped to the inside of Bartram’s locker door. They were fairly innocent pictures, cut out of some 1960s men’s magazine. Not the kind of thing that got printed nowadays. Bartram lived in the past. He sometimes claimed the pictures were of his wife, but he didn’t have a wife.

  They were now in the last week of the six-week rotation. That meant an extra night shift this Friday followed by two more over the weekend. It was the last Friday of the month, payday He knew that people were already out celebrating the fact that their pockets were full. It was just eight o‘clock and the station was closed.

  “A touch of a stiff neck, is it?” Bartram asked, who was fiddling with his pistol, checking the mechanism with an ease born of long experience. His SIG-Sauer still had the original wooden butt. Bartram sometimes went on about losing the Walther, which he considered a better weapon for the job, but not today. He was calm and serious, ready for the coming night and the coming weekend.

  “It’s just a bit stiff,” Morelius said.

  “Watch out for drafts.”

  “I will.”

  “You’d better stay indoors tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “Drafts. There’s a nasty wind blowing through Gothenburg tonight.”

  “Bullshit. It’ll be a routine shift.”

  “It’s payday today, Simon.”

  Morelius and Bartram were walking down the Avenue. Some preferred to walk it alone, and Morelius had been one of those; but the last six months had been different. Being on his own no longer felt like liberation as far as he was concerned. He’d been well and truly scared on several occasions. Had seen things that terrified him.

  On one occasion he’d come face-to-face with death in the Gnistäng Tunnel when a young couple drove straight into the wall. He’d been in the following car and seen everything. Like in a film. Real, but somehow unreal. The Mazda in front of him had swerved left and crashed into the wall with a noise of shattering glass and twisting metal. He wasn’t even on duty he’d just been driving around for fun, as he sometimes did when he was off duty. He’d managed to pull off an emergency stop, then leaped from his car and raced over to the wreck where the girl was hanging with ... with ... He’d gotten violently sick, right in front of her, like your ordinary ... and then he’d tried to phone, but even as he was punching in the number he could hear sirens as his colleagues and an ambulance converged on the scene.

  He thought about that now, as they passed the park for the second time. Beautiful people glittered on the other side of the windows, in bars, in restaurants. Women. Bartram turned to admire the sights to the left.

  “Watch out for that stiff neck.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “Maybe it would be worth it.”

  “The trick is to compensate by looking in the other direction as well.”

  Morelius looked in the other direction, over the Avenue. A gang of kids was approaching from Götaplatsen. One of twenty or so that were tempted to gather in the center of town on a Friday night. The Avenue became an odd mixture of middle-aged elegance, desperate thirty-year-old crises, and desperate fifteen-year-old crises.

  Those who were most drunk tried to make contact, to provoke. The gang pushed their smallest member to the front, waited, then attacked.
Bartram looked to his right now too.

  “I recognize her.”

  “Eh?”

  “That blonde girl over there, in the gang. Nearest to us. She’s the vicar’s daughter.”

  “Yes. Maria Östergaard.”

  “She recovered pretty quickly.”

  “That was a week ago. And I said at the time that it wasn’t all that serious.”

  “But she’s out on the town, even so. What does our vicar have to say about that?”

  “Why not ask her? Here she comes.”

  It was true. Hanne Ostergaard was hurrying toward them, practically running, crossing over the Avenue from the theater, and the two police officers watched her march up to the gang of youths. She grabbed hold of her fair-haired daughter.

  “Come home with me this minute!”

  “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “I asked you to stay at home tonight.”

  “You always want me to stay at home.” She tried to pull her arm away. “Let go of me!” She looked at her friends.

  “I just want you to come home with me,” Hanne said. She had let go of her daughter’s sleeve. “I’m worried stiff by all this. What if it happens again?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” the girl said. “I haven’t even had a beer.” She breathed in her mother’s face. “Can you smell beer? Well, can you?”

  Hanne had started crying. “Please, Maria, I just want you to come home with me now. I get so ... so terribly worried.”

  “There’s nothing to be worried about, Mom. I’m with my friends. I’ll be home by one, as I said.”

  Hanne looked at the girl, at the group of teenagers, then over the street at the two police officers. She made a move as if she were about to run over to them, ask them to arrest the girl and take her home to the house in Orgryte.

  Please don’t come over here, Morelius thought. Though if it gets much worse we’ll have to go and sort it out. He heard a shout. “NO!” He watched the girl turn on her heel and start running down the Avenue. The gang hesitated. One youth suddenly started running after her. It looked like the kid who’d been lurking in the background at the ER. The group moved off, seeming to be pulled along the wide pavement, away from the woman who was left standing there on her own.