LITMIR.BIZ

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seem we’ll get much further today. How are you getting home? Do you need a lift?’

      ‘I brought my own car, so I’m okay. Thanks anyway.’

      They left the flat with relief, careful not to leave it in the same unlocked state as when they arrived.

      The streetlights were lit when they came out to the car park. It had begun to snow lightly while they were inside, and they both had to brush a good deal of snow from their windscreens. When Patrik drove off towards the OK Q8 petrol station he felt something rise to the surface in his mind, something that had been gnawing at him all day. In the silence of his car, alone with his thoughts, he had to admit that something didn’t feel right about the arrest of Anders Nilsson. He wasn’t confident that Mellberg had asked the right questions when he interviewed the witness, which had caused Anders to be brought in to the station. Perhaps he ought to take a closer look at the matter. In the middle of the intersection by the petrol station Patrik made up his mind. He turned the wheel hard and headed into the centre of Fjällbacka instead of towards Tanumshede. He hoped that Dagmar Petrén would be at home.

      Erica was thinking about Patrik’s hands. She usually looked first at a man’s hands and wrists. She thought that hands could be incredibly sexy. They shouldn’t be small, but they didn’t need to be as big as toilet seat lids either. Just big enough and sinewy, without hair, vigorous and supple. Patrik’s hands were just right.

      She forced herself out of her daydreams. It was futile, to say the least, to think about feelings that so far she only felt as a light quiver in her stomach. And it wasn’t even certain how long she would be here in these parts. When the house was sold there would be nothing to keep her here, and then her flat in Stockholm would be waiting for her, along with the life she had there with her friends. These weeks spent in Fjällbacka would be, in all probability, only a brief interlude in her life. Considering all of those things, it would be stupid to build romantic castles in the air regarding an old childhood friend.

      Erica looked out at the twilight that was beginning to settle over the horizon, despite the fact that it was no later than three in the afternoon, and sighed deeply. She was huddled up in a big, loose-fitting sweater that her father used to wear at sea on cold days. She warmed her chilly hands by pulling them far up inside the long sleeves and twisting the ends together. At the moment she was feeling a little sorry for herself. There didn’t seem to be much to be happy about just now. Alex dead, the hassle with the house, Lucas, the book that was heavy going – it all weighed like, a huge burden on her chest. Besides, she felt that she still had a lot to deal with after her parents’ death, both practically and emotionally. In recent days, she hadn’t been able to face continuing the clean-up, and there were half-full trash bags and cartons all over the house. Inside her there were also half-full spaces, with loose threads and unresolved knots of emotion.

      All afternoon she had been pondering the scene she witnessed between Dan and Pernilla. She simply couldn’t make sense of it. It was so long ago that there had been any friction between herself and Pernilla; it had all been cleared up for years now. In any case, that was what Erica had thought. So why had Pernilla reacted the way she did? Erica contemplated ringing Dan, but she didn’t really dare in case Pernilla answered the phone. She couldn’t face another conflict right now, so she decided not to think about it anymore. She would let it rest and hope that Pernilla had simply got up on the wrong side of the bed and that everything would have blown over by the next time they met. And yet the scene kept on gnawing at her. It was no random fit of temper on Pernilla’s part; it was something that went much deeper. But for the life of her, she couldn’t work out what it could be.

      This delaying of the work on her book was stressing her out, and she decided to relieve her conscience and write for a while. She sat down at the computer in her workroom and realized that she would have to take her hands out of the sweater’s warmth in order to work. Things went sluggishly at first, but after a while she worked up both some creative steam and some body heat. She envied the writers who could keep to a strict discipline in their writing. She had to force herself to sit down and write every time. Not out of laziness but because of a deep-seated fear that she might have lost her ability since the last time she wrote anything. That she might sit there with her fingers on the keys and her eyes fixed on the screen and nothing would happen. There would just be emptiness, the words wouldn’t come, and she would realize that she was never going to put a single sentence on paper again. Each time that did not happen was a relief. Now her fingers were flying over the keyboard and she had written over two pages in only an hour. After another three pages, she felt she had earned a reward and allowed herself to spend a while on the book about Alex.

      The cell was very familiar. It wasn’t the first time he had sat there. Drunken nights with vomit on the floor was an everyday occurrence during the periods when things were really bad. Although this time it was different. This time it was serious.

      He lay down on his side on the hard cot, curled up in a foetal position and rested his head on his hands to avoid the feeling of plastic sticking to his face. Cold shivers ran through him from a combination of the cold in the cell and the alcohol deprivation in his body.

      The only thing he’d been told was that he was suspected of murdering Alex. Then they shoved him into the cell and told him to wait. What else did they think he was going to do in this cold place? Teach courses in life-drawing? Anders smiled wryly to himself.

      His thoughts wandered dully since there was nothing to rest his eyes on. The walls were painted light-green over worn concrete with grey spots where the paint had flaked off. In his thoughts, he painted the walls in bold colours. A brush-stroke of red here, one of yellow there. Strong swathes that quickly obliterated the worn green colour. In his mind’s eye the room was soon a blazing cacophony of colours, and only then could he focus his thoughts.

      Alex was dead. That wasn’t a thought he could flee from even if he wanted to; it was an irrefutable fact. She was dead, and his future was dead with her.

      Soon they would come to get him. Drag him away. They would shove him roughly, taunt him, tear at him, until the truth lay there naked and shivering before them. He couldn’t stop them. He didn’t even know if he wanted them to be stopped. There was so much he no longer knew. Not that he’d known very much before. There was little that had enough power to cut through the redemptive fog of alcohol. Only Alex. Only the knowledge that she was breathing the same air somewhere, thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same pain. That was the only thing that had always had enough power to worm its way past, under, over, around the treacherous fogs that did their best to bury all his memories in merciful darkness.

      His legs began to fall asleep as he lay stretched out on the cot, but he ignored the signals from his body and stubbornly refused to budge from the spot. If he moved, he might lose control over the colours that covered the wall and have to stare at bare ugliness again.

      In more lucid moments, he could see some humour, or at least irony, in it all. The fact that he was born with an insatiable need for beauty, at the same time that he was condemned to a life of filth and squalor. Perhaps his fate was already written in the stars when he was born, perhaps his fate was rewritten on that ill-fated day.

      If only. Many times his thoughts had run in circles around this ‘if’, playing with the thought of what his life would have been like if. Maybe a good and honourable life, with family, a home, and art as a source of joy instead of despair. Children playing in the garden outside his studio while fragrant aromas wafted from the kitchen. The very height of a Carl Larsson idyll, with a rosy glow round the edges of the fantasy. And Alex was always in the midst of this tableau. Always in the centre, with him like a planet circling round and round her.

      His fantasies always made him feel warm inside, but suddenly the warm image was replaced with a cold one, with bluish tones and icy chill. He knew this image well. For many nights he’d been able to study it in peace and quiet so that he knew it down to the smallest detail. The blood was what he feared the most. The red, which stood in sharp contrast to the blue. Death was also there, as usual. He lurked along the edges, rubbing his hands in delight. Waiting for him to make his move, do something, anything at all. The only thing he could do was pretend not to see Death. Ignore him until he disappeared.

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