LITMIR.BIZ

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they had been best friends, but that felt like a whole lifetime ago. Now the woman in the bathtub seemed like a stranger.

      Mercifully, the corpse’s eyes were shut, but the lips were bright blue. A thin film of ice had formed around the torso, hiding the lower half of the body completely. The right arm, streaked with blood, hung limply over the edge of the tub, its fingers dipped in the congealed pool of blood on the floor. There was a razor blade on the edge of the tub. The other arm was visible only above the elbow, with the rest hidden beneath the ice. The knees also stuck up through the frozen surface. Alex’s long blonde hair was spread like a fan over the end of the tub but looked brittle and frozen in the cold.

      Erica stood for a long time looking at her. She was shivering both from the cold and from the loneliness exhibited by the macabre tableau. Then she backed silently out of the room.

      Afterwards, everything seemed to happen in a blur. She rang the doctor on duty on her mobile phone, and waited with Eilert until the doctor and the ambulance arrived. She recognized the signs of shock from when she got the news about her parents, and she poured herself a large shot of cognac as soon as she got home. Perhaps not what the doctor would order, but it made her hands stop shaking.

      The sight of Alex had taken her back to her childhood. It was more than twenty-five years ago that they had been best friends, but even though many people had come and gone in her life since then, Alex was still close to her heart. They were just children back then. As adults they had been strangers to each other. And yet Erica had a hard time reconciling herself to the thought that Alex had taken her own life, which was the inescapable interpretation of what she had seen. The Alexandra she had known was one of the most alive and confident people she could imagine. An attractive, self-assured woman with a radiance that made people turn around to look at her. According to what Erica had heard through the grapevine, life had been kind to Alex, just as Erica had always thought it would be. She ran an art gallery in Göteborg, she was married to a man who was both successful and nice, and she lived in a house as big as a manor on the island of Särö. But something had obviously gone wrong.

      Erica felt that she needed to divert her attention, so she punched in her sister’s phone number.

      ‘Were you asleep?’

      ‘Are you kidding? Adrian woke me up at three in the morning, and by the time he finally fell asleep at six, Emma was awake and wanted to play.’

      ‘Couldn’t Lucas get up for once?’

      Icy silence on the other end of the line, and Erica bit her tongue.

      ‘He has an important meeting today, so he needed his sleep. Besides, there’s a lot of turmoil at his job right now. The company is in a critical strategic stage.’

      Anna’s voice was getting louder, and Erica could hear an undertone of hysteria. Lucas always had a ready excuse, and Anna was probably quoting him directly. If it wasn’t an important meeting, then he was stressed out by all the weighty decisions he had to make, or his nerves were shot because of the pressure associated with being, in his own words, such a successful businessman. So all responsibility for the children fell to Anna. With a lively three-year-old and a baby of four months, Anna had looked ten years older than her thirty years when the sisters saw each other at their parents’ funeral.

      ‘Honey, don’t touch that,’ Anna shouted in English.

      ‘Seriously, don’t you think it’s about time you started speaking Swedish with Emma?’

      ‘Lucas thinks we should speak English at home. He says that we’re going to move back to London anyway before she starts school.’

      Erica was so tired of hearing the words ‘Lucas thinks, Lucas says, Lucas feels that …’ In her eyes her brother-in-law was a shining example of a first-class shithead.

      Anna had met him when she was working as an au pair in London, and she was instantly enchanted by the onslaught of attention from the successful stockbroker Lucas Maxwell, ten years her senior. She gave up all her plans of starting at university, and instead devoted her life to being the perfect, ideal wife. The only problem was that Lucas was a man who was never satisfied, and Anna, who had always done exactly as she pleased ever since she was a child, had totally eradicated her own personality after marrying Lucas. Until the children arrived, Erica had still hoped that her sister would come to her senses, leave Lucas, and start living her own life. But when first Emma and then Adrian were born, she had to admit that her brother-in-law was unfortunately here to stay.

      ‘I suggest that we drop the subject of Lucas and his opinions on child-rearing. What have auntie’s little darlings been up to since last time?’

      ‘Well, just the usual, you know … Emma threw a tantrum yesterday and managed to cut up a small fortune in baby clothes before I caught her, and Adrian has either been throwing up or screaming non-stop for three days.’

      ‘It sounds as though you need a change of scene. Can’t you bring the kids with you and come up here for a week? I could really use your help going through a bunch of stuff. And soon we’ll need to tackle all the paperwork too.’

      ‘Er, well … We were planning to talk to you about that.’

      As usual when she had to deal with something unpleasant, Anna’s voice began to quaver noticeably. Erica was instantly on guard. That ‘we’ sounded ominous. As soon as Lucas had a finger in the pie, it usually meant that there was something that would benefit him to the detriment of all others involved.

      Erica waited for Anna to go on.

      ‘Lucas and I have been thinking about moving back to London as soon as he gets the Swedish subsidiary on its feet. We weren’t really planning to bother with maintaining a house here. It’s no fun for you, either, having the hassle of a big country house. I mean, without a family and all …’

      The silence was palpable.

      ‘What are you trying to say?’

      Erica twirled a lock of her curly hair around her index finger, a habit she’d had since childhood and reverted to whenever she was nervous.

      ‘Well … Lucas thinks we ought to sell the house. It would be hard for us to hold on to it and keep it up. Besides, we want to buy a house in Kensington when we move back, and even though Lucas makes plenty of money, the cash from the sale would make a big difference. I mean, a house on the west coast in that area would go for several million kronor. The Germans are wild about ocean views and sea air.’

      Anna kept pressing her argument, but Erica felt she’d heard enough and quietly hung up the phone in the middle of a sentence. Anna had certainly managed to divert her attention, as usual.

      She had always been more of a mother than a big sister to Anna. Ever since they were kids she had protected and watched over her. Anna had been a real child of nature, a whirlwind who followed her own impulses without considering the results. More times than she could count, Erica had been forced to rescue Anna from sticky situations. Lucas had knocked the spontaneity and joie de vivre right out of her. More than anything else, that was what Erica could never forgive.

      By morning, the events of the preceding day seemed like a bad dream. Erica had slept a deep and dreamless sleep, but still felt as though she’d barely had a catnap. She was so tired that her whole body ached. Her stomach was rumbling loudly, but after a quick peek in the fridge she realized that a trip to Eva’s Mart would be necessary before she was going to get any food to eat.

      The town was deserted, and at Ingrid Bergman Square there was no trace of the thriving commerce of the summer months. Visibility was good, without mist or haze, and Erica could see all the way to the outer point of the island of Valö, which was silhouetted against the horizon. Together with Kråkholmen it bordered a narrow passage to the outer archipelago.

      She met no one until she had walked halfway up Galärbacken. It was an encounter she would have preferred to avoid, and she instinctively looked for a possible escape route.

      ‘Good morning.’ Elna Persson’s voice chirped with unabashed sprightliness. ‘Well,

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