She's Never Coming Back (13 page)

But none of these imagined scenarios succeeded in erasing the thought that she wanted to avoid at all costs. That Mike knew more than he was saying, that he’d had something to do with Ylva’s disappearance.

Kristina heard the phone ringing. It had been ringing for
a while, but she hadn’t counted the number of times. Finally her brain clicked into gear and she got up and went to answer it. She looked at the display and saw that it was Mike.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and said: ‘Any news?’

Her son was crying on the other end.

‘I’ve got no one to talk to,’ he snivelled.

Kristina held her breath. She was prepared. For anything. It didn’t matter. Mike was her son, nothing could change that.

‘I’m listening,’ she said. ‘Carry on.’

She waited for him to pull himself together sufficiently that she could understand what he was saying.

‘They went to the school,’ he finally managed to squeeze out.

‘Who?’

‘The police. They talked to Sanna.’

Kristina didn’t answer.

‘Don’t you understand?’ Mike sobbed. ‘They think it’s me. They think I killed her. How can they even think that?’

His voice was helpless and desperate, but she couldn’t hear any lies. Kristina felt the tension leave her muscles.

Karlsson and Gerda went from door to door and talked to the neighbours. Had anyone seen or heard anything that might shed light on Ylva’s disappearance? Cars that had stopped nearby or left the Zetterbergs’ house in the relevant time frame, which was probably between nine in the evening and the following morning.

Karlsson and Gerda were aware that every question they asked pointed suspicion in the same direction.

The result of two days’ fieldwork was a couple of unconnected witnesses who had heard a car leave Bäckavägen and disappear up Sundsliden at around half
past two in the morning. But unfortunately this lead came to nothing when it turned out that the car had been driven by a sober eighteen-year-old who had spent Friday evening round at his girlfriend’s.

‘Just our luck,’ Karlsson said. ‘Why couldn’t he have stayed over? That’s what we did in my day.’

‘If I had a fifteen-year-old daughter, I wouldn’t let an eighteen-year-old stay over, believe me,’ Gerda retorted.

‘No, I guess it’s different if you’ve got girls. What d’you want?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Me neither.’

They were standing in a queue by an ice-cream kiosk.

‘Maybe a soft ice,’ Gerda said.

‘Go for it.’

‘With hundreds and thousands.’

‘Hey big spender.’

‘You only live once.’

‘True. I think I’ll go for three scoops. With strawberry sauce and cream.’

‘So now you’re going the whole hog?’

‘Because I’m worth it. If you’re going for hundreds and thousands, I’m having strawberry sauce and cream.’

They got their ice-creams and ate them leaning against the car in the sun.

‘Doesn’t get any better,’ Karlsson said.

‘Speak for yourself. My hundreds and thousands are finished.’

‘Where would you dump the body?’

‘Don’t know. You?’

‘In a lake,’ Karlsson said. ‘With weights.’

‘Too much hassle,’ Gerda concluded. ‘You’d have to pull and drag the body around and have a boat. And then you’d be worrying that the body would decompose and float up to the surface. Bury the shit, I say.’

‘But you’d have to dig bloody deep. There’s always some animal that’s rooting around in the dirt. God, it’s so good when the cream kind of freezes on the ice cream and goes hard.’

‘When it goes kind of lumpy, I know what you mean.’

‘We’ll have to talk to him again. It’s been a few days now. Maybe his conscience has been doing its thing.’

Mike Zetterberg wondered what else he could do. He tried to think constructively, find a loose thread to pull at.

She hadn’t been on the bus. Wrong, he didn’t know for
sure. What he did know was that none of the bus drivers or passengers could remember seeing her. It was of course possible that no one had noticed her, but Mike found that hard to believe. Ylva attracted attention and had the sort of open smile that invited contact. She normally listened to her iPod so she wouldn’t have to talk to people.

IPod in her ears? Could she have walked out into the road and been run over without anyone seeing it? And the driver had panicked and taken her lifeless body and buried it somewhere or thrown it into the sea. Not likely. She would have walked through the town, people everywhere. Extremely unlikely, almost impossible.

The most likely thing was, and he had to agree with the police here, that she had arranged to meet someone. She had said one thing to Mike and something else to her colleagues. To cover her back. The question was, who had she gone to meet?

Her phone records didn’t provide any clues. He had gone through them himself with Karlsson and Gerda. Her emails at work were just as useless. No saved cyber flirts. She might of course have deleted them to avoid the risk of being discovered, or alternatively have a secret mail address, but Mike didn’t think so. Middle-aged women who slept around
were seen as liberated, they didn’t need to skulk about. The opposite applied when you were a teenager: the girls got the bad reputation, the boys became heroes.

Ylva had been missing for four days. She hadn’t just gone off for a dirty weekend with a hot lover. And her passport was still in the chest of drawers, so she hadn’t taken a last-minute charter flight.

Her mobile …

Mike was just about to phone Karlsson and Gerda when he saw them turn into the driveway. He opened the front door and saw their serious faces.

‘Have you found her?’

Karlsson put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Let’s talk inside.’

For the thirty seconds it took them to move into the kitchen and sit down, Mike was convinced that they’d found Ylva’s body. It was a relief when he realised that she was still missing.

‘Her mobile,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see where she’s been?’

‘She turned her mobile off on Tågagatan.’

‘When?’

‘At half past six on Friday.’

‘She should have been on the bus then,’ Mike said.

‘Why?’

‘That’s on the bus route, and it fits with when she left work.’

‘But she wasn’t on the bus,’ Gerda stated.

‘That’s not why we’re here,’ Karlsson cut in. ‘We’ve spoken to Bill Åkerman.’

Mike froze for a second.

‘I see, and what did he say?’

‘Well, first of all, he was working on Friday, the staff have confirmed that. But he told us something else that we thought was interesting.’

Mike leaned forward, all ears. Karlsson looked to Gerda for support.

‘How was your sex life?’

Mike’s face went bright red. But it was the red of anger, not embarrassment.

‘What the fuck do you mean,
How was your sex life?
Our sex life
is
absolutely fine, thank you very much. The fact that she jumped into bed with that moron doesn’t mean that she didn’t love me, it’s more that she doesn’t love herself. Yes, I know how clichéd that sounds, but in her case it’s actually true. My wife flirts, is always looking for pointless kicks. I’ve seen her dancing up tight with a neighbour
several times, but I’ve also – and I assure you it’s a thousand times worse – been forced to live with the anguish she feels afterwards, when she hates herself and just wants to die.’

‘I thought you said she wasn’t depressed.’

‘Bill Åkerman was the final straw, the alarm bell she needed. It was like we started over again after that. And I’m sure that’s one of the reasons she didn’t go out with her colleagues.’

Karlsson and Gerda looked at each other and nodded.

Without a doubt.

It was difficult to hear what the other person was saying.

Calle Collin was sitting opposite an old actor, at a centrally positioned window table in an upmarket restaurant chosen by the actor. The other guests belonged to the same generation as the actor and glanced over at him discreetly. Two parties had passed the table on their way out and thanked the actor for many pleasurable moments and a lot of laughs. The actor had accepted these pats on the back with false modesty and great delight.

The reason that Calle Collin found it difficult to hear what the actor said was not that he spoke unclearly, but rather that he was so uninteresting.

‘I … success … anecdote … pause for laughter … public record … troubled childhood … not so easy to succeed … all the same I … modest … I always doubt … I constantly fight … I … the main thing … I interpret … I get to the heart of the character … I … empty phrases … I.’

Calle Collin nodded attentively and wrote down key words. He felt melancholy. The actor wasn’t a bad person, he was self-centred because he lacked self-confidence and therefore had an unquenchable need for confirmation. Moments like this were oxygen for him.

Calle Collin’s interview would be a carbon copy of every other interview the actor had ever given. Nothing new would be added and the truth would be crystal clear in its absence. Calle would send the text over to the actor for approval and the actor would have his say and perhaps even hint that Calle’s efforts didn’t quite meet his expectations, as the promise of a page in a publication meant so much more to him now that he had long since passed the peak of his career.

Then the actor would delete the only thing that might be called a real observation on Calle’s part and replace it with some self-glorifying statement, before both parties could agree that they were satisfied.

The actor had been interviewed countless times in the course of his career. The questions were always the same, as were the answers. Calle recognised the words that spewed out of his mouth from articles he had read before the interview. The words were exactly the same and so deeply entrenched that, even if the actor did want to open up and be honest, he couldn’t possibly break free from the image he’d built up of himself.

‘Why?’ Calle blurted suddenly, without warning.

The actor was thrown off track in the middle of an anecdote that he’d told a hundred times before.

‘Excuse me?’

Calle Collin realised that he’d been thinking out loud and didn’t have a clue as to what the actor was actually talking about.

‘How did you become who you became?’ Calle tried, and changed his position.

‘You should be who you are when you’re not who you wanted to be,’ the actor trotted out, well practised.

Calle gave him a friendly smile and nodded.

‘Who were you at school then?’ he asked. ‘The class clown? A shrinking violet?’

The actor was silent for a long time before answering: ‘I
was horrible,’ he said, finally. ‘I beat up others so they wouldn’t beat me.’

Mike sat at the kitchen table. It was quiet, not even the fridge was humming. He thought about turning the page of the newspaper just to hear it rustle, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to lift his hand to make the movement.

He had done everything. That’s certainly what he tried to tell himself. He didn’t know whether it was true or not. Maybe he hadn’t done anything. Maybe he’d just sat paralysed by the kitchen table with a newspaper in front of him that he hadn’t read, a paper that he’d collected from the postbox, because he always collected the paper from the postbox. Every morning of his adult life.

Ylva hadn’t come home and that was that. She’d gone to the office, spent the day there and then left work. But she hadn’t come home.

Ylva had disappeared. She hadn’t been in touch and she hadn’t been seen. She was gone.

In five days’ time, their daughter would turn eight. Sanna’s classmates had been invited to the party. Mike didn’t think that Ylva would come back for it.

Mike thought about their relationship, if it had been a relationship at all.

His mobile phone vibrated on the kitchen table and made a surprisingly loud noise in the silence. Mike looked at the display, saw that it was from the office and answered.

His colleague strained to be casual in a sympathetic way.

‘Just wanted to check whether you’d be coming today.’

‘Of course, I’m just on my way. I didn’t sleep very well.’

‘No rush,’ the colleague assured him. ‘The meeting’s not until this afternoon.’

‘Thanks for phoning,’ Mike said.

He hung up and folded the newspaper. It was the tenth day since Ylva had disappeared.

People who claimed there was no difference between boys and girls had obviously never organised a children’s party, Mike mused. The boys were boisterous and made a noise; they fought and spilled their popcorn and fizzy drinks, whereas the girls gathered round to watch Sanna open her presents.

How much of the difference was due to genetics or culture was another matter, but Mike was grateful that he had a daughter and not a son. Even though there were obviously exceptions. The kind, philosophical Ivan who, when asked how his mummy and daddy were, answered,
Not so good, in
fact we’re quite poor now, so we won’t be able to go to Thailand
. Or the quiet Tobias who, a couple of years ago, had cried as though he’d never stop when he discovered that the party bags didn’t include any chocolate buttons. Mike had made sure not to repeat the mistake at any birthday party since.

Mike and Kristina had carried an extra table into the kitchen so that there would be room for everyone. The table was set. Two other couples scooped ice-cream on to a serving plate full of meringues, Kristina sliced the bananas and Mike made up some jugs of squash. The noise and chaos in the sitting room was music to his ears, a reminder that life went on regardless, even though he himself was in a vacuum.

Because that’s how it felt. Nothing changed, everything was the same. An ocean of words and stiff phrases uttered to make a point, to add importance, to gloss over and comfort. But they didn’t prevent Holst from driving past in his Volvo estate or Mrs Halonen from waving in the distance as she passed with her Alsatian.

Life carried on. This inconceivable event was but a ripple on the surface, and would never be anything more. The sympathy from those around him had now boiled down
to
Nothing new?
Which Mike answered with a troubled expression: Nothing new.