She's Never Coming Back (14 page)

He looked at the clock. Twenty past two. The meringues were nearly ready. Judging by the noise level, it was like
Lord of the Flies
in the next room.

‘Shall I go in and get them?’ Mike asked.

‘Yes, do,’ his mother replied.

Mike went out into the sitting room, whistled loudly to shut them up and told them to come and get something to eat in the kitchen.

There were balloons tied to the postbox and the front door. Ylva watched the guests arrive on the screen. Sanna’s classmates were there, all dressed up and ready to hand over the wrapped presents. The children were welcomed into the house. Mike stood in the doorway and chatted with the parents.

Ylva thought they all looked uncomfortable, stiff and uncertain. She guessed that the fact that she was missing was still at the forefront of their minds. It would be strange if it wasn’t.

The sun shone and the balloons danced and bobbed on the wind. Ylva realised that they wouldn’t have been able to
set the table with paper plates and plastic glasses outside. Anders and Ulrika stayed to help, and so did Björn and Grethe. Mike’s mum had come over the evening before. The other parents were probably doing their own thing in the meantime: going for a walk, heading into town, to the cinema or something like that. If there was time. Parties normally didn’t last more than two to three hours.

When all the guests had arrived and the door had been closed, Ylva couldn’t see what was going on inside, but didn’t find it hard to imagine. The noise from previous children’s parties was still ringing in her ears.

For the next hour or so, nothing much happened other than Mike coming out with the rubbish. Then the terrace door was opened. The children spilled out in an organic mass. Mike and Anders divided them into teams and they did some kind of relay with oranges under their chins. Then they played hide and seek.

Mike and the other adults disappeared into the house. Fifteen minutes later, he stuck his head out of the door and shouted something. The kids stopped in their tracks and then rushed indoors.

Lucky dip, Ylva guessed.

The party would be over soon. The parents would be
back any minute now to rescue them from the noise and mess. Some would stay for a glass of wine in the kitchen and keep them company as they wound down and caught their breath after the timed chaos that was a children’s party.

Sanna was buttering a piece of bread. She did this with such care that Mike and Ylva had started to put two knives in the butter before they put it on the table, one for them and one for Sanna.

Each slice was a work of art for Sanna that was not finished until the bread was covered in an even, smooth layer of butter. Without any bumps or marks.

‘So, do you think it was a good party?’ Mike asked.

Sanna nodded without lifting her eyes from the bread.

This fixation with spreading the butter was a running joke for Mike and Ylva. They wondered what it might indicate, speculated where she might have got it from and what other things in life would be given such time and care.

At times, Ylva worried that Sanna might have some kind of disorder, a touch of autism or some condition known by an acronym. But that wasn’t the case. Mike guessed that spreading butter was a form of meditation. And there was absolutely no point in analysing to death something that
worked. A lot simpler to put an extra knife in the butter. Live and let live. With all our individual peculiarities.

‘What was most fun?’ Mike wondered.

‘Mummy’s not coming home, is she?’

The question was like a slap in the face. Mike had thought a great deal about his mother’s misguided decision, keeping his father’s suicide secret from him and talking evasively of a car crash. He recalled how the feeling of hopelessness and guilt had floored him when the truth finally came out. Mike had decided not to embellish or protect his daughter from the truth.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t look like it.’

Sanna looked at him.

‘Is she dead?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mike replied. ‘I don’t know anything.’

Sanna put the knife back in the butter and started to eat. She glanced quickly down at the table before looking out the window to the world beyond: light green leaves, flowering lilac, it would be the summer holidays soon.

Mike’s eyes filled and his nose got blocked, forcing him to breathe through his mouth.

‘Close your eyes.’

Ylva looked at him warily. She was standing with her
hands on her head, as she’d been instructed to do. He had opened the door just enough to peer round it.

‘It’s a surprise,’ he said. ‘Close your eyes.’

She obeyed, her eyelids quivering uneasily. She heard him come in through the door and walk towards her. She opened her eyes. He was holding a floor lamp in one hand and a heavy paper bag in the other.

‘Something to read,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to have something to pass the time. Do you use glasses?’

She shook her head. The man smiled at her.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

Ylva did as she was told. The man put the bag and the lamp on the floor, and sat beside her on the bed.

‘You’re here now,’ he said. ‘I know that it’s hard to accept. You want to think that it’s temporary, that you’ll be able to get away. Even though you know that will never happen. And the sooner you stop thinking that, the sooner you’ll settle down. Believe me, in a year’s time you won’t want to leave. In a year’s time, you’ll stay, even though I open the door.’

He stroked her hair. As if she was a child and he was comforting her, the wise adult.

‘And it’s not a bad life, the one we can give you,’ he said.

He put his finger under her chin and turned her face gently towards him.

‘Violence isn’t really my thing,’ he said. ‘I only hit you because I have to, to make you obey. It’s effective, but doesn’t help build strong bonds. I prefer the carrot to the whip, praise to censure …’

‘But what do you want us to do?’

Like most men, Karlsson was in fact soft. The unshaven and red-eyed husband of a missing wife was more than he could cope with. If Karlsson hadn’t been convinced that Mike’s tears were due to guilt rather than grief, he could have got him to do anything.

‘I want you to find her,’ Mike said.

‘How?’ Karlsson asked.

Mike didn’t know.

‘Either she doesn’t want to be found, or …’

Karlsson stopped himself, but it was too late. Mike was crying again.

Good God, what a pansy, Karlsson thought. If he doesn’t stop the waterworks soon, he’ll get me started too.

‘Sorry,’ Mike sobbed.

‘Not at all,’ Karlsson said. ‘Perfectly understandable.’

He opened his drawer and found a packet of tissues that he pushed across the table.

‘Thank you,’ Mike said.

Rusty knife, Karlsson thought.

Crime of passion, rusty knife, guilt.

A foreign country was always a good place to hide your alcoholism. The man assumed that was why all Western men living in exile were so confusingly alike.

Johan Lind was, to be fair, married to an African woman and the proud father of two small children, but the whites of his eyes were bloodshot and jaundiced, his cheeks were puffy and his stomach was tight as a beer barrel, like most white men in the Third World.

Johan Lind started to drink at lunchtime and often stopped by a bar on his way home from work. The bar was a corrugated-iron shack that offered only the local beer and
a handful of young women who sat on men’s knees and laughed at their jokes, in return for drinks and tips.

The man guessed that this was how Johan Lind would justify his wayward life. Something evasive like them being poor in Africa, but at least they know how to have fun. Everything wasn’t so damn serious. People had forgotten how to laugh in Sweden.

Something along those lines.

The man couldn’t be certain that Johan Lind was actually of that opinion, as he kept his distance and made his observations from a rental car, but it seemed a qualified guess.

The man had been in Zimbabwe for six days now and wanted to accomplish what he had set out to do as soon as possible. He had learned the following: Johan Lind worked as a foreman on a construction site in central Harare. He lived with his family in Avondale, a nice suburb to the northwest of the city. Every working day was the same.

The man was waiting for the right moment. Which came the next day.

Johan Lind had decided that, as it was Friday, he would take his motorbike to work. It was a mean machine with high suspension and erratic acceleration. The man saw him
pull out from his house and speed up on the bend as if he was still a death-defying twenty-something-year-old.

More than just a bit pathetic, the man thought, as he followed him at a distance to his workplace in town.

When Johan Lind, true to habit, stopped at the bar on the way home from work, the man decided it was time.

He waited further down the road. When Johan Lind drove past a few hours later at a more leisurely pace than normal, his speed reduced slightly to compensate for his alcohol consumption, the man turned the key in the ignition of his rental car and pulled out after him.

It was dark and there weren’t many cars around.

The man held back until they came to a stretch of road without houses. Then he overtook and swung the car across the road in front of the motorbike. Johan Lind lost control and toppled over. The bike spun away from him and he lay there on the asphalt. The man parked up by the side of the road and hurried back to him.

‘You idiot – you fucking drove me off the road!’ Johan screamed.

The man went up to him, looked hastily around. Johan Lind tried to blink away the pain.

‘Are you all right?’ the man asked.

Johan Lind was startled when he heard his mother tongue. He looked up in surprise at the reckless driver who had so nearly cost him his life. He seemed familiar.

‘Let me help you,’ the man said. ‘I’m a doctor.’

He placed his arm under Johan’s neck and took a firm grip.

‘Do you remember Annika?’ he said, and then broke his fellow countryman’s neck.

‘In other words, you’ve got nothing?’

The public prosecutor glanced up from the papers he had demonstratively continued to read while Karlsson and Gerda rattled through the information they had gathered in connection with Ylva Zetterberg’s disappearance three months earlier.

They had concentrated on the missing woman’s affair, her conflicting messages about where she was going that Friday evening and, finally, her alleged liking for a bit of rough in the sack.

Karlsson and Gerda looked at one another, each hoping that the other would come up with a neat paraphrase that would lend authority to the thin and, in practice, useless report.

The public prosecutor continued to sort his papers, a clear indication of how little he valued their work.

‘No body, no witnesses, no inexplicable bank withdrawals, no mysterious emails or phone calls – in short, nothing.’

He looked at them for a response. Neither Karlsson nor Gerda said anything.

‘Then the case is closed,’ the public prosecutor said, and returned to his papers without paying any more attention to the two policemen.

‘That is all,’ he added in a quiet voice.

There was such a thing as the professional mourner, someone who went to funerals where they had no reason to be, who cocked their head and nodded sympathetically with a pained expression. They turned out in numbers. But most people withdrew. The vast majority were nonplussed by other people’s grief, they didn’t know what to do or say. They were afraid of being intrusive, of being a reminder and adding to the pain. They were also frightened that some of the heaviness and sadness might spill into their own lives.

Those who had experienced grief and loss and had been
confronted with the uncertainty of those around them often said afterwards that it didn’t matter so much how those around them responded, what was important was that they did. In whatever form that took.

In Mike’s case, there was nothing to grieve, only uncertainty and questions.

‘And she’s just disappeared?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, she’s run off?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Did something happen then?’

‘I don’t know. She’s missing. She left work and never came home.’

‘What do the police say?’

‘Nothing really. They said that it happens, people just disappear.’

‘She must be somewhere. I don’t understand …’

Mike’s friends and colleagues couldn’t offer their condolences. To do so would signal that they’d given up hope. After a while, they started to keep their distance. There was nothing more to say. Ylva’s disappearance was a mystery.

When she’d been gone five months, the local paper did a long article in conjunction with the TV programme,
Missing
, in an attempt to bring to light more information. The article detailed Ylva’s last day at work. It also included a list of those who had disappeared without trace in the region in recent years, under the heading
People whose bodies have never been found
.

Most of them were men, more than half of whom were feared lost at sea. Some of them had been seen in the days after they’d disappeared, but the witness reports were conflicting and vague.

In his capacity as investigating officer, Karlsson made statements, rattling off statistics and possible scenarios.

‘In cases where we suspect that the missing person may have been killed, we concentrate on those closest to them. That’s usually where we find the culprit.’