Some Kind of Peace (29 page)

I take the other apple from his hand and bite off a piece without saying anything. His comment surprises me. In some way, I hadn’t expected him to deliver such a well-reasoned, well-formulated insight. Somehow I had assumed that he was less sophisticated.

Banal.

A man who doesn’t require a user’s manual. A man whose reactions to any situation in life can be foreseen. And fended off, if necessary.

“Whatever,” says Markus, looking at me, his eyes red from the night’s work.

“There’s one thing I’m still wondering about. Marianne, she’s still unconscious. I need to ask you and your associates about her in order to form a better picture of who she is and how she lives. What did she do in her free time, for example?”

“I don’t really know. Isn’t that strange? You see someone every day, and even so, you never get to know her. Not really.”

“Happens all the time.”

“I think the one who knew Marianne best was Christer, her boyfriend.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Not very much. Marianne describes him as friendly and, well…
supportive. He has certainly been a big help to her in her career, or whatever you want to call it. Listens to her and understands her and so on. I think he is, or was, in finance.”

“Yes, he said that. What is your impression of him?”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s not like I know him very well. I’ve only met him a few times. But he seems intelligent and… sensitive, maybe. He seems to take an interest in several things—music, art. Smart enough not to seem pretentious, even if he is… uh, you know.”

Markus doesn’t answer. He just bites into the apple again and looks out over the sea.

That night I dream about Stefan again. I feel his presence strongly, his scent is with me in my nostrils, his skin just out of reach of my hands, but he isn’t there. Sweaty and in a panic, as if I have a fever, I rush around the cottage and on the property to find him. I raise the thorny branches of the rosebushes, heavy with dark violet buds ready to burst open. I wander among the pine trees, stumble in the thicket, and fall. The damp, soft hair-cap moss gently catches my body.

On the rocks, I stop and look out over the sea, which has a peculiar coppery color. When I turn my gaze toward the sky, I realize that it has given the sea its color; brown-red and ominous, it presses down over the bay. I walk down to my crooked, tarred little pier and hesitantly take a few steps out onto the brittle boards, already aware of what I will find: Stefan resting peacefully on his back in the glistening copper water. A bunch of seaweed forms a soft, billowing pillow whose fringes caress his cheeks like a thousand gentle fingers.

“I miss you,” I say. “It’s always the same. I miss you and you aren’t here.”

Stefan’s thin blue-white eyelids look like they are made of rice paper. They flutter; he opens his eyes and looks right at me.

“But, Siri dear, do you still not understand? Don’t you get why I had to go?”

I’m thinking about talking to Sven. Markus has warned me against this; he doesn’t want me talking to anyone the police have questioned. He would prefer that I move in with Aina and take a sick leave. “Get out of the game,” was how he put it. But instead I’m back at the office, walking down the corridor toward the room we call the Yellow Room.

Sven’s room.

He is sitting with his back to the door. A rust-brown corduroy jacket is tossed over his chair. His desk is covered with stacks of professional journals, notepads, and loose sheets of paper, which I recognize as case files that shouldn’t be there. Coffee cups, ashtrays, and apple cores are balanced on top of everything. Sven is a good therapist but a lousy administrator. In Marianne’s absence, his office and case files have devolved into chaos.

“Sven, do you have a moment?”

Sven swings around on his chair, and from his eyes I can tell that he is surprised; perhaps my presence frightens him.

“Of course, sit down.”

He makes a gesture toward the visitor’s chair, which is full of papers and folders. For a minute I lose patience with him and his mess. Maybe Marianne had nothing against picking up after him, but neither Aina nor I have any intention of doing it.

“And where is it exactly you suggest I sit?”

It wasn’t my purpose, but I can hear the harshness and sarcasm in my voice. Sven leaps up out of the chair.

“I’m so sorry.”

As he clears the folders and papers, I notice that his hands are shaking. Some sheets of paper fly to the floor and end up under the bookshelf. Finally he seems to give up. He places all the papers in a big pile on the floor, sinks down in his chair, and takes out cigarettes. It occurs to me
that I actually prefer them to his pipe. I sit across from him and look directly at him. How can it be possible? Self-assured, shrewd Sven reduced to a chain-smoking bundle of nerves.

“We have to talk,” I say.

“I suppose we do.”

“Sven,” I begin hesitantly, “you are one of a few people who had access to Charlotte’s address, Sara’s case records—”

Sven interrupts me with a desperate tone of voice. I notice that his hands, yellow from the nicotine, are still shaking as he speaks.

“Siri, you have to trust me. I
absolutely
did not sneak into your garden at night, I didn’t send a letter to Charlotte Mimer or… or kill Sara Matteus. How can you even think… I can understand… I can understand how it might look from the outside, but
good Lord
, how long have we known each other? Do you seriously think I’m involved in… in all this?”

I sigh heavily and look up at Sven. Fear fills his eyes as he looks at me across his small desk.

“No, I can’t seriously believe you are involved. Or rather, I don’t know what to believe anymore. Can you please explain one thing to me, Sven: How come your handwriting was in Sara’s case files? Which were in Marianne’s kitchen to boot?”

Sven furrows his brow and hesitates for a moment.

“I borrowed Sara’s file a couple of months ago. I wanted to use it for that article I’m working on, you know, the one about self-injuring behavior in young women. I made copies of a few pages and, sure, I made notes on them. There’s nothing strange about that. Or is there? What I don’t understand is how my papers ended up at Marianne’s.”

“And the photo?”

Sven shakes his head and suddenly looks profoundly sad.

“I had never seen it before the police showed it to me. There was something terribly sad about that picture. Don’t you think?”

He shrugs, as if to underline that he really has nothing to do with it.

“You have to believe me, Siri. I don’t know what else to say. My life has become hell. The police have interrogated me
and my wife
. They’ve called my friends to ask them what kind of person I am. I can tell from
their eyes that they think I’m lying. What do you do when someone has decided you’re a liar? How do you convince them you’re innocent? Where do you turn when you run out of arguments? How can I convince
you
?”

“By being honest.”

“I am being honest.”

“Where were you when Sara died? Birgitta said you weren’t at home.”

Sven sighs deeply and buries his head in his hands, mumbling something at the floor.

“At home. I was at home. With Birgitta.”

“But…?”

“I don’t know!”

Sven suddenly leaps up from his chair and starts pacing back and forth nervously across the room, the lit cigarette still in his hand. He looks at me with a resigned, almost desperate expression. His eyes wide, his gaze fixed on me the entire time. His whole body is quivering with nervous energy and I can see patches of sweat spreading under his armpits.

“
I don’t know why
. I can’t understand it. Why she won’t give me an alibi. She’s lying to the police. Why, Siri? Why? Can you give me a single reason?”

I think I can, easily, but I say nothing. Instead, I observe Sven in silence.

“Twenty-three years. My goodness, we’ve been married for twenty-three years. And then she does this. I don’t understand it.”

“You don’t suppose maybe Birgitta could be upset about your… affairs with other women,” I attempt.

Sven looks at me with something like fury in his eyes. He is almost screaming, and small drops of saliva are hitting me in the face as he leans forward.

“Damn it, Siri. That has nothing to do with you. There must be some things that can remain private in this awful story. It has nothing to do with you. It’s private.”

Sven straightens up and remains standing a few feet away from me. He seems calmer now that he’s been able to take out his anger on me. He still has a little self-esteem left.

Integrity.

And, of course, he’s right, I have nothing to do with his affairs. Without saying a word, he puts out the cigarette in an apple core, grabs his corduroy jacket, and leaves the room.

I didn’t expect it to be so heavy
.

After I finally caught and killed the little runaway dog outside her house, I carefully wrapped both the man and the dog in the black plastic bags I always have on hand. The bags weren’t long enough to cover the whole body, not even when I forced it into a fetal position, so I had to overlap the bags. I slipped two over the man’s head, which reached his hips, and slipped two more bags over his feet and legs. That covered him up to the waist. The dog had to lie by his feet. There was more room down there. Then I sealed the package with many rounds of light-brown packing tape—at the seam and around the waist, throat, and ankles
.

The plan was simple
.

Now I only needed to drag the package a few hundred yards along the trail to the small natural harbor where a few small boats are moored by the abandoned pier. I would row out and dump the body, wrapped in an anchor chain, at a safe distance from the shore. But I had underestimated the exertion that was required to pull a grown man so far. Several times, I sank down to my knees from exhaustion, a claustrophobic feeling welling in my chest. This always happens when my air passages tighten and refuse to let air pass. I breathed in puffs from my inhaler and worried that, for the first time, everything had not gone as planned
.

I had made a mistake and risked everything
.