“Look, Mamma! Too cool, huh?”
Katarina’s trumpeting woke Irene out of her reverie when she walked out of the dressing room like a runway model, dressed in a bright orange top that came down to her navel and a pair of moss-green bell-bottoms. First she just stared at her daughter. Finally she couldn’t hold it back any longer and burst out laughing.
“What are you cackling at?” Katarina said. “This is totally modern! Try and keep up, okay?”
Jenny agreed and said patronizingly to her old fossil of a mother, “This is the latest thing, after all.”
Irene tried hard to contain herself. “I’m sorry, but it’s just that I recognized myself. I looked just like that when I was your age.”
Both her daughters gave her a skeptical look and exchanged a glance heavenward. The hardest thing to believe was that Mamma was ever their age.
Just like all the other shoppers looking at the decorations and searching for gifts, they wound up in NK. Irene was tired and needed a cup of coffee, but the girls voted to go look around the department store first. With a sigh, after a mild protest, Irene had to give in. Whenever the girls joined forces, she was in the minority. All the lights and glitter began to drain the energy out of her. And the elves-! Wherever you looked you saw an elf. Tiny elves, giant elves, artificial elves, and live elves. One of them almost scared her to death when it bent forward and touched her arm and asked if she didn’t want to buy a new shaver for the “little husband.”
Worn out, Irene tried to catch her breath on the escalator up to the second floor. Above their heads hovered slowly rotating Christmas trees. Halogen lamps made them glitter and flash. One was done completely in silver rosettes, another in gold hearts, a third in silver icicles, a fourth in gold balls. . all the gold and silver dazzled her and hurt her eyes. Gold and silver. Silver. Like shiny sardines in their can. Like shiny. .
“Mamma! Lift your feet!”
Katarina was yelling at her. The girls were behind her and realized what was about to happen. But it was too late. She was on her face where the escalator ended. The bag of newly bought panties and stockings spilled out every which way, but Jenny quickly picked them up. Katarina was so embarrassed she was about to sink through the floor. How humiliating could a mother be, anyway?
All Irene’s weariness had vanished. She swiftly gathered up her children, her packages, and her wounded dignity. Eagerly she said, “Let’s go! I need a telephone!”
“Did you hurt yourself? Should I call an ambulance or anything?”
“No. But something did strike me, as a matter of fact. An idea!”
“Don’t you have your cell phone?”
“No, I didn’t bring it.”
They made a U-turn and took the escalator back downstairs. On the ground floor Irene found a nice cafe and a pay phone. She parked the girls at a table furnished with hot chocolate with whipped cream and saffron Lucia buns.
Irene began searching her pockets for the piece of paper with the number on it; she found it and punched in the number.
“Sylvia von Knecht.”
“Hello, excuse me for bothering you. This is Inspector Irene Huss.”
“What do you want?”
It wouldn’t be fair to claim that any great warmth flowed through the line. But it wasn’t necessary either. What was important now was not to get Sylvia into a bad mood. Which Irene unfortunately seemed to have a real talent for. In as friendly a tone as she could muster, Irene said, “A piece of information has come up that I need to check. It will only take five minutes.”
“Go ahead and check then!”
Irene was flustered until she realized what Sylvia meant. “No, I can’t do it on the phone. I have to come up and talk to you at the apartment. It’s very important if it turns out to be true,” she said urgently.
There was a long silence.
“When would you be coming, in that case?”
“Would three o’clock be all right?”
“Fine.”
JUST BEFORE three o’clock they went back to the car. All three had tired feet, but they were happily sated with purchases and impressions. There was no doubt about it: This year there would be a Christmas too. Irene started the car, and only then did she tell the girls that she had to run an errand at someone’s apartment. But it was on the way home, not a detour. The girls griped but promised to wait in the car. Irene parked on Kapellplatsen so that they could stroll around and do some window-shopping. It wasn’t that much fun, though, because all the stores were closed, except for the Konsum grocery store and the bakery. After NK all the other Christmas decorations were an anticlimax. IT WAS Arja who opened the door. She smiled her pleasant smile but it faded rapidly when her sister’s whiny voice was heard from inside the apartment.
“Is it that cop person?”
Before Arja could reply, Irene shouted back, “It’s Detective Inspector Irene Huss from the Homicide Commission.”
She’d be damned if she’d let herself be called a “cop person”! And there wasn’t anything called the “Homicide Commission,” but Sylvia wouldn’t know that. It sounded good. Arja at least was impressed, when she stepped back to let Irene in, as evidenced by her wide eyes and slightly gaping mouth.
Sylvia came out of the kitchen with her lips pressed together in annoyance. Presumably she had gotten lost because the kitchen was not one of the places where she usually spent any time. Irene recalled the virginal kitchen implements over the stove. And the empty hook where a meat cleaver was missing. She tried to smile and look pleasant.
“Thanks for letting me come up and bother you for a moment. I just need to check on one thing. It’s about the keys.”
“Yes?”
“Can we go upstairs?”
Sylvia jerked her neck and began striding toward the stairs to the upper level. Irene assumed that it was all right to follow.
In the upstairs hall Sylvia stopped and turned. She coolly raised one eyebrow and said, “The keys?”
“Would you please get the spare-key ring? The one you said you keep in your desk drawer in your office. I’ll go in and get your husband’s key case. That is, if it’s still on his nightstand?”
Sylvia snorted lightly before she replied, “In the drawer of the nightstand. The police just traipse around at will in my home! I don’t suppose I can stop you. You’ve already taken his car keys, without returning them!”
She swiftly turned and glided away toward her office. Irene swallowed the words that were on the tip of her tongue.
The room had changed. It took a fraction of a second before Irene noticed that the paintings were gone. There were a couple of paintings on the empty walls, but they weren’t “sex pictures,” as Irene in her ignorance had called them. A “collection of erotica,” Henrik von Knecht had corrected her. Imagine how much useful information she had learned in the course of this investigation! The ones that were in the room now were completely normal paintings. Modern and eccentric, but not nudes. A sudden pang of sympathy for Sylvia went through her. She quickly went over to the enormous silk bed and opened the drawer of Richard’s nightstand. It contained paper tissues, some ice-blue cough drops in transparent wrappers, and the shiny, black leather key case. Now she would see if she was right. She was surprised to see that her hands were shaking a little when she unsnapped the case. Out fell the six keys, hanging from their hooks. All were equally shiny. All were made of exactly the same type of metal. All had no numbers or markings. No wear whatsoever. This was the newly made set of keys, the one that Richard had had made at Mister Minit less than six months ago. A sigh of relief escaped her.
“Did you find anything of interest?”
Irene heard Sylvia’s voice behind her back. You could have cut glass with it. Calmly Irene turned around, walked over to the rigid, thin little woman, and said, “Have you looked at Richard’s set of keys since he died?”
