Inger Frimansson
Good Night, My Darling
The first book in the Justine Dalvik series
Translated by Laura A. Wideburg
Prologue
The plane touched down at Arlanda airport at six fifteen in the evening. The first leg had been late to London, which meant that they missed their connection. All the planes to Stockholm had been fully booked. They would not have gotten a seat until the next morning, if the woman from the Embassy had not gotten angry. Her name was Nancy Fors and she had been calm and a bit melancholy the whole trip. The unexpected explosion surprised Justine.
They were the first to leave the plane. Two plainclothes policemen came on board and guided them out through a back way.
“The press has already figured out that you were coming, unfortunately,” one of them said. Justine didn’t quite catch his name.
“They’re real hyenas with all their chomping and slurping, but we’ll fool them.”
They took her into their car.
The light hit her, that pure, cool light and the delicate greenery. She had forgotten that nature could look like that. She mentioned this to Nancy Fors: “Don’t you miss home? How do you manage to live there in that heat?”
“I know that it’s temporary,” she answered. “And this is still here, here at home.”
They passed the Sollentuna-Upplands Vasby exit. It was seven-thirty.
The policeman behind the wheel said, “You know… that girl Martina. Her parents want to meet you.”
“They do?”
“It’s important to them.”
She turned her face toward the window. She saw a little clump of trees with white trunks.
“Sure,” she said. “That’s fine.”
part one
Chapter ONE
That sharp, pure cold. Grey water like a living thing, silk. No sky, no, just no contrasts, she couldn’t stand that, that hurt her eyes. The gathering clouds, getting ready for snow. And the dry snow would come from the skies, swirl like smoke over the roads, and she would remove her clothes and let herself get completely misted.
Over there she had tried to imagine exactly this, the sensation of ice crystals. Her whole body tense, she would close her eyes in order to bring forth the sound of a Nordic stream one spring day when the ice had begun to melt.
She never succeeded. Not even when the fever chills were at their worst and Nathan covered her with clothes, rags, curtains, everything he could find.
She had been freezing with the wrong kind of chill.
She ran forward, forward.
Forward, forward, force the massive body, feet light in jogging shoes. Justine had tried them out at a sports store in Solna, clinically tried them out, with a young man having bright white teeth and slick wavy hair. He had her run on a treadmill and videoed her foot movements. While she was running, she formed her fists tightly, so tightly, afraid to lose her balance, afraid that he would find her ridiculous. An overweight, forty-five-year-old woman, afraid he would see something desperate in her way of pressing her knees together.
He watched her sternly.
“You pronate.”
She looked at him uncertainly.
“Yes, that’s right. But don’t worry about it, lots of people do; almost everyone does actually.”
She got off the treadmill, the hair on her neck somewhat damp. “This means that you run lopsided. You rotate your foot like this, which is why you wear out your soles on one side.” He lifted her old winter boots and showed them to her. “See for yourself.”
“But I never run. I’ve never done it.”
“It doesn’t matter. You pronate anyway.”
“Promenade?”
An attempt at a joke. He laughed politely.
She bought the shoes, which cost just under a thousand crowns. He gave her a bit of a lecture: better to invest in quality, you could hurt yourself jogging with the wrong kind of shoes, tear something, overstretch something, especially if you were not used to it.
The shoes had the brand name Avia. She thought of flying when she saw them.
Of fleeing.
To reach distant horizons.
With her dark blue stocking cap pulled down around her face, she began to go up Johanneslundtippen. She ran, bent forward, and small flocks of green birds flew up from their grass nests. They were silent but accusing. She had interrupted them in some important task with her flailing human body and her heavy, whistling breath.
Or a louse.
High at the top, the wind was strong and forced tears from her eyes. Beneath her, rows of houses were spread out. They looked like cardboard boxes placed in the maze of streets and cul-de-sacs, surrounded by rose hedges. The original plaster architect’s model must have looked exactly like this.
She nearly stumbled into some remains of fireworks, glass and plastic bottles. A group of people had been up here in order for the fireworks and themselves to be seen better on New Year’s Eve, shooting them up higher than
