He stood and buttoned up his trousers.
‘I haven’t even seen your breasts yet.’
He slapped her lightly on the calf.
‘Turn over, I want to see your breasts.’
Ylva just lay there and didn’t move. The man knelt one leg back down on the bed, grabbed her hip and turned her over.
‘Your breasts. Don’t make this any harder on yourself. You think I haven’t seen breasts before?’
Ylva lifted up her top, turned her face away.
‘Sit up so I can see. All breasts are flat when you’re lying down.’
He sat her up and took a step back.
‘Off with your top. Your bra as well, no messing around.’
He looked from left to right and back, with the expression of a disappointed horse trader.
‘You’re too thin,’ he said eventually. ‘All the women round here are. You’ll need to put on a bit of weight. That might be difficult to begin with, with all the stress, but you’ll soon get used to it.’
He sat down on the bed.
‘Let me guess what you’re thinking. You’re trying to work out how you can get out of here, you’re thinking about how unfair it is that you’re being kept here against your will. You keep watching the screen, waiting for something to happen, a dramatic event that will end in your release. It’s natural.’ He sat down on the bed. ‘And believe me,’ he continued, ‘I don’t want to interfere with your dreams and fantasies. But the sooner you accept your situation, the easier it will be.’
He put his finger under her chin and lifted her head. She met his eyes, without reciprocating his smile.
‘You’re sick,’ she said.
The man shrugged.
‘If you did manage to escape, which I strongly doubt, I’d be in the headlines for weeks, of course I would. But, you see, when you’ve suffered misfortune and loss, life changes. Things that were once important become meaningless and what you thought of as nonsense before suddenly becomes an obsession.’
He patted her on the arm and stood up.
‘You’ll be grateful for the small things. It might be hard to imagine now, but I promise you, you’ll get there. And we’ll make the journey together.’
*
They ate the pizza straight from the box.
‘Don’t forget the salad,’ Mike nagged.
‘I don’t like pizza salad,’ Sanna complained.
Mike dropped it. He’d attempted an enticing
Mike had cut Sanna’s pizza into smaller pieces and she ate while she looked at the DVD cover for
The best kind of film, according to Sanna. Mike was forced to agree.
The grease dripped from Sanna’s pizza.
‘Here,’ Mike said, and handed her a piece of kitchen roll. ‘It’s dripping.’
Sanna took it and wiped herself awkwardly. Mike was about to give her a hand when he suddenly remembered his own father’s irritated comment:
‘Just wash your hands when you’re finished,’ he said, gently.
‘Okay.’
As usual, Mike was done before Sanna had even finished her first slice. He insisted that she have one more, which he put on to her plate. Then he put his glass and cutlery into the dishwasher and went out to throw the boxes straight in the bin.
Helsingborg local council had introduced an over-ambitious environmental project that involved all residents sorting their rubbish down to an atomic level. It was a minor science now with a dozen different plastic bins, which had in turn made the binmen so self-important and difficult that they refused to empty any bins that were not right at the edge of the pavement well before they did their rounds.
Mike ripped the boxes into small pieces and then stood for a while outside the house, breathing in the fresh air, completely unaware that his wife was not far away, watching him on a grainy TV screen, with tears in her eyes.
22
‘I take it that you’re not going to write about the case?’
Erik Bergman looked at Calle Collin in amusement. The meeting had been arranged by the wise woman with the big heart, and she had also reminded the crime reporter that Calle was the temp who some years earlier had said no to a job on the evening paper’s news desk, with the now infamous words:
‘Anders Egerbladh and I were in the same class,’ Calle said.
Erik Bergman nodded with interest.
‘And what was he like?’
‘An arse.’
‘Serial shagger was what I was told,’ Bergman said.
‘I’m sure, that too,’ Calle replied. ‘Though I can’t honestly say that I ever met him as an adult. Maybe he changed …’
Erik Bergman looked at him sceptically.
‘… became a good person,’ Calle said. ‘But I find that hard to believe.’
‘What is it that you want to know?’ Bergman asked.
‘I read your articles on the Internet,’ Calle explained, ‘and I may have got the wrong end of the stick, but I had a feeling that you knew more than you wrote.’
‘Why do you want to know?’
Calle shrugged and shook his head at the same time.
‘Curious. It sounds so dramatic: “The hammer murder”, “bestial”.’
‘In this case, they were the right words. We had a bit of a problem with the tag line. We played with The Murder on Fjallgatan or The Steps Murder, as we’d already used The Hammer Murder a few times before. But it was undeniably gruesome. As I said, Anders Egerbladh liked to put it around. There were some divorcees, but most of the women he met via the dating sites were married. I don’t know if he got a kick from it or whether married women use the Internet more. Whatever, it took half the police force to question all the spouses.’
‘And …?’
‘Nope, nothing. They went through all his phone records and email history and discovered that he’d arranged to meet a woman at Gondolen. Then she called at the last minute, presumably to ask him to come to her place instead. After the conversation, he left the restaurant, bought a bunch of flowers from the stall down by Slussen and walked up towards Fjallgatan.’
‘So it was a trap?’
‘Without a doubt. The woman doesn’t actually exist. She used a pay-as-you-go phone and all emails were sent from public computers around town. And the photos on the dating website were downloaded from a foreign blog.’
