‘Hey big spender.’
‘You only live once.’
‘True. I think I’ll go for three scoops. With strawberry sauce and cream.’
‘So now you’re going the whole hog?’
‘Because I’m worth it. If you’re going for hundreds and thousands, I’m having strawberry sauce and cream.’
They got their ice-creams and ate them leaning against the car in the sun.
‘Doesn’t get any better,’ Karlsson said.
‘Speak for yourself. My hundreds and thousands are finished.’
‘Where would you dump the body?’
‘Don’t know. You?’
‘In a lake,’ Karlsson said. ‘With weights.’
‘Too much hassle,’ Gerda concluded. ‘You’d have to pull and drag the body around and have a boat. And then you’d be worrying that the body would decompose and float up to the surface. Bury the shit, I say.’
‘But you’d have to dig bloody deep. There’s always some animal that’s rooting around in the dirt. God, it’s so good when the cream kind of freezes on the ice cream and goes hard.’
‘When it goes kind of lumpy, I know what you mean.’
‘We’ll have to talk to him again. It’s been a few days now. Maybe his conscience has been doing its thing.’
Mike Zetterberg wondered what else he could do. He tried to think constructively, find a loose thread to pull at.
She hadn’t been on the bus. Wrong, he didn’t know for sure. What he did know was that none of the bus drivers or passengers could remember seeing her. It was of course possible that no one had noticed her, but Mike found that hard to believe. Ylva attracted attention and had the sort of open smile that invited contact. She normally listened to her iPod so she wouldn’t have to talk to people.
IPod in her ears? Could she have walked out into the road and been run over without anyone seeing it? And the driver had panicked and taken her lifeless body and buried it somewhere or thrown it into the sea. Not likely. She would have walked through the town, people everywhere. Extremely unlikely, almost impossible.
The most likely thing was, and he had to agree with the police here, that she had arranged to meet someone. She had said one thing to Mike and something else to her colleagues. To cover her back. The question was, who had she gone to meet?
Her phone records didn’t provide any clues. He had gone through them himself with Karlsson and Gerda. Her emails at work were just as useless. No saved cyber flirts. She might of course have deleted them to avoid the risk of being discovered, or alternatively have a secret mail address, but Mike didn’t think so. Middle-aged women who slept around were seen as liberated, they didn’t need to skulk about. The opposite applied when you were a teenager: the girls got the bad reputation, the boys became heroes.
Ylva had been missing for four days. She hadn’t just gone off for a dirty weekend with a hot lover. And her passport was still in the chest of drawers, so she hadn’t taken a last-minute charter flight.
Her mobile …
Mike was just about to phone Karlsson and Gerda when he saw them turn into the driveway. He opened the front door and saw their serious faces.
‘Have you found her?’
Karlsson put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Let’s talk inside.’
For the thirty seconds it took them to move into the kitchen and sit down, Mike was convinced that they’d found Ylva’s body. It was a relief when he realised that she was still missing.
‘Her mobile,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see where she’s been?’
‘She turned her mobile off on Tagagatan.’
‘When?’
‘At half past six on Friday.’
‘She should have been on the bus then,’ Mike said.
‘Why?’
‘That’s on the bus route, and it fits with when she left work.’
‘But she wasn’t on the bus,’ Gerda stated.
‘That’s not why we’re here,’ Karlsson cut in. ‘We’ve spoken to Bill Akerman.’
Mike froze for a second.
‘I see, and what did he say?’
‘Well, first of all, he was working on Friday, the staff have confirmed that. But he told us something else that we thought was interesting.’
Mike leaned forward, all ears. Karlsson looked to Gerda for support.
‘How was your sex life?’
Mike’s face went bright red. But it was the red of anger, not embarrassment.
‘What the fuck do you mean,
‘I thought you said she wasn’t depressed.’
‘Bill Akerman was the final straw, the alarm bell she needed. It was like we started over again after that. And I’m sure that’s one of the reasons she didn’t go out with her colleagues.’
Karlsson and Gerda looked at each other and nodded.
Without a doubt.
29
It was difficult to hear what the other person was saying.
Calle Collin was sitting opposite an old actor, at a centrally positioned window table in an upmarket restaurant chosen by the actor. The other guests belonged to the same generation as the actor and glanced over at him discreetly. Two parties had passed the table on their way out and thanked the actor for many pleasurable moments and a lot of laughs. The actor had accepted these pats on the back with false modesty and great delight.
The reason that Calle Collin found it difficult to hear what the actor said was not that he spoke unclearly, but rather that he was so uninteresting.
‘I … success … anecdote … pause for laughter … public record … troubled childhood … not so easy to succeed … all the same I … modest … I always doubt … I constantly fight … I … the main thing … I interpret … I get to the heart of the character … I … empty phrases … I.’
Calle Collin nodded attentively and wrote down key words. He felt melancholy. The actor wasn’t a bad person, he was self-centred because he lacked self-confidence and therefore had an unquenchable need for confirmation. Moments like this were oxygen for him.
Calle Collin’s interview would be a carbon copy of every other interview the actor had ever given. Nothing new would be added and the truth would be crystal clear in its absence. Calle would send the text over to the actor for approval and the actor would have his say and perhaps even hint that Calle’s efforts didn’t quite meet his
