“I don’t know,” she said. “It feels as if people are checking me out when I look away. Talking about me when I’m not there. As soon as I come along, the conversation kind of starts afresh. You know what I mean? It seems as if it’s ‘Tennis, anyone?’ in a mad panic as soon as they see me coming.”
“Well, it is,” smiled Maria. “You’re the firm’s very own Modesty Blaise. And now you’ve gone to stay out at Torsten’s place and you’re getting more and more isolated and peculiar. Of course everybody’s talking about you.”
Rebecka laughed.
“Oh, thanks, I feel much better now.”
“I saw you talking to Johan Grill and Petra Wilhelmsson. What did you think of Miss Spin? I’m sure she’s very nice, but I just can’t take to somebody whose backside is up between her shoulder blades. Mine’s like a teenager. It’s kind of liberated itself from me and wants to stand on its own two feet.”
“I thought I heard something dragging along the grass when you turned up.”
They fell silent and gazed out over the channel where an old Fingal was chugging along.
“Don’t worry,” said Maria. “People will soon start to get really pissed. Then they’ll come weaving over to you wanting to chat.”
She turned to Rebecka, leaned in close and said in a slurring voice:
“So how does it actually feel to kill somebody?”
Rebecka’s and Maria’s boss Mans Wenngren was standing a little way off, watching them.
Good, he thought. Nicely done.
He could see Maria Taube was making Rebecka Martinsson laugh. Maria’s hands were waving in the air, twisting and turning. Her shoulders moved up and down. It was a wonder she could keep her glass under control. Years of training with upper-class families, presumably. And Rebecka’s posture softened. She looked brown and strong, he noticed. Skinny as a rake, but then she always had been.
Torsten Karlsson was standing a little way to the side behind Mans studying the barbecue buffet. His mouth was watering. Indonesian lamb kebabs, kebabs of beef fillet or scampi with Cajun spices, Caribbean fish kebabs with ginger and pineapple, chicken kebabs with sage and lemon, or Asiatic style, marinated in yogurt with ginger, garam masala and chopped cucumber, along with lots of different sauces and salads. A selection of red and white wines, beer and cider. He knew they called him “Karlsson on the roof” at the office, after the character in Astrid Lindgren’s books. Short and stocky, his black hair sticking up like a scrubbing brush on top of his head. Mans, on the other hand, always looked good in his clothes. There was no way women told him he was sweet, or that he made them laugh.
“I heard you’d got a new Jag,” he said, pinching an olive from the bulgur wheat salad.
“Mmm, an E-type cabriolet, mint condition,” answered Mans mechanically. “How’s she getting on?”
For a split second Torsten Karlsson wondered whether Mans was asking how his own Jag was getting on. He looked up, followed the direction of Mans’ gaze and landed on Rebecka Martinsson and Maria Taube.
“She’s staying up at your place,” Mans went on.
“She couldn’t stay cooped up in that little one room apartment. She didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. Why don’t you ask her yourself? She’s your assistant.”
“Because I’ve just asked you,” snapped Mans.
Torsten Karlsson held up his hands in a don’t-shoot-I-surrender gesture.
“To be honest, I don’t really know,” he said. “I never go out there. And if I am there we talk about other things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, about putting fresh tar on the steps, about the red Falun paint, about her plans to replace all the putty round the windows. She works all the time. For a while she seemed to be obsessed by the compost.”
The expression on Mans’ face encouraged him to go on. Interested, almost amused. Torsten Karlsson pushed his fingers through the black mop of hair on his head.
“Well,” he said, “first of all she set about building. Three different compost bins for garden and household waste. Bought the rat proof kind. Then she built a rapid compost heap. She practically made me write down how you had to layer it all with grass and sand-pure science. And then, when she was supposed to go on that course on corporate taxation in Malmo, you remember?”
“I do, yes.”
“Well, she rang me up and said she couldn’t go, because the compost was, now how did she put it, there was something the matter with it, not enough nitrogen. So she’d fetched some household waste from a nursery nearby, and now it was too wet. So she’d have to stay at home and scatter and drill.”
“Drill?”
“Yes, I had to promise to go out there during the week she was away and drill down through the compost with an old hand drill- the kind you use to make holes in the ice. Then she found the former owners’ compost heap a little way into the forest.”
“And?”
“There was all sorts in there. Old cat skeletons, broken bottles, all kinds of shit… so then she decided to clean it. She found an old bed behind the outhouse with a kind of mesh base. She used that as a huge sieve. Shoveled the stuff onto the bed and shook it so the clean compost fell through. I should have brought along some of our clients and introduced them to one of our promising young associates.”
Mans stared at Torsten Karlsson. He could see Rebecka in his mind’s eye, rosy cheeks, hair standing on end, frantically shaking an iron bed on top of a pile of earth. Torsten down below with wide-eyed clients dressed in dark suits.
They both burst out laughing at the same time and almost couldn’t stop. Torsten wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Although she has calmed down a bit now,” he said. “She isn’t so… I don’t know… the last time I was there she was sitting out on the steps with a book and a cup of coffee.”
“What book was it?” asked Mans.
Torsten Karlsson gave him an odd look.
“I didn’t think to look,” he said. “Talk to her.”
Mans knocked back his glass of red wine.
“I’ll go and say hello,” he said. “But you know me. I’m crap at talking to people. And even worse at talking to women.”
He tried to laugh, but Torsten wasn’t smiling.
“You have to ask her how she is.”
Mans blew air down his nose.
“I know, I know.”
I’m better at short-term relationships, he thought. Clients. Cab drivers. The checkout girl in the local shop. No old conflicts and disappointments lurking just under the surface like tangled seaweed.
Late summer’s afternoon on Lido. The red evening sun settling over the gentle contours of the rocks like a golden bowl. One of the archipelago cruise boats slips by out in the channel. The reeds down by the water put their heads together and rustle and whisper to each other. The sound of the guests chatting and laughing is carried out over the water.
Dinner has progressed to the stage where cigarette packets have appeared on the tables. It was okay to stretch your legs before dessert, so it wasn’t quite so crowded around the tables. Sweaters and cardigans that had been tied around waists or slung over shoulders were now slipped over arms chilled by the evening air. Some people were paying a third or fourth visit to the buffet, standing and chatting to the cooks who were turning the spitting kebabs over the glowing charcoal. Some were well on the way to being drunk. Had to hold on to the railings when they went up the steps to the toilets. Waving their arms about and spilling cigarette ash all over their clothes.
