of security.'
Kollberg raised an objection.
'You said that he grew up. He was a policeman, and professionally it's not very grown up to let yourself be shot down from behind by the man you're shadowing. I said before, I find it hard to believe.'
'Exacdy,' Asa Torell agreed. 'And I definitely don't believe it Something doesn't add up.'
Kollberg pondered this. After a while he said, 'The fact remains. He was working on something and no one knows what. I don't. Nor do you. Am I right?'
'Yes.'
'Did he change in any way? Before this happened?' She didn't answer. Raised her left hand and passed her fingers through her short dark hair. 'Yes,' she said at last 'How?'
'It isn't easy to say.'
'Have these pictures anything to do with the change?' 'Yes. I'll say they have.'
Stretching out her hand, she turned the photographs over and looked at them.
'To talk to anyone about this calls for a degree of confidence that I'm not sure I have in you,' she said. 'But I'll do my best'
Kollberg's palms had begun to sweat and he wiped them against the legs of his trousers. The roles had been reversed. She was calm and he was nervous.
'I loved Ake,' she said. 'From the start But we didn't suit each other very well sexually. We were different as regards tempo and temperament. We didn't have the same demands.'
Asa gave him a searching look.
'But you can be happy just the same. You can learn. Did you know that?' 'No.'
‘We proved it. We learned. I think you understand this.'
Kollberg nodded.
'Beck wouldn't understand it,' she said. 'And certainly not Ronn or anyone else I know.' She shrugged.
'In any case, we learned. We adjusted ourselves to each other, and we had it good.'
Kollberg forgot, for a moment, to listen. This was an alternative that he had never even thought existed.
'It's difficult,' she said. 'I must explain this. If I don't, I can't explain in what way Ake changed. And even if I give you a lot of details pertaining to my private life, it's not certain you'll grasp it But I hope you will.'
She coughed and said in a matter-of-fact tone, 'I've been smoking far too much this last week or two.'
Kollberg could feel that something was about to change. Suddenly he smiled. And Asa Torell smiled back, a trifle bitterly, but still.
'Anyway, let's get this over,' she said. 'The quicker the better. Unfortunately, I'm rather shy. Oddly enough.'
'It's not in the least odd,' Kollberg replied. 'I'm as shy as hell. It's part of the rest of one's emotions.'
'Before I met Ake. I began to think I was a nymphomaniac or something,' she said swiftly. 'Then we fell in love and learned to adjust to each other. I really tried hard, and so did Ake, and we succeeded. We had it good together, better than I ever dreamed of. I forgot that I was more highly sexed than he was, we talked it over once or twice at the beginning, then we never talked any more about sexuality. There was no need. We made love when he felt like it, which was once or twice a week, three times at the most we did it very well and never needed anything else. That is, we were not unfaithful to one another, as you so wittily put it But then ...'
'... suddenly last summer,' Kollberg said.
She gave him a swift, approving glance.
'Exactly. Last summer we went to Mallorca on vacation. While we were away you all had a difficult and very nasty case here in town.'
'Yes. The park murders.'
'By the time we got home they had been cleared up. Ake was quite put out about it'
She paused, then went on, just as quickly and fluently, 'It sounds bad, but so does a lot of what I've said and am going to say. The fact is he got upset because he had missed the investigation. Ake was ambitious, almost to a fault I know that he always dreamed of coming upon something big that everyone else had overlooked. Moreover, he was much younger than the rest of you and in the early days, at any rate, he often felt pushed around at work. I know, too, that he thought you were one of those who bullied him most'
'He was right, I'm afraid.
'He didn't like you very much. He preferred Beck and Melander. I didn't but that's neither here nor there. About the end of July or beginning of August he changed - suddenly, as I said, and in a way that turned the whole of our life together upside down. That's when he took these pictures. Lots more, come to that, dozens of them. We had a sort of routine in our sex life, as I said, and it was fine. Now it was upset all of a sudden, and he was the one to upset it not I. We ... we were together ...'
'Made love, you mean,' Kollberg said.
'OK, we made love as many times in a day as we normally did in a month. Some days he wouldn't even let me go to work. There's no use denying that it was a pleasant surprise to me. I was amazed. You see, we'd been living together for over four years, but...'
'Go on,' Kollberg urged.
She took a deep breath.
'Sure, I thought it was just great. That he walked me about like a wheelbarrow and woke me up at four in the morning and wouldn't let me sleep or have any clothes on or go to work. That he wouldn't leave me alone even in the kitchen and took me on the sink and in the bathtub and from in front and from behind and upside down and in every chair there was. But he himself hadn't really changed and after a while I got the idea that he was trying out some sort of experiment on me. I asked him, but he only laughed.' 'Laughed?'
'Yes, he was in a very good mood all this time. Right up to ... well, until he was killed.' 'Why?'
'That's what I don't know. But one thing I did understand, as soon as I'd got over the first shock.' 'And that was?'
'That he was using me as a kind of guinea pig. He knew everything about me - everything. He knew that I'd get ridiculously horny if he made the slightest effort. And I knew all about him. For instance, that basically he wasn't particularly interested, other than now and again.'
'How long did this go on?'
'Until the middle of September. That's when he suddenly had so much to do and began to be away such a lot' 'Which doesn't fit in at all.'
Kollberg looked steadily at her, then added, 'Thanks. You're a great kid. I like you.'
She gave him a surprised and rather suspicious glance.
'And he didn't tell you what he was working on?'
She shook her head.
'Didn't even hint?'
Another shake of the head.
'And you didn't notice anything special?
'He was out a lot. I mean, out of doors. I couldn't help noticing that He would come home wet and cold.'
Kollberg nodded.
'More than once I was woken up in the small hours when he came home and got into bed, as cold as an icicle. But the last case he talked to me about was one he had in the first half of September. A man who had killed his wife. I think his name was Birgersson.'
'I remember it,' Kollberg said. 'A family tragedy. A very simple, ordinary story. I don't really know why we were brought into it -_ the case might have been taken out of the textbooks. Unhappy marriage, neuroses, quarrels, money troubles. In the end the man killed his wife more or less by accident. Was going to take his own life but didn't dare to and went to the police. But you're right, Stenstrom did have charge of it. He did the interrogating.'
'Wait - something happened during those interrogations.'
‘What?'
'I don't know. But one evening Ake came home very cheerful.'
'Not much to be cheerful about. Dreary story. Typical welfare-state crime. A lonely man with a status-
