why they’d taken such a long walk.
‘Not really. It’s mostly about day-to-day life. But I only read a few pages. I need to take it in small doses.’
Erica went out to the kitchen and, as if to change the subject, she said, ‘Shall we have some tea?’
‘That’d be great,’ said Patrik, hanging up his coat and Maja’s. He followed Erica out to the kitchen, watching her as she busied herself putting on the water and getting out the teabags and cups. They could hear Maja playing with her toys in the living room. After a few minutes Erica set two steaming cups of tea on the kitchen table, and they sat down across from each other.
‘Okay, let’s hear it,’ she said, studying Patrik. She knew him so well. The expression in his eyes under the shock of hair, the nervous drumming of his fingers; there was something he either didn’t want to tell her or didn’t dare.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked, trying to look innocent.
‘Don’t you go blinking those baby blue eyes at me. What aren’t you telling me?’ She took a sip of the hot tea and waited with amusement for him to stop squirming and get to the point.
‘Well…’
‘Yes?’ said Erica helpfully, acknowledging that part of her was taking a sadistic delight in his obvious discomfort.
‘Well, something happened while Maja and I were out on our walk.’
‘Really? You’re both back home in one piece, so what could it be?’
‘Er…’ Patrik sipped his tea to buy some time as he pondered how best to explain. ‘We were walking over towards Lersten’s mill, and then Martin and the team turned up to check out a call they’d received.’ He gave Erica a cautious look. She raised one eyebrow and waited for him to go on.
‘Someone had phoned in a report of a dead body in a house on the road to Hamburgsund, so they were heading over there to take a look.’
‘I see. But you’re on paternity leave, so that really has nothing to do with you.’ Suddenly she gave a start, her cup halfway to her lips. ‘You don’t mean that you…’ She stared at him in disbelief.
‘Yes,’ said Patrik, his voice sounding a bit shrill and his eyes fixed on the table.
‘Don’t tell me you took Maja to a place where a dead body was found?’ Her gaze was riveted on him.
‘Um, yes, but Martin watched her while I went inside to have a look. He took her over to see the flower bed.’ He ventured a slightly conciliatory smile but received only an icy glare in return.
‘Inside to have a look?’ The ice cubes in her voice were clinking mercilessly. ‘You’re on paternity leave. The key words here are “on leave”, not to mention “paternity”! How hard can it be to say “I’m not working right now”?’
‘I just went inside to take a look,’ said Patrik lamely, but he knew Erica was right. He was on leave. Paternity leave. His colleagues could run the show. And he shouldn’t have taken Maja anywhere near a crime scene.
At that instant he realized that there was one more detail Erica didn’t know about. He felt a nervous twitch on his face as he swallowed hard and added:
‘It turned out to be murder, by the way.’
‘Murder!’ Erica’s voice rose to falsetto. ‘It’s not enough that you take Maja to a house where a body was discovered – it turns out to be homicide.’ She shook her head. The rest of the words she wanted to say seemed to have stuck in her throat.
‘I won’t do it ever again.’ Patrik threw out his hands. ‘The team will just have to solve the case on their own. I’m on leave until January, and they know that. I’m going to devote myself one hundred per cent to Maja. Word of honour!’
‘You better mean that,’ snarled Erica. She was so angry that she wanted to lean across the table and shake him. Then curiosity overcame her:
‘Where did it happen? Have they found out who the victim was?’
‘I’ve no idea. It was a big white house a few hundred metres down the road on the left-hand side, on the first turnoff to the right after the mill.’
Erica gave him a strange look. Then she said, ‘A big white house with grey trim?’
Patrik thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘Yes, I think that’s right. It said “Frankel” on the letter box.’
‘I know who lives there. Axel and Erik Frankel. You know, the Erik Frankel that I went to see about the Nazi medal.’
Patrik looked at her, dumbstruck. How could he have forgotten that? Frankel wasn’t exactly the most common name in Sweden.
From the living room they could hear Maja babbling happily.
It was late afternoon by the time they finally made it back to the station. Torbjorn Ruud, head of the crime tech division, and his team had arrived, made a thorough job of it, and then left. The body had also been removed and was on its way to the forensics lab where it would undergo every imaginable and unimaginable examination.
‘Well, that was a hell of a Monday,’ said Mellberg with a sigh as Gosta parked the car.
‘Sure was,’ said Gosta, never one to waste words.
As they entered the station, Mellberg barely had time to register something approaching at high speed before a shaggy form jumped on him and he felt a wet tongue licking his face.
‘Hey! Hey! Cut that out!’ Mellberg pushed the dog away in disgust. Ears drooping, the disappointed animal shambled over to Annika, knowing that at least there he would be welcome.
Gosta fought the urge to laugh as Mellberg wiped off the dog spit with the back of his hand and fussily restored his comb-over to its rightful place, muttering irritably all the while.
Shoulders heaving with mirth, Gosta was turning into his office when the cry of ‘Ernst! Ernst! Come here, now!’ stopped him in his tracks. It had been quite a while since his colleague Ernst Lundgren had been given the axe, and there’d been no talk of him returning to the force.
Gosta stepped out into the corridor and saw Mellberg, his face beet red, pointing at something on the floor. ‘Ernst, what’s this?’
As the dog slunk into view, head hanging with shame, Mellberg bellowed for Annika, who arrived a moment later.
‘Oops, it looks like we’ve had a little accident here.’ She cast a sympathetic look at the dog, who gratefully moved closer to her.
‘A little accident? Ernst has shit on my floor.’
‘What’s going on?’ asked Martin, entering with Paula close behind.
Gosta, who by this time had completely lost the battle to contain his laughter, could barely get out the words: ‘Ernst… has shit on the floor.’
Martin looked from the little pile on Mellberg’s floor to the dog pressed close to Annika’s leg. ‘Don’t tell me you named the dog Ernst?’ he said, and then he too dissolved into giggles.
‘All right, all right,’ said Mellberg. ‘Get this cleaned up, Annika, so we can all go back to work.’ He stomped over to his desk and sat down. The dog looked from Annika to Bertil then, having decided that the worst was over, wagged his tail and went over to join his new master.
The others exchanged surprised glances, wondering what the dog saw in Bertil Mellberg that they had apparently missed.
Erica couldn’t stop thinking about Erik Frankel. She hadn’t known him well, but he and his brother Axel had always been an integral part of Fjallbacka. ‘The doctor’s sons’, they were called, even though it had been fifty years since their father had practised medicine in Fjallbacka, and forty years since he’d died.
She recalled her visit to the house which had once belonged to their parents and had become home to both brothers. It had been her only visit. The elderly bachelors shared a fascination with Germany and Nazism, each in his own way. Erik, a former history teacher, collected artefacts from the Nazi era. Axel, the older brother, had some sort of association with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, if Erica remembered correctly, and she also had a vague memory that he’d run into some sort of trouble during the war.
She’d phoned Erik and told him what she’d found, describing the medal to him. She’d asked if he could help by researching its origins and maybe explain how it might have ended up among her mother’s possessions. His immediate reaction had been silence. She’d said ‘Hello’ several times, thinking he might have hung up on her.
