instead of worrying about the housework, and Lukas showed her every single day how grateful he was that she had chosen to stay at home.
Since her mother-in-law’s death, everything had changed.
Lukas was grieving in a way that frightened her.
He seemed so distant.
Mechanical.
He said very little, and was prone to losing his temper, even with the children. Under normal circumstances he was the one who sat down and helped their eldest son with his schoolwork, but at the moment he was clearly unable to concentrate on the complexities of Year 2 homework. Instead, he had started clearing out the garage, where he was intending to to build new shelves along one wall. It must be freezing cold out there every evening, and when he finally did come in he would eat his evening meal in silence, then go to bed without even touching her.
It was so quiet in the house, and she didn’t like it.
She set down the iron and went over to the window to switch on the radio. Another miserable day was pressing itself against the wet glass. Surely it had to stop raining soon. January was always a desolate month, but this one was worse than usual. The low pressure was actually having a physical effect on her; for several days she had been troubled by a slight headache, and now it had got worse. Her temples were pounding, and she tried massaging them gently. It didn’t help at all. She would go to the bathroom and take a couple of Alvedon before finishing the ironing.
There were no painkillers in the locked medicine cabinet. She searched in despair among Asterix plasters and Flux, bottles of Pyrisept and Vademecum. Not a painkiller in sight, apart from suppositories for children.
It was as if not being able to find any tablets had made the headache worse.
Lukas’s migraine tablets, she thought.
They would help.
The problem was that they weren’t in the medicine cabinet. Lukas thought the lock was too easy to force, and strong medication could be dangerous for a curious eight-year-old. Instead, he kept the box locked in the drawer of the big desk in his study. Astrid knew where the key was: behind a first edition of
She had never opened the drawer, and hesitated before inserting the key in the lock.
They had no secrets from one another, she and Lukas.
Perhaps she ought to ring and ask him first.
He was her husband, she thought wearily, and she only wanted one tablet. Lukas had never told her not to look in the drawer. The very idea of telling each other not to do something was completely alien to them.
The lock opened with an almost inaudible click. She pulled out the drawer and found herself staring down at a photograph. A woman, and the photograph must be quite old. For a while she just stood there looking down at it, then eventually she picked it up, cautiously, and held it under the brighter light of the desk lamp.
There was something familiar about the face, but Astrid couldn’t quite place it. In a way the shape of the face and the straight nose reminded her of Lukas, but that had to be a coincidence. The woman in the photograph also had the same funny teeth, one front tooth lying slightly on top of the other, but after all lots of people had teeth like that. The singer Lill Lindfors, for example, as Astrid had often pointed out when they were young and she was besotted with everything about Lukas.
Despite the fact that she had no idea who the woman was, it struck her in some odd way that she had seen this photograph before. She just couldn’t remember where. As she stared at the woman she realized her headache had disappeared. Quickly, she put the photograph back, closed and locked the drawer and returned the key to its hiding place.
When she left Lukas’s study she closed the door carefully behind her, as if she really had done something forbidden.
The depressing piles of unsolved crimes in Silje Sorensen’s office were getting her down. There was barely room for a coffee cup on her crowded desk, even though everything was in neatly sorted files. She sat down on her chair, pushed aside a bundle of newspaper cuttings and put down the cup, before starting to go through the whole lot.
She had to reprioritize.
Her list of things to do was growing.
The Police Officers’ Association’s more or less legal actions and protests against terrible working conditions, low pay, inadequate staffing and the threat to pension entitlement had led to a somewhat acerbic tone in any dealings between the government and the police. Officers were no longer so willing to work overtime. Things didn’t get done as quickly nowadays. The organization’s 11,000-plus members were gradually beginning to take a fresh look at their priorities. Although the statistics hadn’t yet been processed, it looked as if the clear-up rate for 2008 had fallen dramatically in comparison with previous years – and it was only January. Employees were demanding their right to free time, and were off sick more frequently. Sometimes this coincided noticeably with public holidays and weekends, when major challenges awaited those who were charged with maintaining law and order.
The criminals were having an easier time all round.
People felt less and less safe. The police had always scored highly when it came to credibility and trustworthiness, but now they were losing the sympathy of the public. More and more frequently the papers were running stories about victims of violent crime who had been unable to report the offence because their local police station wasn’t manned, rural stations that were closed at weekends, and victims of crime who had to wait several days for the police to turn up and look for any clues. If they turned up at all, that is.
Silje Sorensen was a member of the union, but she had long since abandoned any attempt to keep a record of her overtime. The only yardstick she used was the reaction at home. When her sons became too much of a handful and her husband became more and more taciturn, she tried to spend more time at home. Otherwise, she sneaked off to work outside normal working hours as often as she could.
As the only child of a shipping owner, her decision to train as a police officer hadn’t exactly been expected. Her mother had gone into a state of shock and hysteria when she learned of her daughter’s career choice. This lasted throughout Silje’s first year in college. We’ve wasted a fortune on boarding schools in Switzerland and England, her mother wailed, and now my daughter is going to throw away her future working in the public sector! If she must get her hands dirty dealing with violent criminals and the like, then why on earth couldn’t she become a solicitor instead? Or a legal advisor within the police service, if the worst came to the worst?
That was exactly the reaction Silje had wanted.
Her father had beamed and kissed her on the forehead when she told him she had got into the Police Training Academy. That wasn’t exactly the idea.
Silje Sorensen had never rebelled as a child or a teenager. Never protested. Not when she was forced to move abroad at the age of ten, only seeing her parents during the holidays. Not when she had to spend two months at a French language school in Switzerland at the age of fifteen, where the working day began at 6.30 in the morning and the Catholic nuns had no qualms about using punishments that were probably forbidden under the Geneva Convention. Silje didn’t even argue with her father when he decided that she should squeeze five school years into two and a half; she gained a degree in English by the time she was nineteen. By then she had come of age, and as a reward for her silent patience and remarkable hard work, her father had transferred more than half of his fortune to his only daughter.
Training as a police officer was Silje Sorensen’s first deliberate act of rebellion.
When she was allocated to work with the legendary Hanne Wilhelmsen during her first year, she quickly realized that this stubborn, rebellious choice of career was going to make her happy. She loved it. The majority of what she knew about police work she had learned from her reluctant, uncommunicative mentor. Although Hanne Wilhelmsen had made herself more and more unpopular through her own headstrong approach, Silje had never ceased to admire her. When Inspector Wilhelmsen was shot during a dramatic incident in Nordmarka and paralysed from the waist down, Silje had grieved as if it had happened to a sister. She never really got over the
