Babylon (32 page)

Even though he knew it was presumptuous, he couldn’t help but
feel a sense of responsibility towards her. If they did carry on seeing each other, then sooner or later the issue of living together would come up. What Seja had said in Copenhagen about the Melkerssons’ house was doubtless only the beginning. The financial aspect certainly didn’t put him off. But the little house in the forest frightened him. The stillness out there became silence, became emptiness and an anxiety-inducing malaise. He didn’t know what he was prepared to do for the sake of love. It seemed to change from one day to the next.

‘But then it’s not easy to succeed at any dream, is it? And the idea of touting yourself around – well, that’s part of every job, at one level or another. You just have to learn to handle it. It’s a matter of self-esteem. People will never stop judging you; you just have to learn to do your best and not care so much about what they think.’

‘That’s easy for you to say.’

‘Yes, but that’s the way most men think. It’s typical of women to adapt to how—’

‘Stop, please. Let’s not go all Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus! I’m sure you’re right. But I just want to enjoy the moment. With you.’

She held his gaze.

‘We’re so lucky.’

Her fingers caressed his temple, then traced his hairline down his cheek to his jaw.

‘So, what do you think?’ she said. ‘Shall we spend the afternoon looking at art, or shall we order another bottle? We can look at the sea, get drunk and have an early night.’

Christian grabbed her hand.

‘Let’s go up to our room now. We can go out later. And then we’ll have all evening to drink wine.’

He pulled her up from the chair.

The water slurped as it was sucked down the plughole. He lay there listening to Seja singing in the shower. He was tangled up in the bedclothes; he rolled over to the other side and yanked the damp sheet free.

Christian was also going to have a shower before they went out, but for the moment he was just glad he’d managed to stay awake. In certain respects the twelve-year age difference made itself felt. He wasn’t thirty any more.

He glanced at the spines of the books on the bedside table; they were both about the war in Iraq. He flicked through them.

Seja emerged from the shower with a towel wound around her head instead of her body. ‘Have you read them?’ she asked, gesturing towards the books.

‘No, why would I have read them?’

‘Because you’re working on that case.’

‘That particular case is more or less closed. And these books are about the war in Iraq.’

‘It’s all connected.’ She rummaged in her bag, hanging up her clothes in the wardrobe.

Christian was reading the back cover of one of the books. ‘Surely that’s just a theory.’

‘An extremely well-founded theory, if so.’

Seja pulled on her jeans and a top before going back into the bathroom. He watched her loop her wet hair into a knot in the doorway.

‘So is this the kind of thing you’re going to write about, then?’ A bit louder, so that she would hear him.

‘It’s interesting. I’m thinking about it.’

Christian hauled himself out of bed and pushed past her into the shower. The hot water woke him up. He was looking forward to a walk through the town.

‘If you’ve finished, perhaps I could have a shave and clean my teeth?’

In the mirror her cheeks were flushed from the hot shower. She changed from her black top into a white one before deciding she was ready to go out.

‘Will you be long?’

‘I’m ready now. Ready to drink in the culture. But have a little patience, I need to check my messages first.’

‘Freak.’

‘Absolutely. And I need to get dressed. Do you want to wait for me downstairs?’

‘I’ve got all the patience in the world when it comes to you.’

She was just about to leave the room when she stopped. ‘Shall I tell you something? It comes back to what we were saying about my job.’

‘Sure, fire away.’

‘I’ve started writing something. No, two things actually. The first
one is, as you suspected long ago, an article about smuggled cultural treasures, the ones you found in that house in Kungsladugård. It’s going to be an expanded news item with references to grave-robbing, among other things. I’ve spoken to two daily papers who will almost certainly take it.’

She waited, probably to see how Christian would react.

‘So why were you sitting there worrying about the future before? Things are going really well for you.’

‘Well, yes, but one piece doesn’t make a future. Anyway, what I really wanted to tell you is that I’ve also started a slightly bigger project. Inspired by my mother and my grandmother. My mother’s life when she was growing up in Finland, what happened when she moved to Sweden with Dad, and – I haven’t got that far yet.’

‘Oh? Like a book? A sort of biography?’

‘No, no. Not a biography. But the idea of a fictional account came out of my thoughts about . . . language. My mother’s refusal to put things into words. I thought that instead of being angry with her, perhaps I should try to
give
her a language. After all, she was shaped by her grandmother and her upbringing.’

Christian started buttoning his shirt. ‘You know, you’ve told me hardly anything about your parents.’

She usually got annoyed when he asked. But this time she was the one who had brought it up.

‘I know,’ Seja said pensively. ‘But that’s a part of the problem. I’ve always been as inarticulate as my mother when I’ve tried to talk about her, as if the very thought of her made me unable to speak. Perhaps it was my way of adapting, I don’t know. Just as my father has learnt to accept that everything is just
the way it is
. And I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to feel mute in any context; words are my thing, aren’t they?’

She laughed. ‘At the risk of sounding pretentious, I’d like to relearn my mother tongue, literally. When I was little she sometimes used to tell me stories about when she was a child in Finland. I’d like to carry on where she left off. Fiction, but inspired by reality.’ She looked at Christian, her face tense with expectation, as if his opinion was of the utmost importance.

He chose his words carefully. ‘I think it sounds good. It’s a good idea to sort things out with your parents before it’s too late, because
otherwise you’ll regret it. And I also think it would help if you put your journalism to one side when it feels like hard work, and focus on something you feel really passionate about. It’s important that you enjoy what you’re doing. Otherwise you just can’t hack it in the long term.’

‘Is that what you think? Do you find your job fun?’

Christian raised his eyebrows in response to her question, which clearly struck him as more or less absurd. Words such as fun and boring just didn’t apply to his job. Eventually he smiled.

‘I’m not talking about what
I
ought to do now. I’m talking about what
you
ought to do. It’s not as though I’ve sorted things out with my parents either.’

He laughed as she attempted to wrestle him down onto the bed. ‘Mind the shirt! It’s new!’

She soon bounced back to her feet, gasping for breath. ‘It’s a feel-good project. A turning-thirty-crisis project. I’m not saying I’m a writer, or that it will turn into a novel. But I know I’ve really missed writing, in my own way. Not as a journalist, but the way I’ve always done it: just writing what springs to mind.’

‘Don’t justify it,’ said Christian. ‘Just go for it.’

After she had gone downstairs, he logged on and scrolled through his emails. A message Renée had forwarded that morning caught his interest. He picked up the phone to ring the office just as Seja came into view in the front garden. She crouched down to examine something on the ground; he couldn’t see what it was. He put the phone down, wrote a few lines to Karlberg and forwarded the message.

49

Gothenburg

The rain after the heat came as a relief. These days Rebecca Nykvist used Slottsskogen park almost as her own private garden. It lived and breathed as a perfect balance between man and nature. The extensive
lawns provided open aspects and enclosures where it was often possible to catch a glimpse of fallow deer and elk. People were ridiculously afraid of getting slightly wet, reacting to the warm spring rain as if it were a vicious hailstorm, striking their cheeks like nails. The buggy mafia frantically packed away their blankets and plastic platefuls of half-eaten banana mash, their suddenly superfluous parasols and surprised, bawling offspring. Indifferent teenagers in front of Björngårdsvillan brushed dried grass off their backsides and headed off towards Linnéstaden or Majorna. Older couples looked up at the sky, their expressions irritated: was the weather trying to upset them personally?

Soon, Rebecca was alone. She tipped her head back, rolling her stiff neck until it felt soft and pliant. A pale rainbow arched above the tree-tops.

She had taken a half day’s leave. Nobody said anything at work, of course they didn’t. No doubt there had been plenty of talk when she came back to the office so soon after Henrik’s death.

Sometimes Rebecca felt like a caricature of herself: even when her partner dies she doesn’t cut herself some slack. She never takes any time off work.

The truth was that it helped her to stick to a daily routine. It gave her something else to think about when she was afraid that the agonising sense of loss would finish her off.

And the job itself had never really got to her emotionally, not even when she had been dealing with patients. If she let herself be affected by all the frustration she encountered, or mixed her own emotions with her relationships at work, she wouldn’t last long. And, besides, she had no intention of addressing her colleagues’ gossip.

No, she kept her distance, kept her sorrow to herself, and carried out the less than stimulating tasks she was given to a standard that was beyond reproach. Bided her time as she waited for some kind of closure.

Her troubles at work would soon blow over. This too shall pass, or whatever the phrase was. The same could not be said for her personal life. This bloody awful business with the police and the boiler and Henrik’s . . .

Rebecca had come to realise the true extent of Henrik’s double life. There had been parts of Henrik that she hadn’t known at all. Could
she have found a way in? Or was that just the kind of man Henrik was, a man with secrets? A man who was simply not to be trusted? Yet another one?

There was incontrovertible proof that he had hidden stolen goods in their cellar; Rebecca didn’t know long they had been there. Henrik must have been conned into something he didn’t understand – he was definitely naive – driven by the prospect of clearing his debts. And the fact that she had been constantly nagging him about money had no doubt played its part in his decision to get involved.

No. This wasn’t her fault. She had unknowingly been exposed to mortal danger. She had lost her life partner and been accused of murder. But she had been released.

She saw him on the far side of the park. The path curved around the lawn and Axel Donner was walking under the trees, on his way up the hill that rose towards Säröleden. The constant hum of the traffic grew more noticeable as she got closer.

Had he sought shelter from the rain? He was facing the other way and hadn’t noticed her yet. Rebecca was overcome by a sudden desire to follow him. Was she hoping he would give something away and, if so, what? Was he on his way to a secret meeting with a lover?

The first time she had joked about his friend being ‘in the closet’, Henrik had been furious, saying her job had warped her world-view. Later, he had brought up the subject, making a joke of it. They had laughed together. Henrik admitted that Axel sometimes got a little clingy, and that he didn’t seem to grasp the social norms of adult friendship: you don’t have to be glued to the other person’s side. It’s OK to go out on your own. You don’t walk around with a hurt expression on your face. You give each other the freedom to explore other relationships.

In the midst of that refreshing laughter Rebecca forgot what ‘other relationships’ might mean in Henrik’s case. It was just so nice to laugh at Axel. To consolidate their sense of being on the same team, even though Henrik had immediately taken it back and insisted that Axel had definitely had women in the past – well, one at least. It was as though Henrik were defending not only Axel in the face of an imagined accusation, but also himself. Rebecca’s good mood had quickly dissipated, to be replaced by irritation. She almost asked why he was being so defensive, but nothing annoyed Henrik more than when he
thought she was analysing him.
I am not your bloody patient
.

She followed Axel Donner at a safe distance.

They hardly knew each other, even though Axel was supposed to be Henrik’s closest friend. In a way, his taciturn, submissive demeanour had been a refreshing change. Henrik’s narcissism sometimes embarrassed her, but that was just the way he was. He wasn’t exactly subtle. The way he had introduced Rebecca to Axel as
my partner
, in passing and in a dismissive tone of voice, had aged her by a couple of decades in seconds.

Rebecca realised that she was thinking about Henrik and their relationship as if it still existed. Her heart skipped a beat. A black, gaping hole opened up at her feet before she briskly made a mental note to bring this up the next time she saw her therapist.

What
was
Axel doing under the trees? He walked onto the porch of a little red cottage with white eaves which looked out of place in the middle of the city. She watched as he tried the door. It was locked.

A twig snapped beneath Rebecca’s feet and suddenly she realised she had been creeping around trying not to make any noise. She felt stupid as she backed away and hid behind a tree trunk. She stayed there until he set off again.

They had never actually been enemies, they just represented different aspects of Henrik’s life. Rebecca’s aversion to him stemmed from something as primitive as a territorial impulse. She was clever enough to realise that Axel had access to places within Henrik where she would never be allowed to set foot. That Axel knew the man Henrik was when Rebecca wasn’t around.