It would be quite an understatement to maintain that Johansson felt at home in his solitude. According to conventional models of human coexistence, it was considerably worse than that. Solitude was the necessary prerequisite for Johansson to function, in the ordinary human sense of shaping the days into a respectable life or in the purely professional sense of acquitting oneself well before other people without consideration for family and friends and feelings in the most general sense. In that respect, his wife’s having left him and taken the children with her made existence almost ideal.
Two years after the divorce his then seven-year-old daughter had given him an LP record, A Single Man by Elton John, for Christmas. Apart from feeling his heart wrench as he read the words on the cover, he saw evidence of unusual human insight for someone her age. As an adult she would either become very strong and independent or else run the risk of being crushed under her own insight.
What disturbed the whole equation-this secure, controlled, predictable life-was his interest in women: their scent, their soft skin, the hollow in the neck between the hairline and the slender throat. It sought him out in dreams at night when he couldn’t defend himself other than by rolling the sheets into a sweaty cord in the middle of the bed; it sought him out in broad daylight; awake, sober, and clearheaded, he would twist his neck out of its socket for a regal posture and a pair of tanned legs he would never see again.
Now a specific example of this interest of his was sitting half an arm’s length away at the same table in a neighborhood restaurant where excellent food was served at a very reasonable price. He had met her two days earlier when he gave a lecture to a group of police chiefs with a legal education on the operation of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Now she was eating her pasta with shellfish and mushrooms with evident enjoyment, which made him happy. It was a good sign. If a woman poked at her food, it was a bad indication of something other than food.
The first time they talked to each other was at the break between the two hours of his lecture. About the obvious tedium of staying at a hotel in Stockholm when your life, home, and friends were in Sundsvall. Then to the point.
“If you don’t have anything better to do on Friday evening, there’s a very good restaurant in my neighborhood.” Johansson nodded, looking down into his white plastic coffee cup. His Norrland dialect was somewhat more marked than usual.
“I thought you’d never dare ask. Where, when, and how?”
Now she was sitting there, half an arm’s length away.
I really ought to say something about my solitude, thought Johansson. Warn her, in case I become really fond of her and she of me.
“Pasta, olive oil, basil, tomato, shellfish, and a little mushroom. What’s wrong with potato pancakes and fried bacon? I was brought up on that kind of thing.”
Johansson nodded and laid down his fork. “I think you know. Otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
She had set aside her fork and looked rather charmed.
Okay, thought Johansson. Shook his head and tilted his wineglass.
“I don’t have the faintest idea. I’m a simple country boy. Tell me about it.”
Seven minutes past eight, only two minutes after they’d responded to the alarm, Stridh and Oredsson arrived at the scene. Oredsson had driven in on the walkway that ran above the parking lot parallel to Valhallavägen, and before he stopped the car he turned on the searchlights. A few yards in front of the car sat an older man in a peaked cap and dark coat. He was rocking his upper body; in his arms he was hugging a dog that looked like a small German shepherd. He didn’t seem to have even noticed their arrival. Some ten yards farther away, exactly at the border between the walkway and the grassy area leading to the nearby wall of the building, lay a lifeless body. Around the head a pool of blood with a radius of close to half a yard shone like melted pewter in the beam of the headlights.
“I can check if he’s alive.” Oredsson looked inquiringly at Stridh while he was undoing his seat belt.
“If you think it’s unpleasant I can do it.” Stridh nodded with a certain emphasis. He was still the boss.
Oredsson shook his head and opened the car door.
“It’s okay. I’ve seen much worse, actually.”
Stridh contented himself with nodding. Didn’t ask where a twenty-four-year-old police trainee might have picked up such experience.
It must have been somewhere. When he reported to the command center a few minutes later he was concise and clear and his voice didn’t sound the least bit shaken. At the scene was a dead male, therefore an ambulance was not needed. Judging by the extensive injuries and the position of the body it appeared most probable that the male in question had fallen or jumped from one of the upper floors in the adjacent apartment building, a high-rise of at least twenty stories that contained student apartments and for unclear reasons was named the Rosehip. There was a witness at the scene, an older man who had been out walking his dog. His colleague Stridh had just spoken with him. It would be great if they could send someone from the after-hours unit plus a technician. Meanwhile, Oredsson would set up the cordon around the dead body, but no other reinforcements were required, in any event not at the present time.
“Yes. That’s the situation,” concluded Oredsson. I’m not going to bother saying anything about the mutt being dead too, he thought.
Police Inspector Bäckström was sitting in the break room at the after-hours unit, staring at the TV; up until now everything had gone well. For a Friday evening it had been unusually calm, and when the riot squad had carried in a street brawler half an hour earlier, Bäckström had seen what was coming and managed to sneak into the restroom. One of his colleagues would have to take care of that piece of crap. A gook, of course, and just as messy as those types always were.
Normally Bäckström worked with the homicide squad, but because he was always in financial straits, he was forced to work a great deal of overtime. True, only fools slaved at the after-hours unit on a Friday evening, but three days before payday he had no choice. Everything had gone fine-up until now, that is, when the chief inspector on duty stood in the door looking just as surly as usual while staring urgently at Bäckström.
“I’ve got a corpse for you, Bäckström. Seems to be lying on the walkway below that student skyscraper above the parking lot at Valhallavägen and Frejgatan. I’ve talked with Wiijnbladh at tech. You can ride with him.”
Bäckström lightened up a little and nodded. A do-it-yourselfer, he thought. One of those student reds who jumped because he didn’t get his welfare on time. I’ve still got a good chance to finish my shift before the bars close.
…
It took a good long while before Bäckström and Wiijnbladh showed up-a do-it-yourselfer wasn’t going to run away from you, and an extra cup of coffee was never a bad thing-but neither Stridh nor Oredsson had been idle. Oredsson had cordoned off the area around the place where the body was lying. At the criminal technology course at school he’d learned that police officers almost always cordoned off too small an area, so he’d used a little extra and the blue-and-white-striped barricade tape was neatly stretched between suitable light posts and trees. A few curiosity seekers had arrived while he was doing that, but after a quick look at the dead body all of them had turned and gone away. He had of course not touched the body. He’d learned that in the same course.
In the meantime Stridh consoled Vindel. After some coaxing he had persuaded him to sit in the backseat of the car, allowing him to bring the dog with him. They had also helped wrap the mutt in Stridh’s own blanket, which he always brought with him on long nighttime work shifts, for reasons that he shared with no one. There was a plastic sheet in the car that was usually spread out in the backseat when they transported drunks, but that was nothing you would wrap a dead body in, especially not in sight of a near relation.