‘Titles are important, Detective Inspector,’ Ludmila said with gentle irony. He smiled to himself. It went quite well.
Gunnar Nyberg laughed a loud, rumbling laugh. Paul Hjelm wondered what Cilla had said to evoke such a bellow. He managed to elicit very few of them himself.
He had reached the inner corner of the sofa. An elderly lady with greying hair and pronounced lines around her eyes held out her hand with a neutral expression. That was enough for him to make the connection. It was getting better and better. He was starting to find his feet again.
‘Mrs Hultin, I presume,’ he said archaically.
‘Stina,’ the lady said neutrally.
‘Paul,’ he said, unnecessarily adding: ‘Hjelm.’
It was that whole thing with first and last names. He still found it ridiculously difficult calling Hultin anything other than Hultin and so his wife was automatically none other than ‘Mrs Hultin’. Anything else would require far too much willpower. Deep down, he wished he knew why. It was probably some kind of hierarchical imprint he had never quite managed to escape.
The hour of the trial had arrived. Hultin was squashed into the corner, his glass so dry it seemed almost to have been licked clean. They greeted one another.
‘Jan-Olov,’ Paul said with a display of sheer willpower. ‘Your glass is empty, I see.’
‘We got here forty-five minutes ago,’ said Hultin. ‘I’ve never trusted that saying “Better late than never”.’
‘Me neither,’ said Paul. ‘And I’m still always last.’
Just then, Sara appeared in the kitchen doorway, clapping her hands together like an old-fashioned hostess.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said in a firm, resolute voice, ‘come to the table. Jorge – help carrying.’
‘Help and help,’ said Jorge, reluctantly peeling away from the others. ‘I cooked the food.’
‘And I’m the prime minister,’ Sara said, disappearing back into the kitchen.
The guests got hesitantly to their feet; there are very few people who want to be first to an empty table. Especially if there are no designated places set out, which turned out to be the case.
On their way over, Paul bumped into Cilla and Kerstin. He gave Kerstin a hug. Cilla stood alongside, watching them. It still felt slightly odd. Despite the fact that years had passed, spreading a comforting blanket of reconciliation over everything that had happened. If we want to wallow in clichés.
‘Everything OK, Kerstin?’ he asked.
‘Yup,’ she replied.
With that, nothing more was said. Gunnar climbed up onto a chair. It strained as best it could to prove it could withstand all possible laws of physics. And it succeeded: it held his weight.
The great man on the chair counted out loud.
‘One, two, three, four, five, six women. Seven including Charlotte. One, two, three, four, five men. Clearly uneven.’
‘We can sit next to one another,’ Kerstin and Cilla said.
Paul looked at them with suspicion.
‘Let’s do it like this,’ said Gunnar who, in his new-found euphoric condition seemed also to have been struck by a fondness for leadership. ‘Astrid next to me, then Jan-Olov, Sara, Paul, Stina, Viggo, Ludmila, Jorge, Cilla, Kerstin. And Charlotte can sit with…?’
‘Astrid,’ said Viggo, just as Astrid said: ‘Viggo.’
‘Perfect,’ said Gunnar, hopping down from the chair with the freedom of movement of a newly-svelte man. And with that, it was settled.
Sure enough, Charlotte ended up sitting on Viggo’s lap. They were served a Chilean meat stew containing a surprising amount of garlic. The wine, Duca d’Aragona 1993, was perfectly suited to it, and was subsequently consumed in near-bacchanal quantities.
‘Wine consumption is a sign of Europeanisation,’ Ludmila said towards the end of the meal. She said it in a tone that didn’t leave any room for objection.
‘What do you mean?’ Hultin asked, surprising the group by being responsible for the majority of it. The wine consumption, that was.
‘When I first came to Sweden,’ Ludmila said, ‘you were as much a part of the vodka-drinking nations as us Russians – just not quite to the same extent. But you’ve slowly switched to wine. You’ve moved from spirits like brännvin to wine.’
‘Hmm,’ said Viggo, stroking his sleeping daughter’s head.
Ludmila ignored him without comment.
‘But in Russia, or actually across the whole of Eastern Europe, vodka is getting even more of a hold. We’re on the way to becoming a lost cause.’
‘And not just for that reason, right?’ said Paul, drawing dangerously close to breaking the golden rule. A few of the others looked at him askance.
The women in particular.
‘I’m utterly convinced,’ Ludmila continued, ‘that the condition of a nation can be measured by the proportion of wine in its total alcohol consumption. The greater the proportion of wine, the greater the spiritual prosperity.’
‘But there are hidden statistics too,’ said Gunnar, seemingly unaffected by the wine. ‘I should think Sweden has the highest in the world.’
‘You mean home-distilled?’ asked Paul.
‘And black-market spirits. But above all, home-distilled schnapps.’
‘Why’s it called brännvin?’ asked Viggo, still incessantly stroking his daughter’s head. ‘It’s not wine, is it?’
Ludmila searched her linguistic memory banks and came up with an answer.
‘The word came to Swedish in the Middle Ages. It was called “brännevin” back then, from the Low German “bernewin”, which means “burnt, or distilled, wine”. In Dutch, it’s called “brandewijn”, which eventually became “brandy”.’
Paul noticed how admiringly Gunnar was looking at her. After all these years, it transpired that this was what his taste in women was like.
‘But that’s no answer,’ Viggo obstinately pointed out. ‘We’re still in the same old spot. Why did they call it a wine when it was a spirit?’
‘Because the word “spirit” didn’t exist,’ said Ludmila. ‘It didn’t appear in Swedish until the end of the eighteenth century, and it was a French import, not a German one. It comes directly from the French “esprit”.’
‘So wine meant spirit and spirit didn’t mean shit?’ Viggo half rhymed, unexpectedly aggressively.
‘Language is constantly changing, Viggo,’ Ludmila said calmly.
‘And don’t you shout at my lady,’ Gunnar said, equally calmly.
It wasn’t the fact that the bells of the Gustav Vasa Church had just struck nine in the distance that interrupted the slightly soured discussion, but the fact that Jorge had just placed a laptop computer in the middle of the dining table.
The nine peals reverberated through Paul’s conscience. With each one, a realisation grew. It was as abrupt as it was absurd. Eventually it was so complete and so overbearing that he had to gulp down an entire glass of Duca d’Aragona to stop himself from breaking the golden rule.
Jorge had attached a little device to the top of the laptop screen. Then he spun the computer around so that it was facing his seat at the table, sat down and called out to the group.
‘Gather round, people!’
They got reluctantly and sluggishly to their feet. Hultin took a couple of elegant sidesteps and smiled awry. His wife Stina propped him up and said, neutrally: ‘They say wine counteracts strokes, but somehow I doubt that’s true.’
Gunnar squeezed his former giant’s body in behind Ludmila’s chair and touched her lightly on the neck. Kerstin launched herself sidelong over Cilla, who laughed loudly and, Paul thought, entirely without cause. Astrid moved over to Viggo and knocked fondly on his head; Viggo simply kept stroking his sleeping daughter’s thin hair. Paul shuffled over and stood at the back. Sara came over and put an arm around him. He barely noticed.