The really frustrating thing after Pia dumped him was that it had been so hard to find any new talent for a bit of fun. Until now. The probationer couldn’t be more than twenty-five, but she seemed more mature somehow. The main point about her was that she was too new to have heard all the stories about how Peder had behaved. About the way he had left his wife, and been unfaithful even while they were still together. About his boys, so little and doubly abandoned by their daddy, who in the middle of his paternity leave decided he could not stand being cooped up at home with the babies and handed them back to their mother. Who had just managed to start working part time after a post-natal year of serious depression.
Peder sat as close to the probationer as he could without seeming weird, still well aware that it was too close anyway. But she did not move away, which Peder took as a good sign.
‘Nice croissants,’ she said, putting her head on one side.
She had her hair cut short, with wayward curls sticking out in all directions. If she hadn’t had such a pretty face, she would have looked like a troll. Peder decided to chance it and grinned his cheekiest grin.
‘They look almost like cocks, don’t they?’ he said with a wink.
The probationer gave him a long look, then got to her feet and walked out. His colleagues on the next sofa pulled mocking faces.
‘Only you, Peder, could make such a cock-up of a chance like that,’ one of them said, shaking his head.
Peder said nothing but went on with his morning coffee and croissant in silence, his cheeks flushing.
Then Detective Superintendent Alex Recht stuck his head round the staff-room door.
‘Peder and Joar, meeting in the Lions’ Den in ten minutes.’
Peder looked around him surreptitiously and noted to his satisfaction that normal order had been restored. He could not get away from his reputation as the randiest male on the whole floor, but he was also the only one who had been promoted to DI when he was only thirty-two, and definitely the only one with a permanent place in Alex Recht’s special investigation team.
He rose from the sofa in a leisurely fashion, carrying his coffee cup. He left it on the draining board, despite the fact that the dishwasher was wide open and a bright red sign headed ‘Your mum doesn’t work here’ told him where everything should go.
In something that seemed as distant as another life, Fredrika Bergman had always been relieved when night came, when fatigue claimed her and she could finally get to bed. But that was then. Now she felt only anxiety as ten o’clock passed and the need for sleep made itself felt. Like a guerrilla she crouched before her enemy, ready to fight to the last drop of blood. She usually had little trouble emerging victorious. Her body and soul were so tightly strung that she lay awake well into the small hours. The exhaustion was almost like physical pain and the baby kicked impatiently to try to make its mother settle down. But it hardly ever succeeded.
The maternity clinic had referred her to a doctor, who thought he was reassuring her when he said she was not the only pregnant woman afflicted by terrible nightmares.
‘It’s the hormones,’ he explained. ‘And we often find it in women who are experiencing problems with loosening of the joints and getting a lot of pain, like you.’
Then he said he would like to sign her off sick, but at that point she got up, walked out and went to work. If she was not allowed to work, she was sure it would destroy her. And that would hardly keep the nightmares at bay.
A week later she was back at the doctor’s, sheepishly admitting she would like a certificate to reduce her working hours by twenty-five per cent. The doctor did as she asked, without further discussion.
Fredrika moved slowly through the short section of corridor in the plainclothes division that was the territory of Alex’s team. Her stomach looked as though a basketball had accidentally found its way under her clothes. Her breasts had nearly doubled in size.
‘Like the beautiful hills of southern France where they grow all that lovely wine,’ as Spencer Lagergren, the baby’s father, had said when they saw each other a few evenings earlier.
As if the painful joints and the nightmares were not enough, Spencer was a problem in himself. Fredrika’s parents, entirely unaware of the existence of their daughter’s lover even though they had been together for over ten years, had been dismayed when she told them just in time for Advent Sunday that she was pregnant. And that the father of the baby was a professor at Uppsala University, and married.
‘But Fredrika!’ her mother exclaimed. ‘How old is this man?’
‘He’s twenty-five years older than me and he’ll take his full share of the responsibility,’ said Fredrika, and almost believed it as she said it.
‘I see,’ her father said wearily. ‘And what does that mean, in the twenty-first century?’
That was a good question, thought Fredrika, suddenly feeling as tired as her father sounded.
What it meant in essence was simply that Spencer intended to acknowledge voluntarily that he was the father and to pay maintenance. And to see the baby as often as possible, but without leaving his wife, who had now also been let in on the secret that had hardly been a secret.
‘What did she say when you told her?’ Fredrika asked cautiously.
‘She said it would be nice to have children about the house,’ replied Spencer.
‘She said that?’ said Fredrika, hardly knowing if he was joking or not.
Spencer gave her a wry look.
‘What do you think?’
Then he had to go, and they had said no more on the subject.
At work, Fredrika’s pregnancy aroused more curiosity than she had hoped, and since nobody actually came out with any direct questions, there was inevitably a good deal of gossip and speculation. Who could be father to the baby of single, career-minded Fredrika Bergman? The only employee in the Criminal Investigation Department without police training behind her, who since her recruitment had managed to annoy every single one of her male colleagues, either by paying them too little attention or by questioning their competence.
It was a surprise, thought Fredrika as she stopped outside Alex’s closed door. That she, initially so sceptical about staying in her police job, seemed to have found her niche there in the end and stayed on beyond her probationary period.
I was on my way out from the very start, she thought, putting one hand on her belly for a moment. I wasn’t going to come back. Yet here I am.
She rapped hard on Alex’s door. She had noticed his hearing did not seem that good these days.
‘Come in,’ muttered her boss from the other side of the door.
He beamed when he saw who it was. He did that a lot these days, and certainly much more often than anyone else in the department.
Fredrika smiled back. Her smile lasted until she saw that his expression had changed and he was looking concerned again.
‘Are you getting much sleep?’
‘Oh, I get by,’ she replied evasively.
Alex nodded, almost to himself.
‘I’ve got a fairly simple case here that…’ he began, but stopped himself and tried again. ‘We’ve been asked to take a look at a hit-and-run incident out at the university. A foreign man was found dead in the middle of Frescativägen. He’d been run over and they haven’t been able to identify him. We need to put his prints through the system and see if it comes up with anything.’
‘And otherwise wait for someone to report him missing?’
‘Yes, and go over what’s been done already, so to speak. He had a few personal items on him; ask to see them. Go through the report, check that there doesn’t seem to be anything suspicious about the case. If there isn’t, close the file, and report back to me.’
A thought flashed through Fredrika’s mind so fast that she had no time to register it. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to retrieve it.