‘You mean there could have been a violent tussle in here after all, and the lamp went flying?’ asked Peder.
‘Exactly so, and when it was all over, someone put the lamp back in its original place. We can ask forensics to check it out, if they haven’t already.’
He crouched down.
‘It’s not plugged into the wall,’ he added. ‘Maybe it was pulled out of the socket when it fell off the table.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Peder, and went over to the window to look out.
‘All the windows in the flat were shut when we got here,’ reported the policeman. ‘And the front door was locked.’
‘From the inside?’
‘Erm, there was no way of telling. That’s to say, it could have been either. But we think the door was locked from the inside.’
‘But it could have been locked from outside? Do we know who had keys to this place?’
‘According to the friends who found the bodies, they were the only ones with keys to the flat. And the daughter who’d just died had a set. That was something they found extremely upsetting, by the way.’
‘The fact that she had keys to the flat, too?’ Peder asked, baffled.
‘No, the fact that she’s supposed to have taken an overdose,’ the officer clarified. ‘Admittedly they hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, but as far as they were aware, she had a very good relationship with her parents. And it was news to them that she was on drugs.’
Joar and Peder exchanged glances.
‘We need to talk to those friends of theirs as soon as possible,’ said Joar. ‘Do they live near here?’
‘Down on Vanadisplan. They’re in.’
‘Let’s get down there right away,’ said Peder, already on his way to the front door.
‘Give me a minute,’ said Joar. ‘I just want one more good look round before we go.’
Peder planted himself in the middle of the living room and waited impatiently for Joar to finish whatever it was he was doing.
‘Going round the flat, what sort of sense do you get of the people who lived here?’ Joar asked him.
Peder looked about him at a loss, caught off guard by the question.
‘That they’re not short of money,’ he said eventually.
Joar, who had come to a stop a few metres away, facing him, put his head on one side.
‘True,’ he said. ‘But anything else?’
Joar’s tone of voice made him feel uneasy, though he could not work out why. As if the questions triggered some complex within him that he had been unaware of until now.
‘I don’t really know.’
‘Try.’
Provoked, Peder tramped demonstratively round the living room and into the kitchen area. He carried on through the hall, into the library and guest room and then back to his starting point. ‘They’re well off,’ he reiterated. ‘They’ve had money for a long time. Maybe inherited some. It almost looks as if they don’t live here. Not properly.’
Joar waited.
‘Explain.’
‘There are almost no pictures of their children. Only a few from when they were little. The photos on the walls aren’t of people, they’re landscapes. I don’t know enough about art to say much about their pictures, but they look expensive.’
‘Is there any exception to what you’ve just said? About it looking as though nobody really lives here?’
‘The bedroom, maybe. They’ve got photos of themselves in there that look quite recent.’
The parquet flooring creaked as Joar moved across the room.
‘I thought exactly the same as you,’ he said, his tone indicating he was pleased about it. ‘And I wonder what that tells us, because down at Vanadisplan we’ve got another couple who claim they knew this family extremely well. Whereas I get the impression that the people who lived in this flat are pretty cool and impersonal people who don’t let anybody get particularly close. I think we need to bear that in mind when we go and see them in a minute. That, and the fact that the impression we’ve got might well mean something else as well.’
‘Like what?’ asked Peder, interested in Joar’s analysis in spite of himself.
‘That they had a second home where they felt more themselves, and where we can presumably get to know them better.’
It was a strange world she worked in. It was hardly the first time the thought had occurred to her, but every time it did, it caught her slightly off guard. Fredrika Bergman was generally very careful to point out to herself and others that she had chosen her current position as part of a longer-term career strategy, and did not see it as anything she would be doing for very long. The reason she took such care to point this out was as simple as it was depressing: she did not like the job very much.
As a civilian appointee in a sea of police officers, uniformed or otherwise, she was constantly being reminded of how different she was and how odd her colleagues found her. She had thought on numerous occasions how peculiar this was, because she was rarely seen as odd or different in other contexts. But things had undeniably improved. Particularly as far as Alex and Peder were concerned; they seemed to view her in a different light since that case they had worked on together the previous summer. A baptism of fire for them all.
Fredrika was also aware that she herself had changed since then, too. She tried to pick her battles. Initially she had flared up at everything, but the unexpected tribulations of pregnancy had made her increasingly reluctant to rise to the bait. But there were still times when conflicts proved unavoidable. Take her recent little visit to the CID fingerprint unit. She had asked one simple question: had they by any chance found a match for the fingerprints of the unidentified man found dead in the road at the university, either in their own records or in those of the Migration Agency?
The question produced an extremely defensive response from the woman she had found to ask. Didn’t Fredrika know what the workload round here was like since it all got too much for Gudrun last month? Didn’t she realise the big biker gang investigation the CID had launched the previous week took precedence?
Fredrika had not been particularly sympathetic, knowing nothing of Gudrun or her sick leave, or the biker investigation, for that matter. What’s more, she was pretty sure there was no specific reason for the delay; the woman had simply forgotten to check the dead man’s prints.
‘You can’t come charging in here making all sorts of demands,’ the woman snapped from behind her computer. ‘Absolutely typical of someone like you with no police experience, no sense of priorities.’
Fredrika merely replied that she was sorry to hear her colleague had so much on her plate, and of course she could wait a few more days for the result, which the woman could pass through when it was ready. She thanked her and withdrew in the direction of the lifts as fast as she could.
Fredrika sat down heavily in her office chair. Her mother thought she was still unusually slim for someone at such an advanced stage of pregnancy, but Fredrika found it hard to take that seriously. The baby was kicking frantically, its angry little feet pounding against the inside of her belly.
‘Getting a bit impatient, aren’t you?’ murmured Fredrika, putting one hand on her stomach. ‘Me too.’
Her parents asked her if the pregnancy was planned, and she told them it was. But she had avoided going into much detail. It was last summer, that summer of never-ending rain, when the plans assumed concrete form. Fredrika was coming up to thirty-five and had to reach a decision on how to deal with childlessness. Or rather – what steps she should take. There were not that many options. Either she adopted a child as a single parent, or she went to Copenhagen and solved the problem by insemination. Or she found someone to live with and had children the natural way.
But this last option did not feel entirely uncomplicated. The years had gone by and Fredrika had not yet been able to make a relationship really work. And after every failed attempt she had gone back to Spencer, who seemed eternally chained to a marriage neither he nor his wife was happy with.