'Fine, that's nice. And which shoes?'
'The red ones.'
He put them on her feet and fastened the metal buckles with some kind of buttons underneath.
Ready to go.
The phone rang.
'Daddy. The phone!'
'Leave it. We must go.'
'Wait.'
Marie ran to pick up the phone in the kitchen, standing on tiptoe in her shiny red shoes to reach. Her face lit up when she heard who it was.
'Daddy, it's Mummy!'
He nodded, and listened while Marie told a long story about the Big Bad Wolf and how it chased the pigs but they won anyway, and how they'd run out of bath foam except they hadn't, because she knew where there was another bottle, two bottles, on the bottom shelf in the cupboard. She was laughing most of the time. Then she gave the receiver a smacking kiss and handed it to him.
'It's for you. Mummy wants to talk.'
His mind was still too drowsy to separate the woman's voice he heard now from his body's memory of the naked Micaela. The voice belonged to Agnes, a woman he had once desired more than anyone else and who had asked him to leave her; her voice and the sensation of Micaela's young body drifted together and merged, and he felt slightly dizzy and breathless. Then he had a strong erection and turned away, Marie mustn't see it.
'Yes?'
'When are you turning up?'
'What do you mean?'
'Marie is with me today.'
'No she isn't. It's not until Monday. We swapped, remember?'
'We did nothing of the sort.'
He was too tired. Not now. Not today.
'Agnes, this is too much. I'm tired and in a hurry. I won't argue, Marie is just next to me.'
He handed the receiver to Marie, at the same time twirling his hands in the air. It was their special sign for being in a hurry.
'Mummy, I can't. I'm late for school.'
Agnes was too good a mother to show Marie how irritated she was. She always put Marie's interests first and he loved her for it.
'Bye, Mummy. Must go now.'
She didn't quite manage to put the receiver back and it crashed against the top of the microwave oven. He caught hold of it.
'There, sweetheart. Let's go!'
He caught sight of the kitchen clock. They could still be there by half past one and they would let her stay until quarter past five. It meant she would get her lunch, though a bit late, and then she could play outside for a bit in the afternoon. It would feel almost like a whole day and she'd be pleased when he picked her up.
Half past one. Sven stared at the green alarm clock on Ewert's desk. Technically, he had been off duty for two hours. The bottles of wine and the gateau were waiting for him in the car. He was ready to go home, he wanted to be with Anita and Jonas, have a nice meal with them. It was his fortieth, after all.
Sven felt that working for the Metropolitan Police was much less important now than he used to think. Once, not that long ago, he wouldn't have hesitated to work on his wedding night, even to divorce, rather than compromise about taking on the late shifts.
He had begun to confide in Ewert how he felt now, especially during the last year, when they had become closer. Sven had tried to explain his totally out-of-order indifference about which moron had carried out which moronic offence, and whether it was that one or some other useless bugger who was arrested for it. Tough. Shit happens. He was a man in his middle age but ready for retirement, he was bored with the detecting and the caring. All he wanted to do was things like relaxing over breakfast in the garden, taking long walks on the beach and being there for Jonas when he came running home from school with his young life in his backpack.
Twenty years of work done, twenty-five more to go. It practically made him hyperventilate, just thinking of that unbearable passage of time inside dull police stations, among the files of incomplete bloody awful investigations. When he was finally allowed to retire, Jonas would be thirty-two. Fuck's sake! What would they say to each other then?
Ewert understood, even though he had no family and his time in uniform, for him, was his entire life. He ate, drank, breathed police work. Even so, he too had felt that it was meaningless, but, worse luck for him, having made policing part of his being meant he would cease to exist when it ended. He understood all right, but couldn't be bothered with his insights.
'Ewert.'
'Yes.'
'I want to go home.'
Ewert had gone down on his knees, collecting the scattered rubbish from his second go at the wastepaper basket. Mushy pieces of banana peel had left stains on the pale brownish carpet.
'I know you do. And so you will. As soon as we've got Lund.'
His head popped up over the edge of the desk, looking at the alarm clock.
'It's been six and a half hours now and we still know bugger all. Nil. Looks like you'll have to wait for your birthday cake.'
'Care For My Heart', originally called 'Pick Up the Pieces', with choir and orchestra, recorded in Sweden, 1963. Siw Malmqvist, her third mixed tape. On the box, an out- of-focus photograph of Siw, beaming at the admiring camera.
'I took that picture, did you know that? In the Kristianstad Palais, back in 1972,.'
He bowed to Sven, made a sweeping gesture with one arm.
'Would you like to dance?'
Then he turned round and began a solo dance. Strange to behold, the tough old policeman with his limp, weaving round his desk to the tune of early sixties folk pop.
They used Sven's car. The box with the gateau and the carrier bag with the bottles were pushed away on the rear window shelf. The heatwave had emptied the centre of the capital, anyone who could, got away, longing for parks, beaches, open water, a breeze. The hot dark tarmac was unresponsive, everything bounced off it, even breath.
They were heading for the E18 route north-westwards out of town. Sven drove fast, past two lights on amber, then two on red, and the few cars waiting for green hooted angrily every time he ignored the signals. A national alert was on, two dozen constables from the City Police were at their beck and call, but still they hadn't learned one single new thing.
'He licks their feet, you know.'
Ewert, staring straight ahead, had broken the silence in the car. Sven shivered, almost slipping out of the overtaking lane and into a bus.
'Never seen anything like it. I've seen raped children, murdered children, even children tortured with sharp metal objects, but this… never. Lying there on the concrete floor, looking as if they'd been thrown there, covered in muck and blood, but with perfectly clean feet. The medic confirmed that their feet were coated in saliva, lots of it. He had been licking them for minutes on end, probably before and after killing them.'
Sven drove faster. The bottle bag slipped about on its shelf, rattling insistently.
'The shoes too. Their clothes were in neat piles, a few centimetres apart, shoes last. A pair of pink leather shoes and a pair of white trainers. The clothes were as dirty as the girls. Gravel, dust, blood. Not the shoes. They shone. Plenty of saliva, more than their feet. He must have been at it for even longer with the shoes.'
The summer lull affected even the traffic on the E18. Sven stayed in the fast lane, overtaking all other cars at speed. He could not bear talking, didn't want to ask questions about Lund, didn't want to learn more about him. Not just now. He almost missed the junction with the much smaller road to Aspsås, stamped on the brakes and wrenched the car across three lanes.
Lennart Oscarsson was waiting in the parking lot, ready to greet them. He looked haunted and nervous. He knew what Grens thought about his decision to leave two guards with the responsibility of transporting Lund across the city at night.
Ewert didn't hold out his hand at once; he hung back for a few seconds because it amused him to shame one of the many idiots that cluttered up his life.