‘Now and again.’
‘Could you be more precise?’
‘Once a week, maybe. Sometimes less often.’
Peder glanced down at his notebook.
‘How did you feel when she went off to study in France?’
Håkan looked tired.
‘I was disappointed.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought we were closer friends than that. It wasn’t so much that she went away, but that she didn’t tell me beforehand.’
Alex looked surprised.
‘She left without saying a word?’
‘No, no. Well, almost. She told me a week before she went, something like that.’
Håkan shifted on his chair.
‘But we sorted all that out,’ he went on. ‘There was no animosity between us.’
Alex gazed at him, frowning.
‘You were a great support to the police when she went missing.’
‘It was important to me to help out,’ Håkan said.
‘Did she mean a lot to you?’ Peder asked.
Håkan nodded. ‘I didn’t have all that many friends.’
Peder leaned across the table, his posture more relaxed.
‘She was a pretty girl,’ he said.
‘She was,’ Håkan agreed. ‘She was lovely.’
‘Did you sleep with her?’
Håkan looked dismayed, and Peder held up his hands in a defensive gesture.
‘I don’t mean any harm,’ he assured Håkan. ‘I’m just saying that you were friends, she was pretty, and you might just have fancied her. There’s nothing strange about that, I’m well aware of how these things can happen.’
Alex gave him a sideways glance, but said nothing. He would rather not hear any more about Peder’s lifestyle than Margareta Berlin had already told him.
Håkan picked at a cuticle without speaking.
‘What Peder is trying to say is that perhaps you just got together one night even though you weren’t a couple,’ Alex said. ‘As Peder said, these things happen, and it’s not the end of the world.’
‘It was only the once,’ Håkan said without looking at them.
‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’ Alex asked.
Håkan looked at him as if he had lost his mind.
‘Because it was nothing to do with you. Why do you think, for fuck’s sake?’
Peder interrupted him.
‘When was this?’
‘A while before she went missing.’
‘How long?’
‘Three or four months.’
‘Did you use protection?’
Håkan squirmed. ‘I didn’t, but she did. She was on the pill.’
‘So she didn’t get pregnant?’ Alex asked.
‘No.’
Håkan refused to meet Alex’s gaze as he answered.
Was he lying?
‘Are you sure?’
A silent nod. Still no eye contact.
‘From a purely hypothetical point of view,’ Alex went on, ‘if she had got pregnant, what would you have done?’
At last, Håkan raised his head.
‘We’d have kept it, of course.’
‘Of course?’ Peder repeated. ‘You were both very young; no one would have blamed you if you’d decided on a termination.’
‘Out of the question,’ Håkan said. ‘It would never have happened. Abortion is murder if the child has been created within a loving relationship. I despise people who think differently.’
‘Did you and Rebecca agree on that?’
‘Of course we did.’
Håkan’s expression darkened and his voice grew hoarse.
‘We would have been excellent parents, if she’d lived.’
INTERVIEW WITH FREDRIKA BERGMAN, 02-05-2009, 15.30 (tape recording)
Present: Urban S, Roger M (interrogators one and two). Fredrika Bergman (witness).
Urban: So at that point you believed Håkan Nilsson to be the guilty party?
Fredrika: There were a number of indications to support that view. He had a motive and the personality traits that led us to believe he was capable of murder.
Roger: Had you discovered the link with the writer Thea Aldrin at that stage?
Fredrika: At that stage we barely knew who Thea Aldrin was; she still hadn’t come up in the investigation.
Urban: So you hadn’t identified the film club?
Fredrika: Absolutely not.
Roger: OK, back to Håkan Nilsson. What about his alibi?
Fredrika: It had been checked during the previous investigation and deemed valid. We reached the same conclusion. He had spent the whole evening at a social event for mentors and students, and witness statements confirmed that he had been there from five o’clock until midnight.
Urban: But you didn’t write him off completely?
Fredrika: No, definitely not. No alibi is one hundred per cent reliable.
Roger: How was Peder Rydh at this point?
Fredrika: I don’t understand the question.
Urban: Was he stable?
Fredrika: Yes. He was feeling better than he had for a long time.
Urban: So you’re saying that there were occasions when Peder Rydh had been feeling under par and had acted injudiciously?
(Silence.)
Roger: You must answer our questions, Fredrika.
Fredrika: Yes, there have been times when he was unstable.
Urban: And acted injudiciously?
Fredrika: And acted injudiciously. But as I said, he was in a good place throughout the investigation, and…
Roger: We’re not there yet. It’s too soon to talk about the investigation as a whole. We’ve only got as far as Håkan Nilsson.
(Silence.)
Urban: What happened next?
Fredrika: Next?
Urban: What happened after that first interview with Håkan Nilsson?
Fredrika: The team who were working on the scene of the crime called Alex. They’d found something else.
THURSDAY
7
As usual, morning coffee was served in a blue mug with her name on it. She couldn’t decide whether she found it childish or humiliating, or both. The nurse padded discreetly around her, setting out bread, butter and marmalade. A soft-boiled egg, a plain yoghurt. The nurse was new; she stuck out like a sore thumb. The new ones were always so stressed around Thea; sometimes, she would hear them whispering in the tiny kitchen area.
‘They say she hasn’t said a single word for nearly thirty years. She must be completely barking.’
As time went by it had become increasingly easy to ignore that kind of talk. It wasn’t the young people’s fault that they didn’t understand. They had no mechanism for understanding Thea’s story, nor were they under any obligation to do so. Thea wasn’t so old that she had forgotten her own youth. The years preceding those that she had decided to kill with silence had largely been good. She recalled her teens, so full of happiness that it hurt to think about it. She could remember falling in love for the first time, the first book she wrote, and the way her heart leapt when the press praised her children’s books to the skies, predicting the most astonishing success. Everything had been smashed to pieces and taken away from her. She had nothing left.
The new nurse bustled around behind her back, stopping to look at the vase of flowers. An auxiliary came in and started changing the sheets on Thea’s bed. Unpleasant, Thea thought. It could easily have waited until she’d finished breakfast.
‘What lovely flowers,’ said the nurse.
Not to Thea, but to the auxiliary.
‘She gets a fresh bouquet every week.’
‘Who from?’
‘We don’t know. They’re delivered by someone from the florist’s; we usually hand them over and she arranges them herself.’
Thea contemplated the nurse’s back view, knowing that she was reading the card that accompanied the flowers.
‘It says “Thanks”,’ Thea heard her say. ‘Thanks for what?’
‘No idea,’ the auxiliary replied. ‘There are so many odd things about all this that…’
She broke off when she realised that Thea was watching them. They never seemed to grasp the fact that her hearing was excellent. They assumed she was an idiot, just because she had chosen not to speak.