Nordgren continued his soldering. He was used to locking up and setting the alarm, and he usually got more done once the others had left. The working hours at the electricians’ were flexible. Carsten, who owned the business, preferred to arrive and leave early. Nordgren thought that was good, better than staying on and surfing the tabloids’ websites instead of going home to the family.
The reason Nordgren often stayed longest in the evening was that his partner, Annika Skott, rarely got home from work before seven. That meant he might as well work a few extra hours before leaving for the day. He fully accepted that the overtime might not always be reflected in his monthly paycheck. In a way, he had a permanent job, but the company had only four employees, and if there wasn’t much work around, you couldn’t expect any extra pay, no matter how many hours you worked.
It had started as a simple repair job on a couple of electrical circuits in a food processor from the sixties, but Nordgren had soon taken the entire device apart. He couldn’t help it. People brought in all kinds of strange objects to be fixed, and nine times out of ten it would have been better to say no from the outset. But Nordgren liked fixing old things. Modern mixers couldn’t compete with the quality of the past; these days, a particularly thick dough could blow the fuses, a tough nut could knock out the power in an entire house. But the bulky food processor lying in pieces in front of him had once been able to knead stoneware clay without overheating.
It was obvious that Nordgren would stay behind a few extra hours to fix a machine like that.
At six thirty, he took the bus home. He had stopped off at the supermarket on the way, to buy food for dinner. The gray sky seemed not to be taking into account the fact that the calendar claimed it was June, and Nordgren stepped beneath the bus shelter to get out of the rain, which had been drizzling down since yesterday morning. He was wearing a quilted navy jacket he had bought from H&M the previous autumn, some boots he had found on sale at Naturkompaniet, and he was holding the carrier bag from ICA in one hand. He had pulled his blue-black cap low on his head, and no one who saw him on the bus would remember him afterward.
In the public sphere, Niklas Nordgren was the anonymous man who crossed the shot as the evening news was setting up a camera in Sergels Torg, randomly filming people on their way down to the subway. He was ordinary personified, a statistician’s wet dream.
Niklas Nordgren’s mother and father had been married for almost forty years, and their love story was one of the family’s most repeated legends. The way Lars Nordgren, working for PEAB construction at the time, had traveled to Poland to build apartments, and while he was there met Ewa—who would later become Niklas’s mother. After a year living not far from Crakow, the pair had moved to Sweden, where they bought a small house in Vårby Gård.
Just in time for Niklas to start high school, the family moved to Skärholmen, somewhere Nordgren’s three-years-older sister had never learned to feel comfortable. He had suffered through school in silent protest. The way the teachers and the curriculum managed to drain such a curious young man of his thirst for knowledge was a miracle, Niklas thought today. He had barely had time to start school in Botkyrka when his parents moved again, this time north, to Solna. His sister moved with them and found an apartment in Sundbyberg, where she lived to this day, but he had taken the opportunity to fly the nest.
Like so many other people of his age, he had ventured out into the world. Today, the years he spent in Asia and Europe seemed like a dream someone else had dreamed. And when he returned to Sweden, he ended up in Lidingö. It had been down to chance, like so much else in his life.
Niklas Nordgren stepped off the bus at the stop in Larsberg and trudged eastward along empty sidewalks. The anonymous blocks of apartments that rose up from the rocks had been built in the late sixties, with an aesthetic, ambition and thrift similar to that of the infamous suburbs of Tensta and Akalla. But that evening, almost all the windows glowed cozily, and the views across Norra Djurgården were spectacularly pretty in the early sunset. To Nordgren, the large, anonymous tower block area was perfect. He wasn’t someone who liked being the center of attention. He wasn’t someone who thought that life was about collecting friends and acquaintances.
There had been a time, immediately after he returned from Asia, when he had tried to take on the role of someone who was both seen and heard. He had made an effort to become someone people pointed out, talked about.
No good had come of it.
At the entrance to his building, Nordgren entered the security code and pushed the door open with his shoulder. The empty street and anonymous buildings, the silhouettes of the industrial area: this was exactly how he wanted it.
When Annika got home, just after seven, Nordgren had already started to prepare dinner. He wasn’t a particularly remarkable cook. When men cooked, they often had trouble not spicing up their performance with testosterone, but Nordgren cooked everyday food. Today, it was pasta with Bolognese sauce. He fried grated carrots, onion and garlic, and then added half a jar of ready-made tomato sauce to make his Bolognese more juicy.
He was stirring the sauce when he heard the front door open. Annika took off her coat in the hallway, went into the bedroom and changed. The gray dress she wore during the day at the accountancy firm where she worked was put back onto its hanger, and she pulled on some jeans and a sweater instead. She came into the kitchen, gave him a quick hug and then got to work grating parmesan as Nordgren drained the boiling water from the pasta.
“Good day?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. “You?”
She shrugged. “Scent of a Woman’s on tonight,” she said.
“Which channel?”
“Four.”
“Mmm,” he replied without enthusiasm.
He didn’t know whether he could bear to watch Bengt Magnusson deliver a half-hour news report midway through the film.
“I think I’ll watch it,” Annika said.
He nodded. To keep the peace, he would sit down next to her and start watching the film, but they both knew that he would disappear into his hobby room as soon as the news started, probably not returning when the film came back on.
Things had been worse than usual these past few days.
“Are you working on anything special?” she asked suspiciously when they sat down at the kitchen table and started to eat.
“Yeah,” he said.
It wasn’t as a conversationalist that Niklas Nordgren had built his reputation.
The evening unfolded as usual. Annika used the news interlude to get herself ready for bed, and by the time she returned to the living room to watch the rest of the film in her dressing gown, he had vanished. She slumped onto the sofa with a resigned sigh, but as her eyelids started to droop during the first ad break, she realized she wouldn’t manage to make it through the film tonight either.
The attractiveness Nordgren had radiated when he first met Annika had been linked to his mysteriousness. Like many others, she had been struck by the contrast between his criminal past and his down-to-earth honesty. But the things that had once attracted her now left her cold. He was no more than he pretended to be. It had come as a surprise to her, even if it shouldn’t have.
In a grand gesture, Annika had let him take over the room next to the living room, turning it into a space for his hobbies. How he had managed to collect so many things was beyond her. He was essentially an orderly person, but it was impossible to organize chaos when it was constantly growing in scope. It was as though things were drawn to him, tools of all kinds, wood and plastic tubes, old cell phones, broken food processors, mountains of nuts and bolts, copper wire and detonators. Within their group of friends, everyone knew that rather than throwing away their worn-out stereo or old showerhead, they could just give it to Nordgren. He would appreciate it.