‘Oh, don’t get upset…’ began Spencer, seeing the glint of moisture in her eyes.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I…’
‘You’re tired,’ said Spencer firmly. ‘You’re tired, and you hate your job with the police. And that, my friend, is a really bad combination.’
Fredrika drank more of her wine.
‘I know,’ she said in a low voice, ‘I know.’
He put a steady arm around her waist.
‘Stay at home tomorrow. We’ll both stay here.’
Fredrika gave an imperceptible sigh.
‘No chance,’ she said. ‘I’m working on a new case now. A little girl’s gone missing. That’s why I was so late: we were interviewing the child’s mother and the mother’s new boyfriend all evening. Such a horrible story you can hardly believe it’s true.’
Spencer pulled her closer. She set down her glass and put both arms around him.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she whispered.
Saying anything like that was admittedly against the unspoken rules they agreed on, but Fredrika was too exhausted to worry about any agreement just then.
‘I’ve missed you, too,’ mumbled Spencer as he kissed the top of her head.
Fredrika stared into his eyes in astonishment.
‘Now there’s a coincidence, eh?’ said Spencer with a crooked smile.
It was after one before Fredrika and Spencer finally decided to try to get some sleep. As usual, Spencer was able to put the decision into practice with little delay. Fredrika found it much harder.
The wide double bed stood along one wall of what was really the only proper room in the flat. Apart from the bed, the flat was sparsely furnished with a couple of battered old English armchairs and a beautiful chess table. Over by the little kitchen there were also a small dining table and two chairs.
The flat had belonged to Spencer’s father, and he had inherited it when his father died, nearly ten years ago now. Since then, Fredrika and her lover had never really met anywhere else. She had still never been to Spencer’s main home, which felt logical. The only times they met somewhere other than the flat were when Fredrika occasionally discreetly accompanied Spencer to some conference abroad. She thought a number of his colleagues must know about their liaison, but quite honestly she couldn’t have cared less. What was more, Spencer’s status among his professorial colleagues was extraordinarily high, so he was never confronted with any direct questions.
Lying there in Spencer’s arms, Fredrika curled up into a little ball. He was breathing deeply behind her and already fast asleep. She stroked a cautious finger over the hairs on his naked arm. She couldn’t imagine a life without him. Such thoughts were indescribably dangerous, she knew that. Yet she could not banish them. And they always came when the night was at its darkest and she was feeling at her loneliest.
She shifted carefully until she was lying on her back.
The visit to Sara Sebastiansson’s had been a strain in every way. Partly because of Sara Sebastiansson herself, of course. The woman was entirely unbalanced. But also because of Peder. He had been mightily pleased when Alex decided Fredrika should not go to see Sara Sebastiansson on her own. Fredrika had seen him straighten up, and his face had broken into a sneering grin.
‘It’s not that I’m questioning your competence,’ Alex had said.
Fredrika knew all too well that that was exactly what he was doing. Expectations of her, a young woman with an academic background, were set extremely low. She was assumed to be barely capable of operating the photocopier. She could sense Alex’s irritation whenever she dared put forward or develop a new hypothesis.
His attitude to the woman in Flemingsburg was a case in point.
Fredrika found it hard to exclude her from the investigation. It was frankly grotesque that Sara hadn’t been asked for a description of the woman and that they hadn’t done a photofit. On the way back to the office after they had seen Sara, Fredrika had tried to raise the question again, but a weary Alex had firmly interrupted her.
‘It’s obvious, completely bloody obvious, that the father of that child is as sick as they come,’ he said agitatedly. ‘There’s nothing to point to there being any other lunatics in Sara’s circle who would want to harm her child, or scare Sara by taking Lilian from her. And nobody’s sent Sara a ransom note or anything like that.’
When Fredrika opened her mouth to point out that the perpetrator could be someone Sara was not actually in touch with at present, or did not realize she was in conflict with, Alex brought the discussion to a close with a:
‘It would be to your advantage in this organization to respect the competence and experience we have here. I’ve been looking for missing children for decades, so believe me, I know what I’m doing.’
Things went very quiet in the car after that, and Fredrika saw no reason to continue the discussion.
She peered over at Spencer’s peaceful face. Craggy features, grey, wavy hair. Good looking, you might even say handsome. Not cute, not ever. She had stopped asking herself how he could sleep so well, night after night, when he was being unfaithful. She assumed it was because he and his wife lived separate lives and had a mutual agreement about the extent of personal freedom they each had in the marriage. There had never been any children. Perhaps they had chosen not to have any. Fredrika wasn’t sure about that.
Alex Recht really shouldn’t have been particularly hard for Fredrika, of all people, to deal with. Not after almost fourteen years with a person whose views came from a time machine stuck somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. Not after fourteen years with someone who still wouldn’t let her open a bottle of wine. Fredrika smiled wistfully. Spencer still respected her infinitely more than Alex did.
‘What is it he gives you that you feel you can’t do without?’ a succession of her friends had asked her over the years. ‘Why do you carry on seeing him, when nothing can ever come of it?’
Her answer had varied over time. At the very beginning, it had been so incredibly exciting and passionate. Forbidden and invigorating for both of them. An adventure. But the relationship had deepened, within its given limitations. They had many interests and some values in common. Over time, closeness to Spencer developed into a sort of fixed point for her. As she commuted between various cities and countries while finishing her studies, Spencer had always been there to come back to. The same was true when she became entangled in a variety of love affairs, all relatively short-lived. Once disaster had struck and the house of cards had collapsed, he was always still there. Never without pride, but permanently bored with his marriage yet unable to leave his wife. Though Fredrika had been told the wife had flings of her own.
Fredrika’s single status had been discussed in her own family on countless occasions over the years. She knew she had been a surprise to her parents in more than just her choice of profession. Neither of them had imagined she would still be single by her age. Her grandmother definitely hadn’t.
‘Oh, you’ll find someone,’ she used to say, patting Fredrika’s arm.
It had been a while now since Fredrika’s grandmother had done that. Fredrika had just celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday with some good friends out in the archipelago, and was still husbandless and childless. Grandma would probably have had a heart attack if she had known Fredrika shared a bed from time to time with the professor who had been her supervisor at university.
Her father delivered thinly veiled lectures on the virtue of ‘settling for’ some things in life and ‘not being too greedy’. Only once Fredrika had grasped this would she, as her brother already did each Sunday, take her place at the parental dining table in the company of a family of her own. A year or two after Fredrika turned thirty and still seemed determinedly single (or ‘alone’, as her father put it), the Sunday dinners were putting such a strain on her mentally that she started to avoid them.