Camilla Lackberg Crime Thrillers 1-3: The Ice Princess, The Preacher, The Stonecutter

Julia nodded thoughtfully. Erica had the feeling that she had merely confirmed something that Julia already knew.

‘Excuse me for asking, but why do you want to know so much about when Alex and I were kids?’

Julia avoided looking her in the eye. Her answer was evasive.

‘She was so much older than I was, and she’d already left the country by the time I was born. Besides, we were really different. I don’t think I ever really got to know her. And now it’s too late. I looked for pictures of her at home, but we have hardly any. So I thought of you.’

Erica felt that Julia’s reply contained so little truth as to qualify as a lie, but she reluctantly accepted it.

‘Well, I have to get going now. Thanks for the coffee.’

Julia got up abruptly and went to the kitchen to put her coffee cup in the dish tub. She was suddenly in a big hurry to leave. Erica walked her to the door.

‘Thanks for letting me see the pictures. It meant a lot to me.’

Then she was gone.

Erica stood in the doorway a long time watching her walk away. A grey and shapeless figure who hurried down the street with her arms held tight to her body as protection from the biting cold. Erica slowly closed the door and went back inside where it was warm.

It was a long time since Patrik had felt so nervous. The feeling he had in the pit of his stomach was wonderful and frightening at the same time.

The pile of clothes on the bed grew as he tried on yet another outfit. All the clothes he put on felt too old-fashioned, too sloppy, too dressy, too square, or simply too ugly. Besides, most of the trousers were uncomfortably tight around the waist. With a sigh he tossed another pair of trousers on the pile and sat down in his shorts on the edge of the bed. He immediately lost all sense of anticipation for the evening and instead got a serious touch of good old anxiety. Maybe it would be better if he rang and cancelled.

Patrik lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling with his hands clasped behind his head. He still owned the double bed that he and Karin had shared, and now he stroked his hand over her side of the bed in a fit of sentimentality. It was not until recently that he had begun rolling over onto her side in his sleep. Actually, he should have bought a new bed as soon as she moved out, but he hadn’t been able to face it.

Despite all the sadness he felt when Karin left him, he’d sometimes wondered if it really was Karin he was missing, or whether he missed the illusion he’d had of marriage as an institution. His father had left his mother for another woman when he was ten years old. The divorce that followed had been heart-rending, exploiting him and his little sister Lotta as the primary weapons. He had promised himself that he would never be unfaithful, but above all that he would never ever get a divorce. If he got married it would be for life. So when he and Karin got married five years ago in Tanumshede Church, he didn’t doubt for a second that it would last forever. But life seldom turns out the way one thinks it will. She and Leif had been meeting behind his back for over a year before he caught them. So fucking classic.

He had come home early from work one day because he wasn’t feeling well, and there they were in the bedroom. In the bed he was lying in right now. Maybe there was a masochist somewhere inside of him. How else could he explain why he hadn’t got rid of the bed long ago? Although now it was all in the past. It no longer mattered.

He heaved himself up out of bed, still unsure if he wanted to go over to Erica’s house tonight or not. He wanted to. And he didn’t want to. With one blow an attack of low self-esteem had swept away the sense of anticipation he’d been feeling all day, even all week. But it was too late to decline, so he didn’t have much choice.

When he finally found a pair of chinos that fit well around the waist and put on a freshly ironed blue shirt, he felt all at once a little better. And he began looking forward to the evening again. A touch of gel made his hair look suitably dishevelled, and after giving his reflection in the mirror a good-luck wave, he felt ready to go.

It was pitch-black out although it was only seven-thirty, and a light snowfall made visibility poor as he drove back to Fjällbacka. He had left in good time and didn’t need to hurry. His thoughts of Erica were briefly pushed aside by the events of recent days at work. Mellberg hadn’t been pleased when Patrik could do no better than substantiate that the witness, Anders’s neighbour Jenny, seemed positive about what she had seen. Anders actually did seem to have an alibi for the critical time period. This may not have provoked the same degree of anger in Patrik as it had in Mellberg, but he couldn’t deny that he felt a certain hopelessness. Two weeks had passed since they had found Alex’s body, and they didn’t feel any closer to a solution than they were then.

What was important now was not to lose heart completely. They had to regroup and start over from the beginning. Every lead, every bit of testimony had to be gone over with new eyes. Patrik made a list in his head of what he needed to work on tomorrow. The top priority was to find out who was the father of the child Alex was expecting. There must be someone in Fjällbacka who had seen or heard something about who she was meeting on weekends. Not that it could be ruled out that Henrik might be the father, and Anders was always a possible candidate too. Although somehow Patrik didn’t think that Anders was someone Alex would consider a suitable candidate to father her child. He thought that what Francine had told Erica was much closer to the truth. There was someone in her life who was very, very important. Someone who was important enough that she would be happy to have a child with him – something that she could not, or would not, want with her husband.

Her sexual relationship with Anders was also something he wanted to find out more about. What did a society woman from Göteborg have in common with a down-and-out drunk? Something told him that if he discovered how their paths had crossed, he would find many of the answers he was seeking. Then there was the article about Nils Lorentz’s disappearance. Alex had been a child back then. Why was she saving a twenty-five-year-old newspaper clipping hidden in a bureau drawer? There were so many threads that were so tangled together. He felt as if he were staring at one of those pictures where everything looks like incoherent dots, until you relax your eyes in just the right way and a shape suddenly emerges with unexpected clarity. The only thing was, he couldn’t find that perfect position to make the dots form a pattern. In his weaker moments he sometimes wondered if he was a good enough cop to find it. Perhaps a murderer would escape because he wasn’t competent enough.

A deer bounded out in front of the car and Patrik was yanked abruptly out of his gloomy thoughts. He hit the brake and managed to miss the deer’s rump by an inch or so. The car skidded on the slick road and didn’t stop for a couple of long, terrifying seconds. Then he leaned his head on his hands, which were still gripping the steering wheel, and let his pulse return to normal. He sat like that for a couple of minutes. Then he drove on towards Fjällbacka, but it took a mile or two at a creeping pace before he dared speed up.

When he drove up the sanded hill in Sälvik towards Erica’s house, he was five minutes late. He parked the car behind hers in the driveway and grabbed the bottle of wine he had brought as a gift. A deep breath and a last check of his hair in the rear-view mirror and he was ready.

The pile of clothes on Erica’s bed was about as big as Patrik’s, maybe even a bit bigger. Her wardrobe was beginning to look empty, and hangers were rattling on the rod. She gave a deep sigh. Nothing fitted quite right. The extra weight that had sneaked up on her in the past week meant that no garment sat the way she would have liked. Weighing herself that morning was something she still cursed and regretted bitterly. Erica gave herself a critical look in the full-length mirror.

The first dilemma had arisen after her shower when, like her favourite literary heroine Bridget Jones, she was faced with the decision of which knickers to choose. Should she wear a beautiful, lace-trimmed thong, for the slim eventuality that she and Patrik ended up in bed? Or should she put on the substantial and terribly ugly knickers with the extra support for tummy and backside, which would increase her chances that they might end up in bed at all? A hard choice, but considering the extent of her belly’s bulge she decided after much deliberation on the support variety. Over them she would wear pantyhose with a tummy-flattening panel. In other words, the heavy artillery.

She glanced at the clock and realized that it was time to decide. After another look at the pile on the bed she pulled out from the bottom the first outfit she had tried on. Black was slimming, and the classic, knee-length dress in a Jackie Kennedy style was flattering to the figure. A pair of pearl earrings and her wristwatch would be her only jewellery, and she let her hair fall loosely over her shoulders. She looked at her profile again in the mirror and held in her stomach as a test. All right – with the combined help of support knickers, pantyhose, and slightly restricted breathing she looked downright acceptable. The extra kilos were not altogether a bad thing, she had to admit. She would have preferred to do without the ones that ended up on her belly, but the one distributed in her breasts made a not entirely uneven cleavage stand out in her décolletage. With a little help from a padded push-up bra, of course, but such aids were virtually universal nowadays. And the bra she was wearing was of the very latest technology, with gel in the cups, which gave her bust a true-to-life movement. Splendid testimony to the advancement of science in the service of humanity.

Trying on all those clothes along with the emotional stress had made her sweat, and with a deep sigh she washed under her arms again. Her make-up took almost twenty minutes to perfect. By the time she was ready, she realized all the primping had taken a bit too long and that she ought to have started cooking long ago. She quickly tidied up the bedroom. It would have taken far too much time to hang up all the clothes, so she simply picked up the whole pile, dumped it on the floor of the wardrobe and shut the door. Just in case, she made the bed and looked round the room to make sure that no unused knickers lay about the floor. A pair of dirty everyday knickers from Sloggi could dampen any man’s desire.

Out of breath she rushed down to the kitchen. All the stress made her feel utterly at a loss. She didn’t have any idea where to start.

Erica forced herself to stand still and take a deep breath. There were two recipes lying on the table in front of her, and she tried to plan the time needed for each of them. She was no master chef, but a fairly decent cook, and she had found the recipes after digging through back issues of Elle Gourmet. The appetizer would be potato pancakes with crème fraiche, lumpfish caviar and finely chopped red onions. For the entree she had planned fillet of pork baked in puff pastry with a port wine sauce and mashed potatoes, and for dessert Gino with vanilla ice cream. Thankfully she’d already prepared it that afternoon, so she could cross that off her list. She decided to start by putting the potatoes on to boil. Then she would grate raw potatoes for the appetizer.

She concentrated on her work for an hour and a half and jumped when the doorbell rang. The time had gone a little too fast, and she hoped that Patrik wasn’t roaring hungry since the food would take a while before it was ready.

Erica was halfway to the door when she noticed that she still had her apron on. The bell rang again as she struggled to undo the granny knot she had tied at her back. She finally got it undone, pulled the apron over her head, and tossed it on a chair in the hall. She ran her hand over her hair, reminded herself to hold in her stomach, and took a deep breath before she opened the door with a smile.

‘Hi, Patrik. Welcome! Come in.’

They hugged briefly and Patrik handed her a bottle of wine wrapped in aluminium foil.

‘Oh, thank you, how nice!’

‘Yes, they recommended this one at the State Liquor Store. Chilean wine. Robust and round with a trace of red berries and a hint of chocolate, supposedly. I’m no wine connoisseur, but they usually know what they’re talking about.’

‘I’m sure it’s excellent.’ Erica gave a warm laugh and put down the bottle on the old hall bureau for a moment so she could help Patrik off with his jacket.

‘Come in. I hope you’re not starving. As usual, my planning was much too optimistic, so it’ll be a while before dinner is ready.’

‘No problem, I’m fine.’

Patrik followed Erica into the kitchen with the wine.

‘Can I help with anything?’

‘Yes, you can take a corkscrew from the top drawer and open a bottle of wine for us. Perhaps we could start by tasting the wine you brought?’

He obeyed willingly. Erica set two large wine glasses for them on the worktop and then began stirring pots and checking the progress of what was in the oven. The fillet of pork had a good way to go, and when she poked the potatoes they were still only half cooked. Patrik handed her one of the wine glasses, now full of deep-red wine. She swirled the glass lightly to release the wine’s aroma, stuck her nose deep into the glass and then inhaled with her mouth closed. The warm oak fragrance of the wine was sucked in through her nostrils and seemed to propagate all the way down to her toes. Delightful. She tasted it cautiously, letting the wine roll round as she sucked in a little air through her mouth. The taste was just as pleasant as the aroma, and she could tell that Patrik had spent a significant sum on this bottle.

Patrik gave her an expectant look.

‘Fantastic!’

‘Yes, I realized last time that you knew about these things. Unfortunately I couldn’t tell the difference between a wine in a box for fifty kronor and a wine that cost thousands.’

‘Sure you could. But it’s all a matter of habit as well. And you have to take the time to really taste a wine instead of guzzling it down.’

Shamefaced, Patrik looked at the glass of wine he had in his hand. A third of it was already gone. He carefully tried to imitate Erica’s method of tasting the wine when she turned her back to check something on the stove. It did seem to taste like a whole new wine. He let a sip of wine roll round in his mouth the same way he had seen Erica do it, and suddenly distinctly different tastes appeared. He even thought he could sense a faint hint of chocolate, dark chocolate, and a rather strong taste of red berries, red grapes perhaps, mixed with a little strawberry. Incredible.

‘How’s it going with the investigation?’ Erica made an effort to ask the question casually, but she waited anxiously for the reply.

‘I think we’re back at square one, so to speak. Anders has an alibi for the time of the murder, and we don’t have a lot else to go on right now. Unfortunately we may have made a classic mistake. We allowed ourselves to feel too certain that we had the right person and stopped investigating other possibilities. Although I have to agree with the superintendent that Anders is perfect in the role of Alex’s killer. A drunk who for some inexplicable reason is having a sexual relationship with a woman who, according to all the rules, should be far, far out of reach of a wino like Anders. A crime of jealousy with the inevitable outcome, when his improbable luck finally runs out. His fingerprints are all over the body and in the bathroom. We even found his footprint in the pool of blood on the floor.’

‘But isn’t that proof enough?’

Patrik swirled his wine and looked thoughtfully down into the red eddies that formed in the glass.