Caroline Åberg - Stockholm Noir

When they found us I was lying beside my mother, she had been dead the whole night. A night that forever induced a distance to my feelings and cut them loose from my thoughts: cold, raw, and harsh, my thoughts live their own lives, grope about in the investigations like an alien machine. A night that made me inseparable from those I hunt. By chance we are each on opposite sides of the law, predestined to devote our lives searching for each other, as if searching for our lost half.

“Hey,” Leila says and runs her fingers through my hair when I come home in the evenings. “Don’t worry, baby, everything will be fine.” Our daughter Mia looks at us with the face of a three-year-old who already knows she’s not quite like either of us, and knows just how lonely that makes her. Her unfathomable gaze on my face, as if she can touch me with it. She’s always had that gaze, since the moment she came into the world, lying on Leila’s stomach in the delivery room. She lay there and observed us with her dark, enigmatic eyes, not making a sound. She struck me speechless, as if setting me in a scene I couldn’t grasp; for hours she would just lie there looking at us. “Everything will be fine,” Leila says, but she doesn’t know that the force coursing through my veins is my element and the water I drink, owning me so profoundly I might not survive if it were to suddenly disappear. Like Epaminondas’s spearhead, the spearhead he kept stuck in his heart, knowing that as long as it remained there he would live, but if he pulled it out he would die.

Leila strokes my hair, but knows nothing of who I am, what moves in my interior; she is lighthearted. Or perhaps she does, in her own remarkable way. With Mia it is different, everything is there between us, as if she saw straight through me from the very beginning.

I hold Kim’s picture in my hand, in the emptiness that ensues when a case is solved, when all tension disappears, the emptiness I never know what to do with. I get up from the desk and slowly collect my things. I look at her address again; it tells me nothing, nothing but a closed case.

I phone Erik. I can tell he’s sitting in the car as I hear the police radio in the background. There’s a moment’s silence when he absorbs what I’m telling him, that I’ve found her, that I know who she is.

“ Her?” he asks, bewildered.

“Her.”

I give him the address, still holding the photo in my hand, my fingers close around her face.

“Okay, I’ll meet you there.”

We hang up and I sit back down for a few minutes until I pull myself together and stand up again. Sköllerstagatan. I don’t even consider taking the official car there, as if this isn’t a place I can get to by car, drive to myself. As if somebody else must take me, but Erik is in Norsborg, so I must go by subway. I pull my pistol out of the holster, insert a new magazine, stuff the gun back into the holster, and strap it on. It rests just under my armpit, close to my body, like a metal-and-leather protuberance, concealed from the world by my jacket. It’s autumn outside on Surbrunnsgatan, the air is clean and clear, the colors so beautiful, and the cold bites my face. When I walk down toward Sveavägen, there are loud noises from children playing soccer in the empty basin of the fountain next to the Stockholm Public Library with the Observatory Grove above. Two of them stand a bit apart from the group, near the edge that separates the shallow basin from the street. Two girls, maybe nine or ten years old, they look like they’re whispering about something. One of them lays a hand on the other’s shoulder, studies me as I walk past; they make me think about Mia, make me wonder what she’s doing. I close my eyes for a second; she’s somewhere in the preschool, maybe in the room with building blocks and Legos, sitting on the floor with the other kids, lost in a game. When I drop her off there in the morning, she throws off her coat, runs in to join the others. It’s her own world, a world to which I’m not admitted, which is hers alone, and I find myself standing outside with her brightly colored coat in my hand, following her with my eyes before I slowly hang up her coat on the little hook that bears her name in the entrance hall. Sometimes I stand awhile outside in the courtyard, peering through the window, watching her play without her knowing, before I tap on the windowpane and she looks back at me and waves. Some mornings she’s sad, I see how she keeps herself together, trying not to show it, she sucks on her fingers while something in her eyes distances her from me. As if it’s she and not I who finally says: Go now.

I feel the weight of the pistol as I walk down to the subway at Rådmansgatan in the chilly air. Passing through the turnstiles, I choose the stairs, not the escalator. The 19, the line I catch every day I don’t take the car, although never in this direction. I stand on the platform and wait. Something makes me nervously feel for the pistol, touch it lightly with my hand, as if its weight isn’t enough to reassure me of its existence. The train arrives and I take a window seat, see my face reflected in the glass in front of the tunnel’s darkness, and feel her presence, feel the inexorable motion that makes the distance between us shrink, melt together to nothing. Hötorget passes on the left, then Central Station, and when the train exits the tunnel at Old Town the city is gorgeous, stunning, the colors of the trees in the south are mirrored in the water, yellow and bloodred; the beauty makes something well up inside me, almost like tears. There are a few women around me, a young girl, and a man in a suit. I get the feeling that they’re staring at me, that they see something inside me, and sweat penetrates my T-shirt, like I’m losing control, like they’re sucking it out of me in complete silence. We pass Slussen, Medborgarplatsen, and at Skanstull I can’t stand it any longer, have to get off with blood rushing to my head, the cold sweat like a film on my skin when I lean against a pillar on the platform.

After a while everything clears, I head to Åhléns department store on Ringvägen, go to the cosmetics department, as if I need time, as if I want to drag it out. I walk around between counters of perfume and makeup, nod at some of the saleswomen, ask a few questions; this is routine, but it’s a tactic that always works while my eyes wander over the products behind them. I know what things are worth, I’ve learned to pick out what’s expensive and reject what’s cheap. I decide on a fragrance from Jimmy Choo.

In the ad behind it, a woman leans her head so far back that you can scarcely see her face, her collarbones catch all the light, the dress’s plunging neckline forms a V between her breasts. I test the scent on my hand, cedar and something floral I can’t identify; when the salesgirl turns her back I pull out one of the drawers below the samples, find the right product, and take it with me. I smile in her direction and nod at the guard by the exit; he follows me with his eyes as I take a few turns, holding the small paper box in my hand. The faint, pleasant scent of cedar accompanies me among the shelves, just a hint of it, and I let the box drop into my pocket. Then I select an inexpensive bottle of shampoo from the shelves, and walk toward the cashier. The calm that spreads out when the salesperson wraps it, it’s like a drug, I hand her my credit card and she slides it through the slot. The small sum burns in the card reader, and she tiredly returns the card with the bag, not looking at me. It’s a movement she repeats, mechanically, over and over again, hundreds of times a day.

I let my gaze glide over the guard’s face without settling, as if he were an object, before I exit onto Ringvägen. The crystal-clear fall air shoots its way into my lungs and I don’t know why I keep doing this. I give away the loot as gifts to Leila. As if I want to be discovered, punished, but I don’t know what for, as if nothing but risk can eradicate the guilt and bring rest.