Åke Edwardson - Sun and Shadow

Not like you either, he thought. Patrik stood up and she grabbed hold of his arm, hanging on to it.

“Can’t you sit here for a bit and talk?” she said.

“I have to go.”

“Just sit here for a bit.” She was holding harder now. She started humming a tune, then suddenly burst out laughing. Oh no, the bitch was as drunk as a skunk. “Come and sit here next to Auntie Ulla and we can have a little chat.” She tugged at his arm, pulling really hard now. The sleeve of his sweater grew a foot and a half longer. He could smell the familiar stench of stale liquor topped up with fresh stuff.

She gave another heave and he lost his balance, falling on top of her.

The apartment door was flung open. As he fell he could hear the sound of his father staggering through the hall.

“What the hell…” He heard his father’s voice and felt him grab hold of his arm and pull him up. It was his arm now and not his sleeve. It hurt and he screamed. He felt like his head would explode.

Maria was baking a sponge cake. It felt like two thousand years ago. Hanne watched the girl spraying flour all around her in the kitchen. A few years ago it was the only thing she did for a while. Sponge cakes. All right by me. Two thousand, one after another.

She went back to the living room, sat down on the sofa, and picked up her book again. The sky had turned dark blue, almost black, but the promise of spring was still in the air outside. Or is it just my imagination? she wondered. Or a dream about the light. We start hoping before winter has even started to go away.

There was a clattering in the kitchen. She loved that sound. A siren was howling from the direction of Saint Sigfrids Plan. A long, rising note that could well be from a police car. She’d learned to distinguish between sirens since starting work at the police station. She heard the sound once more, then it was cut off abruptly. Somebody breaking the speed limit, or maybe a crash. She thought of Simon Morelius and his awful road accident. He couldn’t shake it off. The memory was too strong for him, painful. It could lead to him leaving the force. She didn’t know of anybody else who’d made such a decision for reasons like that.

He kept repeating the horrific details, as if by describing them often enough he could make them go away. But the result was the opposite. She could recite them herself by now. But she hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen it all. The last time, he’d said…

The doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it,” she shouted, getting to her feet.

Patrik was standing outside. He had blood all over his face, a dried-up rivulet under one eye.

“Patrik!” screamed Maria, from behind her mother.

“A man!?” Halders said. “Louise Valker told you about a man?” Why have you kept this to yourself? he thought. It could have cost lives!

“Once…” she said, then fell silent.

“Go on.”

Winter could feel the tension in his body, could see it in Halders. Per Elfvegren seemed to be paralyzed. His wife appeared to be calmer now. She’d been working her way toward this.

“She… she said they’d met a man a few times. That’s all, really…”

Halders stared at her. The penny dropped.

“It never occurred to me that it could have anything to do with…”

“Tell me exactly what she said.”

“I’ve already told you…”

“In what connection did it crop up?”

“I can’t really remember.” She looked at her husband. “But it was when we were alone.”

“What did she say?”

“That they’d been visited… a few times… by a man.”

“And?”

“I had the impression that he was… exciting.”

“How did they meet?”

“I don’t know…”

“Through an ad?”

“Yes, perhaps she did say that.” She seemed to be thinking. “Something about them having been lucky… yes, that they’d been lucky with their advertisements.”

“Had that man answered an ad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Had the man placed an ad?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Did you know him?”

“Certainly not.”

“Did Louise Valker say what he looked like?”

“No.”

“Nothing… personal about him?”

“Not a thing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No.”

“His clothes?”

“No. Nothing about that.”

“She just mentioned him, and that was all?”

“Yes…”

Winter heard a slight hesitation. Halders had heard it as well, waited.

Winter phoned Möllerström. The registrar answered after the first ring.

“Could you please get me the latest issue of Aktuell Rapport, Janne.”

“You mean the men’s magazine?”

“That’s what I said.”

Winter hung up and turned to the list of forty extras who were wearing police uniforms in the film based on the adventures of a detective chief inspector in Gothenburg. Why not an inspector’s? Halders wanted to know. You’ll be in it as well, Ringmar assured him. We’ll all be in it.

“Should we do that, then?” asked Ringmar, who was sitting opposite Winter. “Have you spoken to Sture?”

“He says we should go ahead if we think it’s worth the effort.”

“Forty people,” Ringmar said. “That means ten to fifteen officers tied up for perhaps a week. How long will we need per extra? An hour and a half? An hour? We’ll have to track them down, check their addresses, arrange a meeting, interrogate them.”

“And compare,” Winter said.

“That’s your job.”

“I can get ten officers,” Winter said. He lit a Corps. It was still reasonably light outside. The snow was still there. He looked Ringmar in the eye.

‘Are we heading in the right direction here… the police trail? The uniform trail?“

“I’m damned if I know, Erik.”

“Say what you think.”

Ringmar screwed up his eyes, rubbed his forehead, and produced a noise like sandpaper on rough timber. His features became more marked in the twilight, his wrinkles seemed deeper when the sun was reflected into the room from the buildings on the other side of the river. There wasn’t going to be any leave for Ringmar this February either. Perhaps when the grandchildren came. But the best time for skiing was already past.

“There has been talk of police officers-or police uniforms-a bit too often for us to simply ignore it,” he said in the end.

“I agree.”

“What Börjesson had to say about the record shop was most interesting.”

“I agree.”

“We’ve checked places where there are uniforms, but nobody has reported any missing.”

“No.”

“None at all.”

“No.”

“That only leaves the filmmakers.”

“I agree.”

“Perhaps it’s an omen.”

“A good omen?”

“Are there any good ones? I once saw a film called Omen. It wasn’t exactly teeming with benevolence.”

“There were several,” Winter said. “Parts one and two, et cetera.”

Ringmar rubbed his forehead again.

“I think we ought to get going on that.”

“Will you take charge, please?”

Ringmar agreed, took the list, and went to his own office in order to start organizing the work. A messenger arrived with an internal mail envelope and the secretary raised her eyes heavenward. The girl on the front cover was scantily dressed. A big headline in red and yellow explained the best way to get sex at work. Winter turned the pages until he came to the personal column with the subheading “Make It Quick.” There were a lot of ads. Several pictures of naked genitalia and faces with thick black censor lines over the eyes. Why not the other way around? he wondered.

At the end was a coupon for the text of an advertisement. The Valkers must have filled in one of these and posted it, he thought. Maybe the Elfvegrens as well. And the Martells.