Åke Edwardson - Frozen Tracks

That thought triggered another: Have we stayed here too long? Isn’t it time we moved out of this stone city?

She looked at him. I haven’t brought it up with him again. Perhaps that’s because I no longer want to move away myself. You can lead a good life in Gothenburg. We are not country people. Elsa isn’t complaining. She’s even made friends with somebody on our floor. The fence around the nursery school has been mended. We can always rent a house in the country for the summer.

She looked again at Erik, who seemed to be lost in thought. Things between us are better now than they used to be, a year or so ago. I didn’t know for certain then. I didn’t know for certain for some time. I don’t think he knew for certain either.

We could have been in different worlds. I could have been in heaven, and Erik here on earth. I think I’d have gone to heaven. I’m not sure about him. Ha!

I’ve forgotten about most of the experience. It was just bad luck.

She thought about what had happened during the months before Elsa was born. When she had been kidnapped by a murderer. How she had been kept in his apartment. What thoughts had gone through her mind.

I don’t think he ever intended to hurt me.

Things are different now. It’s good. This is a good time to be on earth. A good place.

She heard another noise from the street down below, a brittle sort of noise.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said to Erik, who was still sitting in the same position with an introspective look on his face, which she could make out, even in the half light.

He looked at her.

“Nothing,” he said.

“I was thinking that we have it pretty good, you and me,” she said.

“Hmm.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Hmm.”

She grabbed a pillow and threw it at him, and he ducked.

“Elsa will wake up if we start fighting,” he said, putting down his bottle of beer and throwing his pillow, which thudded into the wall behind her and knocked a magazine off her bedside table.

“Try this on for size,” she said, hurling his pillow back at him. He saw it coming.

“We actually found a little decomposing pile of newspapers outside the entrance,” said Bergenhem, the first time he’d spoken at the morning meeting. “It was underneath an even more unpleasant pile of leaves.”

“How come you didn’t find it earlier?” asked Halders.

“We weren’t looking, of course,” said Ringmar. “We didn’t know we should be looking for newspapers.”

“Have we found any fingerprints?” asked Halders.

He rubbed at the back of his head, which was feeling stiff again. Stiffer than normal, if you could call this goddamn stiffness normal. He’d been cold out in the square the previous day.

“Beier’s team is looking into it now,” said Ringmar. “They’re also trying to see if they can make out the date on the newspapers. They should be able to.”

The forensic officers had looked doubtful when they were handed the rotting bundle.

“Pointless,” said Halders. “Just as pointless as trying to find specific bicycle tracks at the places where the boys were clubbed down.”

“Bicycle tracks?” said Bergenhem.

“It’s my own theory,” said Halders, sounding as if he were preparing for a DCI examination. “The attacker zoomed in on them on a bike. Silent. Fast. Unexpected.”

“Why not?” said Winter. He didn’t say that the same thought had occurred to him.

“It sounds like such an obvious possibility that all of us must have thought about it,” said Bergenhem.

“Go on, rob me of my idea,” said Halders.

“A newspaper boy on a bike,” said Aneta Djanali.

“It doesn’t have to match up exactly,” said Halders.

“Speaking of newspaper boys,” said Ringmar.

“Yes, go on,” said Djanali.

“It’s a bit odd, in fact. The newspaper delivery person for the buildings around Doktor Fries Square phoned in sick the morning Stillman was attacked,” said Ringmar. “Just like when Smedsberg was almost clubbed down on Mossen.”

“But Stillman didn’t say anything about seeing anybody carrying newspapers,” said Halders.

“Nevertheless.”

“Nevertheless what?” said Halders.

“Let’s leave that for the moment,” said Winter, starting to write on the white board. He turned to face the group. “We’ve been discussing another theory.”

The evening had moved on when Larissa Serimov sat down at the duty officer’s desk. Moving on was an expression her father liked to use about most things. He had moved on himself, moving from the Urals to Scandinavia after the war, and he’d managed to have a child at an age when others were having grandchildren.

We’ll go back there one of these days, Larissa, he always used to say, as if she had moved there with him. And so they did when it finally became possible, and when they got there she had realized, genuinely realized, that they had in fact moved together all those years ago. His return had been her return as well.

He had stayed there, Andrey Ilyanovich Serimov. There were people still living there who remembered him, and whom he remembered. I’ll stay on for a few months, he’d said when she left for Sweden, and she’d been at home for three and a half days when she received the message that he’d fallen off a chair outside cousin Olga’s house, and his heart had probably stopped beating even before he hit the rough decking that surrounded the big, lopsided house like a moat.

The telephone rang.

“Frölunda Police, Serimov.”

“Is this the police?”

“This is the police in Frölunda,” she repeated.

“My name is Kristina Bergort. I’d like to report that my daughter Maja was missing.”

Serimov had written “Kristina Bergort” on the sheet of paper in front of her, but hesitated.

“I beg your pardon? You said your daughter was missing?”

“I realize that this might sound odd, but I think my little daughter was, well, abducted by somebody, and then returned again.”

“You’d better start again, at the beginning,” said Serimov.

She listened to what the mother had to say.

“Are there any marks on Maja? Injuries? Bruises?”

“Not as far as I can see. We-my husband and I-have only just heard about this from her. I called right away. We’re going straight to Frölunda Hospital to have her examined.”

“I see.”

“Do you think that’s a bit, er, hasty?”

“No, no,” said Serimov.

“We’re going anyway. I believe what Maja told us.”

“Of course.”

“And, she also told us he took her ball.”

“He stole it? Her ball?”

“He took her favorite ball, a green one. He said he would throw it to her through the car window once she got out, but he didn’t. And she doesn’t have it now.”

“Does Maja have a good memory?”

“She is very observant,” said Kristina Bergort. “Here comes my husband. We’re off to the hospital now.”

“I’ll meet you there,” said Larissa Serimov.

THE HOSPITAL WAS SUFFUSED WITH A LIGHT THAT MADE PEOPLE in the emergency waiting room look even more ill. There seemed to be lots of waiting rooms. It looks like half of Gothenburg is here, Larissa Serimov thought. Despite the fact that this is a welfare state. We’re not in the Urals. She found it difficult not to laugh. Emergency treatment was not a term that existed in Russia anymore. Emergency, yes-but treatment, no.

At least there was a doctor here, even if the line to see him was long.

The Bergort family were on their own in one of the side rooms. The girl was rolling a ball backward and forward, but her eyes were heavy. She’ll sleep her way through the examination, Serimov thought, and shook hands first with the mother and then her husband. She could see that people were staring at her uniform, which was black with the word POLICE in grotesquely large print on her back. What’s the point of that, she had thought the first time she put it on. To avoid being shot in the back? Or to encourage it?