‘Maybe both.’
‘Maybe he sympathised with your deed?’
‘Deed,’ Persson repeated.
‘Do you regret what you did?’
‘That was a second question,’ Persson said.
He tried to smile at Allan Fredriksson, but the monumental fatigue that had crept over him during the course of the interrogation turned the smile into a grimace. Why can’t they just leave me alone, he thought.
THIRTY-NINE
Yet another clear night with a moon climbing over the horizon. He was standing out in the garden and followed with his gaze an aeroplane on its way east. Its lights twinkled like stars. He tried to visualise the passengers in their seats and the flight attendants hurrying in the aisles, but only managed brief disconnected images.
He took a couple of steps, the small stones crunching under his feet. The sound echoed in the night and he veered from the path up onto the lawn, past the flagpole and the thicket of shrubby cinquefoil.
It was completely calm. The cold had come creeping slowly. The temperature had been sinking one degree per hour and it was set to be the coldest night of the season so far.
Darkness enveloped him more deeply the farther he went from the house. He looked back but kept walking. He knew the way and did not have to think about where to put his feet. After a while his eyes grew accustomed to the details, the old, half-fallen stone wall, the many stems of the rowanberry tree with its ghostlike blackened fruits, the tarp draped like a shroud over the lumber he had ordered to build a garage. Everything loomed out of the darkness. He walked without thinking of anything except the connections that each object that appeared before him told. Everything was connected, had a story, talked to him about a time gone by. It was like a museum of memories.
This is your place on the earth, he thought suddenly. These four thousand square metres of land is the area that decides your life. Limits. He looked back up at the sky. The plane was gone and was by now a good portion of the way out over the Sea of Åland.
He walked aimlessly but nonetheless reached the sea, where the breakers were slowly rolling in. He felt kinship with the water, how it stiffened in the creeping cold. Winter was inexorably here. There was something – he had always thought this – something sorrowful about the sea as it was engulfed by frigidity and darkness. A faint, repeated splash revealed a stone caressed by a glacial hand. The sea was death. Or was it perhaps the opposite, that the sea was life? He was confused by his ambivalent thoughts. He came from a line of fishermen and perhaps his confusion was an inheritance from those that had gone before? He did not know much about his ancestors more than that they had won their livelihood from the sea but also that several of them had died in boats that had foundered or under ice that had given way.
The endless sea and the limited plot of land, a cottage, between them a swathe of forest, a wetland with alder and the heavy scent of scrubby plants with pale flowers and leathery leaves. Once he had seen his life so clearly, it was from above, in a sport plane. Several years ago an old classmate had taken him on a flight over the coast and they had surveyed the archipelago outside Östhammar at a couple of hundred metres’ height. From that perspective the house and surroundings on Bultudden had appeared unnaturally beautiful, like a dreamscape. He had had trouble getting his head around the fact that he actually lived down there.
The dark form of the fishing cottage could be glimpsed some hundred metres away. He set his sights on the gleam of the moonlight in its windows and followed the twisty path along the edge of the water. Suddenly one of the windows lit up, a warm yellow tongue that licked the rock out toward the sea. He stopped short and curled up instinctively, crouching behind a thicket of sea buckthorn, before he was drawn to the light like a moth lurching about in the dark.
He wanted to warm himself. Nothing more. He wanted to be toasty and snug like before. The Magpie would warm him, he was sure of it. She was as fragile as he was, a female outsider who lived by the sea, who had freely found her way to the point in her hunt for images, and he had started to understand her longing.
Slowly he neared the cottage until he stood next to the wall. Her figure formed a fluttering silhouette on the rock. If he was given the opportunity to explain that he was a good man, they would become friends. Her rejecting stance would be replaced by warmth.
He did not wish her ill. She would understand.
FORTY
What was it that made some nights so unpleasant? Even though she had not drunk any wine, which was otherwise one of the usual culprits in poor sleep and nightmares, she had still woken up several times during the night. A couple of times she had got up and looked in on Erik but she had found him snoozing peacefully. It wasn’t Erik who had woken her with a night-time whimper.
That was something else. She sensed what it might be but pushed the thoughts away. The night before, after she had put Erik down for the night and picked up all the toys, watered the flowers, and done everything that is required to keep a home in somewhat reasonable shape, she had taken a long and warm shower. Under the jets of water she shaved, first her legs and armpits, finally her bikini line. Painfully conscious of her actions, she had allowed the razor to continue its work until she was completely smooth. Afterward she had studied herself in the mirror, even taken out her handheld mirror and studied her naked genitals, and blushed a deep red when she turned her face to the wall mirror. Never had she been so naked.
Her fingertips against her skin, then the whole hand in a powerful grip, as if she was being caressed by an aroused man, the agonising pleasure when she pretended, when she dreamt for a brief moment. The most hurtful aspect was not the absence of a man but the feeling of not being seen. She was beautiful. Her body, in spite of her middle age and a child, was beautiful. She wanted to be desired, loved and caressed of course, but above all desired. No one saw her, shaved or not, no one stroked her with their eyes.
All this she had paid for. The night had been an anguish. Now she got up, ashamed, not over her body or her yearning but her inability to do anything about it. Hidden deeply under an ever more organised home life – for she had definitely become better at all this that constituted everyday life, the home and Erik, all this bustling about, plant watering, tidying up, and caretaking – was the suspicion that she would never again experience the closeness of a man.
She cracked the door to Erik’s room. He was still sleeping and would continue to do so for another half hour. She loved him, it went without saying that he stood at the centre of her concerns, but wasn’t there more to life than that? He gave her an incredible amount, but what then? In a few years he would be a teenager, all too soon a young man, and then he would disappear more and more from her sphere. Would she continue to tend her home and go to a work filled with violence and human suffering? Was a well-raised son and the prospect of grandchildren all?
She was starting to believe that if there was going to be a change she would have to do something more radical. It was not enough to shave herself and prance around in front of the mirror, reflecting her own anxiety. She chuckled suddenly as she visualised herself desperately vacuuming or interrogating suspected murderers, while her sex cried out for hands and a pulsating member. She would give everything for a hot breath against her throat.
But what to do? Something radical? Should she quit? What were the alternatives? Start to go out? What she had seen of the city nightlife, the dance clubs, had not tempted her. The chances of scoring a one-night stand were pretty good, but after that?
The feeling of being alone and unloved was more and more replaced, as she got breakfast ready, by anger. It was an anger directed inward. Would she let herself be knocked down, even affected in her dreams by her shortcomings and lack of initiative? Wasn’t it just a matter of grabbing the bull by the horns, of starting to live? And what was wrong with only one night of pleasure? Perhaps in all actuality that was the solution. If a man turned up who could become more than a temporary connection then it would have to develop of its own accord.