The floor felt cool under her bare feet as she walked between rooms. Spencer followed her like a shadow. She got dressed and went out into the hall and put on her running shoes, to the dog’s undisguised delight.
The morning air washed over her, cold and liberating, when she opened the door.
She took the path down toward the sea. Spencer trotted along beside her with tail held high, darting out into the grass alongside the gravel path, pissing here and there. At regular intervals he would turn around and look up at her. The shiny black retriever was a good watchdog and Helena’s constant companion. She breathed deeply, filling her lungs, and her eyes teared up from the morning chill.
The instant she climbed over the dune and out onto the beach, she was enveloped in a grayish-white fog. It lay like a carpet of spun sugar all around her. The dog quickly vanished into the silent softness. No horizon was visible. What little she could see of the water was steel gray and almost completely still. It was remarkably quiet. Only a lone seagull screeched far out over the sea. She decided to walk the entire length of the beach and back, even though visibility was poor. As long as I follow the waterline it should be all right, she thought.
Her headache began to subside, and she tried to collect her muddled thoughts. After last night’s fiasco, she didn’t know what to do.
Despite everything, she believed that Per was the one she wanted to live with. She was sure that he loved her. She was going to turn thirty-five next month and knew that he was expecting an answer, a decision. For a long time he had been wanting to set a wedding date, so she could stop taking the pill. Lately, when they made love, he would often say afterward that he wished he had made her pregnant. She felt uncomfortable every time.
Yet she had never felt so secure, so loved. Maybe that was all she could expect; maybe it was time to make up her mind. She hadn’t had much luck with her love life in the past. She had never been truly in love and didn’t know whether she was this time, either. Maybe she wasn’t capable of it.
Helena’s thoughts were interrupted by the dog barking. It sounded like a hunting bark, as if he had caught the scent of one of those small rabbits that were everywhere on Gotland.
“Spencer! Come here!” she commanded.
He came trotting obediently over to her with his nose to the ground. She squatted down to pet him. She tried to look out to sea but could barely make out the water anymore. On clear days you could see from here the outlines of the cliffs in all their detail on both islands, Big and Little Karlso. That was hard to imagine right now.
Helena shivered. Spring was normally cold on Gotland, but it was unusual for the chilly weather to last into June. The cold, damp air penetrated through one layer after another. She was wearing a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and a jacket, but it didn’t help. She turned around and started heading back the way she had come. I hope Per’s up so we can talk, she thought.
She was feeling better after the walk, starting to think that maybe everything hadn’t been ruined after all. She would call around to her friends today, and soon it would all be forgotten and they could continue on as usual. His jealousy wasn’t really so bad. Besides, she was the one who had started clawing and scratching.
When Helena reached their end of the beach, the fog was even thicker. White, white, white, everywhere she turned. She realized that she hadn’t seen Spencer in quite a while. All she could see clearly was her sneakers, half sunk into the sand. She called out several times. Waited. He didn’t come. How strange.
She took a few steps back, straining to see through the fog.
“Spencer! Here, boy!”
No reaction. Damn dog. This wasn’t like him.
Something was wrong. She stopped and listened. All she could hear was the lapping of the waves. A ripple of fear ran down her spine.
Suddenly the silence was broken. A short bark, and then a whimper that died out. Spencer.
What was going on?
She stood utterly still and tried to fight back the panic that was surging in her chest. The fog surrounded her. It was like being in a silent vacuum. She yelled straight out into the fog.
“Spencer! Here, boy!”
Then she sensed a movement behind her and realized that someone was standing very close. She turned around.
“Is anyone there?” she whispered.
There was a relaxed mood inside the regional newsroom in the big headquarters of Swedish National Television. The morning meeting was over.
Reporters were sitting here and there with cups of coffee in front of them. One held a phone to his ear; another stared at his computer screen; a couple were talking in low voices with their heads together. A few cameramen were leafing listlessly through the evening papers, then the morning ones.
Everywhere were stacks of paper, discarded newspapers, half-empty plastic coffee cups, telephones, computers, and baskets full of faxes, files, and folders.
At the news desk, which was the focal point of the newsroom, only the editor, Max Grenfors, could be found this early in the morning.
Nobody knows how good they have it here, he thought as he typed in the day’s agenda on the computer. A certain energy and enthusiasm ought to be expected after the long weekend, instead of this dull apathy. It was bad enough that the reporters hadn’t come up with any ideas of their own at the morning meeting on this dreary Tuesday, but they had also grumbled about the jobs that needed to be done. Grenfors thought that most reporters lacked the spirit and drive that he himself had possessed as a reporter before he was promoted to the editor’s desk.
Max Grenfors had just turned fifty, but he did what he could. By now his hair was salt-and-pepper, but he had it regularly dyed by one of the city’s most talented hairdressers. He kept in shape with long, lonely workouts at the company gym. For lunch he preferred cottage cheese or yogurt at his computer instead of high-fat meals in the noisy TV lunchroom with his equally noisy colleagues.
As editor it was his job to decide on the content of the broadcast: which stories to run and how much airtime to give them. He liked to get involved in how a story was shaped, which often annoyed the reporters. That didn’t bother him, as long as he had the final say.
Maybe it was the long, cold winter, followed by the wet, windy spring with a chill that never seemed to let up, that had made weariness hover like a musty wool blanket over the newsroom. The summer warmth they were all longing for seemed far away.
Grenfors assigned titles to the stories he was going to air and arranged them in order for the broadcast. The day’s top story was the catastrophic finances of the Academic Hospital in Uppsala, followed by the strike at the Osteraker Prison, the night’s shooting drama in Sodertalje, and then Elsa the cat. Two twelve-year-old boys had rescued her from certain death in the recycling room of an apartment building in Alby. A real human interest story, the editor thought contentedly, forgetting his bad mood for a moment. Anything with children acting as heroes, and animals, always drew viewers.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the anchorman enter the newsroom. It was time for a run-through and the same old discussion about which guest would be invited to the studio that evening-a discussion that could develop into a dispute, or a royal squabble if he let it.
He discovered the dog first. Erik Andersson, sixty-three years old and living on a disability pension, was from Eksta in the island’s interior. He was visiting his sister in Frojel. He and his sister took long walks by the sea in all kinds of weather, even on a foggy day like this.