Ulf smiled. “Seven? Artistic licence perhaps?”

  “He was short-changed,” suggested Carl.

  Anna laughed. “I simply cannot understand these people who cover themselves with tattoos. What on earth are they thinking about?”

  “They think it makes them look better,” Ulf said. “Tattoos are a matter of aesthetics. It’s some people’s idea of adornment.”

  “I know that,” said Anna. “But I can’t imagine allowing anybody to draw on my ... on my body. I just can’t.”

  Ulf, who had now seated himself at his desk, shot a glance across the room towards Anna. Your body, he thought. Your body ... He brought himself up short. He was no callow schoolboy thinking lascivious thoughts; he was a grown man who knew better than to undress somebody mentally, especially since that somebody was a married woman, and a colleague.

  Anna had more to say on tattoos. “Jo,” she said, “had a patient the other day who was covered in tattoos. Apparently, it was head to foot. Everybody in the theatre had their eyes out on stalks, he said. Once Jo had put the patient under, they started to poke and prod at the designs, discussing their merits—or otherwise—like visitors to an art gallery. He said that they would have turned him over on the table to look at what was on the other side, but Jo stopped them as he said it would interfere with the patient’s breathing.”

  Carl did not approve. “They shouldn’t do that sort of thing,” he muttered. “You’re very vulnerable when you’re under anaesthesia. You trust the doctor not to laugh at you.”

  Anna felt that she had to defend her husband’s colleagues. “They’re weren’t laughing at him,” she protested. “And had he been conscious he would probably have been perfectly happy to show them his designs. They’re often proud of them, you know.”

  Carl remembered something. “A spider? I read something about that.” He frowned as he recalled the details. “Yes, there was a young man over in Copenhagen who had a spider tattooed on his neck. It was quite a big one—a tarantula, or something like that. He didn’t tell his girlfriend he was going to have it done—it was to be a surprise for her.”

  “This is going to end badly,” said Anna.

  Ulf agreed. “Stories about tattoos often do.”

  “And tarantulas,” Anna added.

  “Yes,” Carl continued. “It ends even worse than you imagine.”

  Anna shrugged. “His fault. You should think long and hard before you get a tattoo. Think long and hard and then decide against it.”

  Carl, not liking to be interrupted, pursed his lips before continuing. “As I was saying, he planned it as a surprise for his girlfriend—and it was. It turned out that she was an arachnophobe. She screamed and created so much fuss that she ended up in hospital.”

  “And the relationship?” asked Ulf.

  “It didn’t look as if it was going to work,” said Carl. “She started to hyperventilate when he came near her. So that was it. They split up.”

  Ulf looked at Anna. It could have been so different, if only he had met her before she met Jo. And that was pure chance: fate brought some together at the right time, and then she brought others together at the wrong time. He looked at Anna, and then looked away. This is your sentence, he thought. This is what you have to accept.

  “There’s a young woman in the coffee bar,” said Anna, “who has an angel tattooed on her stomach. Right in the middle. When her T-shirt rides up, you can see it. An angel.”

  “Angels are a common motif,” said Ulf. “People like angels.”

  “And believe in them,” interjected Carl.

  “Not really.”

  Carl shook his head. “No, they do. A very high proportion of the population actually believes in angels. There was something about it on the radio. They did a survey.”

  “Who did?” asked Erik. “People are always doing surveys to support their view. They all do it.”

  “This was independent,” snapped Carl.

  Erik was not convinced, but asked Carl what the survey purported to show.

  “What I said it did,” said Carl. “It showed that just over thirty per cent of people believe in angels. They actually believe they’re there.”

  “Guardian angels?” asked Erik. “That sort of thing?”

  “Yes,” said Carl. “Proper angels with wings.” He smiled. “Invisible, of course.” But then he corrected himself. “Well, not entirely invisible. People claim to see them, and so they might be visible to some people even if invisible to ... to the rest of us.”

  Ulf wondered whether a claim by some to be able to see angels amounted to visibility. “Just because somebody says that he sees something doesn’t mean that the thing exists.”

  Anna felt that this was all a discussion about language, rather than about angels. “The point is that some people think angels exist, and some don’t. All of us in this room are agreed, though, that they don’t, but if we went out into the street and asked passers-by what they thought ... well, we might be surprised.”

  Erik looked down at his magazine and turned a page—rather too deliberately, thought Ulf. Erik believes in angels, he said to himself. And he imagined Erik’s guardian angel, who would be interested in fishing and who might perhaps offer advice about the best fly to use on a particular river, or about the location of shoals of fish invisible to the angler in the rowing boat but easily spotted by an angel hovering above the surface of the water. Angels, presumably, had good eyesight; rather like that of birds of prey, who, from a great height, could spot the smallest mouse scurrying about in the undergrowth.

  He shook his head. The whole discussion was absurd. “I suggest we find something better to do than talk about angels,” he said.

  Anna looked at him peevishly. “Like what?”

  Ulf shrugged. “Are all our reports up to date?”

  Carl reached for a piece of paper on his desk. “There was a memo yesterday. It was addressed to me for some reason, but I was going to pass it on to you.”

  “About?” asked Ulf.

  “About restructuring. It asks for views on restructuring.”

  Carl rose from his desk and brought a piece of paper over to Ulf. Ulf took it cautiously, as if it might be infected. Memos descended fairly regularly from the Commissioner’s office, and they usually concealed an agenda. “Restructuring” was a current buzzword, having replaced “efficiency” and “skills development,” terms that had been the subject of the last two reports that the Department of Sensitive Crimes had been requested to submit. Each of these reports had taken two months to write and had disappeared into the maw of the police department without any sign of ever having been read by anybody. That was almost always the case with departmental reports, Ulf thought: People wrote them and submitted them. They then sat unread on several high-level desks before they were removed for filing. So it was, he suspected, throughout bureaucracies everywhere: people filled in forms and wrote reports that were rarely scrutinised and almost never led to anything happening in the real world.

  He was troubled that this memo on restructuring had been addressed to Carl. He was senior to Carl, and it should have come to him. Was there a message here? Was Carl going to be restructured upwards while he was due to be restructured downwards? Something like that had happened in the Department of Traffic and Public Order once, when the head of department found that his desk had been downsized overnight while that of his immediate junior had been correspondingly enlarged. The formal promotion of the junior had followed a few weeks later.

  He thanked Carl. “I’ll write something,” he said, and then added, “Unless you were planning to…” He left the sentence unfinished. It was a direct assertion of seniority, allowing for challenge but making it quite clear that such challenge would not be welcome.

  Carl’s reply was unambiguous. “Definitely not,” he said. “This is you, not me. They sent it to me by mistake—I’m pretty sure of that. There’s nothing more to it than that.”

  “Use the last report,” Anna suggested. “Simply delete ‘efficiency’ or whatever and insert ‘restructuring.’ That will save you a great deal of time.”

  Ulf acknowledged the wisdom of this advice. “Restructuring” would go away, just as “efficiency” and “skills development” had gone away. But hoops had to be jumped through in order for this to happen, and Ulf would have to do that. Then, because “skills development” had crossed his mind, he remembered that Blomquist had asked to see him and that he had suggested they meet in the café across the road that afternoon. He had not entered the commitment in his diary and remembered it just in time.

  “I have to meet Blomquist,” he said to Anna. “I almost forgot.”

  “People do that to him,” said Anna. “He complained to me about it once. He bemoaned the fact that people never kept their appointments.”

  “Poor Blomquist,” said Ulf. “He is, I suspect, one of those people who is much forgotten and much cancelled.”

  Carl smiled. He liked Blomquist but knew exactly what Ulf meant. There were some people who were destined to be cancelled, and Blomquist was definitely one of those.

  “We must all remember,” said Ulf, “that Blomquist is technically a member of this department.”

  “Allocated to us,” said Carl. “That’s what it says on his file. I’ve seen it. It says ‘Allocated to the Department of Sensitive Crimes until further notice.’ That’s not the same as being a member of the department. There’s a distinction, you know.”

  Ulf sighed. There were advantages to working within an organisation—you knew where you stood and you received a steady pay cheque at the end of each month—but there were also disadvantages. There were the rules and the jargon. There was the petty insistence on procedures that had been devised for a purpose long forgotten. There were the jealousies and the scheming. He had often wondered what his life would have been like had he never taken that fateful step of enrolling in the police. He could so easily have accepted the offer he had received of a teacher-training place and ended up teaching mathematics or geography in a high school somewhere. He could have enrolled on the art course he had looked at longingly and even now be showing his latest work in the galleries of Stockholm, or even Berlin. Or preparing a frugal lunch, from a can, in a garret somewhere, cold even in the middle of summer, squeezing each last drop of paint from the tube, reusing unsold canvases to paint new unsellable pictures. But happy, perhaps, and supported by some adoring young woman who would say to her friends, “Ulf’s paintings are pure genius—the world will see that sooner or later.”

  Instead of which he was writing reports on restructuring, enquiring into the private affairs of others, and now facing the prospect of a cup of coffee with a semi-colleague who was hanging on to his position by his fingernails and who went on and on about diet and health and the latest remedy for the same old complaints of humanity.

  He rose from his desk, glancing at Anna as he did so. She looked up and caught his glance, and smiled. It was a moment of pure bliss. Anna was everything. She was decency, courtesy, reliability, motherhood, Sweden, and love. All of that; all of that. And she was somebody else’s. She was that too, perhaps above all those other things.

  * * *

  —

  Blomquist was already there when Ulf arrived in the coffee bar. He had found a seat at one of the popular window tables, and seemed deeply immersed in a copy of the Sydsvenska Dagbladet. As Ulf came in, he looked up and folded the newspaper away. Two cups of coffee, freshly served and still steaming, were on the table.

  “I took the liberty of ordering for you,” said Blomquist as Ulf sat down opposite him.

  Ulf was unsure about this. The gesture of ordering in advance for somebody who had yet to arrive implied a certain familiarity, and for a moment Ulf struggled with irritation. He almost said, “I suppose you know what I like, do you?” but did not, and thanked Blomquist instead. Ulf would never be rude to someone below him in the pecking order; he was always faultlessly polite to people who could not answer back. Just as he was prepared, when the situation required it, to be blunt with those above him.

  Blomquist reached for his cup of coffee. “You know what they’re saying about coffee now?” he said.

  Ulf reached for his own cup. “Oh, they’re always changing their advice, aren’t they? I can never keep up.”

  “Well, I can,” said Blomquist. “I have a file at home to store the cuttings. It’s one of those concertina files—you know the sort? They expand.”

  Ulf nodded. Inwardly, he sighed.

  “I’ve labelled the various sections,” Blomquist continued. “Heart. Liver. Cancer. Skin. Free radicals. All the various categories.”

  Ulf took a sip of his coffee. From the corner of his eye he noticed that the young woman they had been talking about in the office—she of the angel on the stomach—was taking over from the unfriendly young barista, who was removing his blue striped apron, wiping his hands on it as he did so. His eyes wandered to the young woman’s midriff, covered by a dusty pink blouse. Beneath that, he said to himself, is concealed an angel.

  He decided to come to the point. “You wanted to see me,” he said.

  Blomquist inclined his head slightly. “That’s correct.”

  Ulf waited. “So?”

  Blomquist shifted in his seat. “It’s a bit awkward.”

  “You can speak directly to me,” said Ulf. “You don’t have to worry. Anything you say to me will go no further.”

  Blomquist seemed grateful. “Oh, I know that, Varg. I know that you respect confidentiality.”

  “So what is it?” Ulf coaxed. “Problems at home?”

  Blomquist was quick to deny this. “Oh no, nothing like that, although I suppose you get quite a bit of that—with your seniority. People must feel they can unburden themselves to you.”

  “Some feel that way,” said Ulf. “Not many, but some do.” He paused. “And I don’t mind, you know. You can speak perfectly freely.”

  There was a silence that seemed to last for several minutes. Then Blomquist said, “I’m not happy in my work.”

  Ulf stared at the other man. This was a ubiquitous complaint. Nobody was happy, in his view, because the work they did was essentially unhappy work. Crime was a pathology—a failure—and how could anybody be happy when dealing day in, day out, with things of that nature?

  “Do you feel you’re in the wrong job?” Ulf asked. “A square peg in a round hole?”

  Blomquist’s answer came as a surprise. “Oh no, being a policeman is exactly what I want to be.”

  “Then why are you unhappy?”

  Blomquist fiddled with his teaspoon. “Why is anybody unhappy? That’s a question that I’ve often asked myself and…” His voice trailed off. The spoon with which he had been fiddling was slightly bent, and he was now trying to twist it back into shape.

  “Uri Geller,” said Ulf. “Remember him?”

  Blomquist smiled. “The man who bent spoons by…”

  “Sheer willpower. By concentrating and directing his thoughts to the spoon. Or so he claimed.”

  Blomquist made a dismissive gesture before placing the spoon back on the table. “I have no time for such things. It’s all wishful thinking, isn’t it? People want to find evidence of the paranormal, but they never do, do they? It’s all smoke and mirrors.”

  Although he himself had created the diversion, Ulf now steered the conversation back to Blomquist’s unhappiness. “So,” he said, “you’ve never been able to answer the question of why anybody is unhappy. Where does that leave you in your own unhappiness? Unable to work out why you feel the way you feel? Unable to do anything about it?”

  Blomquist shook his head. “Oh no. As far as I’m concerned, my unhappiness has a very obvious cause.”

  Ulf waited. A conversation with Blomquist was always like this, he reminded himself. It drifted off down unexpected alleys and then suddenly returned to the point. And when it did return, it often did so with remarkable clarity and insight. It was easy to underestimate Blomquist.

  Blomquist leaned forward. “A lot of unhappiness is caused by diet,” he said, lowering his voice as might one sharing a confidence. “People eat the wrong things, Varg.”

  Ulf agreed. “I’m sure they do.”

  “Too many carbohydrates,” said Blomquist. “Far too many.”

  Ulf glanced at the neighbouring tables.

  “Yes,” whispered Blomquist. “Exactly. Look at them. Look at that woman over there. Look at her waist—if you can locate it. She has no waist, in fact. Carbohydrates, you see. That’s a Danish pastry she’s polishing off.”

  “You can’t blame the Danes for everything,” Ulf said.

  Blomquist looked puzzled. “I don’t,” he said. “They have a carbohydrate problem, just as we do. All I’m saying is that people eat far too much starchy food—and far, far too much sugar.” He paused, taking another look in the direction of the offending woman. “Sugar is the killer, Varg. Sugar is what does it.”

  “Kills you?”

  “Yes. But it’s the unhappiness that it causes that interests me. Sugar is a mood changer.”

  Ulf thought about this. It seemed to him that people who ate too much sugar seemed to be happy when indulging in their fatal passion for sweetness. It may be making them overweight; it may be rotting their teeth; but he was not sure that sugar made them unhappy. He expressed these doubts to Blomquist, who dismissed them summarily.

  “Sugar leads to mood swings,” he said. “And mood swings are intimately linked to unhappiness. There’s a lot of research pointing to that. I could give you the references, if you like. You could look up the literature online. It’s all there.”

  Ulf looked at the other man. Blomquist was well built, but not overweight, he thought. Was he eating too much sugar, though? Was that the cause of his unhappiness?