Because this wasn’t only about Lennart. It was about life, and all sorts of other people. Her parents: her father the staff sergeant, and her mother the office clerk. Her sister. Lennart’s family: her future father-in-law the major, and her future mother-in-law the handicraft teacher. She and Lennart were engaged and the expectation was that they would shortly be married. Get a house, have children and do all the other usual things; become proper grown-ups, in other words. Martin, Kristina, Sigge and Naomi – everybody they knew was counting on it all happening. Lennart Martinsson and Gunilla Rysth had been . . . what was the phrase? Rock-solid.

  What would they say? Why hadn’t she come out with it sooner? Why wait until the very last second before she went to Uppsala to visit Birgitta? And then just drive off without sorting out the mess she’d created.

  Was there somebody else?

  No, she’d said dismissively. Of course there wasn’t. What did he think? It was just that it wasn’t working any more; there was no one else involved. She had to follow her heart.

  Only Birgitta knew about it. Knew about the choir camp and knew about Tomas. She’d said the shit was bound to splash her, too, when it hit the fan, but she didn’t care. She’d already been studying in Uppsala for a year and had developed a broader outlook on life. And when people rang her from home she’d say yes, Gunilla was staying with her, in her student room in Rackarberget, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. And yes, she’d just found out how things stood with Lennart. They were both very sad about it. But that was life, feelings weren’t always something you could control, time’s a great healer . . . blah-blah-blah.

  She realized thinking about Birgitta helped a bit, and perhaps it really was the case, she noted in slight surprise, that the further she went from Karlstad, and the closer she got to Uppsala, the easier it felt to be alive. Between Örebro and Arboga she even switched on the car radio, but felt suddenly ashamed of her own frivolity and the tears started again.

  Swimming, perhaps drowning, in a sea of emotions: that was an expression she’d come across somewhere and it was a pretty fair description of the state she was in. But she wasn’t planning to drown. The hell I will, she told herself, and blew her nose fiercely on the last paper tissue in the packet. She was going to start living, wasn’t she, not stop?

  It seemed a safe bet, at any event, that it would be some time before she made the trip in the other direction. Months, or even years, if it was up to her. Staff sergeant and office clerk and sister could say what they liked.

  At least I have my Sigurd, she thought when she stopped to fill up in Hummelsta. That was his name – the Volkswagen she had bought from Lennart’s cousin last summer. Red and a bit the worse for wear, with more than 100,000 kilometres on the clock. But as reliable as a grandfather clock, touch wood.

  There actually was a mattress waiting on the floor in Birgitta Enander’s student room, but only for a few nights. From 1 July, on Tuesday, something completely different lay ahead. Gunilla hardly dared think the thought, but it wasn’t easy to keep at bay: a two-room flat on Sibyllegatan in Luthagen. She had found the district and the street on a map in the library in Karlstad, but it hadn’t given her any clear picture of the surroundings. Naturally not.

  The flat belonged to an aunt of Tomas’s but seemed to be a sort of general family perk. When it was clear that Tomas would be doing his military service in Uppsala, it went without saying that he was offered the chance to rent it. Because wasn’t he going to stay on afterwards and study? Of course, and family always came first. The aunt herself lived in Spain all year round; Sibyllegatan was just an insurance policy in case her third marriage hit the rocks.

  That was how Tomas put it, anyway. Gunilla had seen pictures of the flat; he’d sent her a set of photos and whenever she looked at them, or even just thought of them, she could feel her body tingle. Once she got so turned on that she had to find relief in masturbating in the shower. She was going to live there with Tomas! They had met three times altogether (apart from the days in Östersund; once in a borrowed room in Sundsvall, and once – when they’d met halfway – at a motorway hotel outside Västerås), and now they were going to live together. She and Lennart had never moved in together in the four years of their relationship.

  If I’d told Mum she would have had a fainting fit, thought Gunilla. She didn’t care to imagine what her father would have said and done, and she knew this was her best means of self-preservation. Whoever she told the truth to, or asked for advice, they would have told her she was out of her mind. Her sister. All her friends. Everyone.

  So don’t think about it. Silence is golden. Breaking it off was one thing. But breaking it off and moving in with another guy was simply unthinkable. They would have condemned her actions.

  They were going to condemn her actions.

  Everyone except Birgitta. I’m not saying you’re doing the right thing, she’d told her. But I’m pretty sure I’d have done the same. If that’s any comfort.

  And then she’d roared with laughter in that typical way of hers.

  The key was in a plastic bag under her bike saddle, just as they’d arranged. Birgitta was working all summer in a restaurant outside town and wouldn’t be home until after nine.

  It was now two-thirty. Gunilla dragged her heavy luggage upstairs, one bag at a time, and unlocked the front door of the student flat. Five rooms and a shared kitchen, Birgitta had explained, but over the summer it’s just me and Jukka there.

  Perhaps Jukka had a job to go to, as well. He wasn’t home anyway, and Gunilla was left to look round in peace. Not only Birgitta’s room, but also the shared areas. Kitchen, WC and bathroom. It looked pretty untidy, despite three-fifths of the tenants not being in residence, and she was struck again by how fortunate she was to be moving into a flat of her own with the prince of her dreams before the start of her very first term. She remembered Birgitta had had to take a room with a family for the first few months and was over the moon when she got a flat share in the student quarter at Rackarberget.

  Prince of her dreams? Wherever had that come from? It had an ironic undertone that Gunilla didn’t like the sound of. The prince of your dreams inevitably proved a fraud when you got to the heart of the matter, and Tomas Winckler wasn’t a fraud.

  She would have found it hard to explain to anyone else how she could be so completely sure about that, but then she didn’t plan to try. To repeat: silence is golden.

  I could marry him, she thought. Just like that, he’d only have to ask.

  Jesus Christ, she thought immediately. Calm down, don’t be such an idiot, and don’t forget your pills! You’re twenty years old; weren’t you going to get that degree first?

  She opened the fridge door and decided she needed to get some shopping in. There were a shelf and a section in the door marked with Birgitta’s name, but all the fridge had to offer was a litre of milk, a tube of salted cod roe and three yellow onions. Birgitta had told her she got meals at the restaurant, breakfast, lunch and dinner, but if Gunilla was ravenous, all she had to do was go to the shops and stock up. There was no need for either of them to worry about what Jukka ate.

  On the ‘Birgitta’ shelf in the cupboard she found a box of cornflakes, a packet of crispbread and a bottle of ketchup. Oh well, Gunilla thought, I’m only going to be here for three days. By Saturday I shall have a kitchen of my own, and it won’t look like this one.

  She checked her watch. It was three hours until she would be meeting Tomas on Nybron bridge. Her body sang at the thought of him, but she stuck firmly to her resolve to go food shopping rather than taking another shower.

  She was ten minutes early. She’d been worried about not finding the way, but it was just as he’d said. The bridge really was right in the middle of town.

  It was a warm evening but the streets were pretty quiet. He had told her it would be like that. Before the students came back at the end of August, Uppsala was a typical example of small-town Sweden, dozing away the summer. Attractively green, to be sure, especially west of the river, but the majority of its population was elsewhere.

  She didn’t mind that. Quite the opposite; slowly growing into the place, absorbing all those new impressions for a couple of months before getting down to serious work in the English department – wherever it was – what could be better than that?

  Well, maybe Tomas having as much free time as she did, but you couldn’t have everything. He was doing his military service over at a place they called Polackbacken, and would be tied up with that until next autumn, but he was off most evenings. Saturdays and Sundays, too, and in mid-July – that was only two weeks away – he had a week’s so-called harvest leave.

  She leant her elbows on the stone balustrade of the bridge and looked down to watch the turbid water swirling rapidly past. My life, she thought, my life can’t get any better than it is right now.

  And how a thought like that could come into her mind so soon after she had wept uncontrollably at her own wretchedness in a Värmland car park was a matter she decided not to examine too closely.

  Certainly not right now, because she spotted him striding towards her from under the big trees on the west side of the river.

  He had a bunch of flowers in one hand, and a bottle of wine in the other, and half an hour later they were on a rug behind a protective screen of bushes on the slope at the base of the castle. She laughed out loud when he told her he had pinched it from a military store and laid it out ready on his way down to Nybron. He hoped she wouldn’t find it too itchy.

  4

  The distance between the house and the flat was exactly 1,100 metres, but only if you took the direct route.

  Eva Backman shunned the direct route. She made a detour that took her round the whole town, more or less: Oktober Park, straight through Rocksta and the woods, past the new fire station, past the cemetery, the sports ground and Hessle school, and as she came in through the front door, she realized it had taken her an hour and a half.

  That was roughly what she needed, she’d come to understand. The detached house in Haga, where she’d lived with Ville and their three boys for fourteen years, and the flat on the top floor of one of the newly built blocks in Pampas were two different worlds. Eleven hundred metres, a fifteen-minute walk, it was way too short. She needed some kind of transitional space, and that was why she went the long way round on Sundays.

  But only every other time. Only in this direction. On the Sundays when she went the other way – from life as a single person to being a mother of three – no such transition was needed, for whatever reason.

  She also wondered whether this arrangement was as brilliant as she had first thought. It was two years since the divorce, eighteen months since she moved into Grimsgatan. All five people involved had thought it an excellent solution, especially the boys, who hadn’t had to move or be subjected to too much upheaval. They had a dad one week, and a mum the next. Changeover on Sunday, and variety is the spice of life.

  Well, it wouldn’t go on forever, Eva Backman was in the habit of consoling herself. Jörgen would be twenty in January; in two or three years he and Kalle would both have flown the nest, so they could sell the house and get their finances on a better footing.

  A five-year waiting room, she thought, registering that the fridge was as empty as when she left it, a week before. Is this any way to be living, with the menopause just around the corner?

  She was forty-six. What was the alternative? Find a new man? And if so, how? How the hell would she set about it?

  Go back to Ville?

  Not on your life, she thought. She took a cup of coffee with her and went out to sit on the balcony. She knew he would leap at the chance, if she so much as hinted at it. That was almost the worst thing. He wanted her back; he had stopped saying it out loud every time they met, but she could see it in him. It was that sort of feeble, pleading look he had – he sounded that way on the phone, too, and she was finding it harder and harder to bear. Pull yourself together! She wanted to say. Do something – find yourself another woman at least, there must be loads of them in the sports club, sighing for you. But for you and me it’s all over, finito.

  Yes, anything at all but getting back into the old rut. Though why she was sitting in the afternoon sun on the balcony of her own property and thinking about her former husband was a valid question, of course. Weren’t the ninety minutes of transition enough?

  Fuck it, thought Eva Backman. Life sucks.

  But as she sat in front of her laptop paying bills, she thought back to the previous evening. That was considerably more pleasant.

  She had been for dinner at Barbarotti and Marianne’s, at Villa Pickford. It wasn’t the first time, far from it, but it was the first time there had been ten of them round the table.

  Three adults, seven teenagers. Marianne had said that this must surely be absolutely unique, and perhaps she was right. Three typical products of the 1960s, who’d had kids with three others of the same vintage but not currently present, she had pointed out, spurring on Barbarotti to propose a toast.

  Sweden’s youth is its future!

  He’d told them that was the motto on the medals you were awarded for sports at school in his day. Nobody had believed him. He had even left the table to go and rummage in drawers and shoeboxes so he could prove it to them, but returned empty-handed. He’d claimed his first wife must have purloined his medal stash and taken it to be melted down for sordid financial gain. They would have made her a very decent profit, if he did say so himself. But in a quick informal survey of those round the table, he lost the credibility match 9–1.

  That was the first time Jörgen, Kalle and Viktor had spent time with Gunnar and Marianne’s children, and she’d felt a few butterflies in her stomach as they got into the car for the drive out to Kymlingenäs.

  You’re nervous, Mum, I can tell, Kalle had said. You don’t need to be, you know, we can come up with the goods when we have to.

  And he was right. There hadn’t even been that much effort required; there were moments round the big table when she’d had to dab at the corner of her eye. Why did life so seldom look like this? A big group of people eating together round a table. Kids and parents. Conversation and laughter. Why did it have to be so bloody difficult? Why have we forgotten the time-honoured social function of sharing meals in this country?

  Or maybe it was the long intervals – the very fact that it happened so rarely – that made it so special? Would she tire of it if it happened every day?

  She interrupted her own train of thought. Clicked to make her payment and looked at the clock.

  Half past five. Time to pop out and get some food in for breakfast. Tomorrow was Monday.

  She was at the cheese counter when Barbarotti rang.

  ‘Thanks for yesterday,’ she said. ‘Everyone on our team had a great time.’

  ‘Ours, too,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘We’ll definitely be doing that again.’

  ‘Is that why you’re ringing?’ asked Backman, ‘to invite us to breakfast tomorrow? If so, I won’t bother with this shopping. I’m in ICA Express, laying in supplies.’

  ‘No, it isn’t a breakfast invitation,’ said Barbarotti, ‘though if you’re really keen, you’d certainly be welcome. I’m out in Rönninge. In the forest, that is.’

  ‘In the forest?’

  ‘Yes. There’s been an incident. Asunander called me, and now he’s decided it would be just as well for the two of us to look at it together. You and me, that is.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Backman.

  ‘A death,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘A death?’

  ‘Yup. Well, more of a death plummet, to be precise; a fatal fall.’

  ‘What are you raving about?’

  ‘A body, found at the bottom of a sheer drop,’ Barbarotti elaborated. ‘A fall of twenty to twenty-five metres, I’d say. Most things seem to point to it being an accident, but there are certain aspects.’

  ‘Oh, and what are they?’ asked Backman.

  ‘Well, only one really,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Hang on a minute.’

  He was gone for a few seconds; she could hear him talking to someone else. Then he came back on the line.

  ‘Sorry, yes, just the one strange aspect, to be precise. Thirty-five years ago they found another body in exactly the same place.’

  ‘Thirty-five years?’

  ‘Yes. On 28 September 1975.’

  Eva Backman accepted the half kilo of Gruyère that was being passed across the counter as she processed the information.

  ‘An accident?’ she asked. ‘That other time, too?’

  ‘Well, that was how they classified it in the end,’ said Barbarotti. ‘But it took them a while to decide.’

  ‘You sound as if you’ve been briefed,’ said Backman.

  ‘I’ve been here for three hours,’ admitted Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘And I think it sounds a bit fishy.’

  ‘Fishy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has the body got a name? Today’s, I mean.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Barbarotti. ‘He didn’t have any form of ID on him.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Male of about sixty.’

  Eva Backman moved off towards the dairy section, thinking as she went. ‘Is there anything else that seems fishy?’ she asked. ‘Apart from the fact that he’s in exactly the same place?’

  ‘It just feels that way.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘I know you haven’t got my razor-sharp instincts for these things,’ said Barbarotti. ‘We can hardly expect that.’

  ‘Don’t talk crap,’ said Eva Backman.

  ‘All right,’ said Barbarotti. ‘I only called for a bit of a chat, really. I’ve got Wennergren-Olofsson here with me.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Backman. ‘I see. So this is something we’ll be tackling tomorrow morning in fact?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘Death by plummet.’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Right, I’ll let you get on. But we liked your kids. See you tomorrow.’