Camilla Lackberg Crime Thrillers 1-3: The Ice Princess, The Preacher, The Stonecutter
each other?’
Erica held her breath. The paper she had found in the wastebasket at Nelly’s house made her very curious about Julia’s answer.
‘Pappa worked for her.’ The reply came reluctantly from Julia. She put a finger in her mouth without even seeming to be conscious of it and began gnawing at it frantically.
‘Yes, but that must have been long before you were born,’ said Erica. She was still fishing for information.
‘I had a summer job at the cannery when I was younger,’ said Julia.
Her replies still came like pulling teeth. She stopped biting her nails only long enough to answer.
‘You looked like you were getting along well.’
‘Well, I suppose that Nelly sees something in me that nobody else does.’ Her smile was bitter and introspective. All at once Erica felt great sympathy for Julia. Life as the ugly duckling must have been hard. She said nothing, and after a while the silence forced Julia to go on.
‘We were here every summer, after all. The summer after tenth grade Nelly rang Pappa and asked if I’d like to earn a little extra and work in the office. I could hardly turn it down, so after that I worked there every summer until I started at the teachers’ college.’
Erica understood that this answer left a good deal unsaid. But it would have to do. She also understood that she wouldn’t get much more out of Julia about her relationship with Nelly. They sat down on the sofa on the veranda again and drank a few sips of coffee in silence. Both of them gazed blankly out across the ice that stretched towards the horizon.
‘It must have been hard for you when Mamma and Pappa and Alex moved away.’ It was Julia who spoke first.
‘Yes and no. We were no longer playing with each other by then, so of course it was sad, but it wasn’t as dramatic as if we’d still been best friends.’
‘What happened? Why did you stop hanging out together?’
‘If I only knew.’
Erica was astonished that the memory could still hurt so much. That she could still feel the loss of Alex so strongly. So many years had passed since then, and it was probably the rule rather than the exception that childhood best friends often slipped away from each other. Maybe it was because there had never been any natural ending and above all no explanation. They didn’t have a disagreement, Alex didn’t find a new best friend; none of the reasons why a friendship usually dies. She simply withdrew behind a wall of indifference and vanished without saying a word.
‘Did you have a fight about something?’
‘No, not that I know of. Alex just lost interest somehow. She stopped ringing me and stopped asking if we should think up something to do together. If I asked her to do something she wouldn’t say no, but I could tell that she was utterly uninterested. So finally I stopped asking.’
‘Did she have new friends she hung around with?’
Erica wondered why Julia was asking all these questions about her and Alex, but she had nothing against reviving old memories. She might be able to use them in the book.
‘I never saw her with anyone else. At school she always kept to herself. And yet …’
‘What?’ Julia leaned forward eagerly.
‘I still had a feeling that there was someone. But I could be wrong. It was just a feeling.’
Julia nodded thoughtfully. Erica had the feeling that she had merely confirmed something that Julia already knew.
‘Excuse me for asking, but why do you want to know so much about when Alex and I were kids?’
Julia avoided looking her in the eye. Her answer was evasive.
‘She was so much older than I was, and she’d already left the country by the time I was born. Besides, we were really different. I don’t think I ever really got to know her. And now it’s too late. I looked for pictures of her at home, but we have hardly any. So I thought of you.’
Erica felt that Julia’s reply contained so little truth as to qualify as a lie, but she reluctantly accepted it.
‘Well, I have to get going now. Thanks for the coffee.’
Julia got up abruptly and went to the kitchen to put her coffee cup in the dish tub. She was suddenly in a big hurry to leave. Erica walked her to the door.
‘Thanks for letting me see the pictures. It meant a lot to me.’
Then she was gone.
Erica stood in the doorway a long time watching her walk away. A grey and shapeless figure who hurried down the street with her arms held tight to her body as protection from the biting cold. Erica slowly closed the door and went back inside where it was warm.
It was a long time since Patrik had felt so nervous. The feeling he had in the pit of his stomach was wonderful and frightening at the same time.
The pile of clothes on the bed grew as he tried on yet another outfit. All the clothes he put on felt too old-fashioned, too sloppy, too dressy, too square, or simply too ugly. Besides, most of the trousers were uncomfortably tight around the waist. With a sigh he tossed another pair of trousers on the pile and sat down in his shorts on the edge of the bed. He immediately lost all sense of anticipation for the evening and instead got a serious touch of good old anxiety. Maybe it would be better if he rang and cancelled.
Patrik lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling with his hands clasped behind his head. He still owned the double bed that he and Karin had shared, and now he stroked his hand over her side of the bed in a fit of sentimentality. It was not until recently that he had begun rolling over onto her side in his sleep. Actually, he should have bought a new bed as soon as she moved out, but he hadn’t been able to face it.
Despite all the sadness he felt when Karin left him, he’d sometimes wondered if it really was Karin he was missing, or whether he missed the illusion he’d had of marriage as an institution. His father had left his mother for another woman when he was ten years old. The divorce that followed had been heart-rending, exploiting him and his little sister Lotta as the primary weapons. He had promised himself that he would never be unfaithful, but above all that he would never ever get a divorce. If he got married it would be for life. So when he and Karin got married five years ago in Tanumshede Church, he didn’t doubt for a second that it would last forever. But life seldom turns out the way one thinks it will. She and Leif had been meeting behind his back for over a year before he caught them. So fucking classic.
He had come home early from work one day because he wasn’t feeling well, and there they were in the bedroom. In the bed he was lying in right now. Maybe there was a masochist somewhere inside of him. How else could he explain why he hadn’t got rid of the bed long ago? Although now it was all in the past. It no longer mattered.
He heaved himself up out of bed, still unsure if he wanted to go over to Erica’s house tonight or not. He wanted to. And he didn’t want to. With one blow an attack of low self-esteem had swept away the sense of anticipation he’d been feeling all day, even all week. But it was too late to decline, so he didn’t have much choice.
When he finally found a pair of chinos that fit well around the waist and put on a freshly ironed blue shirt, he felt all at once a little better. And he began looking forward to the evening again. A touch of gel made his hair look suitably dishevelled, and after giving his reflection in the mirror a good-luck wave, he felt ready to go.
It was pitch-black out although it was only seven-thirty, and a light snowfall made visibility poor as he drove back to Fjällbacka. He had left in good time and didn’t need to hurry. His thoughts of Erica were briefly pushed aside by the events of recent days at work. Mellberg hadn’t been pleased when Patrik could do no better than substantiate that the witness, Anders’s neighbour Jenny, seemed positive about what she had seen. Anders actually did seem to have an alibi for the critical time period. This may not have provoked the same degree of