Camilla Lackberg Crime Thrillers 1-3: The Ice Princess, The Preacher, The Stonecutter
saw right through him. Besides, her nose for romances was utterly preternatural. He might as well raise the white flag and capitulate, so he leaned back and waited for the barrage of questions that was undoubtedly in the offing. She began softly and insidiously.
‘You certainly were exhausted today.’
‘Mmm …’
Not that he wasn’t going to make her work a little for the information.
‘Was there a party last night?’ Annika kept fishing as she probed with Machiavellian guile for cracks in his armour.
‘Well, I suppose you could call it a party. It probably depends on one’s point of view. How would you define “party” anyway?’ He threw out his arms and opened his eyes wide in innocence.
‘Oh, skip the bullshit, Patrik. Just tell me. Who is she?’
He said nothing, tormenting her with his silence. After a few seconds he saw a light go on in Annika’s eyes.
‘Aha!’ Her exclamation resounded triumphantly as Annika waved her finger in the air, certain of victory.
‘It’s that woman, what’s her name, what’s her name …’ She snapped her fingers as she feverishly searched her memory. ‘Erica! Erica Falck!’
Relieved, she leaned back in her chair again. ‘So-o-o, Patrik … how long has this been going on …?’
He never ceased to be amazed at the unerring precision with which she always hit the target. It was no good denying it, either. He could feel a blush spreading all the way from his head to his toes, and it spoke more clearly than anything he might say. Then he couldn’t help the broad smile that spread across his face, and that was the last nail in the coffin as far as Annika was concerned.
After a five-minute interrogation Patrik finally managed to drag himself out of Annika’s office. He felt as if he’d been run through the wringer. But it hadn’t been unpleasant to talk about Erica, and it was with difficulty that he returned to the task he had given himself to deal with immediately. He put on his coat, told Annika he was off and headed out into the winter weather, where big snowflakes had begun falling lightly to the ground.
Outside the window Erica saw the snow fluttering down. She was sitting at her computer but had turned it off and was now staring at a black screen. Despite a pounding headache she had forced herself to write ten pages about Selma Lagerlöf. She no longer felt any enthusiasm for the biography, but she was bound by her contract, and in a few months it had to be done. The conversation with Dan had put a dampener on her good mood, and she wondered whether he was telling Pernilla everything at this very moment. She decided to make use of her worry about Dan for something creative and rebooted her computer.
The draft of the book about Alex was on the computer desktop, and she opened the file, which now held a good hundred pages. Methodically she read through the pages from beginning to end. It was good. It was even very good. What worried her was how all the people in Alex’s circle of friends and family would react if the book were published. Naturally Erica had disguised the story a bit, changing the names of people and places, and allowing herself some flights of imagination. But the core of the book was unmistakably based on Alex’s life, as seen through Erica’s eyes. The section about Dan in particular was giving Erica a real headache. How could she leave out him and his family? At the same time she felt that she had to write this story. For the first time an idea for a book had really filled her with enthusiasm. There were so many other ideas that hadn’t panned out and that she’d rejected over the years; she couldn’t afford to lose this one. First she intended to concentrate on finishing the book, then she would deal with the problem of how to handle the feelings of those involved.
Almost an hour of energetic writing had passed when the doorbell rang. At first she was annoyed at being disturbed now that she had finally got going, but then she thought maybe it was Patrik and leapt out of her chair. She did a quick check of her appearance in the mirror before she bounded down the stairs to the front door. The smile on her lips faded instantly when she saw who was standing outside. Pernilla looked terrible. She appeared to have aged ten years since Erica saw her last. Her eyes were swollen and red from crying, her hair was uncombed, and she seemed to have forgotten her coat in her haste; she was shivering in a thin cardigan. Erica let her into the warm house. With an impulsive gesture she put her arms round Pernilla and hugged her as she stroked her back the same way she’d stroked Dan’s only a couple of hours before. It robbed Pernilla of what little self-control she had left, and she wept with long wrenching sobs on Erica’s shoulder. After a while she raised her head. Her mascara had smeared even more, giving her an almost comical, clown-like look.
‘I’m sorry.’ Pernilla looked through her haze of tears at Erica’s shoulder, where the white jumper she was wearing had been coloured black by the mascara.
‘It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. Come in.’
Erica put one arm round Pernilla’s shoulders and led her into the living room. She could feel Pernilla shaking all over, and she didn’t think it was only because of the cold. For a second, she wondered why Pernilla had chosen her to go to. Erica had always been Dan’s friend much more than Pernilla’s. She thought it was a little odd that Pernilla hadn’t gone to one of her own girlfriends, or her sister. But now she was here, at any rate, and Erica had to do everything she could to help her.
‘I’ve got a pot of coffee on. Would you like a cup? It’s been on for about an hour, but it’s probably fairly drinkable.’
‘Yes, thanks.’
Pernilla sat down on the sofa and hugged her arms to her chest, as if she were afraid of falling apart and wanted to hold herself together. In a way this was probably true.
Erica came back with two cups of coffee. She placed one on the coffee table in front of Pernilla and the other in front of herself, sitting down in the big wing chair so that she was facing Pernilla on the sofa. She waited for Pernilla to begin.
‘Did you know?’
Erica hesitated. ‘Yes, but not until very recently.’ She hesitated again. ‘I urged Dan to tell you.’
Pernilla nodded. ‘What should I do?’
The question was rhetorical, so Erica let it go unanswered.
Pernilla went on. ‘I knew that from the start I was just a way for Dan to get over you.’
Erica began to protest, but Pernilla stopped her with a wave of her hand.
‘I knew that was true, but I thought things changed with time and that we really loved each other. We get on well and I trusted him completely.’
‘Dan loves you, Pernilla. I know he does.’
Pernilla didn’t seem to be listening to her; she kept talking while she gazed into her coffee cup. Erica saw that she was gripping the cup so hard that her knuckles were white.
‘I could live with it if he was having an affair and blame it on an early mid-life crisis or something. But I can never forgive him for getting that woman pregnant.’
The fury in Pernilla’s voice was so strong that Erica had to fight an impulse to move back. When Pernilla raised her head and looked at Erica, the hatred in her eyes was so fierce that Erica felt an icy premonition. She had never before seen such a white-hot, intense fury. For a brief moment she wondered how long Pernilla had actually known about Dan’s relationship with Alex. And how far she would be prepared to go to exact revenge. Then she rejected the idea as quickly as it had appeared. This was Pernilla, a housewife with three children, married to Dan for many years, not a raging fury acting as an avenging angel against her husband’s lover. But there was still a cold ferocity in Pernilla’s eyes that scared Erica.
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. I just had to get out of the house. That was the only thought I had in my head. I couldn’t even look at him.’
Erica sent a sympathetic thought