tell Birgit that he wasn’t the father of Alexandra’s child, or should he keep quiet and hope that it didn’t come out during the investigation? Erica didn’t envy him and couldn’t say how she would have acted in his situation. The truth wasn’t always the best solution.
It was already getting dark, and she was grateful that her father had put in outdoor lamps that turned on automatically when anyone approached the house. She had always been terribly afraid of the dark. When she was little, she thought it was something she would grow out of, because adults couldn’t be afraid of the dark, could they? But she was thirty-five years old, and she still looked under the bed to make sure that nothing was lurking there in the dark. How pathetic.
When she had turned on all the lights in the house, she poured herself a big glass of red wine and curled up on the wicker sofa on the veranda. The darkness was impenetrable, but she still stared straight ahead, though with unseeing eyes. She felt lonely. There were so many people grieving for Alex, people who had been affected by her death. But Erica had only Anna now. Sometimes she wondered whether even Anna would miss her.
She and Alex had been so close as girls. When Alex began to withdraw, and finally disappeared completely when she moved, it felt as though the world had ended for Erica. Alex was the only person she’d had to herself, and except for her father the only one who really cared about her.
Erica put her glass of red wine down on the table so forcefully that she almost broke the base off the glass. She felt altogether too restless to sit still. She had to do something. It was no use to pretend that Alex’s death had not affected her deeply. What bothered her most of all was that the image of Alex conveyed by family and friends did not jibe at all with the Alex she had known. Even if people change on the path from childhood to adulthood, there is still a core of personality that remains intact. The Alex they had described to her was a complete stranger.
She got up and put on her coat again. Her car keys were in her pocket, and at the last moment she took a pocket torch and stuffed it into the other pocket of her coat.
The house at the top of the hill looked deserted in the violet light from the street-lamp. Erica parked the car in the car park behind the school. She didn’t want anyone to see her going into the house.
The bushes on the property offered a welcome cover as she cautiously sneaked up to the veranda. She hoped their old habits persisted and raised the doormat. There was the spare key to the house, hidden in exactly the same place as twenty-five years ago. The door creaked a little when she opened it, but she hoped that none of the neighbours had heard anything.
It was eerie stepping into the shadowy house. Her fear of the dark made it hard for her to breathe, and she forced herself to take some deep breaths to calm her nerves. She thankfully remembered the torch in her coat pocket and said a silent prayer that the batteries were good. They were. The light from the torch made her feel a bit calmer.
She played the beam of light over the living room on the first floor. She didn’t know what she was looking for here in the house. She hoped that no neighbour or passer-by would see the light and call the police.
The room was lovely and airy, but Erica noticed that the brown and orange seventies furniture that she remembered from her childhood had been replaced by light pieces of clean-lined Scandinavian design, made of birch. She understood that Alex had set her mark on the house. Everything was in perfect order, which created a desolate impression. There wasn’t a single crease on the sofa or even a magazine laid out on the coffee table. She saw nothing that seemed worth examining more closely.
She recalled that the kitchen lay beyond the living room. It was big and roomy and immaculate, disturbed only by a lone coffee cup in the dish rack. Erica returned to the living room and went upstairs. She turned right at the top of the stairs and entered the master bedroom. Erica remembered it as Alex’s parents’ bedroom, but now it was obviously Alex and Henrik’s room. It, too, was tastefully decorated but with a more exotic flavour. The fabrics were chocolate-brown and magenta, and there were African wooden masks on the walls. The room was spacious with a high ceiling, which allowed a large chandelier to hang properly. Alexandra had apparently resisted the temptation to decorate her house from top to bottom with marine details, something that was common in the houses of summer residents. Everything from curtains adorned with shells to paintings of complicated knots sold like hotcakes in the small summertime shops in Fjällbacka.
Unlike the other rooms that Erica looked in, the bedroom seemed lived-in. Small personal items lay scattered here and there. On the night-stand lay a pair of glasses and a book of poems by Gustaf Fröding. A pair of stockings were flung on the floor and some jumpers were laid out on the bedspread. This was the first time Erica felt that Alex really had lived in this house.
Erica began cautiously looking through drawers and cabinets. She still didn’t know what she was searching for and felt like a voyeur as she rummaged among Alex’s lovely silk underwear. But just as she decided to move on to the next drawer she heard something rustle on the bottom.
All of a sudden she paused with her hand full of lace-trimmed panties and bras. She clearly heard a sound from downstairs through the stillness in the house. A door being carefully opened and closed. Erica looked all around her in panic. The only hiding places in the room were under the bed or in one of the wardrobes covering one wall. All at once she felt claustrophobic. She couldn’t move until she heard footsteps on the stairs; instinctively she crept over to the closest wardrobe. The door opened without a creak, thank God, and she quickly climbed in among the clothes and closed the door behind her. She had no chance to see who had entered the house, but she could clearly hear footsteps coming closer and closer. The person stopped for a moment outside the bedroom door before coming in. She suddenly realized that she was holding something in her hand. Without thinking she had grabbed whatever it was that rustled in the drawer. She cautiously put it in her jacket pocket.
She scarcely dared breathe. Her nose started to itch and she desperately tried to wiggle it to relieve the problem. She was in luck; it stopped.
The intruder was searching the bedroom. It sounded as if he or she were doing about the same thing Erica was doing before she was interrupted. Drawers were pulled out, and Erica knew that the wardrobes were next. Her panic rose. Beads of sweat formed on her brow. What could she do? The only solution she saw was to squeeze as far back behind the clothes as possible. She was lucky to have stepped into a wardrobe with several long coats in it, and she cautiously squeezed in amongst them and draped them in front of her. She hoped the two ankles sticking out of a pair of shoes on the floor wouldn’t be noticed.
It took a while for the person to go through the bureau. She inhaled a musty smell of mothballs, sincerely hoping they had done their job so that no bugs were creeping around here in the dark. She also hoped that it wasn’t Alex’s killer out there, only a few metres away. But who else would have reason to sneak around in Alex’s house, thought Erica, choosing to ignore the fact that she had no written invitation either.
All at once the door to the wardrobe was opened and Erica felt a gust of fresh air against the exposed skin of her ankles. She held her breath.
The wardrobe didn’t seem to be hiding any secrets or valuables – at least not for the person who was doing the searching – and the door was closed again almost at once. The other doors were opened and closed just as quickly, and the next moment she heard the footsteps going out the bedroom door and down the stairs. She didn’t dare step out of the wardrobe until a good while after she heard the front door carefully closing. It was wonderful to be able to breathe at last without being acutely conscious of each breath.
The room looked the same as when Erica came in. Whoever the visitor was, the search had been careful and had left no traces. Erica was fairly convinced that it wasn’t a burglar. She took a closer look at the wardrobe she had hidden inside. When she retreated to the far corner she had felt something hard pressing against the back of her calves. She swept aside the clothes and saw that what she had felt was a large canvas. It stood with the back facing her. She lifted it out carefully and turned it round. It was an incredibly beautiful painting. Even Erica could see that it had been done by a talented artist. The motif was a naked Alexandra, lying on her side with her head resting on one hand. The