Karl met his mirror image in the mullioned window. He was in a somber mood and wondered why she hadn’t answered.
It was silent in the house. Margaretha had gone to bed early. He had silenced her at dinner, hadn’t been able to talk. Even less able to eat. Margaretha had looked at him in astonishment. Her short and sinewy body had squirmed. She had fiddled about with her steel-rimmed spectacles. Taken small bites of food.
There was nothing that Margaretha needed to know. Absolutely nothing, he now said to himself.
He looked down at his hands and felt deep remorse.
Why hadn’t he dealt with those carved letters straightaway? Why had he let the child keep them on her neck? He knew why—it had been too hard to explain to somebody why she might have had them or where they came from. If it had come out that she had marks carved on the flesh of her neck, she might have been called a freak. There would have been gossip. Berzelius has adopted a freak. She would probably have been classified as one of those people who cut themselves. Perhaps there would even have been talk of an institution for people with destructive behavior.
Karl felt how his anguish turned into anger. It was as if history was about to repeat itself. Again she would risk not only his good reputation, but also her own. Accursed child, he thought. It was all her fault!
He immediately became thankful that she hadn’t answered the phone. He didn’t want to talk to her any longer. From now on he would not take any steps to have contact with her again.
He nodded slowly, satisfied with that fateful decision.
He remained standing by the window quite a while. Then he turned off the table lamps in the living room, went into the bedroom and lay down beside Margaretha to sleep. After just over an hour he still lay there awake. He got up and put on his dark blue dressing gown and wide slippers. He shuffled across to the sofa, sat down with difficulty and started watching TV again.
*
The little wine fridge held twelve bottles.
Jana Berzelius grasped one of them, pressed the electric corkscrew and filled a crystal glass to the brim. She took a gulp and felt how the light yellow liquid ran down her throat.
It had been necessary to leave the salvage site. She had stood there a short while and looked into the container, then she had told Henrik she had to go. She quickly walked across the area, got into her car and drove home.
She couldn’t stand still, had to occupy herself with something. She opened the big fridge and pulled out a cluster of tomatoes. With a knife in her hand, she started to cut them up, slowly cutting through the thin skin, putting the slices in a bowl, and swallowed yet another gulp of wine. Took out a cucumber, rinsed it and put that under the knife too. She thought about the container. Deep inside she had known that its contents would be important for her. The dream had shown the numbers, letters, the combination. She had seen it and known. But she had had no idea that she would find the mirror in there. She cut slice after slice of cucumber. How could she know it was her mirror? The knife worked faster with the cucumber. Had she been inside it? She must have been inside it. The slices were coming all the faster. She had been inside it! Now she was violently hacking away at the cucumber. Then she raised the knife and stabbed it right into the chopping board. The blade sank deep into the wood.
Jana thought about it from different angles. Started thinking about the carved name on her neck. Why did she have a name carved there? Why had she been marked in that way? She really did want an answer to all her questions. But there was nobody to ask. Except Lena. Jana immediately dismissed the idea of visiting Lena at the detention center. Someone could overhear the questions she would ask. Perhaps start to suspect something, or even find out that Jana was carrying out her own investigation on the side. She didn’t want to risk anything, not unnecessarily. She took a deep breath. There really was nobody else to turn to. Nobody at all. Unless... Jana looked up and saw the knife sticking straight up from the chopping board. No...there was nobody. Or was there? Well, perhaps there was one person. A single person, but he wasn’t alive. If he had been alive he would certainly have been able to tell her everything. But he wasn’t alive, of course. Was he? Could he...? No...or?
Jana grasped the wineglass and went to her computer. She emptied the glass in one gulp, sat down in front of the computer and went to a site where you could search for companies and people throughout the country. She hesitated a moment, then wrote the name Hades and pressed Enter.
Lots of company names showed up, but not a single person. She opened another search engine and wrote the same name. The search gave thirty-one million results.
She sighed. It was hopeless. He wouldn’t be still alive. He couldn’t be. It was simply impossible. But why had Lena implied that he was?
She changed her search to “Hades as a name” but that too resulted in a hoard of pages. She tried every possible combination of the name to try to find something that would lead to him.
She was close to giving up when it suddenly struck her. If you really wanted to find somebody then you ought to look in the police computers.
She needed to get into those databases.
And she needed to get into them without being found out.
CHAPTER
FORTY
FREDERIC “FREDDY” OLSSON drummed on the garbage trolley. The music pumped away in his earphones. A rasping voice at high volume.
Billy Idol.
“Hey little sister, what have you done?”
Freddy nodded in time and sang along with the lyrics.
“Hey little sister, who’s your only one?”
It was just before midnight and there was nobody on the platform.
Freddy parked his trolley routinely in front of a waste bin, opened the lid and lifted out the bag of rubbish. He had to exert himself, the bag was heavy.
Goddam, so much rubbish, he thought before he tied the bag and let it join the others on the trolley.
He got out a new bag, turned up the volume on his Walkman and sang: “It’s a nice day to start again.”
Then he stopped, drummed on the trolley and bellowed out: “It’s a nice day for a white wedding.”
He smiled to himself, lined the bin with the new bag and locked the lid with a click.
When he steered the garbage trolley toward the next rubbish bin he caught sight of a leg sticking out from a little space behind a bench. He went up to it and saw a little girl sitting there, leaning against the wall. She was fast asleep.
Freddy looked around as if he was looking for her parents. But the platform was empty. He slowly took off his earphones, went up to the girl and prodded her.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, you!”
She didn’t move.
“Hey little girl, wake up!”
With his fingers he prodded her cheek. Once again, a bit harder. Her dark eyes stared straight into his, and in a fraction of a second she was on her feet. She shouted and waved her arms, trying to get away from him as quickly as possible.
“Easy,” said Freddy.
But she didn’t listen. She backed away from him.
“Hey, stop there,” he said when he saw where she was going.
“Stop! Oh hell! Watch out!”
The girl continued to back away.
“Stop! Watch out!” he shouted and threw himself forward to catch her.
But it was too late. The girl stepped right over the edge onto the track. The last thing she saw was Freddy’s terrified look.
Then everything was black.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE