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“Do you know who the woman was?”

Wiikman shook his head.

“Petrus didn’t tell you anything about his trip to Spain?”

“He might have mentioned it, that he had been to Mallorca, but I didn’t live here back then. He didn’t tell me anything in particular. I don’t think he thought it was much to boast about.”

Lindell decided not to say anything about Blomgren’s farewell letter but asked if Petrus had appeared depressed over the last while. Arne Wiikman hesitated a few seconds before answering.

“He was a bit thoughtful,” he said finally.

But he could not supply any reasons why. They hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks. The contact between the two men had been limited to a phone call some weeks earlier. They had talked about an acquaintance they both had in common who had been run over by a bus in town and who was now in the hospital. During the conversation Petrus Blomgren had not brought up anything out of the ordinary or appeared despondent.

Before Ann Lindell got ready to leave she asked if Blomgren had ever talked about women.

Arne Wiikman smiled for the first time.

“He wasn’t bad looking in his day, so I’m sure he had a lady friend at some point, I’m sure he did. Who hasn’t, after all, but that’s not something you run off at the mouth about, especially if things seem to have dried up.”

“I thought that was when the talk really got started,” Lindell said.

Wiikman chuckled.

“You want to hear some?”

“Let’s do it another time.”

Wiikman quickly became serious again.

“I wish he had found some peace.”

“Is there anyone else who would be able to give me information about Petrus?”

“No,” Wiikman said immediately.

“One last question: Petrus regularly sent money to Doctors Without Borders. Do you know why?”

“No idea,” Wiikman said. “I don’t even know what that is.”

Back in the car Lindell took the Gysinge Road toward Uppsala, made a few phone calls, among others to Freddie Asplund, a new recruit, and asked him to check if it was possible to find twenty-two-year-old records of passengers on charter flights to Mallorca.

When she reached the roundabout at Ringgatan she made a turn in the direction of the Savoy, a bakery cafe. She needed to think.

Sixteen

The murmur from the radio turned into music. Laura reached over and turned the volume up. It was a piece she knew so well but could not place. She turned the volume up even higher.

Should I prove to be weaker than those who have looked down on me all these years? she thought and hit the doorpost as she rushed out of the kitchen, away from the music. She stopped short, whirled around, and glared at the radio, at the shiny volume knob whose rounded slightly glossy, chubby surface seemed puffed up with self-satisfied smugness.

Should I be weaker?

“Never, never!” she screamed and leapt forward, grabbing the radio and throwing it to the ground, stamping on the gray-tinted cover. Albi-noni’s “Adagio in G Minor” was silenced. She continued assaulting the appliance until all that remained of it were broken parts. She left the kitchen panting, then ended up standing in the living room, listening.

“That was a close call,” she muttered.

Her old life had tried to gain the upper hand.

What she feared most of all was to walk down the street and not exist, to step into the elevator at work and discover that the mirror reflected someone else, to exit the elevator and hear the poisonous tongues gabbing behind her back.

Never, never, never again. No one would ever trample on Laura Hindersten again. The music had stopped.

She swept her coat around her, opened the French windows as far as they would go, and then started to empty the bookshelves in the dining room. Fifteen books in each pile. Dust flew up. Some books fell on the floor and she kicked them out onto the terrace. Methodically she cleared case after case. There went the German collection, the early editions of Goethe, the beloved Voigt and the hated Kinz. Ditto two meters of filled bookshelves by and about Schopenhauer.

When Laura reached Virgil she hesitated for