Silenced Read Free Page B

couldn’t be more than twenty-five, but she seemed more mature somehow. The main point about her was that she was too new to have heard all the stories about how Peder had behaved. About the way he had left his wife, and been unfaithful even while they were still together. About his boys, so little and doubly abandoned by their daddy, who in the middle of his paternity leave decided he could not stand being cooped up at home with the babies and handed them back to their mother. Who had just managed to start working part time after a post-natal year of serious depression.
    Peder sat as close to the probationer as he could without seeming weird, still well aware that it was too close anyway. But she did not move away, which Peder took as a good sign.
    ‘Nice croissants,’ she said, putting her head on one side.
    She had her hair cut short, with wayward curls sticking out in all directions. If she hadn’t had such a pretty face, she would have looked like a troll. Peder decided to chance it and grinned his cheekiest grin.
    ‘They look almost like cocks, don’t they?’ he said with a wink.
    The probationer gave him a long look, then got to her feet and walked out. His colleagues on the next sofa pulled mocking faces.
    ‘Only you, Peder, could make such a cock-up of a chance like that,’ one of them said, shaking his head.
    Peder said nothing but went on with his morning coffee and croissant in silence, his cheeks flushing.
    Then Detective Superintendent Alex Recht stuck his head round the staff-room door.
    ‘Peder and Joar, meeting in the Lions’ Den in ten minutes.’
    Peder looked around him surreptitiously and noted to his satisfaction that normal order had been restored. He could not get away from his reputation as the randiest male on the whole floor, but he was also the only one who had been promoted to DI when he was only thirty-two, and definitely the only one with a permanent place in Alex Recht’s special investigation team.
    He rose from the sofa in a leisurely fashion, carrying his coffee cup. He left it on the draining board, despite the fact that the dishwasher was wide open and a bright red sign headed ‘Your mum doesn’t work here’ told him where everything should go.
    In something that seemed as distant as another life, Fredrika Bergman had always been relieved when night came, when fatigue claimed her and she could finally get to bed. But that was then. Now she felt only anxiety as ten o’clock passed and the need for sleep made itself felt. Like a guerrilla she crouched before her enemy, ready to fight to the last drop of blood. She usually had little trouble emerging victorious. Her body and soul were so tightly strung that she lay awake well into the small hours. The exhaustion was almost like physical pain and the baby kicked impatiently to try to make its mother settle down. But it hardly ever succeeded.
    The maternity clinic had referred her to a doctor, who thought he was reassuring her when he said she was not the only pregnant woman afflicted by terrible nightmares.
    ‘It’s the hormones,’ he explained. ‘And we often find it in women who are experiencing problems with loosening of the joints and getting a lot of pain, like you.’
    Then he said he would like to sign her off sick, but at that point she got up, walked out and went to work. If she was not allowed to work, she was sure it would destroy her. And that would hardly keep the nightmares at bay.
    A week later she was back at the doctor’s, sheepishly admitting she would like a certificate to reduce her working hours by twenty-five per cent. The doctor did as she asked, without further discussion.
    Fredrika moved slowly through the short section of corridor in the plainclothes division that was the territory of Alex’s team. Her stomach looked as though a basketball had accidentally found its way under her clothes. Her breasts had nearly doubled in size.
    ‘Like the beautiful hills of southern France where they grow all