Sun and Shadow Read Free

sooner.
    How long had he been living here? Ten years? Was it really ten years? Something like that. How many women had he brought back to his apartment during all that time? He preferred not to think about it. He could hold up both hands and count his fingers: that would probably be enough.
    He walked through the rooms illuminated by the light from the city streets. He smiled. Soon he’d have to wade through piles of underwear in the hall. A stocking draped over the back of the sofa. He knew Angela. You need a bit of untidiness in your life, she’d said. You’ll bring chaos, he’d said. About time, was her reply.
    What if she says no in the end? he’d thought not very long ago. Grown tired of him?
    The trams came and went in Vasaplatsen down below. The wall opposite the big window in the living room was white in the evening glow. Just to the side was the shiny red dot on the CD player. Winter went over to it and took out the Springsteen box he’d been sent at great expense last autumn by his London friend, DCI Steve MacDonald. He’d done it so that Winter would be impressed by how much the postage had cost and listen as seriously as he could. Winter liked jazz and MacDonald accepted that, but he’d damn well see to it that Winter got a decent education in all the good things he’d missed during his sheltered youth, growing up with John Coltrane.
    The strange thing was that he listened to even more jazz now that he’d started listening to rock as well, and he could hear different nuances in Coltrane, a new dark side. To his surprise he’d also discovered things he liked in simple rock. Perhaps that was just it. The simplicity.
    As you grow older you search for simplicity. I’m getting older. I’ll soon be forty. That’s old, relatively speaking. Maybe I’m not a simple person, but I can learn, still. Or perhaps I’ve always been a simple soul. Angela has noticed that. That’s why she’s picked me out of ten thousand others.
    He put the fourth disc into the CD player and selected the tenth track, his favorite all this last month, or at least ever since the decision was made. The decision. I’m happy with you in my arms, I’m happy with you in my heart, happy when I taste your kiss, I’m happy in love like this. The simple life. Angela had understood. Maybe he would find happiness.
    The ballad oozed through the room as he got undressed, happy, baby, come the dark, and suddenly he was in the shower thinking of nothing. He could hear the music through the water, and then the sound of a key as Angela let herself in.
     
    Lars Bergenhem drove over Älvsborg Bridge. The car was rocking in the wind. He was off duty, and when he came to the tunnel he wondered what the hell he was doing there. In the tunnel. In the car. He could be sitting at home, watching his two-year-old daughter as she slept. That’s what he used to do. Ada would sleep, and he would watch. He could be watching Martina cleaning up the kitchen after Ada’s evening meal. He could be doing the cleaning up himself.
    It had started the way it always did. A word neither of them understood. After Ada had fallen asleep it was so quiet that he didn’t have the strength to try to find words that wouldn’t make everything worse. He was used to investigations, but this was too much for him. He was a detective, but he wasn’t a detective of love. Didn’t that come from some song or other? “Detective of love?” Elvis Costello? “Watching the Detectives.”
    He turned northward when he came to Frölunda Torg, heading back. A drive he’d done before, but not for a long time.
    Everything had been fine. The apprehension inside him had long since died away. Had it come back? Was it his fault? Was it to do with him or Martina? Those words that neither of them wanted to understand. Where did they come from? It was like a headache.
    His townhouse looked cozy when he got out of the car. Cozy. There were more lights on than necessary.
    Martina was in the