The Chosen Read Free Page A

previously, drifting like a jellyfish
between the National Crime Unit, the local forces and the Stockholm City police. On paper they had been part of the Stockholm City police, but in reality they had served several masters. Alex had
liked it that way, and if it was up to him, the new team would be no different.
    ‘I’ll send a car to bring in her partner if he’s at home,’ Alex said. ‘I want to hear what he has to say, see whether we can eliminate him as a suspect.’
    ‘I shouldn’t think he did it himself,’ his boss said. ‘It’s too crude.’
    ‘I agree. It sounds like revenge or some other crap. But we still have to talk to the guy. I’m sure he must know who shot her in the back.’

O nly an hour had passed since Fredrika had left Police HQ in Kungsholmen to go to her rehearsal. One hour, but the job no longer existed. Nor did her family or her friends. Not within the vacuum
that was created when she settled her violin in the correct position between her chin and shoulder.
    The music carried her as if she had wings. She was flying high above everyone else, pretending she was alone in the universe. It was a dangerous thought. Soloists rarely did well in an ensemble,
but for a moment –
just one moment
– Fredrika Bergman wanted to experience a taste of the life she had never had, to catch a glimpse of the woman she had never become.
    It was the third week of the new, yet familiar era. All her adult life Fredrika had mourned the career as a violinist that she had never had, and would never have. Not only had she grieved, she
had searched hard for an alternative future. She had wandered around like a lost soul among the ruins of everything that had once been hers, wondering what to do, because as a child and a
teenager, she had lived for music. Music was her vocation, and without it life was worth very little.
    Things never turn out as we expect.
    Sometimes they
’
re better, but often they
’
re worse.
    Occasionally the memory would resurface, as unwelcome as rain from a summer sky. The memory of a car skidding, ending up on the wrong side of the road, crashing and turning over. With children
in the back, parents in the front, skis on the roof. She remembered those cataclysmic seconds when everything was torn apart, and the silence that followed. The scars were still there. Every day
she could see them on her arm, white lines that told the story of why she had been unable to put in the necessary hours of practice every day. In despair and emotional turmoil she had buried her
violin in the graveyard of the past, and become a different person.
    And now she was playing again.
    It was her mother who had found the string ensemble and told her: ‘This is your chance, Fredrika’. As if Fredrika, who was married to a man twenty-five years older than her, with two
small children, had endless hours at her disposal, just waiting for something to fill them.
    But seek and ye shall find, as they say, and for the past three weeks music had been back in her life. For the first time in twenty years, Fredrika felt something that might just be harmony. Her
husband and children made her heart whole. She was happy in her work, for once. Reaching this point had been a messy process. The case of the hijacked plane a few months earlier had been the key.
Her employer in the Justice Department had sent her back to work with the police on a temporary basis, and Fredrika had realised where she felt at home, where she wanted to be.
    In the police service. On the first of January, she was back. Working with Alex Recht as part of a new investigative team, which was very similar to the one she had been a part of a few years
ago.
    Very similar, even though so much had changed.
    Harmony. A word that would have made her feel queasy just a couple of years ago. But not now. Now it had acquired a new meaning; it wrapped itself around her soul like cotton wool, and lit a
spark in her eyes. Fredrika Bergman had found