Frozen Moment Read online

  FROZEN MOMENT

  CAMILLA CEDER

  Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy

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  * * *

  First published in Great Britain in 2010

  by Weidenfeld Nicolson

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  © Camilla Ceder 2009

  Translation © Marlaine Delargy 2010

  First published in Sweden as Fruset dgonblick in 2009

  by Wahlstrom Widstrand

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

  in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

  permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher.

  The right of Camilla Ceder to be identified as the author of

  this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any

  resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 o 297 85947 5 (cased)

  ISBN 978 o 297 85949 9 (trade paperback)

  Typset by Input Data Services Ltd, Bridgwater, Somerset

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ive's plc

  The Orion Publishing Group's policy is to use papers that

  are natural, renewable and recyclable products and

  made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging

  and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to

  the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  20 December 2006

  In the old days, when they were both working, Åke Melkersson liked to get up an hour before his wife - she was more of a night person - just to indulge himself for that hour with a cup of coffee and the crossword in the morning paper. A quarter of an hour before they were due to leave, he would wake Kristina; she would get dressed more or less in her sleep, then stumble her way to the garage and collapse in the passenger seat with a blanket over her knees. She would sleep all the way to the timber factory gate, where he would get out and she would drive the short distance to Hjällbo and the post office where she had worked for so many years.

  In the afternoons she would pick him up at the factory gate at twenty to six, every day except Thursday when she arrived two hours later after meeting her sister at Dahl's for coffee and cakes. And so on Thursdays he would have a shower at work instead of when he got home.

  Since Kristina retired he had had the car to himself, and had been forced to rent a space in the factory car park for the first time in twenty-seven years. Sixty kronor a month it cost him. At first he had thought about leaving the car in the free car park down by the holiday cottages and walking the last bit of the journey. It wasn't the money that annoyed him. It was just so penny-pinching on the part of the company.

  Anyway, now he didn't need the space any more. He had paid until the end of the month, but he wouldn't need it after today - his last day at work.

  The realisation had coursed through his body like an electric shock when the alarm clock went off. For a second he had considered calling in sick for the first time in many years, pretending that he had been struck down by a nasty bout of the flu in order to avoid the obligatory cake and the laboured speech from the director.

  A frozen branch had caught on the dining room window during the night and was stuck fast in the rime. December hadn't been this cold for a long time. He lingered over his empty coffee cup and thought that this was the last time he would spend an hour like this: sitting alone in the early morning, by the soft light of the Advent candles in the holders Kristina had inherited from her family.

  He decided to set off a little earlier than usual so that he would have time to empty his locker before work started; he stood up a little too quickly and knocked over the glass of milk which had been dangerously close to the edge of the table.

  When he got in the car it was almost half past six. The first hesitant snowflakes fell from the lingering night sky and landed on the windscreen. He switched on the wipers and watched them sweep the snow- flakes away, hypnotised by the movement.

  Kristina had been saying for days that it was going to snow, warning him that the roads would be slippery; they were always at their most treacherous just before it snowed. And you can always tell it's going to snow when the air tears at your skin and ice particles form on your face, invisible but feeling like frosted glass.

  It was those five years that made the difference, the fact that she was five years older than him. It had been an issue when they decided to get married almost half a century ago but the age difference had levelled out over the years, and for most of their marriage they had hardly noticed it. Now it was making itself felt once again. Kristina had turned seventy in May, but he thought it was the lack of social contact that had changed her, rather than the encroaching years. That was what had made it easier for anxiety to tighten its grip.

  Was that what happened to people who retired? People like us, he thought for a second, who no longer have anything to do. Who have long ago exhausted every topic of conversation and established that the pleasure gained from the various activities available barely compensated for the effort involved.

  The last hill, the steepest, had been gritted. That was the only advantage of the shocking amount of building and the mass influx of residents during the 90s: the roads were gritted during the winter. From being the back of beyond, the area had suddenly become highly desirable. One pastel-coloured house af
ter another had shot up with impressive speed. The potholes left by last year's deep frost needed filling in, however, and Åke grimaced as the undercarriage of his old Opel Astra jolted. It carried on banging rhythmically beneath his feet as he took the bend at Johansson a little too quickly and felt the tyres lose their grip on the surface of the road. No, the new highways agency was in no hurry to get the holes filled in. After all, the younger generation drove around in enormous cars with tyres to match.

  As he pulled out on to Göteborgsvägen, which was still deserted, early risers were starting to switch on the lights in their kitchens. The windows of the houses showed up as soft yellow points of light in the midst of all the blackness. He braked and let the six-thirty bus pull out from the stop. As usual it was almost empty

  Bang-bang-bang. It sounded like the exhaust pipe.

  The bitterly cold morning was hardly conducive to the idea of pulling over and waiting for the next bus. It wouldn't be daylight for a long time yet. Åke decided to chance it, hoping the car would make it as far as work, then he would drive straight to the garage in Lerum at the end of the day. He could ask Christer to take a look at it.

  Happy with his decision he increased his speed as much as he dared on the twisting, icy road. The sparse street lights showed the way over the hills to Olofstorp like a string of beads. In a way it felt good to have something specific to do when he left the factory for the last time, with his personal effects in a cardboard box on the seat beside him. Like a kind of assurance that life didn't end there, that there were still things that wouldn't be done if you didn't exist.

  Kristina's prediction of bad weather came to nothing when the snow stopped falling just as suddenly as it had started. He switched off the windscreen wipers and turned on the radio so that he wouldn't have to listen to the banging from underneath the car.Bloody old heap. He was now passing through Olofstorp: the school, the nursery, shops, the folk museum, and then the street lights came to an end and he was once again on a deserted road. He was trying to get rid of the mist on the windscreen while simultaneously struggling to find a frequency on the radio when suddenly the car decided enough was enough. A deafening clatter made him swear out loud. He managed to manoeuvre off the road at the petrol station, which was closed, rolling the Astra under the roof, which seemed to float freely above the self-service pumps. With one more curse, he breathed out. He was grateful that the exhaust pipe - it had to be the exhaust pipe - had fallen off here, and not on one of the pitch-black stretches of road between the villages.

  He took out his mobile and weighed it in his hand for a moment. The thought of ringing Kristina and asking her to find the number for a breakdown truck or for Christer, then spending another half-hour calming her down, wasn't exactly appealing. He would have to find another solution.

  In the boot he discovered an oily piece of rope with which he was able to do a reasonable job of tying up the exhaust pipe - that should enable him to drive to the nearest garage. Buoyed up by having coped with the challenge so far, he acted on impulse and drove along the gravel track into the countryside instead of carrying on towards (the town. The track crossed the river Lärje over a narrow stone bridge, then continued to slice its way among the hills. Åke was taking a chance. A few years ago he had driven their grandchild out to a friend's house somewhere around here and he had a vague memory of a garage by one of the farms a short distance past the bridge.

  Perhaps his memory wasn't quite as reliable as it had been. Each curve revealed only fresh stretches of road running between deserted fields and meadows. He was glad that dawn was beginning to break. There was no guarantee the garage would still be there, of course, he thought, regretting his impulse just as the car rounded a bend and the full beam of the headlights illuminated a dilapidated old barn. The house opposite wasn't exactly in tip-top condition either, but in the yard in between stood a considerable number of dead cars. The place was run-down, that was obvious, but the iron sign proclaiming THOMAS EDELL - VEHICLE REPAIRS AND SCRAPYARD was still there.

  It was a relief to park the rattling car in the yard between two scruffy pickup trucks. The silence that followed felt almost sacred. He got out and stretched his legs, took a couple of deep breaths, inhaling the bitterly cold morning air, and gazed up at the greyish-white wooden house. There were no lights in any of the windows. However, bright light was pouring out from a metal annexe attached to the barn - a garage, with its doors wide open.

  It was gone seven o'clock by now, and he wasn't surprised to see that someone was already busy in the workshop. Real grafters make an early start, that's what he had always believed, although it was a little odd that no one seemed to have noticed his noisy arrival. Everything was as silent as the grave. He cleared his throat and shouted a greeting as he walked across the grass.

  The floor of the workshop was covered in tools, but there wasn't a soul in sight. A Nissan Micra up on the ramp was obscuring his view, so he took a few steps further inside.

  'Hello there!'

  Where the annexe joined the old barn there was a chaotic office made of white plywood screens; that was empty too, but a radio was playing away to itself almost inaudibly. He stood there nonplussed for a moment, then managed to make out the sound of Soothing Favourites. Then he realised he was late for work, late for his own leaving party, and this place was obviously not manned, despite all the indications to the contrary. He stepped outside again and decided to walk around the house just to make sure there was no one there who might help him. He didn't really want to drive that rattling heap much further.

  Afterwards he would recall that a feeling of unease gradually crept over him. Perhaps it was the thought of the director and being late for work, but there was something else as well, something indefinable. He almost had a heart attack when a black and white cat shot out of an open cellar window, yowling loudly. The next moment he saw the man, lying spreadeagled on the ground where the gravel path continued around the back of the barn. He didn't need to go any closer to see that the man had been run over, probably several times. The whole of the lower half of his body had been more or less… destroyed.

  He's only half a man, thought Åke Melkersson, a hysterical, terrified giggle rising in his chest. He's flat, half of him smeared over the gravel. He thought back to the cartoons of his childhood, in which characters were always getting run over by steamrollers, ending up as flat as pancakes. There was never any blood in the cartoons, but there was blood here, collected in a hollow in the gravel around the man's head, like a gory halo.

  Then Åke did what the characters in the cartoons never did: he walked backwards and threw up. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket, then he threw up again all over his trousers. I can't go to work like this, he thought irrationally before he stumbled back to the car and reversed out at high speed, making the exhaust pipe come crashing down again; it dragged along the ground all the way back to the main road.

  When he finally reached something that could with a little goodwill be classed as civilisation, he pulled over at a bus stop. With trembling hands he keyed in the emergency number.

  Afterwards he sat for a while in the car with the window down, hoping that the cold air pouring in would stop him from fainting. The policewoman's voice had been matter-of-fact, gathering information. This had helped him to calm down, and to come to his senses sufficiently to offer to drive back to the scene of the crime; he could wait there to be interviewed by the police, instead of giving his home address and telephone number. He didn't want to worry Kristina unnecessarily, least of all in a situation like this.

  The traffic, increasing as usual as the time approached eight o'clock, also had a calming effect on his nerves. He turned the heater up to maximum and picked up his mobile once again.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  Andreas Karlberg was sitting at his desk in the police station watching a magpie that had obviously taken a wrong turning and ended up on his windowsill. Its feet made a muted tapping sound as it m
oved across the metal ledge. The small coal-black eyes stared straight into his, then the bird seemed to take fright and flew away.

  Karlberg had other things on his mind. He was pondering whether he was a man of integrity, a man who knew how to draw suitable boundaries around himself, or whether he was just using this as an excuse for behaving like an egotistical pig. In the top drawer of his desk lay a popular psychology book entitled Energy Thieves. He had found the book lying on his doormat in a padded envelope on his birthday a couple of weeks ago. It had turned out to be from his ex, whom he hadn't seen for months.On your 34th birthday. To someone who ought to learn how to say no. Good luck, love from Marie.

  His first impulse had been to ring her up and ask her what she meant, but he realised there was a risk that she would immediately see this as an opportunity to explain at length why she had left him six months ago and he wasn't sure he wanted to know. Not any more, not when the wound left by the broken relationship had started to heal.

  Presumably it had something to do with his job. He worked too many hours, too many evenings, was too preoccupied with the job. But he couldn't agree that he had a problem when it came to putting her before other people. If you had the chance to be there for a friend, he still thought you ought to do so. Even if it meant you often found your weekends taken up with helping someone to move house, giving someone a lift to the airport at some ridiculous hour or lending money to someone in a tight spot.

  Good luck, Marie had written. He presumed she was encouraging him to practise the art of saying no, and he had actually taken her seriously. Not that he had since become notorious for saying no, but he had started by carefully evaluating every situation where he would previously have said yes without a second's hesitation. Like yesterday evening, when he had stood in the queue at the supermarket checkout watching the woman in front of him puffing and blowing as she unpacked a mountain of food from her trolley. She had suddenly turned to him and asked, somewhat apologetically, if he would mind loading her shopping on to the conveyor belt while she went to the other end and started packing it into bags. It would speed things up, she said. And she might well be right, he had thought, glancing in confusion from his prawn baguette to her enquiring expression, and back to his baguette.