Camilla Lackberg Crime Thrillers 1-3: The Ice Princess, The Preacher, The Stonecutter. Camilla Lackberg
Then silence from Julia.
Erica wondered what Alex’s little sister was doing on her front porch so early on a Tuesday morning, but her good breeding asserted itself and she asked Julia to come in.
Julia tramped briskly inside, hung up her coat and scarf, and preceded Erica into the living room.
‘Do you think I could have a cup of that wonderful coffee I smell?’
‘Oh, sure, I’ll get you one.’
Safely out of Julia’s sight in the kitchen, Erica poured a cup of coffee and rolled her eyes. Something wasn’t quite right with that girl.
Erica handed the cup to Julia and asked her to have a seat on the wicker sofa on the veranda. They drank their coffee in silence. Erica decided to wait her out. Julia was going to have to broach the subject herself and explain why she was here. It took a couple of tense minutes before Julia spoke.
‘Are you living here now?’
‘No, actually. I live in Stockholm but I’m here straightening out everything with the house.’
‘Yes, I heard. I’m sorry.’
‘Thank you. My condolences to you too.’
Julia gave an odd little laugh that Erica found surprising and misplaced. She recalled the document she had found in the wastebasket at Nelly Lorentz’s house and wondered how the pieces fit together.
‘You’re probably wondering why I’m here.’ Julia looked at Erica with her strange, steady gaze. She blinked very seldom.
It struck Erica again how diametrically opposite she was to her big sister. Julia’s skin was pitted with acne scars, and her hair looked as if she’d cut it herself with nail scissors. Without a mirror. There was something unhealthy about the way she looked. A sickly pallor had settled like a dirty grey film over her skin. Nor did she appear to share Alex’s interest in clothes. Her outfits looked as though they had been bought in shops catering to little old retired ladies. Her clothes were as far from the style of the day as they could get without crossing the line to become masquerade costumes.
‘Do you have any photos of Alex?’
‘Excuse me?’ Erica was startled by the direct question. ‘Photos? Yes, I suppose I do. Quite a few, even. Pappa loved taking pictures, and he took a lot of us when we were kids. Alex was over here so often that she’s probably in a lot of the pictures.’
‘Could I see them?’ Julia gave Erica a reproachful look, as if admonishing her for not going to fetch the photos already. Grateful for any excuse to escape Julia’s penetrating gaze for a moment, Erica went to get the photo albums.
The albums were in a chest up in the attic. She hadn’t had a chance to clean there yet, but she knew exactly where the chest was. All the family photographs were stored inside; she had shuddered at the thought of sitting down to go through them. A large part of the photos were in unsorted piles, but she knew that the ones she was looking for had been carefully put into albums. She paged through them systematically, starting at the top of the stack. In the third album she found what she was looking for. The fourth album also had pictures of Alex, and clutching both albums she cautiously climbed down the attic stairs.
Julia was sitting in exactly the same position as before. Erica wondered whether she had moved at all while she was gone.
‘Here’s something that should interest you.’
Erica was out of breath. She dropped the thick photo albums on the coffee table so hard that dust flew.
Julia eagerly began looking through the first album while Erica sat down next to her on the sofa to describe what was in the pictures.
‘When was this one taken?’
Julia was pointing at the first photo she found of Alex, two pages into the album.
‘Let me see. This must be …1974. Yes, I think that’s right. We were about nine then, I think.’
Erica ran a finger over the photo and felt a strong sense of melancholy in her stomach. It was so long ago. She and Alex stood naked in the garden on a warm summer day. If she remembered correctly they had been naked because they were running back and forth through the water spraying from the garden hose. What seemed a bit odd about the picture was that Alex was wearing winter mittens.
‘Why does she have mittens on? This looks like it’s in July or something.’ Julia turned an astonished face to Erica, who laughed at the memory.
‘Your sister loved those mittens and insisted on wearing them, not only all winter long but also for large parts of the summer. She was as stubborn as a mule, and nobody could convince her to put away those darn disgusting mittens.’
‘She knew what she wanted, didn’t she?’
Julia looked at the picture in the album with an almost tender expression. The next second it was gone, and she impatiently moved on to the next page.
The photos felt like relics from another lifetime for Erica. It was so long ago, and so much had happened since then. Sometimes it felt as if the childhood years with Alex were only a dream.
‘We were more like sisters than friends. We spent all our waking hours together, and we often slept over at each other’s house too. Every day we used to compare notes on what was for dinner and then we picked the house with the best food.’
‘In other words, you often ate here.’ For the first time a smile crept onto Julia’s lips.
‘Yes, say what you will about your mother, she could never have made a living on her cooking.’
One particular photo caught Erica’s eye. She touched it gently. It was an incredibly lovely photograph. Alex was sitting in the stern of Tore’s boat, laughing boisterously. Her blonde hair was flying round her face, and the silhouette of all of Fjällbacka was spread out behind her. They must have been on their way out for a day of sunshine and swimming on the skerries. There had been many such days. Her mother had not come along, as usual. She had always blamed a host of small matters she had to attend to, and chose to stay home. That’s how it always was. Erica could easily count on the fingers of one hand the excursions that had included her mother Elsy. She chuckled when she saw a picture of Anna from the same boat trip. As usual, she was playing monkey; in this picture she was hanging daringly outside the railing and making faces at the camera.
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes, my little sister Anna.’
Erica’s tone was curt, indicating that she didn’t want to discuss that subject any further. Julia got the message and kept paging through the album with her short fat fingers. Her nails were bitten to the quick. On some of her fingers she had bitten the nail so much that sores formed around the edges. Erica forced her gaze away from Julia’s wounded fingers and looked instead at the pictures flipping past in her hands.
Towards the end of the second album Alex was suddenly no longer included in the pictures. It was quite a sharp contrast. Before she was on every page; now there were no more pictures of her. Julia carefully stacked the albums on the coffee table and leaned back in the corner of the sofa with her coffee cup in her hands.
‘Would you like some fresh coffee? That must be cold by now.’
Julia looked at her cup and saw that Erica was right. ‘Yes, if there’s more I’ll take some, thanks.’
She handed over her cup to Erica, who was happy for a chance to stretch her legs a bit. The wicker sofa was lovely to look at, but after sitting on it a while both her back and her bottom were protesting. Julia’s back seemed to share this opinion, since she got up and followed Erica into the kitchen.
‘It was a nice funeral. Lots of friends for the reception at your place as well.’
Erica stood with her back to Julia and poured fresh coffee into their cups. A noncommittal murmur was the only reply she got. She decided to be a little nosy.