Death in Summer, page 1
Death in Summer
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
Thursday, June 20, 2019
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Friday, June 21, Midsummer’s Eve
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Saturday, June 22, Midsummer Day
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Sunday, June 23rd
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Monday, June 24
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Tuesday, June 25
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Wednesday, June 26
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Thursday, June 27
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Friday, June 28
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Saturday, June 29
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Sunday, June 30
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Monday, July 1
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Tuesday, July 2
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Epilogue
Canelo Crime
Newsletter
About the Author
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
Prologue
MS Estonia, September 28, 1994
His sweater was stuck up under his life jacket so his back was exposed. His shoes were missing, maybe still inside, but he didn’t feel any cold. A woman yelled heartbreakingly, pleading for his help, but there was no time or opportunity to help. He abandoned her without a moment’s hesitation, lunging for the railing. People were fighting for their lives to hold on as the ship listed. Should he try to get back inside, to his mother and father? But something told him that he was alone now. He had to make it on his own. With a new resolve, he pulled himself over the railing. The angle increased with every wave and he would be able to slide down the outside of the ferry soon. He looked down at the listing ship. He had time to think that it looked like a dying whale with the white belly visible just above the surface. So many remained in its bowels.
Fear ached in his chest, but he kept going. His feet slipped forward over the metal hull. He bumped into other people in the darkness, confused and panic-stricken people who were all waiting for the wave that would carry them away into the black void. Everywhere there were desperate cries for loved ones. He thought of his mother and father again. He hadn’t seen Niklas since he pulled himself up the listing stairs in the middle of a chain of people.
He stepped on one of the windows from the outside, feeling with his foot the contrast between its thick plastic and the cold hull. The cabin within was empty. The family staying in there must have gotten out. Blankets, pillows, and luggage lay in a jumble on top of the closed door. A pink teddy bear lay wedged in the hat rack.
The lights flickered on one final time and then the signal horn blared sharply. The sky glowed red with emergency flares.
The whole world had capsized.
He looked up and watched wave after wave hit the life rafts that had made it into the water. The wind lifted them up, causing them to tumble along the surface. He had to decide now: stay put and go down with the ship, or jump into the frigid water.
There was no surviving this. He realized that. His life would end this night.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
1.
The vomit poured out of Fredrik Fröding, like an unchecked waterfall. It burned in his nose when he tried to catch his breath between heaves. He was kneeling in front of the toilet with one hand convulsively clutching the toilet paper holder as he spewed out the last of his stomach contents.
He stood up, his legs shaking, and felt frightened when he saw his own reflection. The whites of his eyes were a light pink with angry red blood vessels pointing in toward the irises.
His gray face and unshaven jawline made him look away.
He tried to take a step toward the door, but his legs wouldn’t support him, and he collapsed onto the floor. He lay there on the bathmat, his eyes focused on the dusty plastic cover over the sink’s drainpipe as he tried to get the room to stop spinning.
It had gotten to be too many again. He hadn’t waited more than half an hour after the first two pills before taking two more. Now he had finished the whole blister pack. The alcohol in his bloodstream had sped up the effect. And the side effects. The dizziness had hit him like a sandbag and the vomiting had followed not long afterward. Do not mix anti-anxiety pills with alcohol. That was the cardinal rule which had been impressed on him ever since his very first pill. And he had been careful about it for all these years. The last time he had screwed up was in college almost fifteen years ago now. That time, he had woken up in a stairwell holding his knocked-out front teeth in his hand.
Fredrik lay there on the bathmat for a while, allowing his breathing to calm down. He had to get up soon. He would lose his appointment with Torsten Bredh if he did not stand up, walk down the stairs, and get to the subway. He tried to picture the path before him, imagining the knot inside himself gradually untying with each step he took in his visualization. With some effort, he managed to make it up onto all fours. His legs wobbled beneath him, but in the end he was finally standing on the cold plastic bathmat. Without letting go of the bathroom wall, he made it into the shower and turned on the water. Steam soon began to seep out over the shower curtain. He cautiously let go of the wall with one hand and pulled off his boxer shorts. He avoided looking at himself in the mirror over the sink as he stepped naked into the scalding water.
Forty-five minutes later, he was standing out on Karlavägen. People hurried past with bags in their hands, the same as always, looking stressed out, seemingly completely unaware of how quickly life could change. Fredrik envied them. He used to daydream about the people he saw shopping at the ICA Supermarket Esplanad. Sweaty dads holding the hands of little kids, plowing their way from the taco shell aisle to the vegetables. Imagine what it would be like to be one of them, someone who planned Friday night dinner, changed diapers, and took all-inclusive family-friendly vacations.
He zipped up his leather jacket and descended the stairs stooping over forwards, focusing on the escalator on the other side of the barriers. He sat down heavily on the bottom step and rubbed his face with his hands as he caught his breath. People cleared their throats and sighed audibly at him as they pushed their way past, but he ignored them. He closed his eyes and raised his face in the cool air that wafted up from the dark tunnels. He imagined it sweeping away his dizziness and nausea.
His anxiety had been in remission for almost five years this time. Five years of calm, but it was all back now with a force that frightened him. He knew what had triggered it, but he couldn’t avoid it. It was like a force that drew him in, and he found himself standing by all the newspapers, flipping through Sunday supplements with headlines like “Life After the MS Estonia” or articles about mothers holding the hands of cute little kids laying flowers at the memorial on Stockholm’s Djurgården Island: “Elsa never got to meet her grandmother.” Even after so many years the journalists and photographers still had him in their sights. Sometimes there would be a phone call or two around the anniversary, sometimes even several in one day. The milestone anniversaries were the worst, although on the other hand people gave up much faster. It wasn’t like in the beginning, when they had pretty much lived outside the hospital and then camped out on the street outside his grandmother’s apartment for weeks after he got home. They hadn’t hesitated to photograph him, his friends, his school. They had coaxed, wheedled, threatened, and bribed, anything to land the best possible story about the devastated thirteen-year-old who had lost his entire family in Europe’s worst ferry disaster.
And now here they went again. Time to start filing stories for the commemorative inserts. Even though they hadn’t been particularly aggressive in their attempts thus far, they had been intrusive enough to send him into this downward spiral, which had brought him to Thomas Bredh’s office with regard to his post-traumatic stress.
Fredrik stood up unsteadily. He could see the platform. Three minutes until the next train.
* * *
Sofia Hjortén contemplated the available parking space next to the fully loaded motorhome. The Volkswagen Golf she kept out on Ulvön Island was rusty and had several dents on its doors. It was a beater. On the mainland, however, she was more cautious about where she parked. Her black Volvo XC60 was only a year old and she didn’t
A mother was sitting on a stool in the shade outside the motorhome breastfeeding a baby. A brown dog drank lazily out of a plastic water bowl by her feet. Amused, Sofia noted several similar vehicles and drivers in the lot. Always mothers with varying assortments of children and pets that needed to be walked, but never any fathers.
She locked her car and walked into the outlet store. The hunting and fishing supply store on highway E4 was a popular stop for many tourists, and in the summer months the crowds could easily become annoying, usually in the clothing department where visiting urbanites scrambled through half-price down jackets and warm hiking boots that would never see hide nor hair of an actual mountain. Sofia was usually the only representative of her sex in the fishing gear department.
Bengt walked over and gave her a hug. She didn’t actually feel like they knew each other well enough to hug. They had fished together on the same competitive pike fishing team for the last three years. That was all. In her eyes they were more like acquaintances than friends, but she knew that she didn’t have the same social interaction criteria as normal people.
“Are you excited about this weekend? Norway, can you believe it? It’s been years since I’ve fished there. Remember though, the bus is leaving at nine a.m. sharp on Saturday,” Bengt warned her over his shoulder. “That means no Midsummer’s Eve partying! Or is the detective perhaps working this weekend?”
He nodded toward a glass counter in the back of the store to indicate that she should follow him over there.
“No, actually this detective is taking Midsummer off,” Sofia said. This would be the first Midsummer holiday that she wouldn’t be working since she had started with the Örnsköldsvik Police Station’s investigative unit.
Bengt ducked down behind the counter, rummaged through a bunch of cardboard boxes that hadn’t been unpacked yet, pulled something out of a wad of bubble wrap, and then reverently held up a gold-colored fishing reel.
“Here she is, a Shimano Calcutta Conquest 400, in the flesh.” Bengt bowed slightly and presented the reel to her. “You are right-handed, right?”
Sofia nodded and accepted it. She tried disengaging the clutch and casting, enjoying for a second the nearly silent Japanese precision.
“Nice, huh?”
This reel was going to cost her a small fortune, but it would be worth it. Her team had won the prize at last year’s Pike Challenge, but she had lost two of her best Wolfcreek trolling spoons and her last Shimano reel in the process.
“It’ll hold 110 meters of 0.35 mm line. That ought to do the trick for you. Do you need any lures or bait to go with that? A rubber, maybe?” He grinned at his own joke. Sofia couldn’t resist the expectant look on his face.
“You do know that real men use jerkbait, right?”
Bengt chuckled as he took the reel back from her and packed it back up again.
“Two more days,” he beamed. “And then away we go!”
2.
“Fredrik?” said Torsten Bredh, snapping his fingers and cocking his head to the side, trying to catch Fredrik’s eye.
The sun was shining outside the psychiatrist’s window and Fredrik was contemplating the grimy streaks on the unwashed windowpanes. He was lost in his own thoughts, hearing the sounds of the ropes rubbing against the rubber life raft, feeling Niklas’s cold hand clinging convulsively to his as the waves crashed in.
At first they had laughed, weeping with joy at how absurd it was that they had both managed to get out and down into the same raft. But the longer it took before the rescuers arrived, the quieter they had grown. Fredrik had comforted his little brother, trying to convince him that everything would be all right despite the thoughts that were tearing him up inside, thoughts about all the people who were still on the ferry, in the water, on the bottom, thoughts about their mother and father. In the end they had just clung to each other, holding on tight, and whispering soothing words that didn’t mean anything. Two people had died right next to them, but none of them had said anything about it. They had all just sat there as if turned to stone. Right up until that last wave came…
Fredrik looked up, gazing around at Torsten’s third-floor office on Sveavägen in the heart of Stockholm with its hippie furnishings. This place was like his second home. The public healthcare sector had given up hope on him a long time ago. The only alternative Fredrik had had left was private healthcare or in his case private mental healthcare. Torsten had opened his practice, focused on grief counseling and post-traumatic stress, right when Fredrik’s doctor had shrugged and started discussing long-term disability or early retirement. His medical records had been sent over to Torsten and that’s where he had remained.
By this point most of Torsten’s other patients had moved on, starting new lives, allowing their wounds to heal. But not him.
“Fredrik?”
“Yes?” He directed his gaze toward the psychiatrist’s green plaid shirt pocket.
“I asked you what you were thinking about.”
“Niklas.”
Torsten did his best to hide his disappointment, but his raised eyebrows revealed that that wasn’t the answer he had wanted to hear.
“I saw him again yesterday,” Fredrik said.
Torsten lowered his gaze, the air audibly escaping his nostrils in a prolonged exhalation.
“Ah, I see. So where did he turn up this time?”
Fredrik shrugged, fully aware that Torsten’s questions did not stem from any sort of genuine interest.
“Does it matter?”
Torsten responded with a shoulder shrug of his own. This was a well-rehearsed dance between the two of them.
“It’ll be twenty-five years this year, right?” Torsten asked.
The question was rhetorical, but Fredrik nodded anyway.
“Have the newspapers contacted you?”
Yet another nod.
Torsten leaned back in his chair.
“So tell me,” Torsten continued, “where did you see him?”
This was how their dance ended, an ending that was hardly in line with any of the many treatment programs and methods Torsten had tried on Fredrik in the hopes that he would move on. Instead, he would let him talk over and over again about the grief, anxiety, and suffocating guilt he lived with. The guilt he felt for having let go of his brother’s hand that night. How he had let him slip away into the black water, only seconds before the rescuers had reached them.
“Where did you see him?” Torsten repeated.
Fredrik closed his eyes and rested his head in his hands.
He had been walking down Karlavägen and had been in a good mood. Two of his colleagues in the passport office in Sollentuna had asked if he wanted to grab a beer with them after work to celebrate the start of the summer holidays. They had ended up sitting outside near Stureplan and one beer had become several beers. They had discussed work and their summer plans. Fredrik had lied and said that he was going sailing with some friends. It had felt good, almost like having a real life. On his way home he had stopped in at Pressbyrån, the convenience store, to buy a soda. He had been drunk. The combination of four anxiety pills with several beers had affected him quickly. He had had a hard time focusing his eyes to enter his pin number when he bought his soda, and he staggered as he squeezed past the line on his way out of the store.
That was when it had happened.
A man in a black cap and a light hoodie passed him moving at high speed just as he came out of the store, so close that Fredrik had to slow down to avoid bumping into him. He watched the man as he walked over to the crosswalk and then crossed the street with his head down, as if he were looking at his shoes or wanted to hide his face. But one glimpse of his profile was enough for Fredrik.
It was Niklas. He knew it.
Before he had had a chance to react, the light had turned red and the cars had started moving again on the four-lane road. He had shouted. Over and over again he had shouted to Niklas, but the man hadn’t reacted. Without thinking, Fredrik had darted out into traffic, running until his heart threatened to explode in his chest. He had darted in and out between people out on evening walks, trying to keep his eyes on that black cap, which was quickly making its way through the crowd. He had last spotted Niklas heading for the door of the Ceder City East hotel by the corner of Humlegården Park, shaking hands with a redheaded man standing out front and then entering the hotel. Fredrik had stood there, as if stunned, suddenly unsure if he had seen correctly.
