Camilla Lackberg Crime Thrillers 1 and 2: The Ice Princess, The Preacher

They sat down on a white leather sofa, and thank goodness she didn’t offer him coffee. He’d had plenty of that today. She set the child on her lap, but he squirmed out of her grasp. So she put him on the floor, where he toddled about on his still unsteady legs.

Patrik was struck by how young the woman was. She couldn’t be out of her teens, he guessed about eighteen. But he knew that it wasn’t unusual for girls in small towns to have one or two children before the age of twenty. Since she called the boy Max, he concluded that the father didn’t live with them. That wasn’t unusual either. Teenage relationships often couldn’t survive the stress of a baby.

He pulled out his notebook.

‘So it was Friday the week before last, the twenty-second, that you saw Anders Nilsson come home at seven o’clock? How is it that you’re so sure of the time?’

‘I never miss Separate Worlds on TV. It starts at seven and it was just before that when I heard a lot of commotion outside. Nothing unusual, I must say. It’s always rather lively over at Anders’s place. His drinking buddies come and go at all hours, and sometimes the police show up as well. But I still went to check through the peephole in the door, and that’s when I saw him. Drunk as a lord, he was trying to unlock his door, but the keyhole would have had to be a metre wide for him to find it. He finally got the door open and went inside, and that’s when I heard the theme song for Separate Worlds and hurried back to the TV.’

She was chewing nervously on a lock of her long hair. Patrik saw that her nails were bitten down to the quick. There were traces of hot pink nail polish on what was left of her nails.

Max had steadily worked his way round the coffee table in the direction of Patrik and now took triumphant possession of his trouser leg.

‘Up, up, up,’ he chanted, and Patrik gave Jenny a questioning look.

‘Sure, pick him up. He obviously likes you.’

Patrik awkwardly lifted the boy onto his knee and gave him his bunch of keys to play with. The child beamed like the sun. He gave Patrik a big smile and showed two front teeth that looked like little grains of rice. Patrik gave him a big smile back. He felt a quavering in his chest. If things had turned out differently he could have had a boy of his own on his knee by this time. He cautiously stroked Max’s downy head.