Hidden in Snow (The ?re Murders, #1)(10)

The air is filled with featherlight snowflakes.

“It’s so fucking wrong,” Amanda says after a deep drag.

“How the fuck can they do this to someone our age?”

Ebba glances at her friend. This isn’t the first time they’ve talked about it. Amanda has said that she’s thinking of exposing the whole story. Telling it like it is so that everyone will know the truth.

Her eyes are burning beneath her red hat, the one that matches the scarves they bought together.

Ebba has never seen Amanda so stressed, which worries her. She realizes it’s not right to keep quiet, but she can’t help being afraid of the consequences.

What will happen if everything comes out?

“Don’t you think you ought to speak to your mother?”

she suggests.

“She’d be furious. I know exactly what she’d say.”

Amanda throws down the cigarette butt and stamps on it. Hard, so that only brown fragments remain on the snow.

“What about your dad?” Ebba ventures.

Amanda snorts. “You know exactly what he’s like. If there’s the slightest risk that it might affect his political career, he’ll do whatever it takes to keep it quiet.”

When Amanda gets wound up, it’s hard to reason with her. She has a much more fiery temperament than Ebba; she’s always the one who reacts to injustices or contradicts the teachers. Amanda doesn’t care what people think. She does things that Ebba would never dare to do, and she’s capable of saying just about anything.

Amanda doesn’t lie awake at night worrying, as Ebba does.

“They’re not going to get away with this,” Amanda says, making a sweeping gesture with one hand.

Ebba feels the anger emanating from her friend.

“We need to go in,” she says. “We’ve got math in three minutes.”

She jerks her head toward the entrance of the pale-yellow school building. The sign above the door says J?MTLANDS GYMNASIUM! (J?mtland High School!) Ebba has always wondered about that exclamation mark.

She gets to her feet with a hard knot in her stomach.

She is concerned about her parents’ reaction if they find out what she and Amanda have been up to.

She wishes she’d never gotten involved; she should have said no right from the start.

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

Amanda doesn’t answer.

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10

The water is at exactly the right temperature as Daniel cautiously lowers Alice into the bath.

She wriggles a little as she always does at first, before she contentedly relaxes, with his left hand supporting her back.

He is on his knees on the white floor, with the pink baby bath placed in the middle of the shower. This is their precious time. He always tries to get home early enough to bathe his daughter.

One of the big advantages of his placement up here is the regular hours. There are few major criminal investigations. He occasionally longs for a faster pace, but he doesn’t miss his old job with the narcotics squad in Gothenburg, the dispiriting attempts to deal with far too many parallel cases. The feeling that every crime they solve is immediately followed by two more. The endless gang wars and shootings.

He is from Norrland after all; he grew up in Sundsvall.

The atmosphere in ?re is a welcome reminder of his origins.

He was lured down south by the big-city vibe of Gothenburg, but he soon realized there was a downside.

He soaps Alice, who gurgles happily. Her soft, fair hair feels like silk against his palm as he rinses her little head.

He finishes up by cleaning her navel with the tip of his index finger.

He wishes his mother, Francesca, had gotten the chance to meet Alice. Ten years have passed since the car accident, and he has learned to live with the loss. Before Alice was born, days or even weeks could pass without him thinking about his mother.

Now she is in his thoughts almost every day.

He was only twenty-six when she died. She was still living in Sundsvall, and an ordinary walk to buy some milk became the last thing she ever did. The driver fled from the scene. The case is still unsolved, a wound that won’t heal.

Daniel had already moved to Gothenburg and traveled home in a daze to organize the funeral.

He didn’t bother informing his father. Why should he care that Francesca was dead, since he’d shown virtually no interest in her while she was alive? He’d persuaded her to move to Sweden from Italy, then left after only a few years, when Daniel was little. Francesca was too ashamed to return to Italy as an unmarried mother, so she stayed in Sweden.

Daniel has no relationship with the Italian side of his family, and contact with his Swedish father is minimal. He’s married to someone else now and lives in Ume?. He had two more children, a girl and a boy. Daniel has met them only a couple of times during rare visits that gradually petered out altogether when he was about ten years old.

The sense of being let down is still with him, a deep, infected wound. He has always sworn that he will be a different kind of father.

He will never abandon Alice, whatever happens.

Nor will she ever need to be afraid of him, as his own mother was afraid of her father, the bad-tempered grandfather Daniel has never met.

He grew up with stories of his grandfather’s outbursts of rage. Francesca used to tell him about how her father would explode, and the rest of the family would have to take cover until he calmed down. Her tone was lighthearted, but it must have been a considerable strain. Growing up with a man who ruled the roost with his temper can’t have been much fun.