Free The Andalucian Friend by Alexander Söderberg Page B

didn’t really want to go home but realized the party would carry on long into the following day.
    Hector followed her out to her taxi and opened the door for her.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    “Thank you ,” he said.
    She leaned forward and let him kiss her. His lips were softer than she had imagined. There was something very careful about him. He slid out of the kiss.
    She couldn’t sleep when she got home, so sat on the veranda instead, listening to the birds singing to her, breathing in the magical smells of the early morning and absorbing all the beauty before her. The fresh, dark, early-morning green of the lawn, the dense foliage of the trees, the interconnectedness of the whole. She knew she was high, but didn’t feel at all guilty.
    She asked herself why she had so suddenly dropped her guard, and why she had willfully crossed so many boundaries in her life recently with such an intense inward smile.

     
    Lars was leaning against the wall watching Erik, who was sitting with his feet up on an open desk drawer, poking his ear with a pen. Eva Castroneves was making tiny half-inch turns on her office chair and Gunilla was reading a document with her glasses perched on her nose. She put down the sheet she had been reading, took off her reading glasses, and let them dangle on the cord around her neck.
    “OK, Lars, you start.”
    Lars shuffled on the spot as if he were trying to find a hole to crawl into, always this anxiety whenever he was asked to speak in front of other people. He searched inside himself for the part of his personality that could help rescue him from this. Maybe the slightly angry one, maybe the slightly vacant one, or perhaps a mix of the two. He found something, plugged it in, and started to explain to his colleagues in a more or less clear voice about how Sophie Brinkmann had met Hector Guzman at the NK department store and how last night she had gone to a party at a restaurant in Vasastan.
    “But I’ve written all that in my reports.”
    Gunilla took over.
    “Sophie and Hector have some sort of relationship, we know that now. What sort of relationship it is will doubtless become clear in the future. The party, Lars, tell us about that.”
    He cleared his throat quietly, clasped his hands, let them go; his arms were hanging awkwardly, his legs couldn’t find a relaxed posture.
    “I didn’t see or notice anything unusual except that two men took up position outside the restaurant after an elderly man arrived there late in the evening, probably Hector’s father. Sophie got in a taxi at 3:28, which in all likelihood drove her home from the city.”
    “Thank you,” Gunilla said, and nodded toward Eva.
    “I took photographs of the other guests as they left the venue,” Lars added. “The pictures are a bit grainy, but maybe you’d like to take a look, Eva?”
    Lars noticed that his voice was sounding higher than normal, and didn’t like it.
    “Good … let Eva have the pictures,” Gunilla said.
    He scratched his neck.
    Eva went back to her papers, looking through them, then leafing a bit further.
    “Sophie Brinkmann, born Lantz, seems like someone who lives a good life, probably on the inheritance from her husband, socializes sporadically with her friends and occasionally her mother. There aren’t really any question marks in her past. Normal school career, marks slightly above average, she spent a year in the US as an exchange student, traveled in Asia for a few months with a friend after graduating from high school, then had a number of jobs before studying nursing at Sophiahemmet University College. She met David Brinkmann and gave birth to Albert two years later, they got married, moved into a villa in Stocksund from an apartment in Stockholm. When David died in 2003 she sold the villa and bought something smaller for her and her son in the same area. …”
    Eva stopped, leafed a bit further through her notes, then continued: “She’s close to her son, Albert, she doesn’t