Free Room No. 10 by Åke Edwardson Page A

the window and looked out. These thoughts. What a job. Occupying your intellect with thoughts about painted dead hands. Dead people. He could have been a nuclear physicist, a disc jockey, a hockey coach. Could have watched the sun go down over the city without wondering what kind of shit it would bring up the next morning.
    Now it was on its way down again, farther and farther down, and gone. At the end of October next year he would take Aneta and the kids to Cyprus; they had already planned on it. It was still warm there in October, and a bit into November, too; he knew this because he had done winter battalion exercises down there in the eighties. An MP with a severe crew cut who still had his hair. Now he had a severelybald head. That was better; he wouldn’t scratch someone if he head-butted him. But he didn’t head-butt anyone, not even the car-borne drunk murderer. Cyprus. He would show them Cyprus for the first time. He hadn’t been back, himself. But it was still there. He didn’t think Larnaca had changed too damn much. He knew that Fig Tree Bay had. There had been nothing there then, only a bay they went to in an old piece-of-shit bus, a shed that sold drinks. Aiya Napa, not much then. A tired fishing village, hungover UN soldiers, Nissi Beach. A few dips in the salt water, a siesta in the shade of the palm grove near the entrance, two beers at the Pelican Bar and you were ready for everything again.
    October. This one, or the next. Would they have caught Paula Ney’s murderer by then? He looked out through the window; it was the same view that Paula had seen for the past few years. In October, the trees on that hill would be as good as bare. There wouldn’t be much color left in this city. And that would just be the beginning of winter hell. It would be time to leave it. To travel. Traveling. This case was about traveling, in a way they didn’t yet understand. He turned around. It wasn’t just the suitcase.
    Halders’s cell phone rang. The sound was muffled in the half-finished apartment. He thought of it as half.
    “What are you doing?” said Djanali.
    “Thinking about Cyprus, actually.”
    “During working hours?”
    “Don’t tell anyone.”
    “Maybe she was on her way to the sunshine,” said Djanali.
    “Or anywhere.”
    “Are you still in the apartment?”
    “Yes.”
    “Found anything?”
    “No. Nothing personal.”
    “We don’t know much about Paula Ney’s personal life,” said Djanali.
    “Surprisingly little.”
    “She doesn’t seem to have had any friends at work. Not that I met, anyway.”
    “Not so easy with headphones over your ears day after day,” said Halders.
    “She was working on other things, at least just now.”
    “What, exactly?”
    “Well . . .”
    “Thanks. Can’t be more precise than that.”
    “It was services. Upgrading services for the customers.”
    “Oh, shit. I thought it was all about degrading customers,” Halders said, turning in toward the room, the living room. The parlor. “Ex-customers.”
    “That’s a bit retrograde of you,” said Djanali.
    “Yes, I can understand that.”
    “But anyway, she didn’t have headphones over her ears.”
    “We’ll have to have a good talk with her service-upgrading friends,” said Halders. “Anything else new?”
    “Winter is in the process of emptying all the lockers at Central Station.”
    “My thanks.” Halders took a few steps into the room. He wasn’t completely passé yet; they still listened to him. He saw the branches moving grandly outside the window. The crown of the tree was very green.
    “There are almost four hundred of them, you know,” said Djanali.
    “Then they need help.”
    •   •   •
    Paula Ney had owned a black Samsonite and that’s what they could look for. They had gotten its approximate measurements from Paula’s parents. It wasn’t one of the largest models. It was one of the older ones.
    Bengtsson was opening lockers with the help of two part-time