Free The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin

something, but the woman was just staring straight ahead with a sullen expression.
    Joakim had a couple of things to do in the capital. The first was to call in at a small gallery in Östermalm to pick up a landscape painting, an inheritance he didn’t really want to be responsible for.
    The owner wasn’t in, but his elderly mother was there and recognized Joakim. When he had given her his receipt, she went off to unlock a security door and bring out the Rambe painting. It was in a flat wooden box, fastened with screws.
    “We looked at it yesterday before we packed it,” said the woman. “Incomparable.”
    “Yes, we’ve missed it,” said Joakim, although that wasn’t strictly true.
    “Are there any of the others left on Öland?”
    “I don’t know. The royal family has one, I think, but it’s hardly likely to be hanging in some drawing room at Solliden.”
    With the painting safe in the trunk Joakim drove west toward Bromma. It was half past two and the rush-hour traffic hadn’t yet begun to snarl up. It took him just about quarter of an hour to get out of the city and turn off toward the area where the Apple House lay.
    The sight of his old home awoke a greater sense of nostalgia within him than Stockholm had done. The house was only a few hundred yards from the water, in a big garden surrounded by a fence and thick lilac hedges. There were five other big houses on the same street, but only one of them was visible through the trees.
    The Apple House was a tall, airy wooden house that had been built for the director of a bank at the beginning of the twentieth century. But before Joakim and Katrine bought the house, it had been lived in for many years by a collective of New Age individuals, young relatives of the owner who had allowed people to rent rooms and had clearly been more interested in meditating than in painting or general maintenance.
    No one in the collective had shown any kind of staying power or respect for the house, and the neighbors in the houses around them had fought for many years to get rid of them. When Joakim and Katrine finally took it on, the house was dilapidated and the garden almost completely overgrown—but both of them had tackled the renovation of the Apple House with the same energy as they had devoted to their first shared apartment, on Rörstrandsgatan, where a crazy eighty-two-year-old had lived with her seven cats.
    Joakim had been working as a craft teacher and had devoted himself to the house in the evenings and on weekends; Katrine had still been working part-time as an art teacher, and had spent the rest of the time on the house.
    They had celebrated Livia’s second birthday along with Ethel and Ingrid in a chaotic mess of ripped-up floorboards, tins of paint, rolls of wallpaper, and various power tools—with only cold water because the hot water system had broken down that same weekend.
    By the time Livia turned three, however, they had been able to have a proper old-fashioned children’s party on newly stripped wooden floors, with walls that had been smoothed down and papered, and staircases and banisters that had been repaired and oiled. And when Gabriel celebrated his first birthday, the house had been more or less finished.
    These days the place looked like a turn-of-the-century house again, and could be handed over in good order, apart from the leaves in the garden and the lawn that needed mowing. It was waiting for its new owners, the Stenbergs, a couple in their thirties with no children, who both worked in the city center but wanted to live on the outskirts.
    Joakim pulled up by the gravel driveway and reversed so that the trailer ended up by the garage. Then he got out and took a look around.
    Everything was quiet. The only neighbors whose house was in sight were the Hesslins, Lisa and Michael, and they had become good friends with Katrine and Joakim—but there were no cars in their driveway this afternoon. They had repainted their house last summer, this time