'As long as you don't give us all this winter vomiting bug,' Thomas said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

It couldn't have been him. It must have been someone else.

'How was work today?' she said, putting the saucepan on a trivet from Designtorget.

He sighed, holding the morning paper out in front of him, preventing her from seeing his eyes.

'Cramne at Justice is difficult to deal with. A load of talk and not much action. The girl from the Federation of County Councils and I are having to do most of the work, and he gets the credit.'

Annika stood still, the pan of rice in her hand, and stared at the headline on the front page of the paper, something to do with a leak about the culture proposal that was due next week.

'The Federation of County Councils,' she said. 'What was her name again?'

Thomas inadvertently let one corner of the paper fold back, she met his eyes for an instant before he shook the paper to make it stand up again.

'Sophia,' he said. 'Sophia Grenborg.'

Annika stared at the picture of the Minister of Culture ill.u.s.trating the article.

'What's she like?'

Thomas carried on reading, hesitating a few moments before replying. 'Ambitious,' he said, 'pretty good. Often tries to lobby for the Federation at our expense. She can be b.l.o.o.d.y annoying.'

He folded the paper, got up and tossed it onto the window sill.

'Right,' he said. 'I'll get the kids. I don't want to miss tennis this week.'

And he came back into the kitchen with a squealing child under each arm, put them on their chairs, felt the loose tooth and admired the new boots, flicked the pigtails and listened to tales of sweet machines and promises to visit Peter No-Tail in Uppsala.

I'm imagining things, she thought. I must have seen wrong I must have seen wrong.

She tried to laugh, but couldn't thaw out the sharp stone in her chest.

It wasn't him. It was someone else. We're his family and he loves us. He'd never let the children down.

They ate quickly, didn't want to miss the cartoons.

'That was great, thanks,' Thomas said, giving her a peck on the cheek.

They cleared up together, their hands occasionally touching, their eyes meeting for brief moments.

He would never leave me.

She poured detergent into the dishwasher and switched it on. He took her face in his hands, studying her face with a frown.

'It's good you're going to have another day at home,' he said. 'You look really pale.'

She looked down, pushed his hands away.

'I feel a bit washed out,' she said, and walked out of the kitchen.

'Don't wait up,' he said to the back of her head. 'I promised Arnold I'd go for a beer afterwards.'

She turned to ice in the doorway, the razor-sharp stone rotating in her chest. She stood still, feeling her heart thud.

'Okay,' she said, regaining control of her muscles again, moving one foot in front of the other, out into the hall, into the bedroom, onto the bed. She heard him take his sports bag and tennis racket out of the hall cupboard, he called goodbye to her and the children, she heard their distracted reply and her own silence.

Had he noticed anything odd about her? Had he reacted in a particular way?

She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

To be honest, she had been a bit strange this past year. He wasn't just reacting to this evening.

She got up, walked round the bed to use the phone on her little table.

'Thomas said you were ill,' Arnold said, the only one of Thomas's old friends who had ever really accepted her. 'Are you feeling any better?'

Annika swallowed and muttered.

'Well, I can quite see why he can't play tonight when you're this bad, but this is the second week in a row.'

Annika fell. The floor beneath her became a black hole and she was sailing off through s.p.a.ce.

'I'll have to find another partner if he keeps cancelling, I hope you can see that.'

'Can't you give it a bit longer?' Annika said, sinking into the bed. 'He appreciates your matches so much.'

Arnold sighed, irritated. 'Okay,' he said, 'but Thomas is a real b.l.o.o.d.y pest. He can never make a decision and stick to it. If you book a fixed time on court for the whole autumn, you can't just decide not to use it.'

Annika put a hand over her eyes, her heart racing.

'Well, I'll tell him,' she said, and hung up.

Some time must have pa.s.sed, because suddenly the children were with her in bed, one on each side of her, they were singing something she vaguely recognized and she hummed along, and in the background the angels sang a harmony.

These are my children, she thought. He'll never take my children away from me He'll never take my children away from me.

'Right,' she said, 'it's time for bed.'

And she got them into bed by reading them a story, without any awareness of what she was reading. She tucked them in and kissed them and went round turning out the lights. She huddled into the alcove by the living-room window and rested her temple against the ice-cold gla.s.s. She could feel the draught from the ill-fitting frame against her thighs, and listened to the wind as it tried to creep round the hinges. Her insides were mute and calm, weighed down by the rumbling stone.

The apartment lay in darkness behind her. The swinging streetlamp outside cast yellow shadows across the room, from the outside her windows were nothing but black holes.

She listened, trying to hear the children's breathing but could only hear her own. She held her breath trying to hear more, but her hearing was blocked by her heartbeat, the blood rushing and racing and bubbling in her head.

Unfaithful, she thought. Sven was always unfaithful Sven was always unfaithful.

She had refused to see it for all those years, and the only time she protested he had hit her in the head with a pair of pliers. Without realizing it, she fingered the small scar on her forehead, it was almost invisible now, she hardly ever thought about it.

She was used to men being unfaithful.

She could see him in front of her: her first love, her childhood friend, her fiance, the sports star. Sven Mattsson who loved her more than anything else in the world, Sven who worshipped her so much that no one else could get close to her but him, couldn't even talk to her, and she wasn't allowed to think about anyone else but him, actually, nothing else but him. Anything else would be punished, and he punished her, he punished her and punished her until the day he stood before her by the furnace in the Halleforsnas works with his hunting knife in his hand.

She turned away from the image, stood up and shook it off, shrugging it off the same way she shrugged off her nightmares, the familiar nightmares that came back after that night in the tunnel, the men from Studio Six who were discussing what to do with her, Sven with his b.l.o.o.d.y knife, her cat flying through the air with its guts hanging out.

And now Thomas was unfaithful.

Right now he was probably in bed with blonde Sophia Grenborg, maybe he was entering her right now, maybe they were licking each other or relaxing in each other's sweat.

She stared at the yellow shadows, planted her feet firmly on the wooden floor, the newly sanded floor that she had varnished three times. She folded her arms over her chest and forced herself to breathe slowly. The apartment responded to her with gentle caution.

How much was she prepared to sacrifice to hold her life together?

She had a choice. It was just a matter of making a decision.

The realization made her shoulders relax, and it was suddenly easier to breathe. She went over to her computer and logged on to the internet. In the darkness she looked up Sophia Grenborg in Stockholm in the census results, getting a load of hits.

The woman she had seen with Thomas outside NK was in her thirties, or slightly younger. Certainly not over thirty-five.

Annika narrowed the search.

As the representative of the Federation of County Councils in a research project looking into threats to politicians, she couldn't be younger than twenty-five.

She removed anyone born after 1980.

Still too many.

She logged out and went into the Federation's own website, and looked among the employees.

She spelled her name with 'ph'. So incredibly b.l.o.o.d.y a.n.a.lly retentively absurdly sodding pretentious.

Back to the other website and the name search.

Sophia Grenborg. Just the one. Twenty-nine. Lived in Upper ostermalm, born in Engelbrekt parish. Oh how terribly, terribly b.l.o.o.d.y smart.

She printed out the page through the fax machine and logged out. With the printout in her hand she rang the duty desk of the National Police Board and asked for a copy of the pa.s.sport belonging to the person with Sophia Grenborg's personal ident.i.ty number.

'Ten minutes,' the officer said tiredly.

Without making a sound she checked that the children were asleep, then crept out into the Stockholm night.

It had started to snow. Wet flakes materialized against the dirty grey sky, falling onto her face when she looked up. All sounds descended half an octave, striking her eardrums with doubt and deception.

She hurried through the snow, leaving damp tracks behind her on the pavement.

The entrance to the Stockholm Police Headquarters was on Bergsgatan, two hundred metres from her door. She stopped at the big electric gates, pressed the pedestrian intercom and was let into the oblong cage that led to the door itself.

The copy hadn't arrived yet, so she was told to take a seat for a few minutes.

She sat down on one of the chairs along the wall, swallowed and refused to feel bad.

All pa.s.sport photos in Sweden were still public doc.u.ments and could be requested at any time. There had been discussions about restricting access, but so far no decision had been taken.

I don't need to explain myself, she thought. I don't need an excuse I don't need an excuse.

When she was given the envelope she couldn't wait to see if she was right, and turned away from the reception desk and pulled out the Polaroid picture.

It was her. No doubt at all.

Sophia Grenborg.

Her husband was walking around Stockholm kissing Sophia Grenborg.

She put the photograph back in the envelope and went back to her children.

35.

Margit Axelsson had believed in the innate power of human beings all her life. She was convinced that every individual had the power to influence events; it was just a matter of will-power and engagement. As a young woman she had believed in global revolution, that the ma.s.ses would be freed and cast off the yoke of imperialism as the world rang out with hymns of praise.

She stretched her back and looked out over the room.

Today she knew that you could act on a large scale, or on a small scale. She knew that she was making a contribution, day by day, in her work with the children at the nursery, the collective future, everyone's responsibility, but also in her work here, in the ceramics room of Pitholm's People's Hall.

The Workers' Educational a.s.sociation had always believed that those who had received the fewest of society's resources should be compensated through education, cultural activities and opportunities. She regarded it as justice applied in the educational and cultural sphere.

Study groups were a lesson in democracy. They took as their starting point the belief that every individual has the capacity and desire to develop themselves, to exert influence and take responsibility, that every individual is a resource.

And she saw how the members grew, young and old alike. When they learned to handle the clay and the glazes their self-confidence grew, their understanding of the opinions of others, and, with that, their ability to actively influence what went on in the society around them.

She had to remind herself of this as she stood beside her sculpture.

She had had to live with the mistakes of her youth all her life. Not one day had pa.s.sed without her peace of mind being disrupted by the thought of the consequences of her actions. For long periods the impact was small, superficial, life and work functioned as a plaster on her guilt. But other days she could hardly get out of bed, paralysed with rage at her own inadequacy.

Those days had got fewer over the years. Nonetheless, she knew they took their toll, had always known that the guilt she carried would kill her. She wasn't just thinking about how overweight she was, how the comfort eating helped her through the bad patches, but about the gnawing away of her own psyche, her inability to fend off anxiety. She was often ill, had an unusually poor immune system.

And now he was back.

All those years she had had nightmares about him, turning round quickly in dark alleyways and imagining him behind her, and now he was really here.

Her reaction hadn't been as violent as she had imagined.

She didn't scream, didn't faint, just noticed her heartbeat quicken, and felt slightly dizzy. She sank onto a chair in the hall with the yellow dragon in her hand, his unpleasant, childish signal that they should meet up at their old meeting place.