In the Darkness Read Online Free Page B

reception desk. She put down her book immediately. In any case, she’d reached a promising love scene and wanted to save it for when she was under the bedclothes. They exchanged a few words, then he nodded briefly and headed for Rosenkrantzgate and Egil Einarsson’s widow.

Chapter 4
    HE GLANCED QUICKLY in the mirror and ran his fingers through his hair. Because it was short he didn’t alter its appearance at all. It was more an act of ritual than vanity.
    Sejer took every opportunity to get out of the office. He drove rather slowly through the town centre; he always drove slowly, his car was old and sluggish, a large blue Peugeot 604 which he’d never had any reason to change. In snowy conditions it was like driving a sledge. Soon he was passing colourful houses, each home to four families. They were on his right, pink, yellow and green; the sun was shining on them now making them glow invitingly. They’d been built in the fifties and possessed a certain patina that newer houses didn’t have. The trees were well grown, the gardens fertile, or at least they would be when the spring arrived. But it was still cold, spring was late in coming. They’d had dry weather for a long time, and blobs of dirty snow lay like rubbish in the gutters. His eyes searched for number 16 and recognised the well-maintained green house the moment he saw it. The entrance was a chaos of trikes, lorries and plastic toys of all kinds, which the children had indiscriminately brought out from cellars and attics. Bare asphalt was always tempting after a long winter. He parked and rang the bell.
    After a few moments she came to the door, with a thin little boy hanging on to her skirts.
    ‘Mrs Einarsson,’ he said, bowing slightly, ‘may I come in?’ Jorun Einarsson nodded vaguely and a touch unwillingly, but she hadn’t many people to talk to. He was standing quite close to her, and she caught the smell of him, a mixture of jacket leather and a discreet aftershave lotion.
    ‘I don’t know any more than I did last autumn,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Well, apart from the fact he’s dead. But I was expecting that, of course. I mean, the way the car looked …’ She put an arm around the boy as if to protect them both.
    ‘But now we’ve found him, Mrs Einarsson. So things are a bit different, aren’t they?’ He kept quiet and waited.
    ‘It must have been some nutcase who wanted money.’ She shook her head distractedly. ‘Well, his wallet had gone. You saw that his wallet had gone. Even though he had only a hundred kroner. But people kill just for loose change nowadays.’
    ‘I promise this won’t take long.’
    She gave in and retreated down the corridor. Sejer stood in the doorway to the living room and looked about. He always felt a certain dismay when it struck him just how similar people were; he saw it in their living rooms, how they filled them. They were the same everywhere, arranged in the same symmetry, with the television and video as a kind of focal point for the rest of the furniture. This was where the family huddled together to get warm. Mrs Einarsson had a pink leather suite and a shaggy white carpet under the coffee table. It was a feminine room. She’d lived alone for six months, maybe she’d spent the time expunging any masculine influence, if there’d been any to begin with. Then, as now, he could see no trace of loss or love for the man they’d found in the black river water, grey and perforated like an old sponge. What anguish there had been was directed towards other things, practical things. What was she going to live on and how could she get out and find another man when she hadn’t got the money for a babysitter? Such thoughts depressed him. They caused him to examine the wedding photo above the sofa, a somewhat lavish portrait of the young Jorun with bleached hair. Standing next to her was Egil Einarsson, slender and smooth-cheeked like a confirmation candidate and sporting a thin moustache. They posed to