1.

I’M SURE YOU already know the story of Dr Carl Dance. Probably you saw the news headlines back when it all came out: ‘The Greatest Love Story of All Time’, ‘A Story of True Romance’, ‘The Nation’s Greatest Lover’. It was in all the papers, and I don’t mean only the Swedish ones, I mean everywhere: London, New York, Berlin. Everyone loves a good romance. Sometimes Lina’s picture was there too, right on the front page, and underneath would be printed ‘The Doctor’s Lover’ or something like that. But you can’t always believe what you read in the papers. I suspected from the start that something wasn’t quite right about Dance. That suit. That accent. The little beard. It was more than those things, though, it was something harder to put my finger on. And while I knew the whole time that he was a chancer—or I suspected it, at least—I was still the one pushing for Lina to see him. That’s something I have to live with forever.

The thing you need to know about Lina is that she was beautiful. Not just pretty, I mean there was something almost magical about the way she looked and the effect she had on people. Lina had the usual Fredelius family face: straight eyebrows over dark eyes, brown hair. That sounds like nothing special but somehow, on her, those plain features were transformed. My eyes, like hers, were brown, but hers were clearer and larger, and the irises were illuminated with flecks of gold. Her hair was soft and silky, and lay smooth as water in every style she put it in: unlike the wiry strands that covered my head, which would never lie flat, even if I used an iron. Next to Lina I always felt a bit undone, a bit drab. There was something seamless and elegant about her, about the way she moved. An effortlessness. Me, even though I looked alright—just alright—from the outside, on the inside it sometimes felt like I was being held together with scraps of sticking plaster and safety pins. Especially when I was standing beside Lina.

From the time when she was in her pram, or toddling beside Mama down the footpaths of Södermalm, people noticed Lina. Women would smile at her in the street.

‘What a perfect doll! Isn’t she just the spitting image of Baby Mary in Sunshine and Gold!’

Later, men noticed too. Any time we went anywhere together I’d see their eyes snapping over to Lina as if propelled by magnets. Meanwhile, I was invisible to them. It was as if I wasn’t even there. I’d watch them gawp at Lina, with stunned faces and goggling eyes, sometimes even with their mouths hanging open a little, tongues lolling. Lina didn’t care. Usually she didn’t even notice, and if she did she’d roll her eyes. Sometimes she’d pull an ugly face at the man, and laugh at his bewildered reaction. It made all the attention she got a bit easier to bear.

Lina’s the big sister. Everyone was always surprised about that. People would take me to be the older one. She was smaller than me, for one thing, slender and frail, with tiny bones like a bird’s. Even before she got ill she was that way. Just after her twentieth birthday was when the illness first appeared. At the start it seemed like nothing much, she was more tired than usual and her heart would race when she climbed the stairs. But after a few weeks her face paled and she lost weight. When she finished her shift at the factory she often went straight to bed. Not that she ever complained. Lina never complained about anything, which might sound like an admirable trait, but in reality was mostly frustrating. If you don’t worry about yourself, it just means someone else has to do that job for you. I had to almost drag her bodily to the doctor. We had no money, so we went to the public hospital, Serafen.

Serafen is right in the middle of town, across the street from the City Hall. Two hundred years before, the place had been the grand residence of some wealthy industrialist. It was a long building of red brick, with a row of mullioned windows running along the front. As you came around the curving drive, the two wings of the building unfurled themselves in front of you in a perfectly choreographed sweep. But when you got closer you could tell that the place had seen better days. There were tiles missing from the roof, and the far wing of the building seemed to be sinking into the ground. The brickwork had long, dark cracks running up and down it, and the awnings over the windows were sagging and broken.

The waiting room was a draughty hall that echoed with fits of coughing and the cries of small children. It must once have been an impressive room, with tall windows that looked out over a small park, but now it was dingy with neglect. You could hardly see through the window glass for the layer of soot and grime that coated it, and the floor was covered in muddy footprints and littered with dead leaves and scraps of newspaper. No matter what time of day you went there, the place was packed with patients, mostly workers from Södermalm, all jostling and complaining, and the air was heavy with the smell of coal briquettes and sweat and damp, dirty wool.

The first doctor we saw there was this old man, Dr Blix: an ancient bloated ogre with a bare and warty scalp. I only remember that detail because the whole time Lina was explaining what was wrong with her, he didn’t once look at her. Instead he sat with his chin sunk on his chest, the shiny dome of his skull pointed right at us, while he had a brief snooze. When he woke up, he told Lina her problem was that she hadn’t had any children yet. If I hadn’t been there he wouldn’t have done any tests even. I had to practically fight him to order the X-rays and blood tests. When we went back for the results, I was clenching my fists, ready for another round with old Blix. But when the door of the consultation room opened, it was a different doctor.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said, shaking hands with each of us. ‘I’m Dr Dance.’

You couldn’t think of a greater contrast between Dr Dance and his decrepit predecessor. Dr Dance was thin and clean and neat, old too, but wearing an elegant suit and gold wire spectacles. He had a white triangular beard, and bright eyes that darted sharply from Lina to me and back. But the main thing I noticed was his foreign accent. American. The only other time I’d ever heard an American accent was on records. Ethel Waters, Hoagy Carmichael. I remember wondering what a man like that—a real-life American, a fancy-looking doctor—was doing working at a place like Serafen.

He went over to the lighted screen and put up Lina’s X-rays: one taken from the front, and one from the back. It was strange to see the image of her rib cage up there while she sat on the chair beside me. Like she’d been split in two. The X-ray showed up the hard white of her breastbone, and her collarbones made elegant grey arches above the paler lines of her ribs, as faint as watercolour strokes, or curls of smoke. Even her bones were beautiful.

Dr Dance was standing there with his arms folded, frowning at the X-ray.

‘Not good news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘See this here, this white patch?’ He pointed with a pen to a mottled area near Lina’s spine. ‘We call that an opacity.’

‘You mean those little blobs, like clouds?’ Lina asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘But they don’t look dangerous at all.’

‘Perhaps not, Miss Dahlstrom, but I’m afraid they may very likely be. These cloudy opacities,’ he tapped at one with his pen, ‘which might not seem like much to your eye, look to be a case of pulmonary tuberculosis.’

‘TB?’ I said. I glanced over at Lina. She was smiling absently at the X-ray screen as though it was a painting on a wall. ‘How bad is it?’ I asked.

‘Greta, don’t worry, I feel fine …’ Lina put her hand on my arm.

‘Miss Dahlstrom,’ said Dr Dance, ‘you might feel fine now, but very soon you will start to feel ill. Make no mistake, I’m afraid this looks to be a serious case. I’d like to run the tests again, for confirmation.’

‘And if it is what you say, what will the treatment involve?’ I asked.

‘Unfortunately this hospital offers no specialised treatment for tuberculosis. There are private sanatoriums available: I would recommend sixteen weeks’ stay at the outset … However, the closest of these is, I believe, in Västerbotten, which means—’

‘Sorry, Doctor,’ I said, ‘but sixteen weeks in a sanatorium … I mean, how much is that going to cost? We want to do the best we can for Lina, but …’

‘Greta, please! I really feel fine. I’m just a bit tired sometimes, is all. Everyone’s getting all worked up over nothing.’

I gave her a look. It was difficult enough to get a doctor to take you seriously. This was not the time for one of her displays of stoicism.

‘Sorry, Dr Dance,’ I said again. ‘But a sanatorium is out of reach for us. It’s not realistic.’

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Places like Västerbotten come with a hefty price tag, it’s true.’ He paused, put his elbows on his desk and steepled his fingers. He leaned forward and looked at Lina the same way he had looked at the X-ray, attentively, intensely. ‘Perhaps I can help. In addition to consulting here at Serafen, I run a private clinic in Östermalm, and there we offer a range of treatments that would be suitable for Miss Dahlstrom. I myself specialise in various radiation treatments, advanced developments in the field.’

‘But private clinics,’ I said, ‘I mean, we don’t have that much money to spare.’

‘Rest is the most important cure,’ he said. ‘Let’s focus on that for now. First of all, I want to run these tests again. For the time being: rest, fresh air and plenty of good food.’

We were both quiet on the walk home. Lina looked exactly as usual: not one bit deathly ill. If anything, she looked better than usual. She was smiling as we walked along, and with her pink cheeks and bright eyes she was the picture of health. She looked as ordinary and happy as if we were coming home from a trip to the cinema. It seemed impossible that, invisible to the eye, inside her chest, close to her heart, she was carrying the seed of an awful disease that one day might do her in.

2.

ALTHOUGH LINA LOOKED healthy, she was by no means well. She slept ten, eleven hours a night if nobody woke her, and was often out of breath. A few weeks before, Petter—that’s Lina’s husband—and I had managed to convince her to drop her shifts at the factory down to two days a week. But that meant she and Petter couldn’t afford the rent on their own rooms anymore, so they’d had to move back in with Mama and Papa and me. At that time we were living in an apartment in Hallandsgatan, where we’d moved after Lina was married. I wasn’t married then, and I’m still not. I don’t really see the point of husbands.

I loved having Lina living with us again, but I have to say, it was a bit too cosy with the five of us packed into that place, not to mention all of Lina and Petter’s boxes and suitcases in there too, stacked in every corner like the luggage room at Central Station. Our apartment was a three-room place in the back section of the building, which was shaped like a square around a small inner courtyard. It was always cold and damp in our apartment because our windows only looked out onto the courtyard, so we never got any sun.

There was my bedroom, and Mama and Papa’s, which were always freezing, and then a bigger room that had the stove and sink and a kitchen table, and, since Lina and Petter had moved in, also a kind of couch we’d made out of old crates and cushions for Lina to rest on during the day. Lina and Petter had my room, and I camped out on Lina’s couch at night. Really it wasn’t too bad unless everyone was home at the same time, in which case it felt like a crowded enclosure at the zoo.

One evening, about a week after Lina’s second appointment at Serafen, all of us were home. Papa was sitting at the table reading the paper, Petter was beside him rolling a cigarette. Mama and I were making dinner. The room felt cramped with the four of us in there. Lina was lying down in my room. Dinner was cabbage rolls—we always had those on Wednesdays—stuffed with the previous night’s leftovers. I hated cooking cabbage rolls because the apartment always got so steamed up and then you had that squalid smell of cabbage water in your hair and your clothes and you never seemed to be able to get rid of it. I was in among the clouds of steam, draining the rolls and putting the potatoes to dry, when there was a knock at the door.

Mama went to answer it and came back with a tall, thin man behind her. It took me a good few moments to recognise him. It was Dr Dance from Serafen. To say he looked out of place in our apartment is an understatement. He was so polished and elegant, so tall and neat, politely holding his hat and gloves in his hands. He stood out from the dinginess of the room as if he had a spotlight shining on him.

Mama’s fingers plucked at the patched skirt of the housecoat she always wore. ‘This gentleman says he’s here to see Lina,’ she whispered, and shuffled off to fetch her.

‘Who are you?’ asked Petter. He got up from his chair.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the doctor. He stepped towards Petter with his hand outstretched, a hand as white and clean as his gloves. ‘The name’s Dance: Dr Carl Dance. Good to meet you. And you are?’

Just then Lina appeared, wrapped in a blanket.

‘Sit down please, Dr Dance,’ said Papa. Dr Dance laid his hat and gloves on the table and took a seat. We only had five chairs, so Mama hovered nearby. ‘What can we do for you?’ Papa asked.

‘I’m here about Miss Dahlstrom.’

I saw Petter bristle at the ‘Miss’. He’d always been the jealous type.

‘Last week she and,’ he gestured to me, ‘this young lady here came to consult with me at Serafen. I ran a few tests and the results are back.’

‘And?’ I asked, but I already knew it wasn’t good. Why else would he have come?

‘I’m sorry to be bringing you bad news, but I’m afraid the results confirm the initial diagnosis. Pulmonary tuberculosis. It’s of the utmost importance that Miss Dahlstrom seek treatment right away.’

Lina laughed. ‘Ill? Not a bit! I’ve been telling you all the whole time I feel completely fine,’ she said. ‘A bit tired, maybe …’

Papa motioned for her to be quiet.

‘Are you sure, Doctor?’ Papa asked.

‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it.’

‘And what about treatment?’ I asked. ‘Like I said, we couldn’t afford a sanatorium like that one you mentioned in Västerbotten.’

‘I think I have a solution,’ Dr Dance said. He turned and addressed Papa. ‘As I explained to these two ladies, as well as consulting at Serafen I run a clinic in Östermalm where we specialise in all kinds of brand-new treatments, including radiation therapy, which is my own special area of interest. The facilities we have at the clinic are far better than the ones you’d find in—’

‘And who’s going to pay for that?’ Petter cut in. ‘Private treatment, that’s an arm and a leg. Not something for the likes of us.’

‘Yes, I understand your family’s situation, and I’d like to offer to treat Miss Dahlstrom pro bono—for free. You wouldn’t pay a cent.’

I could see Petter fuming every time Dr Dance called Lina ‘Miss’.

‘That’s a very generous offer you’re making, Doctor,’ Papa said carefully. He looked impressed; his eyebrows were pulled up so high they were almost touching his hairline. ‘What kind of treatment did you say it was?’

Mama was standing by the stove, frowning as she folded and refolded one of the grey cloths we used as dishrags. Only Lina looked unconcerned, her gaze moving from face to face as if she was watching a play.

‘There are a few options open to us,’ said Dr Dance. ‘The main one I have in mind is a new kind of radiation therapy. It’s the very latest technology from the States. Basically, it’s a great big old X-ray machine that blasts the growths that are causing the illness—blasts them and destroys them.’

‘Blasts?’ I said. ‘That sounds a bit dangerous … Does it cause any other damage?’

He nodded gently. ‘That’s a good question, miss. I know the treatment might sound aggressive, but you can rest easy that it is perfectly safe. The ray I’ll be using is routinely used in America, though you won’t find such a thing at Serafen, or indeed anywhere else in Stockholm.’

Lina let out a loud laugh. We all turned to look at her. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just all of you sitting around with your serious expressions.’ She mimicked Mama’s worried look.

‘Lina, it’s a serious situation,’ I said.

Mama was wringing the dishrag in her hands. ‘Now I don’t know about this … this, what’d’yacallit, this … ray,’ she said. ‘A ray? I never heard of such a thing.’

‘Mama, we don’t have the money for a sanatorium. We should think about it,’ I said. ‘But anyway,’ I went on, ‘it’s not up to us: Lina should be the one who decides.’ She still looked like she was a spectator on the scene. Sometimes she played too much at being the baby of the family. Even though she wasn’t. ‘Lina? Don’t you have anything to say about all this?’

She smiled. ‘Oh, you’re blowing it out of proportion. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me that a bit of a rest won’t fix. This nice doctor here has just made a mistake. I’m sorry, Doctor, I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s how it is.’

Dr Dance was nodding. ‘Miss Dahlstrom, I completely understand that you feel that way.’

Petter squirmed in his chair. His face had turned a bright shade of pink. The doctor went on, ‘But I regret to tell you that this is the illness speaking. Your calm feelings are the treacherous symptoms of the first stage of this terrible disease.’

‘Now, you listen here, mister,’ said Petter. It had been one too many ‘Miss Dahlstrom’s for him. He stood up. He put his hands flat on the table and leaned over towards Dr Dance. ‘First of all, it’s Mrs Dahlstrom. Mrs. That’s right. She’s my wife.’ He pointed his finger at his own chest. ‘And second of all, what right do you have to come bursting in here, telling us about some crazy ray and how my wife has a terrible treacherous disease!’

Petter was a very tall and large man. He practically had to stoop and turn side-on to go through doorways. He towered over Dr Dance, who sat with his head tilted back, looking up at him.

‘Mr Dahlstrom,’ the doctor said, ‘you have my apologies.’ He put his hand on his heart. ‘I’m awfully sorry I offended you. I meant no insult. I myself am something of a bachelor at heart, and I always make the mistake of assuming everybody else is too. I do apologise.’ He stood up. ‘And yes: you’re absolutely right, Mr Dahlstrom, I had no right, no right whatsoever, to intrude on you all in this manner with such grave news. Once again, I apologise. I was only hoping to save time, which can be of the essence in cases like these. But I see I have been too impatient. I’m truly sorry.’

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a calling card. ‘I know it’s a lot of information to take in at once, but I do ask that you consider my offer. Please take as much time as you need to talk it over.’ He put the card on the table. ‘But please also keep in mind that this illness can progress quickly, and swift action is of the utmost importance.’

He nodded to each of us, then picked up his hat and gloves and left.

3.

ALL THROUGH OUR dinner of cabbage rolls, now cold, Petter seethed about Dr Dance and his ‘Miss Dahlstrom’s.

‘Just because he’s some rich American, he thinks he can come barging in here like an oil baron and act like my wife’s fair game.’ He shoved his half-eaten plate of food away and leaned back in his chair.

‘Petter, that’s not the point at hand,’ I said. This was hardly the first time someone had fancied Lina. ‘We need to think about what’s best for Lina’s health.’

‘Health! As if anyone’d trust that creep! Making eyes at Lina. Forget it!’

‘He was just trying to help,’ Lina said. ‘I thought he was very polite. And so serious.’ She too was hardly eating. She’d cut up the cabbage roll and was pushing the bits from one side of her plate to the other.

‘He certainly did seem to be dedicated to his work,’ said Papa, who always found this an impressive characteristic in a man. ‘He must be a very good doctor, putting in that extra effort to come all the way out here to give us Lina’s results. Shows real commitment. Not to mention his offer of free treatment. It isn’t something to turn our noses up at, that’s what I say. Even at Serafen we’d have to pay.’

‘He says it’s free now,’ Mama said, ‘but then later he’ll say different. And at least with Serafen, you know where you are. I don’t know about this clinic.’ She shook her head. ‘Sounded to me like he wanted the chance to try out his newfangled machine—his ray—on someone. Our Lina’s not some kind of guinea pig!’ She sniffed. ‘But the whole thing’s not up to me.’

‘We could go and take a look at the clinic,’ I said.

Petter slammed his hand down on the table. ‘We’re not discussing it further! I’m not letting that American anywhere near Lina, and that’s the end of that!’

We ate in silence for a few minutes.

‘Well,’ Lina said, ‘all I can say is Dr Dance is certainly miles better than that first chap we got at Serafen. Blix. Remember him, Greta? Couldn’t even manage to stay awake through my appointment.’ She laughed at the memory.

Lina was right about that: I wouldn’t have trusted that fool Blix with so much as bandaging a cut on my finger. I remember thinking how lucky it was that Dance had turned up when he had. Out of nowhere, too, like a fairy godmother in a story. Even though Dr Dance seemed unusual, I thought Petter’s reaction against him was much too hasty, as well as wrongheaded. If I’d had to choose between that old ghoul Blix and Dr Dance’s crazy ray, I would’ve chosen Dance any day of the week. Anything was better than Serafen. In the seven years I’d been working at the Hellgren tobacco factory, there had been nine cigar-rollers who died at Serafen, some of TB, and some in childbirth. As bizarre as Dr Dance’s ray sounded, and as odd as he might seem, I knew he was our best bet to cure Lina.

Over the following days, while I was getting more and more worried about Lina’s diagnosis, she herself was brimming with joy. She sailed about the place with a dreamy look on her face, smiling the whole time, as if there was music in the air that only she could hear. She kept repeating that she was fine, she’d never felt better, and that we were all jumping at shadows. And she did look fine. More than fine. Lina always looked lovely, as I said, but at that time she was absolutely radiant. Her face was rosy, the skin smooth as wax, and her eyes sparkled even more than usual. She laughed more than usual too, and seemed to find everything beautiful. The view of the dirty courtyard, the cross-section of a cut apple, she marvelled and exclaimed over all of it. ‘Everything’s just so … glorious,’ she’d say. ‘Can’t you see it?’

Lina had always had a cheerful disposition, but this was something else, something with a sinister edge. It frightened me. I’d come across her crouched in the corner, trying to catch dancing dust motes in her hand, or sprawled over the couch in the main room with her head thrown back and her eyes closed, a rapturous expression on her face, as if she was drunk.

4.

WHENEVER I HAVE a problem, the first person I always talk it over with is Ilse. Ilse was my very best friend at the time, and she still is. We used to live on the same street before we moved to Hallandsgatan, and these days we live together. She worked alongside me at the Wilhelm Hellgren & Co tobacco factory on and off, but she also made extra money working as a domestic, usually as a scullery maid in a big house, or sometimes as a char in smaller places. She’d landed a live-in job with a rich family in Malmö over Christmas and New Year, so I hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, but she was due back any day.

A few days after our visit from Dr Dance I came into work and saw Ilse sitting in her old spot beside mine on the bench. I ran over to her and put my arms around her. Ilse was soft and round, shorter than me, with a mass of straw-coloured curls that she was forever trying to tame into neat waves. She had pale skin and two pink patches always on her cheeks. I held her tight. Her hair tickled my face, and smelled the same as ever, like dusty, sun-warmed grass.

As we worked, I whispered to her the news about Lina. She dropped the tobacco leaves she was holding and took my hand.

‘Oh, darling,’ she said. ‘Not Lina!’ We both turned to look at where Lina was sitting, at the table on the other side of the aisle. Lina’s face had lost its rosy glow. Her skin was grey and her forehead creased in concentration as she worked.

Ilse put her arm around me. ‘But maybe it’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You’ll see. You’ll go back to Serafen and they’ll have made a mistake.’ She picked up her tobacco leaves again and fed them into the roller. ‘Or maybe … have you thought about this? Maybe it could be that Lina might be, you know, expecting. Now, wouldn’t that be lovely? A new baby? Lina’d be so happy. I think she never got over the little one she lost.’

It was true that Lina’s miscarriage had taken a toll on her. She’d been so very ill, and grieved for that lost baby enough to make your heart ache. I hoped desperately that Ilse was right.

When I next looked over at Lina I saw that she had laid her head down on the workbench. Over the last weeks she’d been sleeping more and more, and only getting up when she was woken. Her euphoria had disappeared, and now she had no energy for anything. When she came in to Hellgren for her two shifts a week, she barely managed to make it through the day. We used to walk to work: the factory was about twenty minutes from Hallandsgatan, but it started to happen that Lina would already be worn out by the time we arrived. Mama and I shared a bicycle, and I made a pillion seat on it for Lina, but even when she was spared the walk, she could hardly keep her eyes open at work.

The Wilhelm Hellgren factory was an enormous complex of grim-looking buildings that took up a whole block along Åsögatan and Götgatan. The place looked like something out of a Dickens novel, all pointed gables and soot-darkened stone. It wasn’t only the cigar-rollers that worked there, but all the company staff: the people who designed the packaging, the clerks and the accountants, and the businessmen who ran the show. They of course had the best rooms on the upper floors. Not that I’d ever set foot there. Ilse and Lina and I worked in the cigar-rolling room, on the ground floor. This room was long and bare, like a barn, with tall arched windows along one wall and rows and rows of benches with hundreds of women squeezed along both sides, hunched over, busy making cigars.

I knew that Hellgren was absolutely the worst place for Lina to be spending her days. At that time of year our workroom was as cold and damp as a cellar. It smelled like a tin of tobacco, and there were always bits of dried tobacco leaf crunching under your feet and tobacco dust floating in the air. You’d blow your nose after a shift and your handkerchief would be speckled brown with tobacco crumbs. It was not the place for a person with lung trouble. I tried to convince Lina to take a few weeks off, but she kept insisting on coming in. She was worried about the money. ‘Because, my darling Greta, you know that in this life we all have to earn our keep,’ she’d say.

Lina was draped over the workbench, quite inert, as if she was in a deep sleep: no small feat in a place as noisy as Hellgren. On top of the clattering of a hundred cigar-rolling frame pins being pushed up and down, there was the constant blare of dance music coming through the row of loudspeakers that ran along the central aisle, the noise amplified by women singing along. I looked around for the floor manager, a hulking red-faced man named Blund, and saw he was prowling on the far side of the room. I grabbed a handful of my finished cigars and darted over to where Lina was sitting. She was fast asleep. As I slid in beside her on the bench I gave her a nudge. She blinked open her eyes.

Everyone had a daily quota of cigars to finish, and for each cigar that was broken or damaged, another two needed to be produced. Because a cigar took more than a day to complete—you had to leave them to dry out overnight a few times—damaged cigars meant your quota kept piling up during the week, and then you had to stay back, sometimes for hours, to finish up on Saturday. At the end of the workday, Blund checked our cigar crates and entered the number made and broken in a ledger that he kept on a lectern at the front of the room.

Lina had become slow and clumsy. She started breaking more and more cigars, and making ones that weren’t up to scratch. When I sat beside her at the workbench I always tried to cover for her, rolling extras to make up for her broken ones, and taking the misshapen, too-small cigars out of her crate and putting them into mine. But Blund still noticed her shortfall.

I could see him coming towards us down the central aisle, rolling from side to side on his gouty feet like a ship.

‘Come on, girly,’ he croaked at Lina, leaning down over her table, ‘you can work faster than that, can’t ya?’

I could smell his sour breath. Lina bent her head. Her hands were trembling as she pressed and folded the leaves. Blund started picking through her crate of finished cigars with his pudgy fingers.

‘Hmm … Look at this mess. Shoddy workmanship,’ he said, and then, ‘What d’ya call this?’ He took out a lumpy, bulbous cigar from Lina’s crate and held it up. It was about as bad as the ones I used to make back when I first started rolling. ‘Eh? Girly? D’you call this a cigar? Would you wanna smoke this?’ He shoved it in Lina’s face. ‘Looks like something else to me!’ He gave a great guffaw, his mouth opening so wide that I could see his brown and broken molars.

Lina didn’t answer or look up from the leaves she was pressing. Her face had gone bright pink and her eyes were glassy. Blund then proceeded to make crude motions with the cigar, laughing loudly the whole time. The women on the surrounding benches fell silent and stopped working to watch. His abundant flesh was quaking with laughter.

I can’t stand bullies. I stood up and snatched the thing from Blund’s hand and broke it in two. He stood there open-mouthed. There was an eruption of laughter from the women around us.

‘Add another two to my list, Mr Blund,’ I said.

I dropped the broken cigar on the floor.

‘You’re getting a strike for that, Fredelius,’ he yelled, waving his finger right in my face. I ignored him. That old bully didn’t scare me.

5.

AFTER DANCE’S VISIT, we eventually agreed about getting a second opinion, but the earliest appointment at Serafen wasn’t until almost a fortnight later. Now, I’m not and never have been someone who’s content to sit around waiting, so I took it upon myself in that fortnight to learn as much as I possibly could about Lina’s illness. The day after the scene with Blund, I finished work early and went to collect the bicycle. Mama had taken it that morning to her charring job over on Bondegatan. Then I rode to the library. I love that place. I love any library, really. Even the shabby old Worker’s Library we used to go to as kids seemed magical to me. The Worker’s Library was not much more than a few rooms upstairs from Friberg’s bakery, so calling it a library was a bit of an overstatement. If you went through the open doorway beside Friberg’s window and climbed up two flights of rackety stairs, you’d find a series of dim and dusty rooms lined with mismatched bookcases. The books there were mostly old and missing their dust jackets. When you opened them, they let out a whiff of mildew and a grainy shower of perished cardboard from the worn spine.

But even with all that, the place was like an enchanted world to me, enclosed and safe. I used to spend hours and hours there, reading first Tomtebobarnen and Malins Midsommar, then everything from Hjalmar Söderberg and Selma Lagerlöf to translations of Edith Øberg and Frankenstein. But there was one book in the library that I’d loved more than any other. When I was ten, I had it on loan continuously for a whole year. It was a book about the life of Karolina Widerström, the first female doctor in Sweden. In another kind of life I would’ve been a doctor too. This book had a photograph of Widerström on the front page. She was already old in the picture, sitting in a fancy chair, with a top hat on, and a cravat. I still remember her face in that picture, her eyes staring out at you, so stern, as if she could see right into your heart and knew that you could do better than you were doing. I used to think about her a lot when I was little, and she had a place in my trinity of childhood heroes, along with Queen Christina of Sweden and Ragnar Lodbrok.

The Worker’s Library was long gone and had been replaced with the City Library on Odengatan. The two couldn’t have been more different. The City Library was in the rich part of town, which was full of shops too expensive to enter, and parks with perfectly tended gardens. The library building had a round central tower rising from a squat base, dotted all around with small square windows. The building was brand new, but it looked like part of the Kärnan Castle in Helsingborg, like it was from another time.

When I had the bicycle I often rode there from work, through Gamla Stan, and up Sveavägen. It was uphill for most of Sveavägen, but once the park was in sight the road flattened out and I could sail down the hill, right into the park. As soon as you entered the park gate, the quiet of the trees and the snow stretched out all around, which was heaven to me after a shift at the factory with the voices and music and clanking in the air all day. In the park there was only the soft hiss of my tyres on the footpath, and the birds, and the wind whistling in my ears. In winter, the park was usually deserted, and often I didn’t see a single person on the way.

Soon, the central tower of the library would come into view, pushing its way up through the treetops, which at that time of the year were nothing more than bare branches. I left my bicycle at the back of the library and walked around to Sveavägen and the main stairs at the front. Going through that wide doorway, pushing open the heavy glass door into the dim hall, past the shadowy Greek figures, and climbing up and up the wide marble steps into the reading room made the grimy streets and the drudgery of my daily life fall away. In the light of that circular room I felt part of a different world, one of ideas and imagination. The walls of the tower formed an atrium that rose right to the domed ceiling three floors up, lined all the way with curved landings and shelves of books. Their brightly coloured spines shone out like stained glass.

That day I went straight to the science section. It was up on the third landing, a place I rarely ventured. Everything I knew about TB I’d got from reading novels from the 1800s where the characters had consumption and were wasting away. Nothing very helpful.

I found an encyclopedia. Under Active Tuberculosis, this:

Symptoms:

Coughing for more than three weeks.

Coughing up blood.

Fatigue.

Chills.

Weight loss (unintentional).

Prognosis:

Seventy-two per cent of sufferers will die without treatment, most often within the first forty days.

The early stages of the illness are characterised by mild euphoria. This means that patients often refuse medical treatment, not believing that they are ill.

The more I read, the more I realised that Dr Dance was right. We needed to act quickly. I turned to the page listing the cure.

Resting in a warm, dry climate, preferably one with a constant temperature above twenty degrees Celsius.

Cleanliness.

Plenty of nourishing food.

Light exercise undertaken in the sunshine.

Whoever had written that entry had obviously never been to Södermalm: Söder, as we locals call it. Where we lived was almost always dark, chilly, damp and dirty, except for a few weeks in summer when the cold gave way to a festering heat, and all the smells of the place were intensified and the air swarmed with mosquitoes and gnats.

What I most wanted to know about was treatments. I found some old medical reference books, but nowhere could I find anything about radiation therapy. Other than sanatoriums, and a drug called Sanocrysin, the books only listed crazy-sounding procedures—such as crushing the patient’s chest with bags of lead, or cutting a hole into their lung to make it collapse—which made Dr Dance’s cell-blasting ray sound like a perfectly safe and reasonable alternative. A librarian told me that to find out about the newest treatments I would have to go to the Karolinska Medical Institute library, over in Solna. But, he told me, I wouldn’t be able to get in. It was for medical students only.

I rode back home in the dark, eager to tell everyone what I’d found out. But the only person who was still up was Petter. I made him sit down at the table, and I got out my notebook.

‘So you’re the doctor now?’ he joked when he saw my pages of notes.

I wish I could have been. I went through my notes, explaining the different stages of the illness, and things to expect.

‘That’s why we need to do something right away,’ I said. ‘Most people die without treatment, and they die quickly, if it’s serious.’

Petter was busy cleaning his nails with the end of a match.

‘Are you even listening?’

‘Sure I am.’ He lolled back in his chair and stretched his arms overhead. ‘But I think you’re jumping the gun. We’ll get Lina checked out by a different doctor. She’s already booked in. A couple of weeks won’t matter. It’s no big deal.’ He yawned. ‘Relax. Everything’ll turn out fine. Lina doesn’t even think she’s ill, don’t forget. You’re always saying we should listen to her.’

‘But that’s part of the illness! That’s exactly what I’ve been telling you!’ I stopped to take a breath. Getting into an argument with him wouldn’t help anyone. ‘Look. It’s important not to take any chances. Not only for Lina, it’s important for us too. You know, if it is TB that she has, we can all get contaminated.’

‘What d’you mean? TB’s not catching. You’re born with it … a spot on the lung. Everyone knows that.’

‘Petter, it’s a contagious illness. I think we’re fine for now. Lina’s still in what they call the latent stage, but once she starts coughing, we’re all at risk. You most of all.’

‘Why me most of all?’

‘You have the most contact with her.’

‘Nah, you’ve got it wrong.’ But he looked worried. He pulled my notebook towards him and huddled over it, running his fingers under the lines of text as he read, his lips moving. Petter wasn’t much of a reader, and didn’t need to be. His life was spent on the Slussen docks, loading and unloading timber, sacks of coal, bales of fabric. ‘I can’t make head nor tail of this,’ he said after a few minutes. ‘Your writing’s too messy. Puh-new-mo-tho-rax?’ he intoned slowly. ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It’s something that could go wrong with Lina. It means her lungs might, you know, sort of … fall in.’

He gaped at me.

‘And then,’ I went on, ‘she won’t be able to breathe.’

I wished then that I hadn’t learned so much about it.

6.

WHEN I LOOK back on it now, it seems to me that that was the night when the trouble with Petter first began. I suppose it was my fault. Over the next week or so I began to notice that he was out of the house more, and some nights he didn’t come home at all. He’d have excuses. One day he said he’d been down at the docks waiting for extra work to come in, and the next it was that he’d been so tired after his shift that he’d slept at his friend Jonas’s place, which was right beside the docks. And he avoided Lina. I noticed that he wouldn’t sit at the table when she was sitting there, and I once got up in the night to find him sleeping on the floor of the kitchen instead of in bed with her. Had he become afraid of catching TB? Or was there another reason?

I couldn’t get out of my head what Dr Dance had said about how important it was to act quickly. And I was sure I’d heard Lina coughing in the night. Of course when I asked her she denied it. The appointment at Serafen seemed like years away.

‘I know just the thing to cheer you up,’ Ilse said as we got our bicycles after our shift. It had been snowing and the air was sharp. Night had come long before.

‘Oh yes, don’t tell me …’ I knew she was going to try to convince me to go ice-skating with her in Djurgården. Ilse was addicted to skating. For her it was the solution, if only a temporary one, to every problem. ‘It’s that glorious speed!’ she’d say. She was a devil on the ice alright, swooping in tight circles, pirouetting, arms out and one leg in the air.

At that time it was coming to the middle of winter. In Stockholm this is a season of leafless trees and thick snow that make the city into a black and white picture of itself. The days struggle to get out of the night’s grip, and each day is so brief that they begin to feel as unreal as dreams, as though you might only have imagined them. Prime skating weather, Ilse would say. That year most of the archipelago was frozen over, and people were skating not only on the lakes, but the whole way from Gamla Stan to Färjstaden.

‘Come on! It’ll be good for you,’ she said. ‘What you need is some fresh air. You look just about worn away with worry.’

I really didn’t feel like going. To tell the truth, I hated skating. I’d never got the hang of it. The only reason I went was to see the pleasure on Ilse’s face as she whirled around, and also for the roasted chestnuts.

‘Go on, come with me as a favour. Please?’ she begged. I knew she wouldn’t stop pestering me until I agreed, and honestly, I had nothing better to do.

We pulled our scarves up over our noses and put on hats and gloves. We brushed the snow off the bicycle seats and were wheeling them out onto the road when a voice called, ‘Miss Fredelius!’

A figure was running towards us along Åsögatan. A tall, thin man.

‘Hey! Miss Fredelius!’ He ran up to us and stopped, puffing for breath. It was Dr Dance.

‘I’m so glad I managed to catch you. Listen, I need to talk to you urgently. It’s about your sister.’

‘What about her? We’re getting a second opinion on Thursday.’

‘Second opinion!’ He threw up his hands in horror. ‘There’s no time for that. What she needs is treatment, and right away.’

‘I understand that the situation’s urgent,’ I said. ‘And I’m worried about it too, but I’m afraid it’s not up to me to decide. I’ll speak to my family again, but they’re not all that keen on your treatments. But thank you again for offering.’

Ilse and I wheeled our bicycles on.

‘Wait!’ called Dr Dance. He loped along beside us, one foot on the path, one in the dirty snow that lay in the gutter. ‘Listen.’ He stepped in front of us and put his hand on my handlebars. His breath made white clouds in the cold air. ‘How about this? How about I take you two ladies to my clinic right now and show you how the machines work? Miss Fredelius, I know your mother especially was a little worried about the treatment methods. Maybe if you see the machines yourself, it might help convince your family.’ He looked from me to Ilse hopefully. ‘It’s not far. I have a car waiting.’

‘I’m not sure that would—’

‘No! Wait!’ Ilse said, her eyes bright with excitement. She always loved an adventure. ‘Why don’t we go?’ She put her hand on my arm. ‘Can’t hurt.’

‘And miss skating?’

‘Oh, skating—we can skate any old day of the week. Don’t you want to see these machines?’

It was true that I was curious. I hadn’t been able to find any information about rays in the medical books, and I’d started to wonder if they existed at all.

‘Alright,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’ We locked up our bikes.

Dr Dance had a large black car waiting on Götgatan. I had only ever travelled in a car once, years before, as part of a car demonstration in Kungsträdgården, so it was a treat to climb into the warm interior, sit on the leather seats and watch the glittering streets and lamps and bridges glide past. I was sorry that the trip to Östermalm was so short.

Dr Dance stopped the car beside a small park which had a fountain in the middle of it, empty of water for the winter, made of pale stone with a wide basin and a statue of a woman standing in its centre. You’d never find a public fountain like that in Hallandsgatan. The thing would’ve been choked with litter during the winter, probably with a few drunks sleeping underneath the basin, and people doing their laundry in it during the summer. But this park, and all the streets surrounding it, was clean and quiet. There was no one about, only a man in an overcoat walking his dog in the distance, whistling. There was no other sound. No one shouted from the windows or slammed doors. No children played on the footpaths and no one came and went from their night shifts. Everyone was shut inside, warm and safe and silent in their comfortable apartments. The neatly painted doors were blank and impersonal and gave nothing away, like the smooth faces of rich people. When I looked up I saw rows of lighted squares of windows, glowing honey-coloured on every building, all the way to the end of the street.

Dr Dance led us over to a row of buildings opposite the park. The footpaths here were wider than in Söder. They’d been swept clean of snow, and gravel had been laid down, so you didn’t even get your shoes wet. He unlocked the door of one building and we went upstairs and through a dark and deserted waiting room into a larger room. He turned on the lights and spread his arms wide.

‘Welcome to my clinic.’

To step into that room was to step into a futuristic scene. There was an impression of dazzling brightness. White-painted walls, tiled white floor, shining steel. The air was cool on my face, and tasted thin and pure, like the air of a snowfield. The overhead lights left no trace of shadow and all the objects in the room leapt to the eye, sharp-edged and clear. Strange instruments and contraptions of metal and glass gleamed from every corner. I’d never been in a place so sparkling and clean, never knew that such places even existed. Especially not within a fifteen-minute walk from the grit of Serafen.

In one corner of the room was an imposing machine, like a large steel cabinet, as tall as me and three times as wide. Its front was studded with dials and switches and lights. It had a thick cord running out of the top, and thinner cords sprouting from the sides. It looked to be almost a living thing, asleep. In the opposite corner was another machine, also large but squat, a wide, shoulder-height white box with a fat metal pipe coming out of the front. The sides of this machine were smooth as an eggshell, without visible joins or seams or rivets, as if the thing wasn’t even man-made, but had emerged from somewhere fully formed. From a row of hooks above it hung aprons and goggles.

A high shelf that ran along two walls was stacked with brown-and-green glass bottles, small wooden boxes, and a row of smaller machines with dials that looked like scales or clocks. Under the shelf on one wall was a sink and a long workbench with two black microscopes under glass domes, glass beakers, more bottles, racks of test tubes. There were surgical implements laid out on a white cloth: a stethoscope, scissors, forceps, thermometer, and other items I didn’t recognise.

Ilse stood looking around, her mouth practically hanging open.

‘Yes, it’s an impressive sight, isn’t it?’ said Dr Dance. ‘It’s taken me more than a few years to build this place up. Most of our equipment is imported direct from the States, or hand-built by me and my colleagues.’

He pointed to the white machine with the pipe. ‘This is the one I have in mind for your sister,’ he said. ‘Diathermy.’ He went over to it and pressed a switch at the back. The machine started to hum. Up close, I saw that from the fat pipe at the front two thinner pipes branched off. Both had a flat steel disc attached to the end, about the size of a large dinner plate and five times as thick. Dr Dance switched off the machine.

‘See,’ he said, ‘the patient sits here.’ He fetched a small stool and placed it in front of the machine. ‘Miss?’ he gestured to Ilse. ‘Would you be so good as to oblige us?’ Ilse sat on the stool and he adjusted the discs so that one of them was in front of her and one behind.

‘These are condenser plates,’ Dance said. ‘They transmit high-frequency waves, and as those waves travel through the tissues of the body they’re converted into heat—intense heat. This heat has great therapeutic potential for cases like your sister’s.’

‘So you’re saying the heat is generated by the tissues, not by the machine? And I suppose that the heat stimulates the blood circulation, or does it have another function?’

Dr Dance looked at me with his head tilted to one side. ‘I gotta say, you’ve certainly done your homework. You’re absolutely spot on. Maybe you ought to think about a career in medicine! This heat therapy reduces inflammation by increasing blood flow, but rather than the heat being applied directly, the current causes the tissues to generate the heat themselves, which is much more beneficial.’

‘And what about side effects?’

‘As I said, this is a very safe treatment. Adverse effects are very rare, and are primarily to do with the skill of the person administering the treatment.’

‘Burns, you mean?’

‘That’s right. The machine does generate a relatively small amount of heat. But burns are only ever a risk with an inexperienced practitioner. It’s true that minor adverse effects do occur in some patients from time to time: headache, dizziness, that kind of thing. But these quickly pass.’

Dr Dance went over to the cabinet and took out a small black case, about the size of a shoebox. ‘Then we also have this,’ he said. ‘The violet ray.’

He opened the case and pulled out a thick black bakelite cylinder with an electrical cord running out of it, and a glass rod with a flattish bulb at one end. He fitted the narrow end of the rod into the black cylinder, which I now saw was a handle, and screwed it into place. He plugged the cord into an electrical socket on the wall and the thing immediately started buzzing. He held it up by the handle, as if it was a sword. The room filled with the sharp, damp scent of an approaching lightning storm.

‘Smell that?’ he asked. He sniffed the air. ‘Ozone. One of the many benefits of the ray. Very calming for the nervous system. Now, just you watch this.’ He pressed a switch on the handle and the rod began to glow with a faint blue light. It got brighter by the second. ‘See that? This particular light frequency is produced by millions of ions bombarding the argon gas inside this glass tube.’ The tube was now burning as bright as a light bulb, brighter. I had to shield my eyes. ‘What you see in front of you is much more than a pretty-coloured light: that blue colour is actually full of ultraviolet rays, which are normally invisible to the naked eye, and have great germicidal capabilities. They can also rejuvenate tissues, and have a general immune-strengthening function.’

I’d never heard of anything like this before, and I have to say it sounded a bit wild to me.

‘So, another form of heat therapy? Is that what you mean by rejuvenating tissues?’

‘Yes, it is another form of heat therapy, but the UV rays also promote cellular renewal. Now, it might sound fanciful, but in the States the ray is beginning to be well regarded as an antibacterial and regenerative treatment. It’s very new, though. Cutting edge.’

He pressed the handle switch again and the light began to pulse slightly.

‘Miss,’ said Dr Dance to Ilse, ‘may I? If you wouldn’t mind rolling up your sleeve.’

Ilse took off her coat, pushed up her sleeve and came towards Dance with a doubtful look. ‘No need to worry,’ he said, ‘this particular treatment feels very pleasant.’

Ilse held out her arm to him, bracing herself for a shock. Dr Dance passed the glass bulb up and down her forearm, from wrist to elbow.

‘See?’ he said. ‘Nothing to be scared of.’

Ilse smiled. ‘It just feels warm, is all,’ she said. ‘Like being out in the sun.’

‘What did I tell you?’ said Dr Dance. ‘Perfectly safe!’

He flicked the switch and the ray’s light died away.

‘Now. There’s one more thing I want to show you.’

He led us over to the workbench and removed the glass cover from one of the microscopes. He sat at a stool, and bent his head to the eyepiece. He fiddled with the dials. ‘There!’ He stood up. ‘Please, take a look, Miss Fredelius.’

I’d never had the chance to look through a microscope before. I remember when I first read about microbes and bacteria at school, the idea had seemed magical to me: a whole invisible parallel world living alongside us, and inside us too. It was like something out of a fairy story. I leaned over the microscope and closed one eye. At first all I could see was a pink, blurry mass. After a few seconds I could make out some pink squiggles on a white background.

‘What is it that I’m looking at?’ I asked.

‘That, Miss Fredelius, is a sample from inside your sister’s lungs. It shows the bacilli that are this very moment infesting her and making her ill.’

‘Let me see too!’ Ilse pushed me out of the way and squinted into the eyepiece.

‘Miss Fredelius,’ said Dr Dance, turning to me with a grave look. ‘You and I both know how ill your sister is, and we both want to do everything we possibly can to help her. Those bacilli you see there may not look like much, but they are at work on your sister’s lungs as we speak, multiplying every second. Once the disease becomes active—coughing, fever, chills—it can progress very quickly.’ He lowered his voice to slightly above a whisper. ‘Listen, I didn’t want to say this in the presence of the rest of your family, but the fact is, there’s no small chance that your sister may die of this illness.’

I got a feeling like icy water running down the middle of my spine. Hot tears welled up.

‘I can see that you want the best for your sister,’ he went on, ‘and I know I can help her. Perhaps Mrs Dahlstrom herself, and the rest of your family, aren’t as aware of the seriousness of the situation?’

I blinked down the tears and nodded.

‘I’d like you to do something for me,’ he said. He went to a cupboard and took out a small wooden case. ‘In here is a microscope,’ he said. ‘I want you to take this home to your family and show them the slide I just showed you. Will you do that for me?’ He handed me the case. ‘Explain to them just how serious Mrs Dahlstrom’s illness is. Ask them to consider my offer. Tell them you’ve seen my equipment in action first-hand, and that it’s perfectly safe, and effective.’

I nodded again.

He covered Lina’s slide with an empty one, and put them into a small wooden box. He handed the box to me and I put it in my coat pocket.

‘I’ll drive you two ladies home now.’

We were silent on the drive back over the bridge to Söder. As the night-time city slid past the windows, my tears came back and fell down my cheeks in the dark. Ilse took my hand. I let my head rest on her shoulder.

7.

IT WAS ALREADY clear to me that Petter was the main source of opposition to Dr Dance’s treatment, but I wasn’t prepared for how badly he would react to the microscope slide.

‘What’s all this?’ he asked early the next morning when he saw me setting up the microscope on the kitchen table.

He’d spent the night away again, and smelled strongly of brännvin. I explained that I’d seen Dr Dance’s clinic, how sleek and modern it was, and what the slide showed, but Petter refused even to look at the microscope, let alone through it.

I’d already shown the slides to Lina and Mama and Papa the night before. I started by telling them again that we needed to consider Dr Dance’s treatment.

Papa nodded. ‘It’s a very generous offer. I always said we should take it up.’

‘What about getting a second opinion?’ Mama asked. ‘Isn’t that what we agreed? On Thursday?’

‘We can’t wait around for so long,’ I said. ‘This is a serious illness. Every day might be important.’

Lina was lying on the couch wrapped in blankets. She groaned. ‘Oh, not this again. You lot are making too much fuss. I don’t need any fancy ray, or any other thing. All I need is to have a rest for a while, and for you to stop arguing. I’ll get better on my own. You’ll see.’

‘For god’s sake, Lina, you’re not helping,’ I said. I turned back to Mama. ‘Look, I can even show you Lina’s illness.’

I opened the microscope case. I felt like a magician about to do a fabulous trick. I was sure everyone was going to be as impressed as Ilse and I had been.

I had to coax Mama to look through the eyepiece, and when she finally did, all she said was, ‘Oh yes, very nice,’ in an uncertain voice. What did impress her, though, was the fact that Dr Dance had lent me the microscope in the first place: clearly it was an expensive piece of equipment. Mama was in a panic in case it got damaged in some way, and later insisted on keeping it packed up in its case overnight; she even went to fetch an old towel to wrap the case in for extra protection.

After Mama had looked through the eyepiece, Lina became interested, and got up to see.

‘No,’ she said, hunched over the microscope. She shook her head, which brought on a flurry of small dry coughs that she tried to supress. ‘You’re saying those little squiggly things came from the insides of my lungs? Impossible! How would he even get them from there? I bet he just painted them onto that microscope.’ She straightened up, steadying herself against the table, as if she was dizzy. I reached out to feel her forehead, but she shoved my hand away. ‘Lovely colour, though, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I never knew the insides of my lungs were so pretty.’ I could hear her straining for breath.

‘Lina, you have to stop pretending. I think we should try Dr Dance’s treatment,’ I said. ‘I saw the machines for myself, and he even tested one on Ilse.’

Lina shrugged, and lay back down on the couch. ‘If you like,’ she said. ‘I mean, why not. I’m sure there’s no harm in it. But we all know it isn’t really up to me, is it? Petter’s the one you’ve got to convince.’

After seeing the slide, Papa looked even more worried than before. Over the past week I had watched his face become sunken and grey: the face of an old man. He’d noticed Lina’s coughing too. New and deeper lines seemed to etch themselves daily around his eyes and down his thin cheeks.

‘Greta,’ he said, ‘I think you’re absolutely right. We can’t leave Lina to Serafen. The fellow there sounded worse than useless. This Dr Dance, he seems to know his stuff. But like Lina says, it’s her and Petter—’

‘Papa, it’s Petter,’ Lina said. ‘Petter’s the one who decides.’

‘Hmm. I’ll have a word with him about it when I see him tomorrow night.’

So that next morning I was ready for a fight.

‘And now you’re in cahoots with that crazy old doctor?’ Petter said as he sat down at the table across from me.

‘I’m not in cahoots with anyone,’ I said. ‘All I want is for Lina to get better. And besides, Dr Dance might not be as crazy as you think.’

Petter grunted and slouched over in his chair. ‘I saw what I saw: he was making eyes at my wife. “Miss Dahlstrom” my arse.’

‘Petter, who cares! You think no one ever looks at Lina? Listen, Dr Dance can help us. We can get something from him—’

‘Enough! I won’t have it!’

The sound of Lina’s coughs rang out through the apartment.

‘See?’ I said. ‘She’s started coughing now. That means she’s in the active stage. And that means that we’re—’

‘It’s probably just the flu! Jesus, Greta, you’re talking like none of us have ever been ill. Lina will go to Serafen and that’s that. Serafen’s always been good enough for the rest of us, and Serafen is where Lina will go.’

‘But the treatments there are like something out of the Stone Age compared to what Dance can provide. He is offering something we’d never get otherwise. You know what they’ll do to Lina at Serafen? They’ll cut holes in her lungs; they’ll make her lie on a bed for weeks and weeks while they put lead weights on her chest to crush her ribs. Is that what you want?’ My voice was getting louder than I had meant it to. ‘Do you know how many people die in that place?’

‘Die?’ He jumped up out of his chair. ‘I’ve had enough of your fearmongering. Lina’s not going to die!’ He gave a kind of shiver. ‘Ugh, stop talking like that, will you?’ He began pacing around the room with a disgusted look on his face. ‘I’ve said no, and that’s the end of it. We’re not having anything to do with this Dance character and his contraptions. If Lina goes anywhere, she’ll go to Serafen, so you just put away that, that … thing over there,’ he waved at the microscope, ‘and say no more about it.’

Perhaps Papa could convince him, I thought. I didn’t know then that he’d never get the chance to even try.

‘Fine. Lina has an appointment at Serafen tomorrow in any case. I’m going too. Will you come along?’

‘You go with her.’ He avoided my eye. ‘I’ll be working late.’

8.

BUT HE WASN’T working late. The next morning, he was gone. Lina woke me, and handed me a note. Her face was stained with tears.

Gone to Sundsvall to work with Alrik.

Better wages. I’ll send money.

P.

Sundsvall, where Petter’s brother lived, was miles away. Up north. That day Lina took a turn for the worse. She went into fits of coughing that left her limp and breathless. That night she shook me awake, coughing and gasping for breath. She turned on the lamp and showed me her handkerchief, speckled with blood.

‘What’s happening to me?’ The tears slid down her pale face. I held her close while her body quaked and shuddered through spasms of coughing. The more she cried, the more she coughed, and the more she coughed, the harder it was for her to breathe. I turned my face away and held my breath whenever she coughed. Her skin was clammy and her bones felt sharp under my arms. There was no longer any doubting Dr Dance’s diagnosis. I got up and opened the window, to ventilate the room. I knew TB is spread through the air. It was too cold to keep the window open for long. All of us were in danger now.

We went back to Serafen, but it was as good as useless. The doctor we saw this time wasn’t quite as decrepit as old Blix, but he was just as bad. Dr Hellbrun, his name was: a thin worm of a fellow, with a long beige face. He kept talking over us. They’d misplaced the previous test results, and all of Lina’s notes, he said, so the tests would have to be done again, for the third time.

‘There’s no time!’ I kept saying. Lina sat beside me, trying to suppress her coughs. ‘Look, can’t you see how ill my sister is? She’s coughing up blood—’

‘No, that’s gone away now,’ Lina interrupted.

‘Lina, it’s going to come back,’ I said. ‘Dr Hellbrun, we can’t wait a whole week for tests that are going to tell us what we can see with our own eyes.’

‘Now, now, miss.’ Dr Hellbrun made a smoothing motion with his hands. ‘Please. There’s no need to get excited. Please calm down.’

The man was useless. It was time to take matters into my own hands.

As soon as I’d dropped Lina home I rode over to the post office and sent a telegram to Dr Dance.

ACCEPT OFFER LINA DAHLSTROM. WHEN SUITABLE FOR TREATMENT? G. FREDELIUS

I wanted to ask him about returning the microscope too—I was always at work during the hours the clinic was open—but I only had 50 öre, so I had to get the message in under twelve words.

When I got home that evening there was a telegram waiting on the mat, setting the date for Lina’s appointment for Sunday. Dr Dance apologised for the delay, saying he needed to go out of town for a few days on business. He said Lina should keep warm, and lie flat on her back as much as possible until then. It seemed a long time to wait, but on the other hand I was relieved the appointment was on a Sunday: I wouldn’t have to skip any work. Even though Petter had said that he’d send money, none had arrived yet, and I didn’t quite trust his word. If it turned out that we’d lost his income we well as Lina’s, we’d need every öre we could get.

I was expecting a big fight with Mama and Lina about Dance, but by now it was obvious to all of us, maybe even Lina, just how serious the situation was, and how little we could rely on Serafen. So that Sunday, Lina, Papa and I set out for Östermalm. Mama was out on a charring job. Papa and I walked, with me pushing Lina on the bicycle. Papa had the microscope case gripped tight in both hands. The day was overcast and we crossed Slussbron and Strömbron with the cold wind in our faces, but once we reached the edge of Östermalm the weather cleared and the wind dropped away, as if we’d stepped into spring.

Although it was still only February, you could feel a bit of the sun’s warmth on your face as it reflected back from the snow, and from the clean fronts of the buildings. Walking through those bright streets I felt better than I had in weeks: finally something was being done.

When we arrived at the clinic, a woman in a very elegant suit and hat was coming out. We rang the bell, and as we waited Papa pointed to a brass sign beside the door. It read: Holm Clinic. ‘Shouldn’t it be Dance Clinic?’ Papa asked.

I pushed the door open.

‘Dance Clinic?’ I heard Lina say behind me as we climbed the stairs. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. That sounds like a ballet school.’

Dr Dance was waiting for us, and led us through to the same treatment room as last time. He turned to Lina.

‘Mrs Dahlstrom, you’ll need to remove your clothing down to your slip please.’ He gestured to a screen in the corner. Papa got up and went out to the waiting room.

First Dr Dance did some tests. He measured Lina’s blood pressure, took her temperature and weighed her. He listened to her chest with a stethoscope and gently tapped her back with a small hammer. He checked her reflexes. He had her breathe into a machine that looked like a grocer’s scale with a tube coming out of the top.

‘Spirometer,’ he explained. ‘To measure lung capacity.’

He wrote down every measurement in a notepad, in writing so tiny it would have been illegible to anyone but him.

Then he took out a tape measure and started taking measurements of various parts of Lina’s body. She flinched when he passed the tape around her chest, right over her breasts.

‘What are these measurements for?’ I asked.

He threw me a surprised glance, like he’d forgotten I was there.

‘Body composition and dimension are important records that will help us monitor Mrs Dahlstrom’s recovery.’

The measuring seemed to take a very long time. When he was finished, he got up and went to the cabinet and took out the black box that I’d seen before.

‘Can I get dressed?’ Lina asked. She was sitting hunched over, as if she was trying to hide as much of her body as she could.

‘Not just yet,’ said Dr Dance. He leaned closer to her. ‘I know it’s uncomfortable but it’s better if you stay as you are. It’ll make for easier access, for the treatment.’

Lina folded her arms over her thin chest.

‘I’m going to start Mrs Dahlstrom on the violet ray,’ Dr Dance said to me.

To show Lina that the procedure was painless, he first demonstrated it on me, running the lit-up bulb up and down my forearm, exactly as he’d done with Ilse.

He asked Lina to sit on a stool facing away from him, and lifted up the back of her slip, exposing her knickers and the white skin of her back. He adjusted the setting of the ray and held it up to her spine. As it touched her, there was a sharp crack. Lina leapt up off the stool with a yell.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Dahlstrom,’ said Dr Dance in a smooth voice, not, in my opinion, sounding terribly sorry at all. Lina was standing rigid and red-faced beside the stool. I could hear every breath rasp in her lungs, a sound like a metal file. There were tears in her eyes. She was trying to blink them back. Dr Dance put his hand on her shoulder and she jerked away from him. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said again. ‘Sometimes at the higher settings there can be a tiny jolt when the ray is first applied, but it’s nothing to worry about, it won’t hurt you at all.’

Lina gave a nervous laugh like a snort and wiped away her tears with the palm of her hand.

‘Sorry, Dr Dance,’ she said. ‘I got a fright, is all. I’m ready now.’

She sat back down and took hold of the stool with both hands, her fingers curling underneath it. I saw her dig her fingernails into the wood until her knuckles went white.

Dr Dance held up the ray. ‘Ready?’

She nodded.

‘Here we go,’ he said.

There was the same cracking sound as before, but this time Lina gritted her teeth and clutched the seat even tighter. He passed the bulb up and down her back, and then side to side for a few minutes.

‘That should do it.’ He switched off the ray. ‘How are you feeling now?’

‘I feel fine,’ she said.

‘In that case, let’s start you on some diathermy. Just a taste.’

Dr Dance sat Lina down in front of the white machine with the pipes coming out of it.

‘Is this going to hurt?’ she asked. ‘I don’t mind, I just prefer to know in advance.’

‘Hurt? No. Diathermy’s a heat treatment, so you’ll feel a little warm, but that’s all. It’ll only be for a few minutes.’ He fiddled with the switches and dials at the side of the machine. ‘You’ll have to remove your slip and brassiere for this one.’

Lina glanced at me.

‘Why, Doctor?’ I asked. ‘Can’t she keep her slip on at least?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid nothing can come between the condenser plates and the patient’s skin. Risk of burns,’ he said.

So this was why he hadn’t switched on the machine with Ilse, I thought.

Lina shot me another look and then pulled the straps of her slip and wriggled her arms through so the slip fell down to her waist. Her face was flushed a deep pink. She reached up and undid her homemade bra and handed it to me.

‘That should be fine,’ said Dr Dance. ‘You’ll also need to remove that necklace, and any other jewellery.’ Lina took off her wedding ring and passed it to me. I put it in my pocket. She reached up to unfasten her necklace, but her hands were trembling.

‘Here, let me.’ Dr Dance stepped forward. He was a long time messing about with the clasp. ‘Sorry, Mrs Dahlstrom, that I’m so slow. I’m not used to handling women’s jewels.’

He was leaning over her with his face tilted down, too close to the nape of her neck. I caught a glimpse of his face. There was something about his expression I didn’t like: eyes popping, tongue on his lip. I’d seen that expression on men’s faces hundreds of times when they were looking at Lina. He stepped back with the necklace in his hand. When he went over to put it on his desk, Lina looked over at me. She rolled her eyes and gave a pale smile.

Dr Dance came back to the machine and adjusted the two discs just as he had for Ilse, one at the front and one at the back. Lina looked relieved when they were in place, shielding her body from his gaze.

‘Okay, Mrs Dahlstrom, I’m going to start her up now. You might feel a little heat but remember, it’s completely normal and it won’t hurt you. The important thing is to stay perfectly still and not move at all: you don’t want to come into contact with these two condenser plates.’ He pointed at the discs. ‘We don’t want any burns. Are you ready?’

She nodded. I saw her grip the underside of the stool again.

He flipped a switch at the back of the machine and it started humming. I can see now that I should have been suspicious that he hadn’t tested the diathermy on either me or Ilse, as he had with the violet ray. Of course, now I also know that there were a whole lot of other things I should have been suspicious of too.

Lina’s face had turned an even brighter pink. At first I thought it was from embarrassment, or possibly anger, but soon I realised that it was caused by the machine. Within a minute I could feel the waves of heat coming off it even from a metre away: it was like being in front of a burning oven that had its door wide open. Another minute passed. Beads of sweat appeared on Lina’s face.

‘Lina? You alright?’ I asked. I had to raise my voice over the machine’s hum.

She nodded, but her eyes were wild and panicked. Dr Dance glanced up at her, his expression blank, and then looked back down at his watch, timing the procedure. Lina’s face by then looked as if it was sunburned. Her eyes slid over to me, wide open with the whites glaring right the way around the irises. I had to fight the urge to rush to the machine and pull Lina away from it.

‘How much longer, Dr Dance?’ I asked him.

‘Just another few minutes.’

His voice was flat and calm, as if he hadn’t even registered Lina’s distress. But perhaps you don’t always need to be compassionate to be a good doctor. By then she was panting and the sweat was running down her forehead and the sides of her face, dripping from her jaw. I knew that Lina would never speak out. Some people might think of Lina’s uncomplaining character as toughness, but, for me, it was too close to martyrdom. You have to tell people what you need. I couldn’t stand watching her endure the situation a moment longer.

‘Stop,’ I said, stepping forward. ‘That’s enough—’

Right at that moment there was a thumping sound from outside and the door was flung open. A man appeared in the doorway.

‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘What in god’s name is going on in here?’

He was a large, round man, wearing a homburg and an overcoat. He stood there with his hand on the door handle and a furious expression on his face. I could see Papa hovering in the waiting room behind him.

At the sound of the man’s voice, Dr Dance’s head snapped up. His mouth dropped open and he leapt over to the machine and turned it off.

‘Carl?’ said the man, his moustache bristling. ‘You’d better have a damn good explanation for this.’

‘Per …’ Dr Dance’s voice was shaky. ‘I didn’t expect you to be here today.’

‘Evidently.’ The man looked at me, and then at Lina. ‘Miss, your treatment session is over now.’ He came over and pulled the discs away from Lina. ‘Please go and get dressed.’

She scuttled off, holding up the front of her slip.

‘And you,’ the man turned to Dr Dance, ‘you can explain how it is that you are in here in my clinic, on my premises, after hours, using my equipment without my approval.’

I remembered the sign beside the door.

9.

‘AND?’ ILSE SAID the next morning as she sat down beside me at the workbench. ‘How’d it go?’

She listened to the story with her eyes wide.

‘So,’ she said, ‘when he took us to the clinic that night, he was breaking in. We were breaking in!’ She sounded inappropriately thrilled. ‘It was odd that he took us there so late, now I come to think about it …’

‘Breaking in?’ I replied. ‘Hardly.’ Ilse’s imagination is stronger than most people’s. ‘He had keys, remember, so he obviously works there.’

Ilse held her forefinger up in the air. ‘Could have been stolen,’ she said.

‘You read too many detective novels.’

I picked up the cigar I’d been working on.

‘Then what d’you suppose Dr Dance’s real job is?’ Ilse mused. ‘A cleaner? But how would a cleaner know so much about all those machines?’

‘He’s not a cleaner. He’s a doctor. But he lied about owning the clinic.’

We worked in silence for a few minutes. Then she said, ‘But did he lie? Did he ever say that he owned it?’

She had a point.

‘Maybe not. But he certainly acted like he did,’ I said. ‘And he did say, “Welcome to my clinic,” or something like that. Remember?’

‘Oh, poor old chap.’ Ilse took a cigar from her roller and put it into her crate. ‘I feel rather sorry for old Dance. He was only trying to impress us, you know. Now he’s probably gone and got himself fired from his cleaning job. The duffer.’

I pictured that greedy expression I’d seen on his face as he leaned close to Lina. ‘I don’t feel sorry for him one bit,’ I said. But if Dance couldn’t treat Lina, she was doomed to Serafen. We needed him.

After our shift, Ilse and I rode home together along Götgatan. I was riding behind her, and as we came up to the corner of Vartoftagatan she braked so suddenly that I almost collided into the back of her. I swerved clear just in time.

‘Hey!’

She didn’t even hear me.

‘Look! Look!’ She was pointing down Vartoftagatan. ‘There he is!’

‘Who?’

‘Dr Dance!’

‘Where?’ I searched the crowd. The street was swarming with thin men in hats and coats, any one of whom could have been him.

‘I bet he’s going to your place,’ Ilse said. She pushed away from the kerb and took off down Vartoftagatan without a backwards glance. I followed her.

We pedalled fast and sure enough, a few metres down the road I spotted a tall man loping along on the opposite side of the street. He did look a lot like Dr Dance, but I couldn’t be sure. We got off our bicycles and crept along the footpath, keeping well behind the man and out of his line of vision. He looked like he was up to something. He kept glancing to the left and to the right, as if he was keeping an eye out for someone. At one point he stopped and turned around in a full circle, scanning the people in the street. Ilse and I pretended to be examining a display of dresses in a shop window, but I got a clear view of his face: it was him, no question.

We tailed him to the end of the street. When he got to Västgötagatan, he cut across the park towards Hallandsgatan.

‘See?’ Ilse hissed at me. ‘Told you! I bet he’s going to visit Lina to apologise.’

We walked our bicycles along the far side of the park. Our apartment building came into view. Dr Dance went towards it but then his steps started to slow. He stopped outside on the other side of the road. He stood there a long time—maybe ten minutes or more—gazing up at the building. It was hard to see, but it looked like he kept taking something out of his coat pocket and then putting it back again.

Then, without warning, he turned straight back the way he’d come. He was walking along the other side of the street, and though he passed within a few metres of us, he didn’t even notice we were there.

When he was out of sight, Ilse said, ‘Come on!’ Don’t you want to know what he’s up to?’

She jumped on her bicycle and sped away in the direction he’d gone.

‘Ilse! Wait!’ I called out. ‘He’s probably just going home.’

She didn’t slow down. I groaned and mounted my bike to pedal after her. I caught up with her at the corner. Up ahead, we could see Dance getting into his car. He drove off up Götgatan towards Östermalm. Ilse shot off after him and I followed. We weaved our way through the pedestrians and other cyclists.

‘Ilse,’ I called. ‘Come on, let’s go back. This is stupid. He’s just going home.’ But she didn’t seem to hear, or she chose to ignore me.

‘We have to memorise his numberplate,’ she said. She turned around to face me. ‘It’s A30507. Don’t forget it! A30507!’ She was certainly getting into the spirit of the chase. Like I said, Ilse was a big fan of detective novels: Frank Heller, Fredrik Lindholm, Stein Riverton. She always had one on her nightstand.

We tailed the car to Slussen, but lost sight of it in the tangle of roads and footbridges that run to Gamla Stan. We rode over the rattling wooden bridge anyway, and as soon as we reached the other side there was his car again, waiting at the lights. Ilse was right about the numberplate. I know nothing about cars—I have no idea about makes or models or anything like that—to me it was just a black one, and I never would’ve spotted it again in a million years without that numberplate. Traffic was lighter in Gamla Stan, so we had to pedal hard. We crossed over Strömbron, by which time I was thoroughly out of breath. After that it was downhill all the way to Östermalm. At first it seemed like he was going to the clinic, but instead of stopping at Karlaplan, he kept going up Karlavägen, and then into Jungfrugatan. He stopped the car about halfway down. We jumped off our bicycles and ducked into a doorway.

The street was full of fancy apartment buildings, each with a polished brass bell and a nameplate, and neatly painted window frames. We watched him get out of his car and go into one of the buildings: 7B.

‘D’you suppose that’s where he lives?’ Ilse asked. She ran over and tried the door he’d entered, but it was locked.

‘Ilse,’ I said, ‘what are we even doing here?’

‘We’re gathering information!’ she said. ‘This man is up to something, I can tell you that much. And you never know what information might turn out to be handy one day.’ She was busy scanning the buildings on the other side of the street. She pointed at the one directly opposite 7B. ‘Let’s nip in there and see what we can see.’ She dashed across.

The building seemed to be some sort of office premises and the street door was ajar. By the time I’d reached the door, Ilse was already inside. I could hear her footsteps on the stairs. I followed her up to the first-floor landing, where a round window looked onto Jungfrugatan. Ilse stood looking out.

‘Let’s go up one more,’ she said.

On the next landing we both leaned into the window. The second-floor double windows opposite had lace curtains looped back, and a row of short candles on the inside windowsill. There were two lamps burning in the room, one in each window. It was already pretty dark by that time, and with the lamps on, the front of the room was lit up like a stage.

In the window on the left we could see the side profile of a dark-haired woman sitting on a sofa, leafing through a book or a magazine. She was perched with a straight back on the very edge of the sofa, a model of ladylike deportment. Her hair was pinned back neatly into a low chignon, and her striped blouse had puffed sleeves and a floppy bow or ruffle at the front. Beside her was a small table with a vase of white flowers and a pile of magazines or newspapers and some porcelain tea wares. Behind her I could see bookshelves and some potted ferns. The right-hand window showed the edge of a fireplace and a dining table, and some paintings on the back wall.

The woman seemed distracted and kept looking up every minute or so. A moment later, someone appeared in the right-hand window. It was a man, but we could only see his back as he took off his coat and hung it on a coat rack. The woman jumped up and passed out of our view behind the wall between the two windows. Then the man disappeared too.

‘No!’ Ilse whispered. ‘Come back!’

For a while nothing happened, then the man appeared in the left-hand window. He was walking across the room towards the back wall but he was nothing more than a shape, and we still couldn’t see his face. He was tall and thin: it could’ve been Dr Dance. It looked like he was talking to someone; he was gesturing with his hands, cutting the air with them.

‘Is that him?’ I asked. I pressed my face closer to the window, right up against it.

‘Could be …’ Ilse said.

Her breath fogged the glass and she reached up to wipe it clear.

The man turned and walked back towards the window into the light and we saw his face.

‘It’s him,’ Ilse said.

The woman appeared again, standing side-on to the window, and facing Dr Dance. She looked agitated, as if she was pleading with him. She kept putting her hands over her heart and then spreading them wide in the air. Then she put her face in her hands.

‘She’s upset,’ Ilse said.

I nodded. At this point I’d rather started to enjoy myself: I felt like we’d come into the cinema halfway through a film and were trying to piece together the story.

‘D’you think that’s his wife?’ Ilse asked.

‘I’m pretty sure he said he wasn’t married. More than once.’

Dr Dance was standing there shaking his head. It looked like the woman was crying now. We could see her shoulders shaking. Dr Dance folded his arms and stepped forward to the window. Ilse and I ducked down out of sight. After a second, I inched my head back up again.

‘But I’d say that’s definitely his wife,’ I said. ‘The liar.’

Ilse’s head popped up beside mine. Dr Dance and the woman were standing facing each other and we saw them both in profile. The woman threw her arms around Dr Dance’s neck and buried her face in his shoulder. He stood motionless, arms by his sides. The next moment he shoved her from him, with such force that her head jolted back.

‘Whoa!’ Ilse said.

Dance turned and walked away from the window. The woman stayed where she was and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, then she turned and followed him. Both of them had moved out of the light and it was difficult to see what happened next. The two shapes of their bodies moved towards each other and became entangled.

‘What’s going on? Is he beating her?’ I asked.

‘I can’t tell.’

Ilse bobbed her head around to try and get a better view. They might have been in each other’s arms in reconciliation, or they might have been locked in a struggle.

‘No,’ Ilse said. ‘It looks more like he has his arms around her, like he’s holding her.’

There came a loud bang, which made us both jump. It was a door slamming on the landing above, followed by the sound of keys in the lock, and then footsteps. Ilse grabbed my hand and we dashed downstairs and out of the building.

10.

DANCE’S QUESTIONABLE BEHAVIOUR towards the woman in the window is one of the reasons I’ve never had much time for husbands. I know not all husbands are unkind, or potentially violent, not by any means. I know plenty of good, gentle, caring men: Papa; Ilse’s brothers, Ole and Henrik; my uncle Gunnar. But the thing with husbands is, you can never be quite sure about them. You never know what they’re really like when they’re at home, until you’re the one at home with them. Men, some of them, have one face for the world and another for their wife. Like Hugo Björne. To all the world he seemed like a respectable and cultured man, a great actor, a guest at the king’s palace. Then his wife was seen around town with a black eye, with marks on her throat. People talked—the poor wife, national scandal—but in the end it didn’t change people’s opinion about Björne. Not the people that mattered anyway. He was still up on the stage at Dramaten, bowing to applause night after night, his photo was still in Svenska Dagbladet. But that Hugo Björne on the stage isn’t the same one that his wife knew: his wife was the one that knew him with his true face.

The day after we tailed Dr Dance to his apartment, I thought I spotted him again as I was leaving the factory, but I might’ve only been imagining it. I had Dance on the brain, alright. I walked home wondering if the woman in the window really was Mrs Dance. The way he’d pushed her off him, the way her head had snapped back when he did, so sharply that it looked like it might come off. She must have been his wife. What a misfortune to be married to a man like Dance, a man who pretended to be single and spent his days ogling young, ill women less than half his age. I strode along, my head down and my hands in my coat pockets. What kind of man pretends not to have a wife? And then manhandles her like that? What man pretends to be the owner of a fancy medical clinic and sneaks in by night to use the machines, like a burglar? What else might he be lying about? Maybe Ilse was right: maybe he wasn’t even a real doctor. Maybe he was nothing more than some American charlatan, taking everyone in with his fancy clothes and machines and foreign airs. No one here knew what Americans were supposed to be like.

I was furious at Dance, but worse, I was furious with myself. I felt like I’d let Lina down. Dance was obviously interested in her, that much had been clear from the start. But men always paid attention to Lina, and I’d thought it didn’t matter. So I’d stood by while Dance had leered at Lina and pawed at her. He’d taken me in with his suave ways and generous promises. I’d stood beside Lina as she sat there half naked and ashamed, undergoing a painful procedure. While he ogled her. And worse, I was the one who’d insisted on visiting Dance in the first place.

As I was coming around the corner of Hallandsgatan, I collided with someone going the other way.

‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Watch it!’

I looked up and my eyes met those of Dr Dance himself. We stared at each other for a moment. I probably had an expression of complete horror on my face. It was as if I’d conjured him into existence by thinking so intensely about him, like summoning a demon with black magic. Once again I pictured his leering face, him pushing his wife, her silent pleading with him.

‘You!’ I said.

He started, as if he’d only just recognised me. ‘Ah … Miss Fredelius,’ he said. ‘Listen, I wanted to—’

‘You owe us an explanation, Dr Dance. If you even are a doctor.’

He shuffled back a step and gave a quick laugh. ‘Er … I do apologise for Sunday’s little, er, irregularity.’

‘Irregularity? You call that an irregularity? You posed as a doctor at that clinic, you pretended—’

Dance held up his hand. ‘Hold on now,’ he said. ‘I assure you that I am a fully qualified—’

‘And you pretended to be a bachelor! And what about the way you treat your wife? Listen, Dance, you stay away from my sister. If I see you hanging around Söder again, believe me, you’ll be sorry.’ I turned on my heel and marched away.

‘Wait!’ he called out. I heard him jogging along behind me. ‘It’s all just a misunderstanding!’

‘Leave me alone.’ I quickened my step.

‘I’m sorry,’ he called after me. ‘All I wanted was to help her.’

After that day I didn’t see him around Söder again, and soon enough I had other worries that pushed him right out of my head.

During the days after Dance’s treatment all of us watched Lina for signs of improvement. Not that I had very high hopes at that stage. But it started to seem like she was getting better. Even the night after the treatment I thought I heard her coughing less, and she woke earlier than usual the next morning. It was such a small difference, though, too slight for any of us to mention, in case it wasn’t real. I started to think that I might have been too hasty with Dance when I’d run into him in the street.

In any case, I had plenty of things to keep my mind occupied. As usual, we had the never-ending worry about making ends meet. Not only had Petter failed to send any money like he’d promised, he hadn’t even sent a line to say that he’d safely arrived, or where we could reach him. Meanwhile, Mama had taken on extra charring jobs, and most days she left home before five o’clock and was out until after eight at night. She also brought home mending work, and all of us, including Papa, sat around the kitchen table stitching away until the small hours. Papa was working overtime, and I started taking on double shifts.

It got so that I felt like all I did was work and sleep, and work and sleep again. I’d fall into bed exhausted, but even in my sleep I couldn’t escape from the factory. I’d close my eyes and dream of rolling giant cigars, as wide as tree trunks and as long as a room. Or I’d dream I was toiling my way up a mountain, my feet sinking into the ground with every step. Then I’d see that it wasn’t a mountain I was climbing, but a pile of tobacco leaves so large that I couldn’t see the top of it.

In the mornings I’d wake with eyes gritty with sleep. My neck and fingers became stiff and sore, and sometimes I’d look at Lina, spending her days in bed or on the couch, and envy her. Resent her, even. This wasn’t what my life was meant for. If Lina had taken the illness more seriously at the start, perhaps it wouldn’t have got so bad. Now we were all in a mess because of it. At the factory, whenever I saw that Blund had moved on to the other end of the room, I would stand up to loosen my neck and back. I’d stretch my arms up and roll my head from side to side. Ilse would eye me with a worried face.

‘You should take it easy,’ she said one day. ‘If you’re not careful, you’ll end up in Serafen yourself.’

Lina was taking Petter’s absence very hard. The first thing she did every day was ask if there was any news of him, and the moment she heard the post slide through the slot, she’d shuffle up to the front door, wrapped in her blanket, and leaf through it. But there was never anything from Petter. One night, I came home from my shift, opened the front door and almost fell over her. She was huddled in a ball on the floor, knees pressed into her face, crying. I crouched down beside her.

‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’

She could hardly speak, and forced the words out between juddering breaths that racked her body.

‘A letter … I thought … it was … Petter …’

I saw that she was holding a damp and partially torn page in her hand.

‘But … it’s just Lasse … And then, my locket … with Petter’s picture … it’s gone … It’s a sign he’s not coming back.’

‘Lina,’ I sighed. I put my arms around her and rocked her back and forth. My head was tight with exhaustion. ‘It’s going to be alright.’

‘Why hasn’t he written? And he hasn’t sent any money.’ She looked up at me. ‘Has he forgotten us?’

She was like a child sometimes. Even though I longed for bed, I sat with her and told her soothing stories of letters lost, misaddressed, and being returned to the sender, only to finally arrive months after they were posted. All fairytales, but she seemed to believe them.

11.

EVEN WITH LINA’S anxieties over Petter, day by day, against all odds, it became more and more clear that her condition was improving. I didn’t dare to believe it at first, but it really seemed to be true. Lina had stopped coughing up blood, and a week or so after her treatment, her coughing fits had almost disappeared. It seemed that Dance’s ray might actually have done something. I initially thought it was a coincidence, or an effect of the milder weather, but even through a cold spell and some days of rain, Lina kept improving. She spent fewer hours sleeping during the day, and we’d come home from work to find her sitting up, or even standing in the kitchen making dinner.

One evening when I was cycling home from the factory, limp with exhaustion, I spotted a familiar figure waiting on our corner. It was Papa. As soon as he saw me, he started running towards me, waving something in the air. I pedalled faster.

‘What?’ I called to him when I was still at the end of our block. My voice blew away in the wind. We met in the park. I was out of breath. ‘What is it?’

‘Look. What d’you make of this?’

He thrust a piece of paper at me: a telegram. It had been sent from Sundsvall, and read:

FAMILY PETTER DAHLSTROM HALLANDSGATAN: HAVE NEWS OF PETTER. TELEPHONE 4369 SUNDSVALL PO 6 PM THURSDAY. ALRIK DAHLSTROM.

And I’d thought that Petter had been lying when he’d said he’d he gone to work with Alrik.

‘What do you think?’ Papa asked me, his eyes narrow. ‘Can’t be good news, eh?’ He had taken off his cap and was twisting it in his hands.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Probably not.’

I was starting to get a cold feeling in my stomach, as if someone had scooped it hollow.

‘He would’ve said what it was about otherwise, eh?’ Papa said. ‘Wouldn’t he? Or if it was to tell us he’d arrived, you’d send a postcard, wouldn’t you? Not a telegram.’ Papa always rambled when he was nervous. ‘What d’you suppose it is?’

‘I don’t know, Papa. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.’ I folded up the telegram and put it in my coat pocket. ‘At least it’s some news.’

‘Should we mention it to Lina? She’s frantic for news, but maybe it’s better not to … to upset her, you know?’

‘I know.’

I was afraid, as he was, that any kind of nervous shock would bring back the illness in full force.

‘We’ll keep it to ourselves for now,’ I said. ‘Lina’s already been waiting for weeks: one more day won’t hurt. And Mama doesn’t need any extra worries either. Anyway, you never know, it might turn out to be something good after all.’

But even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew in my heart that it wouldn’t be.

All that evening, through our dinner of watery vegetable soup, and later, hemming a sheet for Mama, the only thing I could think about was the telegram. Was Petter dead? That seemed the obvious thing. Killed on the docks while loading something onto a ship: accidents like that happened all the time. I didn’t know if Lina could cope with such a shock. At the factory, there was a constant round of collections for newly widowed women who’d been left to fend for themselves after their stevedore husbands had drowned or been crushed to death. But it could also be that Petter hadn’t died, only been maimed. Which would almost be worse. Sounds awful to say, I know, but it’s true. It’d be much worse for a man like Petter, so proud of his health and strength, his muscles grown massive on his frame from all those years of heavy work. I could imagine how he’d hate to live his life staggering from place to place on crutches, his legs dragging behind him, white and weak. And it would be hard on the rest of us too. Another mouth to feed.

I thought of Berit Blenstrom, who used to work on my bench at the factory. One day her husband was mown down by a car on Götgatan. His back was broken. He couldn’t move his arms or legs, or speak, or even sit up by himself: the most he could do was turn his head from one side to the other, and blink. We took collections for Berit too. But the thing with collections is, people will only give money for so long, and Berit couldn’t earn enough for the family on her own. They got behind on the rent and had to move out to the country. Last I heard they were in a village way up north, near Jokkmokk. I pictured her up there in all those miles of snow and ice, huddled in some desolate cabin with her crippled husband and their two small children. I shivered.

‘You’re both very quiet this evening,’ Lina said.

I kept my eyes on my sewing and avoided looking at Papa.

I’d arranged to meet him at the post office after work the next day. I got there early and he was already waiting outside the door, bouncing nervously from foot to foot. He looked like he was about to be sick. He’d never made a phone call before.

‘Have you got the number to call? Did you remember to bring it?’ he asked before I’d even got off my bicycle.

There wasn’t much of a queue, and in a few minutes we were squeezed into one of the telephone booths. I took out the telegram from my pocket. Papa lifted the receiver from the cradle. His hand was trembling.

‘What number, please?’ I heard a voice ask.

Papa cleared his throat, then shook his head and handed the receiver to me. We had to wait through an endless series of pips and clicks while the operator connected us. The Sundsvall post-office clerk answered, before another man came on the line.

‘Dahlstrom here,’ he said. His voice sounded exactly like Petter’s.

My hands had started to sweat. I wiped them one after the other on the sides of my skirt.

‘Alrik, this is Greta speaking, Petter’s sister-in-law.’ I tilted the receiver so Papa could hear too. ‘What’s your news of Petter?’ Papa was breathing loud in my ear, and kept bumping his head into mine as he strained to move closer to the receiver.

‘Has he come home? I thought maybe—’

‘No, isn’t he with you?’ My heart bunched up under my ribs.

‘No, he isn’t. That’s the thing.’ Papa was clutching my shoulder and his fingers pinched like talons. The line started to hiss and crackle. ‘… last Friday.’

‘What? Alrik, the line’s bad. Say again?’

‘What?’ he said. ‘… don’t know …’ The line hissed again. ‘… do know is that … since last Friday. That’s what I’m saying to you.’

‘You’re saying he’s disappeared? Is that it?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. Last Friday … back from his shift, nor on Saturday … thought he’d … a bender is all, for the … went down to port office and the fellow … hair nor hide of him for days.’

‘Alrik, have you been to the police?’

‘Police? Well now, I don’t … and wouldn’t want to be rushing off … drop of a hat … again in Stockholm?’

‘He hasn’t turned up here.’ He’d have arrived by now if he left last Friday.

The operator was on the line again. ‘Do you need further time?’

‘No, thank you,’ I said.

We rang off. Papa and I stood there in the booth for a few minutes, not saying anything.

We walked home slowly.

‘Are we going to tell Lina?’ Papa asked as we turned into Hallandsgatan.

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I mean, we don’t really know anything, do we? Petter could be lying dead in some ditch, or he could’ve done a runner and be living it up in Uppsala or somewhere.’

We walked in silence for a while. Then Papa said, ‘I never wanted to say, but I thought all along he’d done a bunk, and not gone to Sundsvall at all.’ He looked at me. ‘What would you want with going to Sundsvall when you have a perfectly good job right here in Stockholm?’

I’d thought the same thing. I’d even wondered whether his departure had been longer in the planning than it seemed. He’d been hell-bent on Lina dropping her factory shifts and moving in with us: was it because it would be easier for him to leave knowing Lina was safely installed at our place? Could it be that he’d found some other woman? But then on the other hand I remembered his shocked face the night I’d told him that TB was contagious. Maybe he was scared.

‘But it turns out he did go to Sundsvall,’ Papa went on. ‘And I’m downright ashamed of myself for thinking he’d be the type to go and leave us in the lurch.’

‘Don’t feel too bad just yet. For all we know he still might’ve.’

‘So it might be best not to mention it to Lina, don’t you think?’

I sighed. I was a terrible liar. But not as bad as Papa. ‘Maybe that’s for the best.’

‘But we do know one thing for sure,’ he said as we neared our building.

‘What’s that?’

‘Not to expect any money from him.’

As we trudged up the stairs to our apartment, I made an effort to make my face look neutral: the face of a person with no secrets. I find it hard to control my face in that way. I never can seem to keep my feelings hidden under a mask the way other people can. Something always gives me away. As I came up to the door, I saw that there was a parcel on our doorstep. Papa appeared on the landing beside me, out of breath from the climb.

‘What’s that then?’ he asked.

The light on our landing was broken, but I could see that it was a large, open cardboard box with a lot of small packets inside, each wrapped in brown paper. I caught the white rectangle of an envelope among the parcels and fished it out. I held it up to my face: it was addressed in a fancy script to Mrs Dahlstrom.

‘I bet this is from Dance,’ I said.

12.

WE BROUGHT THE box inside and when we unpacked it we found it was full of food: fresh bread, cheese, butter, real coffee—something we could usually never afford—tins of fish paste and sardines, beef tea concentrate, drinking chocolate, fruit, wine, cinnamon buns and sweet biscuits. Never before had such glories been seen in our house, not even at Christmas. And to make it even more grand, everything had come from Östermalm’s Saluhall—the name was printed on the side of the box in elegant letters—a shop I’d heard of but never set foot in.

After we’d unpacked all the treasures, Lina read the note aloud:

Dear Mrs Dahlstrom,

Please accept my humble apologies for the interruption of your treatment, and any confusion this may have caused.

Please accept this gift as a small token of my apologies.

Yours,

Dr Carl Dance

Lina cast her eye over the items that lay spread out on the table. ‘Oh, isn’t that sweet of him?’

‘Sweet?’ I said. ‘The man’s a complete charlatan. Don’t let that old toad get around you with some measly cakes and coffee, Lina.’

‘Come on, he’s not all that bad. He’s managed to cure me, hasn’t he?’

It was the first time any of us had said so out loud. No one wanted to tempt fate.

That night, we feasted as we never had before. I have to admit, I had no qualms whatsoever about eating my fill of the dainties Dance had sent, charlatan or not. After dinner, we lolled in our chairs, finishing the bottle of wine.

‘Imagine if we could always eat like this.’ Lina picked another grape from the bunch on her plate and popped it into her mouth. ‘How fat we’d be.’

‘You could do with getting quite a bit fatter,’ I said, smiling at her. ‘You’ve wasted away to nearly nothing. Drink up your chocolate and eat another biscuit: doctor’s orders!’

Lina laughed and stuffed one into her mouth.

‘You two can joke,’ Papa said, ‘but don’t get too used to this. From now on it’ll be even harder to put food on the table.’

I shot him a look.

‘Why from now on?’ Lina said. Her mouth was still full. ‘What’s happened? Has someone lost their job?’ She looked from Papa to me. ‘What’s going on?’ Her voice had risen a note.

Papa clamped his lips together. He looked studiously at the ceiling.

‘Nothing’s going on,’ I said. I stood up to start clearing away the plates. ‘I think what Papa means is that, you know, we’re all working hard but don’t seem to be making much money.’ I tried again to catch Papa’s eye. ‘Isn’t that right, Papa?’

‘Eh? Yes, pet, oh yes, that’s right.’

He nodded too vigorously. His poker face was even worse than mine.

Lina was looking at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Something’s going on,’ she said.

I kept my eyes on the plates I was stacking up. I could feel her gaze on me.

‘Greta, what is it? Come on, tell me.’

I felt a flush start to spread across my cheeks. I turned my back and took the plates to the sink.

‘Is it Petter?’ she asked.

I couldn’t help glancing over at Papa. Our eyes met.

‘What’s happened to Petter?’ Lina’s voice held a wild note of panic.

‘Oh, pet,’ said Papa, ‘we didn’t want to tell you—’

‘What? What is it?’

‘It’s nothing,’ I cut in. ‘Only that we had a message from Alrik that he hasn’t seen Petter in a few days, that’s all.’

‘But he arrived? In Sundsvall?’

‘Yes, isn’t that great news? And Alrik told us that he got the job he was—’

‘But why hasn’t he written? And now he’s gone missing, is that what you’re saying?’

Lina’s face was white and rigid. I rinsed and dried a plate and began piling it with food for Mama when she came in. I tried to keep my movements calm and slow.

‘Is he dead?’ Lina asked.

‘Of course he’s not dead. Don’t be silly. And he hasn’t gone missing either. It’s nothing serious, only that Alrik hasn’t seen him for a few days, and—’

‘Has Alrik gone to the police?’ I could hear the tears hovering at the edge of her voice.

‘Lina,’ I said. ‘This is why we didn’t want to tell you about it: we knew you’d get all worked up. It’s absolutely nothing to worry about, I promise. Probably he took a job somewhere and forgot to mention it. You know what he’s like.’

Lina didn’t say anything. After a moment she got up and went to the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

13.

THE DAYS PASSED and there was no news of Petter, and what we had feared would happen did. The day after Lina found out her husband was missing, her cough came back. She seemed to get worse by the hour. Within a few days her skin had become grey and opaque, and she had purple hollows around her eyes. Her hair had started to fall out. When I swept the floor, balls of hair would appear, tangled among the crumbs and dust. I found long strands of it stuck to plates, in my food, on the undersides of my socks, in my bed. At night, her raspy breathing echoed through the apartment.

I went to Serafen and begged someone to come and see Lina right away, but they refused.

‘No house calls,’ the nurse at the desk told me. ‘I can see she’s in the care of Dr Hellbrun. He’s not available until Friday.’

That was three days away. It was too long. I made the appointment anyway and on the way home I sent a telegram to Dance.

URGENT! LINA DAHLSTROM RELAPSE. PLEASE HELP. REQUEST TREATMENT. G. FREDELIUS

As much as I disliked and distrusted the man, there was no denying that his treatment had had an effect. But when I pictured again his leering face and bulging eyes, and Lina trying not to cry out during the treatment, the memory made me nauseous, like the smell of sour milk.

Lina spent her waking hours, if you could call them that, lying on the couch. Sometimes she tried to read, mostly Helena Nyblom’s fairytales, but usually she just lay on her back and gazed unseeingly towards the window. The days when she was up and about in the apartment seemed like years ago, though it hadn’t been more than a few weeks. Now, all she did was sleep.

Dance did not reply to my telegram. I rode over to the clinic but no one answered the door. I counted down the days until we could see Hellbrun, my heart sick and sore.

I had never really thought that Lina might die until then. I mean, I was aware of it theoretically, but that was the first time I felt it. I remembered something that happened long ago. When we were kids, you used to be able to buy fish off the Slussen pier. We’d go there with Mama every Friday, but one Friday Mama sent me down there alone. The pier was crowded. A ship had just docked and the fishermen were unloading huge bags of mussels, crates of oysters. As I stood aside to let a man pass, someone grabbed my shoulder from behind.

It was one of the fishmongers, a woman. I’d noticed her before. She gave me the creeps. She would stop what she was doing whenever Lina appeared and stand there staring at her as we went past. Now, I’ve told you before how people often stared at my sister in the street, but this was different. This woman’s face was crowded with an emotion I couldn’t read.

‘You,’ she said. Up close her face was younger than I thought. Her skin was smooth and velvety. But her eyes were dark. ‘I seen you down here.’

Her bony fingers dug painfully through my coat. I could smell the fish on them.

‘That girl, your sister. Where is she?’

I tried to struggle out of her grip.

‘That’s none of your—’

‘That girl is marked. She will die, eaten from within. I see it. It’s written on her face. Here.’ She placed her thumb between my eyes. It left a cold spot. ‘It’s written.’

I’m not a superstitious person. I don’t believe in messages from the beyond. That day I went home and forgot about what the woman had said. But during the time of Lina’s illness the memory of that woman was often in my mind, that cold spot between my eyes.

At home we mentioned Petter as little as possible. But after Lina had gone to bed one night, Papa, Mama and I sat around the table talking in low voices.

‘He’s done a runner,’ Papa said. He leaned across the table. ‘Makes sense. Lina got ill, and then he found out he could catch it. Simple.’

‘Rubbish!’ hissed Mama. ‘Petter’s not the sort to go and do a thing like that. He’s a good boy. He’d stick by our Lina, thick and thin. Something must’ve happened to him.’

I didn’t want to say it, but I thought Papa was right. It made sense to me too. Petter could’ve started a whole new life for himself out there in Sundsvall: no invalid wife, no risk of catching a deadly disease. Petter was a man who didn’t like life to be too complicated.

‘We need to find out what’s going on,’ I said. ‘It’s hard on all of us not knowing, Lina most of all.’

‘Should we go to the police?’ asked Mama.

Papa and I looked at each other.

‘Seems like old Alrik wasn’t too keen on that,’ he said.

Mama snorted. ‘Alrik!’ she said, too loudly. Papa held his finger to his lips. ‘What do I care about Alrik?’ she went on in a whisper. ‘We’ve got to find Petter.’

The next day I put a call through to the police station at Sundsvall, not that it did any good.

‘What crime is it that you’re reporting again?’ the police officer asked after I’d explained the situation. He had a squeaky voice. He sounded like he was fifteen.

‘I’m calling to report a missing person,’ I said again. ‘His name is Petter Dahlstrom. He’s my brother-in-law.’ The line was silent. ‘Hello? Are you there?’

‘Yeah. Sorry, miss. I heard your story the first time. Been gone two weeks, has he? It’s not so long, see? Wait another week and then call again.’ He hung up.

14.

ON THE FRIDAY, Lina and I went back yet again to Serafen, where we faced the beige, worm-like Dr Hellbrun. I really don’t know what we were doing there, as we hadn’t had the blood tests redone as he’d wanted, but I was desperate. Hellbrun suggested a sanatorium. He may as well have suggested a holiday to the moon.

‘Can’t I just rest at home?’ Lina asked.

Hellbrun shook his head. ‘You must be lying in a completely horizontal position at all times to see any marked benefit. It’s to do with the way the blood distribution affects the bacilli.’

‘There’s no way that we can afford a sanatorium,’ I said. ‘What about that medication, Sanocrysin?’

He looked at me. ‘How do you know about a thing like Sanocrysin?’

‘I’ve been doing some reading.’

‘Then you might also have read that the side effects outweigh the benefits of the drug. Weight loss, severe ulceration of the mouth, diarrhoea. It’s no longer available for prescription in this country in any case. Hasn’t been for many years.’

‘What about diathermy? Is there any hospital that offers it? Lina had some good results with it.’

He sighed. ‘Yes, short-wave diathermy,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of that. Heat to kill the bacilli. Some American thing. Inconclusive evidence, if I recall. You certainly won’t find anything like that here at Serafen. No, surgical intervention would be Mrs Dahlstrom’s main option here.’

‘I’m not having an operation,’ Lina said, her eyes wide with terror.

Dr Hellbrun didn’t seem to hear her.

‘What surgical intervention?’ I asked.

‘We could perform a partial lung resection.’

Lina put her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut.

‘So you’d cut out—’ I began.

‘Yes, yes,’ he interrupted. ‘We remove the diseased lung tissue. But it has its risks. I wouldn’t recommend it at this stage. We’ll see how Mrs Dahlstrom gets on in the next week or so. In the meantime, if she can’t go to a sanatorium, I suppose we could try something new, a vaccine. There has been some success with it in France, nothing overwhelming, but I’m willing to prescribe it.’

He wrote the prescription and handed the paper to Lina.

But despite Dr Hellbrun’s vaccine, Lina got worse. She was racked by coughing fits if she so much as got up and walked from one room to another. Sometimes she could hardly breathe. I’d find her hunched over, gripping the back of a kitchen chair, white-faced and wheezing like a bellows. She grew even thinner and paler, and her skin became damp and translucent. There was still no news of Petter, and it seemed like the more Lina worried about him, and about our situation, the worse she got. I tried Dance again, with no response.

The following week we went back to see Dr Hellbrun.

‘It’s been more than a month since Mrs Dahlstrom’s first symptoms, and she continues to decline,’ he said. ‘The time has come to consider the surgery.’

When we got home from Serafen, Lina went straight to bed, and shortly afterwards Mama and Papa came in. Then the doorbell rang and Mama went to answer it. I heard Lina getting up, no doubt hoping it was Petter. She appeared at the bedroom door wearing her dressing gown and a scarf. But it was Dr Dance.

‘Good evening,’ he said. He took off his hat and nodded to each of us in turn.

Papa leapt over to him and shook his hand with both of his own. ‘Please, Dr Dance, sit down.’

We four sat at the table, and Lina on the couch.

‘I’m very sorry to intrude upon you like this,’ Dance said, ‘but I’ve come to extend my apologies to you all, about the misunderstanding at the clinic. I’m truly sorry for that unpleasant situation, and for the shock it might have caused.’ He looked over at Lina. ‘Particularly for Mrs Dahlstrom.’ He smiled at her. ‘How are you feeling these days, Mrs Dahlstrom?’ he asked, although you only had to look at her to know the answer to that question.

‘Didn’t you get my telegram?’ I asked.

Dr Dance looked puzzled for a second. ‘Ah, I’m sorry. I’ve been out of town this past week and more. I must have missed it.’

Lina started to say something, but went into a coughing fit, gasping for air.

‘Mrs Dahlstrom,’ Dance said, holding up a hand, ‘please don’t exert yourself. The other reason I’m here today is because I’d like to offer you a course of treatment.’

‘The same treatment as last time?’ Papa asked. ‘It seemed to do Lina some good.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Dr Dance said. ‘It certainly is a very effective approach, but it needs a series of sessions, over a number of months, to make a lasting difference. The treatment we offer is based on the same principles, but using different, much stronger, machines.’

‘And how much would you be charging for that?’ Mama asked.

‘We would offer this free of charge.’

‘We? Who’s we?’ I asked. ‘Do you mean Dr Holm?’

Dance looked at me. ‘Well, ah, this time the sessions wouldn’t be taking place in the Holm Clinic,’ he said. He shifted in his seat and his eyes wandered around the room.

‘Then where?’ I asked.

‘It would be at a private residence,’ he said.

‘You mean at your house?’ I asked.

Dance nodded. ‘Yes. I, together with my colleague, Dr—’

‘Sorry, doctor,’ I said, ‘but at your house?’ I pictured again his leer, his bulging eyes, the way he held his face close to Lina’s throat. ‘Do you invite all your patients to your house? Or only young women? Or only Lina?’ I couldn’t help it, the words came shooting forth without seeming to pass through my brain first. ‘What does your wife think about this?’

‘Greta!’ Papa said, turning sharply to me. ‘Mind your manners! We ought to be grateful to Dr Dance for wanting to help us. He’s being very generous.’ He turned back to Dance. ‘Sorry, doctor,’ he said.

Dr Dance bowed his head. ‘My colleague, Dr Nils Persson, and I have put together an extensive treatment room at my residence, stocked with the most up-to-date radiation equipment.’ Dance looked back at me. ‘I know it was an unpleasant scene at the clinic last time, and again, I’m truly sorry. All I want is to help Mrs Dahlstrom. Being able to help in this kind of situation is the reason I decided to practise medicine in the first place.’

He stood up to go. ‘Please, think it over,’ he said. He took a step towards the door then turned on his heel. ‘Ah! I almost forgot.’ He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small white parcel. ‘Mrs Dahlstrom, I believe this belongs to you?’

Lina pulled the paper open.

‘Oh!’ she said, and burst into another fit of coughing. ‘I thought …’ she said between wheezing breaths, ‘that this was lost forever!’

She held up a small golden object: her necklace. It was a locket on a chain, and inside was a picture of Petter’s face. The sight of it sent a fresh wave of revulsion flooding over me. Could Dance have held on to it so he’d have an excuse to contact her again? Oldest trick in the book.

‘Dr Dance, thank you!’ Lina said, beaming up at him.

He smiled at her joy. ‘My pleasure. I’m glad I could return it to you.’ He nodded again at each of us in turn. ‘I must be going. I hope you will consider the offer.’

‘Wait!’ Lina croaked. ‘Dr Dance!’ She began coughing again. He stood patiently with his hat in his hands until she could speak again. ‘I want to … do the treatments.’

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘We can begin as soon as next week.’

We heard the door close behind him and his footsteps down the stairs. Lina got up and pulled the curtain aside from the window, and looked out. I went and put my arm around her.

We saw Dance emerge from the building and cross the courtyard. Then he paused and looked up at our window. Lina pulled the curtain, leaving a skinny crack for us to peep through.

‘I wish we didn’t need him,’ I said.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. We watched Dr Dance disappear into the archway that led through the front of the building and out to the street.

‘So do I,’ she said then. ‘He gives me the creeps.’ She turned and looked me in the eye. ‘But what choice have I got?’

1.

YOU CAN IMAGINE how relieved I felt when Mrs Dahlstrom and her family agreed to the treatments at my home. Not that I was surprised by their hesitancy, or held it against them in any way. In their place I guess I’d have been as apprehensive as they were, suspicious even, of a stranger, a foreigner no less, offering some fantastical cure. And the misunderstanding at the Holm Clinic would certainly have placed me in something of a poor light.

Before I met Mrs Dahlstrom, I’d never had cause to visit Södermalm. The Dahlstroms lived way down in Hallandsgatan, in one of those tenements built twenty years before, during the housing crisis. Number 36 was in a long double-storey building that ran the length of the narrow street, abutting a park. From a distance, the place didn’t look too bad; the windows had glass in them, and the park had some benches and a copse of linden trees. But on closer inspection the building revealed itself as mean and neglected. The paint was peeling off the front wall in great scabrous patches, as if the building was diseased, and instead of curtains, there were scraps of blankets or rags hanging up in some of the windows. The park was strewn with litter and I spotted a couple of tramps staggering among the trees. I wouldn’t call Hallandsgatan a slum, exactly, but it wasn’t a neighbourhood anyone would choose to live in either.

The Dahlstroms’ apartment was in the back section of the building complex, which formed a square. To reach it you had to first pass through an archway under the front part of the building, and cross a grimy courtyard, with slippery cobblestones and a row of foul-smelling trash cans along one wall. I have to say, I was a little shocked the first time I saw the state of that place and how the Dahlstroms lived. When I stepped inside, the apartment seemed to be full of dozens of people, but I quickly realised that was on account of it being so small. As far as I could tell, it consisted of one dingy room with a sink and cooking stove on one wall, above which hung a row of what looked to be old dishrags pegged up to dry, a table and chairs, and some kind of makeshift bed or couch in the corner. There were two doors leading off of this room, to what must have been the bedrooms: but no entrance hall, no separate living room. Likely no bathroom. And five adults lived there. The place was cold and damp and smelled of dishwater and dirty laundry, and the only heating seemed to be the cooking stove. It was no wonder that Mrs Dahlstrom had contracted a respiratory illness.

Perhaps you’re wondering why I was so eager to help Mrs Dahlstrom, a woman I hardly knew. Perhaps you’re even thinking that I had sinister motives of one kind or another; I can see how somebody might form that view. But the reason is a lot more mundane than you might think. The fact is, in my life I’ve been fortunate enough to attain a certain level of social standing, and it’s my belief that I ought to offer assistance where I can, especially to those who don’t enjoy such privileges. I could see that the Dahlstroms were in dire need of help, and I was in a position to give it. Simple. Sure, it might be true that I had a soft spot for Mrs Dahlstrom from the beginning, but she was so pleasant to be around that it would have been hard to find any man who wasn’t a little sweet on her.

At that time, radiation therapy for tuberculosis was not much more than an experimental approach, but I’d spent years researching the field, and in fact I am one of its pioneers. A simple explanation of the treatment is that because radiation already has a scientifically proven bactericidal effect on carcinomas, it can also be successfully used in pulmonary TB, especially at the higher doses. I’d seen the devastating results of this terrible disease many times in my professional life, and it’s my driving goal to do all I can to contribute to eradicating it.

I had but a few days to prepare my home clinic for Mrs Dahlstrom, who was to be its first patient. I was already occupied with installing a brand-new radiation machine, one that I had designed and built myself, and which was much more powerful than anything commercially available, especially in that somewhat backward country. I had years before stopped relying on commercially produced machines in favour of my own designs, with which I was constantly pushing the frontiers of treatment methodologies.

I worked around the clock to set up the clinic. To call it a clinic was a tad overblown; in actuality it was just one room in the apartment, fitted out with the necessary equipment. I enlisted the help of my trusted colleague from the Holm Clinic, Nils Persson, but even with the two of us working a series of late nights, as well as through the weekends, we barely had it up and running in time. I don’t mean to boast about it, but when we were done and had the place spick-and-span, the set-up looked mighty impressive, and would have done even to a layman.

I had a small laboratory in one corner, with a bench for my microscope, burners, beakers and test tubes, and alongside this I’d installed a sink. There was a desk with a light-box above it, and a trolley with my medical kit set out: stethoscope, thermometer, sphygmomanometer, a case of syringes, swabs, and so forth. The treatment bed I’d modified for size, partly on account of the limited space, and partly on account of Mrs Dahlstrom being small in stature. In another corner stood the radiation machine. Its housing was made of nineteen-gauge brushed stainless steel, which contained an iron core, an insulated copper conductor, and super-voltage X-ray tubes. It was capable of transmitting up to 200 kilovolts of energy. There was absolutely nothing like it anywhere in the country. It was such an impressive machine, gleaming and new, bristling with latent power, I could hardly keep my eyes off of it, and couldn’t wait to put it through its paces. The day before Mrs Dahlstrom’s visit I placed her X-rays up on the light-box in readiness.

When the doorbell rang the next morning, I saw that Mrs Dahlstrom’s sister, father and mother had all come along. Mrs Dahlstrom wasn’t looking all that well, though not much worse than when I’d last seen her. If you’re a reader of novels or poetry of the past two centuries, you’ll no doubt have come across mention of the great physical beauty that is bestowed on the sufferer of TB. Pulmonary tuberculosis, or consumption, has long been a highly romanticised illness on account of this. But the idea of TB being the most beautifying of diseases is more than a flourish of the poet’s pen, it does hold a grain of truth within it. The sparkling eyes, the flushed cheeks and red lips of the sufferer can all be attributed to the constant low-grade fever; the pale skin and appealing languor to a decreased blood-oxygen saturation.

I have observed this phenomenon several times throughout my career, but I never felt the uncanniness of the manifestation as strongly as I did with Mrs Dahlstrom. She was by anyone’s standards a beauty, there was no question, but the illness had transformed her into something different, something barely human. Her skin, as smooth as wax, glowed with an inner radiance, and the extreme thinness of her limbs lent her movements a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Her dark eyes were languid, but would flash with unexpected sparks of gold. She looked like a life-sized doll, not like a woman at all.

While we were all still standing in the hall, the doorbell rang again and Nils appeared. We were ready to begin.

We went upstairs to the treatment room and got Mrs Dahlstrom prepared. Her sister stood beside her, holding her hand. I have to admit that, excited though I was, I was also a little nervous about the new machine, and I wanted things to go smoothly after last time. Having the family there as an audience only contributed to my anxiety. Nils fetched chairs for them, and they sat, straight-backed, in a row along the wall, perched like a line of birds on a telephone wire. Mr Fredelius was watching the proceedings with his jaw hanging open, Mrs Fredelius had her handbag in an iron grip on her lap, and I could feel Miss Fredelius’s sharp eyes on me, noting my every move. Nils was feeling it too, I could tell. He checked and re-checked every one of the machine’s settings, taking off and putting on his glasses every time.

At last he said, ‘Alright. Looks like we’re all set.’

For this first session, Nils and I had agreed to start out with a lower dose of radiation, and progress slowly week by week. It was a fine line between making the procedure as pleasant as possible for Mrs Dahlstrom and making sure it was effective.

‘Ready, Mrs Dahlstrom?’ I asked her.

‘Yes.’

I gave Nils a nod.

‘Here we go!’ he said, and pressed the switch.

When the machine purred to life Nils actually broke out in applause, and everybody followed suit. I’m pleased to say that things went exactly to plan, without a single hitch.

As the family were putting on their coats and saying their goodbyes in the hall, I heard footsteps on the stairs and then the key in the lock. Doris came in. My wife. I made the introductions.

‘Oh, so you are a married man,’ Miss Fredelius said to me. She gave me quite a piercing look. ‘I wasn’t sure.’

‘Greta!’ her mother hissed at her, and shoved her towards the door.

As soon as they were outside, Doris asked, ‘Whatever did the girl mean by that?’ She took off her coat and hung it up.

Doris has always been a sensitive woman, and prone to taking things to heart. She is also wary of new ideas. The somewhat unusual notion of treating patients at home had been immediately met on her part with suspicion, particularly when she learned that the first patient was to be a young lady. And now that she had seen what an alluring young lady that patient was, I realised she might very well cause a difficult scene.

‘So that was Miss Dahlstrom, was it?’ she asked, her voice a study of unconcern. She was busy picking invisible bits of fluff from the back of her coat.

‘Mrs,’ I replied.

Even with this reassurance, Doris’s pink face stayed crumpled in a series of worried furrows.

‘Hmm. Where was her Mr then? At work, I expect?’

‘I believe so,’ I said. ‘Doris, my darling. You have nothing at all to worry about.’ I put my arms around her, but her body was stiff in my embrace.

‘And will this Mrs Dahlstrom be visiting often?’ she asked.

I felt a sort of pity for Doris, and also a sort of pain, but mostly I felt frustration. However, I didn’t want things to become difficult. The last thing Mrs Dahlstrom needed was for Doris to take against her. So I soothed my wife. I told her all about the terrible position the Dahlstrom family was in, their impoverished state of living, the seriousness of Mrs Dahlstrom’s case—Doris had always been very supportive of charitable works—and I reminded her that it was only right that we, being in a position to help, ought to do so. It was our responsibility. I mentioned Mrs Dahlstrom’s tender age and her uneducated background. Very soon Doris was reassured, and convinced of the worthiness of the cause.

Still, over the next few weeks, Mrs Dahlstrom’s visits were now and then something of a sensitive point for Doris, a state of affairs that quickly began to wear rather thin.

2.

THROUGH THE SPRING and all that summer, Mrs Dahlstrom came to the apartment for her treatments, at first once a week, then every third day. I stopped working at Serafen so as to have more time for her. As my confidence with the new equipment grew, I was soon able to manage the treatments on my own, and no longer required Nils’s assistance. The months went by and Mrs Dahlstrom and I got to know each other better. She was an even more gentle and charming creature than I first thought, full of jokes and curiosity and quick to laugh. I soon grew to be very fond of her, and was proud to be in a position to help her. In the beginning, Miss Fredelius always accompanied her, but after a few weeks it seemed I’d gained her trust and Mrs Dahlstrom came alone.

The treatments went as planned, and I was gratified to observe some rapid improvement in my patient’s energy levels, along with a decrease in coughing and pulmonary inflammation. Financially, I knew the family were a lot worse off after the disappearance of Mrs Dahlstrom’s husband, a fact she eventually confided to me. Even with my regular food deliveries, I feared that there was pressure on Mrs Dahlstrom to return work, when what she needed was complete rest. As bad as her apartment might have been, the absolute worst place for her was that damp and filthy factory, and so, though my own finances were in pretty bad shape, I went to the bank and arranged to have a weekly sum paid to her from my private account, on the proviso that she stay home. I organised a car to collect her for her appointments, and take her back afterwards. I kept her on this regimen for months, what I called the Three Rs: rest, radiation, and a rich diet.

But a few weeks later her cough worsened again and she complained of a sore throat. Further tests showed that the TB had not been halted as I’d hoped, but had infiltrated her larynx. We had to act fast. I knew that this laryngeal manifestation of the disease needed more direct treatment, preferably with an electrotherapy unit that had a vacuum tube attachment for the throat. I didn’t have the time to build one of those, so I bought a unit, a new, high-frequency machine.

I have to admit that this treatment is uncomfortable for the patient. I was awfully sorry to inflict it on Mrs Dahlstrom, but I had to do what was best for her. During the procedure she sat stiffly, her eyes fixed on the machine I held in my hands. Because I am a skilled practitioner, I was able to control the current so that only a pale hint of blue light was showing in the glass tube. This is important to minimise discomfort for the patient. Once the current was steady, I had her open her mouth wide enough that I could position the tube against her palatine tonsils, right at the back of her throat. She had to keep very still. If she became restless and moved even a fraction, she would receive a small shock in her throat from the tube. Some practitioners apply head restraints to avoid this, but I was reluctant to adopt this inhumane approach. Whenever Mrs Dahlstrom got a shock she flinched and sometimes began to cry.

However, I knew how effective this remedy was, so I persevered despite her complaints, and despite how difficult it was to administer.

I did all I could to make the sessions as pleasant as possible for Mrs Dahlstrom. I bought a phonograph and some records that were popular at time: Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael, and played these in the background. Music can be very effective in lowering levels of agitation, I have had cause to observe. When her treatments were over, Mrs Dahlstrom and I sat together and drank a cup of coffee, or sometimes a glass of aquavit, and ate pastries or cake. I kept a stock of treats on hand for her: candy, fruit, drinking chocolate, and sometimes even hair ribbons, stockings. Anything to make this difficult time a little easier for her.

When I first started treating her I had grave concerns about the effect of Petter Dahlstrom’s sudden disappearance. I kept a close eye on her, and though there seemed to be no obvious shock effect, the possibility of a delayed reaction was always in my mind. Such emotional crises can have serious physical ramifications for patients. Speaking for myself, I can’t say I was the least bit sorry he was gone from her life. Aside from the loss of earnings, I had no doubt she was better off, and in fact I might go so far as to say that he disappeared at the perfect time. One day, over coffee and cake, Mrs Dahlstrom told me that her sister had reported him as missing to the police.

‘Not that it will do any good,’ Mrs Dahlstrom said, looking down at her empty plate and tracing her finger through the cake crumbs. ‘He’s run away. I just know it. I think it was because of my sickness. He’s run away from me.’

‘Do the police have any leads?’ I asked, though I had no high expectations of the deductive powers of the Sundsvall district police force. ‘Any idea where he might be?’

‘They haven’t done a thing,’ she said. ‘I doubt they will.’

I saw the tears flood her eyes and I reached out and put my arms around her. Her breath was hot and soft against my skin. I could feel her ribs expand and contract and her heart beating within her.

‘Shh … There, there,’ I said. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

‘They’ll never find him,’ she said in a small voice.

I had never held her before, never dared. The only time I touched her was when the treatment required it. The heat blazed off her skin and I breathed in the delicate scent of her. I let go of her before I wanted to. The window was open and the summer air blew in over us, perfuming the room with the scent of the grasses and flowers of the Gärdet park. I think I never felt so happy as in that moment.

She was right, I thought. They’d never find him.

3.

THAT WHOLE SUMMER, in fact, proved to the happiest of my life. I looked forward to Mrs Dahlstrom’s treatments much as I had to vacations as a child, and on the days of her appointments I awoke with the same electrified feeling, my blood surging through my veins like a wild melody. The very idea of her, of being near her, made me light-headed. Naturally I took care to never speak of my feelings to her; the last thing I wanted was to overwhelm her, but I knew that she felt it too. It was in the air, as palpable as an electrical current passing between us. I saw it in her eyes, and I sensed it when I touched her.

The fears I had that Mrs Dahlstrom would be devastated by her husband’s disappearance continued to be groundless, and she showed every sign of adjusting to life without him. Granted, she was not yet cured of the TB, but there was no doubt that her condition had improved with the radiation therapy. Without my intervention she would likely have already succumbed to this awful disease. I felt very optimistic about the future.

The one blight on my days was Doris. Doris and her jealousy of Mrs Dahlstrom. I knew that my wife meant no harm, and she had not caused any scenes as I feared she might, but there was a constant undercurrent of disapproval and an atmosphere of surveillance at home. Doris had a thousand questions about Mrs Dahlstrom, about her personal life, about my feelings for her, about the topics of our conversations. She often interrupted our treatments, knocking on the door with offers of coffee, or on the pretence that she’d heard me calling her. This was not only thoughtless, it was downright dangerous: being distracted while performing these delicate procedures could cause an injury to the patient. Once, I opened the door of the treatment room to reveal her skulking outside on the landing. Eavesdropping, no doubt. It was extremely wearing for me, and it was also difficult to stand by and watch Doris’s distress. I tried time and again to reassure her, to tell her how much she meant to me, but it made no difference. After a while I started to feel that if Doris’s behaviour continued much longer I’d have no choice but to take some kind of action.

During that time I often found myself wandering the city after my shifts at the Holm Clinic, unwilling to return to the apartment and face another of Doris’s interrogations. One day, one of those particularly glorious October days that fade into a long, golden fall afternoon, when it seems a crime to be cooped up inside, I left the clinic early. I didn’t want to go home, and with nowhere else to go I made my way down to the water. The streets were busy with pedestrians. I crossed over the Djurgården bridge and went through the Blue Gate into the park. I followed the path that runs beside the water of Djurgårdsbrunnsviken. On fine days, being in Djurgården was like being on vacation. The sun threw white sparks onto the water and gusts of yellow birch leaves swooped past me to float on the lake in miniature golden flotillas. Everywhere people were out strolling: couples and nannies with children and pairs of young girls walking along with their arms linked together, laughing. I smiled at each person I encountered and tipped my hat to the ladies. I could see a file of riders walking their horses across the path up ahead. I used to ride as a boy and I stopped to watch them pass. It was a group of ladies, all riding astride, which made much more sense than the ridiculous practice of riding side-saddle that had been common in my youth. One of the women, the last one in the file, looked a lot like Mrs Dahlstrom. I thought of how much I would love to take her for a ride when she was better. How beautiful she would look mounted.

The woman did look an awful lot like Mrs Dahlstrom, I thought, watching her; even her gestures and movements were similar. Was it her? I squinted. Although I have near-perfect vision I couldn’t see her face clearly under her cap. I hurried along the path, then broke into a run, but all I could see were the riders’ backs and the horses’ rumps rocking away round a bend in the path. I stopped, out of breath with my hat knocked askew. I had to laugh at myself really, seeing Mrs Dahlstrom everywhere like a man possessed. How true that love makes fools of us all. I realised there was no way Mrs Dahlstrom, my Lina, was out riding in Djurgården; the very idea was ridiculous. I doubt she’d ever sat on a horse in her life, and besides, she was completely housebound apart from her visits to me.

A few days later, when she came to her appointment as usual, I noticed right away that she’d taken a turn for the worse. Her cough was almost constant, and her breathing was strained. She was limp and paler than ever, her eyes sunken in her face. I put a record on the phonograph and we chatted as I administered the radiation.

‘When you are well again, I’ll give you a special treat,’ I told her. ‘I’ll take you horseriding in Djurgården. I saw some riders there the other day, and it was the funniest thing: one of them was the spitting image of you.’

She gave a laugh, which set off a coughing fit.

‘I have been,’ was all she managed to get out between coughs.

‘Deep breaths, my dear,’ I said, and rubbed her back. ‘Deep breaths.’

‘The other day.’ She was still coughing. ‘That was me.’

She tried to laugh, but couldn’t for all her coughing. I laughed at her joke; she was a funny one alright.

‘No,’ she said vehemently. ‘It was me. Really.’ In short bursts between coughs and gasps she said, ‘Papa … took me out … with Greta … riding. Because I never have … and I always wanted … to go.’ She lay back on the table, spent.

‘No.’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘Tell me that’s not true.’

I couldn’t believe her father would be so foolhardy. Exertion like that might be more than she could take. I decided to double her radiation time and increase her adrenaline dose. I was so furious that I accompanied her back to her apartment to speak with Mr Fredelius.

I found him smoking a pipe at the kitchen table, which made me even angrier; the smoke would be incredibly irritating for Lina’s lungs. I wanted to snatch the filthy thing from him and smash it to pieces on the floor. Instead I motioned for him to join me outside on the landing. I was shaking with rage.

‘Mr Fredelius, are you trying to kill your own daughter?’ I said when we were both outside with the door closed behind us. I had to make an effort to keep my voice down.

‘What d’you mean?’

He stood there blinking his small piggy eyes at me, with that damned pipe still clenched between his teeth.

‘You allowed Mrs Dahlstrom to go out horseriding? Do you understand how weak she is?’

He slowly took the pipe out of his mouth. ‘Only a bit of fun,’ he said. ‘They just walked ’em. No harm in it.’ His voice was amiable and dimwitted.

‘No harm in it? Are you crazy? It could damn well kill her,’ I told him.

He shrugged. ‘Seemed alright to me.’ He put his pipe back in his mouth. It clicked against his teeth.

‘And smoking? In the house? With a seriously ill respiratory patient present?’ I shook my head. I could hardly believe the man. My head started to ache. I turned and went down the stairs, leaving him there on the landing.

I heard him call after me, ‘S-sorry, doctor! I didn’t know.’

On the way back to Östermalm, I thought of Lina’s pale face and a terrible fear gripped me, a blackness descended before my eyes. That was the first day I actually felt we might lose her.

4.

I STILL HADN’T managed to calm myself by the time I arrived home, though I’d taken the long way, through Norrmalm and Vasastan. If anything, I was even more riled up than when I left the Dahlstroms’. In my agitation I drove recklessly around the night-time streets, too fast and through a few red lights. When I opened the front door I could hear the clink of teacups and the polite hum of Doris’s voice, the low tone she reserved for visitors. One of Doris’s tea parties was the last thing I wanted to face that evening. Without even removing my hat and coat, I made my way down the hall.

‘Doris? May I have a word?’ I called out.

I opened the parlour door harder than I meant to and it bounced off the wall behind.

I saw her head turn towards me at the sound. She was sitting in the armchair by the fire with a teacup and saucer poised in front of her and her eyebrows raised. Opposite her, side-by-side on the sofa, were two men, one of them in police uniform.

‘Oh, Carl,’ Doris said. ‘You’re back at last. These two gentlemen and I were just having such a lovely chat. They were hoping to speak with you.’ She put down her cup and saucer on the table. ‘This is Detective Inspector Larsson and this is Sergeant Blom.’ She gestured to each of them with a slight inclination of her head and an upturned palm, as if we were all meeting at a party. Blom was a squarish lump of a man, with a brick-red complexion and a bald head. He was the one in uniform. His meaty forefinger and thumb were pinched onto the handle of his porcelain teacup, as if his strength was such that a more substantial hold would shatter it into pieces. Larsson, in a suit of varying shades of brown, looked like a curate: thin, with wire-rimmed spectacles and soft, ashy hair, receding at the crown. ‘My husband,’ Doris said to the policemen. ‘Dr Dance.’

My immediate thought was that they had witnessed my driving back from Södermalm, and were here to issue me with a traffic infringement notice, and I marvelled at the speed at which they had acted.

Larsson cleared his throat. ‘Now Dr Dance,’ he said, ‘we won’t take up much of your time. We understand you’re a very busy man. We’re gathering information about a missing person, a certain Petter Dahlstrom, and we’d like to ask you some routine questions. Your wife tells us that he is known to you?’

‘Yes, he is—I mean, I know the name.’ I wondered what else Doris had told them. ‘That is to say, I met him once. He’s the husband of one of my patients.’

Blom had put down his teacup and was writing laboriously in a small notebook with a rather large pencil.

‘Met him once,’ repeated Larsson in a flat voice. ‘And what was the nature of your relationship?’

‘Relationship? We didn’t have any relationship. As I say, I met the man but a single time.’

‘And when was that?’

‘Months ago, back in … would have been January. Or, no, February. I don’t remember exactly. It was winter, in any case.’

Larsson’s eyes never left my face.

‘You met at his residence, I understand?’ Blom asked. He didn’t look up from his notebook. ‘You called on him at his home?’

‘Not exactly on him, but yes it was, at his family’s home. Your information is correct on that score. Listen, is there any indication of where he was last seen?’

‘Can’t reveal that,’ said Blom. ‘Operational reasons.’

‘And, any idea where he might be now, Dr Dance?’ Larsson asked.

‘None whatsoever.’

‘Right,’ said Larsson. ‘Thank you for your time, Dr Dance. That will be all for now.’ He stood and picked up his hat from the table. Blom tucked his notebook into his pocket.

‘Thank you, Mrs Dance,’ Larsson said, turning to her, ‘for the lovely coffee.’

‘We’ll see ourselves out,’ said Blom.

Doris had the sense to leave the apartment shortly after they did. I sank back into the sofa and closed my eyes. I had a raging headache.

5.

‘WELL, AT LEAST … something’s … happening,’ Lina wheezed when I told her about the visit from the police.

‘They were … at our place … too. Searched … the whole apartment … Made a … mess. Mama … furious.’ She pressed her hand against the side of her ribs.

‘Do they have any leads?’ I asked her.

She shook her head. ‘But then no one … would tell me anyway … don’t want to … upset.’

Lina was in worse shape than she’d been for a long time. As I had feared, her riding expedition had taken its toll. Her heart rate was fluttery and right up at 140, her blood neutrophil-tolymphocyte ratio was alarmingly high. Each breath was a labour for her, a mountain to ascend, and when she blinked it was with excruciating slowness, as if her eyelids had weights attached. I found it painful to look at her. At the end of her session I gathered her up in my arms to lift her down from the treatment table. She had become even thinner and I could feel her bones through her flesh. Her iliac crest pressed into my belly.

‘My dear,’ I whispered into her hair. ‘You must take care. You must try your best to get stronger.’

I set her down and she pulled back from me to look into my face. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips parted. Her breath smelled sweet, like the scent of dark, ripe berries.

‘Yoo-hoo!’ came a high-pitched voice from the landing. ‘Fika delivery!’

The door was pushed open and Doris appeared. She was carrying a large tray laden with pastries and coffee.

‘I just passed by the Valhalla bakery on my walk and couldn’t resist!’ she exclaimed.

I could see that something had to be done.

6.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK I was plagued by worry and sleepless nights. I had a lot on my mind. Lina’s weak condition prompted me to explore other treatment modalities, but I feared that time was against us. My sleeplessness meant that during the day I was sluggish and muzzy-headed. My hands were unsteady and I made foolish mistakes with my work. Nils took me aside one day at the clinic to ask if anything was wrong.

‘I’m fine,’ I told him. ‘Bit of trouble with the wife, that’s all.’

That particular day at work was an especially bad one. I was drowsy and slow and couldn’t fix my mind on any task. I had a near-constant headache that gripped the perimeter of my skull like a vice. In the morning I’d left a tray of blood samples out on the bench instead of putting them in the cooler, which meant they would all have to be redone. It was a careless mistake that would cost hours of work, contacting each patient and scheduling them in to be retested. And just my luck, it had to be Holm who discovered my error. He didn’t reprimand me, but I saw his moustache bristle as his lips twisted into a sour line.

And then, to make things even worse, not an hour later I dropped a box of test tubes in the lab. Every one of them was smashed. Tiny shards of glass went skittering over the rubber floor into all corners of the room. I was scrabbling around gathering them up when Holm came in.

‘What’s going on in here?’ He looked around at the mess I’d made.

‘Doesn’t seem to be my day,’ I said.

‘Mmm,’ he said and folded his arms. ‘I can see that.’ He stood there and made no move to help me clear up. ‘Is there anything in particular the matter, Carl? Feeling ill?’ His voice was tight as a blade. ‘Why don’t you go home early today?’

And that’s what I did. I had no energy for taking the long way home, all I could think about was getting into bed. I was so tired I knew I’d sleep the sleep of the dead. But when I got in the door, Doris waylaid me.

‘Back so early?’ she said. ‘But it’s not Mrs Dahlstrom’s day today.’

Her voice had a tinny edge that sent my ears into a spasm and made my head pulsate. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, blocking my way to the bedroom. She had a newspaper in her hand.

‘Come on, Doris. Please let me get past. I need to go to bed.’

I tried to go around her but she kept stepping into my path.

‘What’s the matter, Carl? Have you been out celebrating? One too many drinks?’

‘Come on now, Doris. Let me past,’ I said. I reached out to move her bodily out of the way, but she dodged me and waved the afternoon newspaper in my face.

‘You ought to be celebrating,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you seen the news?’

She opened the paper and read out loud. ‘“Stockholm man found dead. The body of a man has been found in a cabin outside of Sundsvall. The body has been identified as that of one Petter Dahlstrom, twenty-two, formerly of Södermalm.”’

She glared at me and swayed slightly on the spot. It was possible that she’d been drinking. ‘Isn’t that your sweetheart’s husband?’ she asked. ‘You must be overjoyed!’

She flung the newspaper to the floor and scurried towards the front door, sobbing. She slammed the door behind her.

I picked up the newspaper Doris had discarded and read through the rest of the article. There wasn’t very much more to it, other than that the death was not being treated as suspicious.

7.

NATURALLY MY FIRST thought was of the effect this news might have on Lina. I drove to Hallandsgatan. As soon as I pulled up outside number 36 I knew something was terribly wrong. The sound of wailing and crying drifted from her building out onto the street. I ran inside and found a crowd of people on the landing.

‘Out of the way!’ I shouted as I pushed through. ‘I’m a doctor!’

The apartment was jammed with people.

‘Mrs Dahlstrom!’ I called. ‘Lina!’

Somebody directed me to a bedroom, and there she was, lying very still. Her sister was slumped over her, crying. I sank down to my knees at the bedside. Lina’s face was very white and her lips were blue.

‘She’s gone,’ the sister sobbed.

People swarmed all around us, I don’t know who they were. I shouted for everyone to get out of the room. Miss Fredelius refused to leave, and clung on to her sister. I had to push her out of the way so I could check Lina’s pulse and breathing. I couldn’t find a pulse right away but her body was still warm. I was sure there was still life in her.

A man appeared carrying a doctor’s case. He ordered me out of the room but I refused and we got into an argument. Then he checked her vitals and pronounced her dead.

‘She isn’t dead!’ I yelled it into his face.

I fought to get to Lina’s side but somebody held me back, then I was bundled out of the room and the door slammed closed. I pounded on it with my fists and wrenched at the handle with both hands, but it wouldn’t open. I paced up and down. Strangers’ faces loomed out at me in the dim and crowded room. All I could think was that I had to see Lina, had to be with her.

After a while the doctor come out of the room, followed by Miss Fredelius. Mrs Fredelius flung herself upon her daughter, sobbing, and the two were ushered out of the apartment by another woman. The doctor and Mr Fredelius sat down at the table and I slipped back in to see Lina. She was alone. Her jaw had fallen open and her eyes were wide. I sat beside her on the bed and looked down into her lovely face. Her eyes stared into the beyond, and as I gazed into them they seemed to grow in size and envelop me.

I knew she was gone, that she was dead, but the voice of my heart kept saying to me, ‘She’s alive!’

The door opened and her father came in, mopping his eyes with his handkerchief.

‘She’s gone, isn’t she?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘please close her eyes, Dr Dance.’

So I did as he asked, even though it was the most painful thing I’d ever done. I leaned down, and with the lightest touch possible I closed the eyes of my Lina, my darling.

8.

I SAT FOR a long time in that room. Sometimes Lina’s father sat with me. Sometimes other people came and went. At some point I noticed it was dark. Then that the bedside lamp was on. All I could do was look at Lina and think how I had failed her. I couldn’t save her. I looked at her and I hardly breathed. I didn’t blink. I felt as if my whole body, my whole sense of self, had disappeared, and all that was left of me was my eyes, gazing and gazing at her. Already she looked different. She was changing before my very eyes, moment to moment. Her face had become even bonier and the flesh seemed to be sliding backwards. Her hands were clasped together over the comforter and the nail beds were purple. I could feel her growing colder with each hour that passed.

There was a knock at the door and a man in a dark suit came in.

‘I’m Mr Bergius, the undertaker.’

Lina’s father got up and they went out together. I heard them talking through the door, on and on. I thought their voices would disturb Lina, so I went out to tell them to keep it down. They were sitting opposite one another at the kitchen table.

Mr Fredelius was shaking his head. ‘No. In that case no flowers,’ he said. ‘And no car neither. Just the casket and the removal.’

‘Casket, the budget line, and the removal.’ Mr Bergius jotted something in a notebook. ‘Brings us to three thousand, one hundred crowns.’

Mr Fredelius’s face was the colour of putty. Mr Bergius went on, ‘Can I interest you in one small bouquet for your daughter’s casket? Roses perhaps? Or lilies? Nothing extravagant.’

‘I don’t know.’ The voice of Lina’s father seemed to come from far away. ‘Will you accept instalments?’

‘I’m afraid not. And we’d need a down payment.’

‘Sorry, Mr Bergius, but we just can’t—’

‘But Mrs Dahlstrom must have flowers,’ I said. ‘She must.’ My voice was flat and cracked and too loud in the room. The two men turned to look at me. ‘She will have roses,’ I said. ‘White roses. Dozens of them.’ What kind of a family would dream of sending their daughter into the next world without flowers? Lina, a beautiful young woman. She needed that, at least.

‘Dr Dance,’ Lina’s father said. ‘We’re not able—’

‘Please, Mr Fredelius. Let me take care of it. Let me do this one last thing for Mrs Dahlstrom.’

Tears were streaming down his cheeks. He looked from me to Mr Bergius and back, his face a pale, bewildered mask.

‘Please,’ I repeated. ‘Let me take care of her.’

At last he nodded.

I addressed Mr Bergius. ‘We’ll take the roses. And a car. The best you have. Top of the line.’ I got out my chequebook.

Mr Fredelius had slumped forward over the table. His shoulders were shaking. When he spoke I could make out his words only with difficulty. ‘Thank you, Dr Dance.’

Mr Bergius had a lot of papers for me to sign, confirming that I was to be the one responsible for Lina. I took the copies and put them in my pocket. Then he had all kinds of questions about the funeral arrangements. I didn’t care to discuss it while Lina was listening in the next room, so Mr Bergius and I went to settle matters at his office, even though it was the middle of the night.

Over the next days I managed to come to grips with the thousand technicalities that make up the administration of death. I stopped going to work and concentrated solely on Lina and what needed to be done for her. She was all that mattered. I arranged to have her body moved to the receiving vault. I spoke to the mortician and gave strict instructions as to Lina’s embalming. I chose her place in the Norra Begravningsplatsen cemetery. I chose the perfect car, the perfect flowers, and music for the ceremony. I chose the dress she was to wear. I made sure that everything was of the very best quality money could buy. Her dress was ivory silk, and she would wear the finest jewels. I had a tomb built for her, a little house where she would live. I drew up the design myself and oversaw its construction. Every day I visited her in the vault, to tell her how things were progressing. I showed her the designs for her new house, and I brought the dress to show her too.

The day of the funeral came. It was late October by then. The nights were lengthening and eating into the days, and the winds had turned icy. From the moment I opened my eyes that morning I had a feeling of pressure, of weight, on my head and my shoulders, and I walked with a stoop. Everything seemed to be covered with a layer of grey fuzz, as if a fog had drifted into the house.

The chapel at the cemetery was almost full when I arrived. I could see Lina waiting in her coffin at the end of the aisle. As I walked towards her, the guests turned their heads to look at me, exactly as they would turn to look at a bride entering the church for her wedding. And indeed, the ceremony was more like a wedding than anything else. Lina looked radiant in her silk dress, lying nestled among her bed of lace and flowers. I took my place in the front pew beside Lina’s parents and sister.

But here too everything was covered in that grey mist and seemed to be happening at one remove from me, as if I was watching it all on a movie screen. The organ music started. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Minor. Then the pastor appeared and began the service. But right away he made a mistake.

‘Wife of Petter Dahlstrom, and sister of Greta Fredelius …’

I had to stop myself from calling out and correcting him. Lina was no longer Dahlstrom’s wife. Dahlstrom was dead, and Lina was mine. Had we already been married? My head felt confused and the fog seemed to settle in my eyes.

The service ended. The coffin was closed. We all went out to the tomb. It was small, but beautiful, and looked nothing like a mausoleum. It was built of white stone, and had a window so Lina could look out at the trees and the sun and stars. I’d had blue silk curtains put up to shield her from the prying eyes of strangers.

The coffin was also a design of my own, made to protect her delicate and beautiful body. It was double-chambered, and the inner oak chamber was lined with sterile cotton sprayed with formalin and eau de cologne. This inner chamber was encased in a metal chamber with air-tight seals fastened with twenty steel locks. A ventilation system allowed air to circulate between both chambers, each of which had a glass portion over where Lina’s head would lie. The outer chamber also had a panel in the same spot, which could be pulled back so that she could look out and I could look in at her. I hoped this would make her feel less lonely.

9.

NOW A DIFFERENT phase of my life began, and I started to lead what you might call a double life. I still lived in the same apartment with Doris, exactly as I had before. I still went to the clinic and treated patients. I ate the same meals at the same times and I wore the same clothes. But that part of my life seemed like it was in shadow while my real life was with Lina.

I visited her at her little white house almost every day. It wasn’t that I intended to go, it was more that I was compelled to do so. Sometimes I had no particular plan to go at all, but as the hours passed I would notice a tension taking hold of me. My muscles grew tight, my ribs clenched around my lungs, and before long I could breathe only in strained gasps. These sensations got stronger by the minute until I was in agony. It was as if Lina held a string attached to my heart and could summon me to her side by tugging on it. I would find myself hurrying to the cemetery as anxiously as if I was about to miss an important appointment. I would unlock the door of the tomb with shaking hands, and it was only after sitting beside the coffin for some time that I felt able to breathe normally again.

Lina’s first winter in her new house was an especially hard one, and by February I was dismayed to find a damp spot in the corner of the ceiling where water was leaking through. I set about patching it up, and it was while I was on the ladder, scraping away the damaged plaster, that it happened. A loud metallic popping sound, so loud that I almost fell off the ladder in fright. It was like a gun going off. I took a look outside, but there was nobody around. When I came back I saw that the twenty locks that held the coffin closed had sprung open. Then I heard a voice. Lina’s voice.

‘Dr Dance, are you there? What’s happened to me?’

I looked around. The voice sounded so alive I thought she must be standing somewhere in the room. But I was alone. The hairs on my neck and arms raised themselves up. I approached the coffin and slid back the viewing panel. Lina was lying exactly as usual. Her body was still. I felt weak and dizzy and my head tingled. The room seemed to recede from me.

‘Dr Dance?’

I leaned down and placed my ear to the top of the coffin.

‘Where am I?’ I heard the voice say.

I fell back in shock. The voice was coming from inside the coffin, complete with a slight metallic echo, not from inside my head. It was unmistakable.

‘Lina?’

‘Don’t be afraid,’ the voice said, and it was unquestionably Lina’s voice. I knew it so intimately. ‘I just want to know where I am.’

‘You’re in the new house that I built for you.’ There were tears in my eyes and my voice trembled with them.

‘Do you live here with me?’ she asked.

‘No, my dear. I am only visiting.’

The tears started rolling down my face and onto the coffin. I dropped my head and pressed my cheek to the glass panel. I stayed there like that for perhaps an hour, but she didn’t speak again. When I got up I felt the most wonderful sense of ease and peace, such as I hadn’t felt in years. I went home and slept the deep and dreamless sleep of a child.

As you might imagine, over the following days I gave careful consideration to the matter of Lina’s voice. I could see for myself that her vocalisations were not produced in the usual way that you or I might speak: her lips and face had not moved when she made an utterance. Naturally my first thought was that I was losing my mind, or experiencing some sort of hallucination. This might seem like a reasonable explanation; it was true that I was under a high degree of emotional strain at the time, a situation which can easily result in disordered behaviour in some individuals.

However, after further thought, this explanation struck me as unviable. Apart from Lina’s voice, every other phenomenon that I encountered during that time was completely normal. I heard no other voices, I experienced no visions or disorientation or altered states, as would be the case were I suffering mental malaise. In fact, my ability to rationally analyse the question of my own sanity goes some way to proving that I was in full possession of my faculties.

A much more likely explanation was that I, as an open-minded and enquiring man, free of prejudices, was able to receive Lina’s voice as she spoke to me from another plane. Far from being hokum, such communication is in fact a common phenomenon backed up by scientific research. Now, you might think that your consciousness resides in your brain, which resides in your body, and on the face of it that seems like a reasonable assumption. But to this day, nobody has yet been able to identify the cells and processes whereby this ‘I’, otherwise known as the soul or consciousness, is produced. In other words, it has never been proven that the essence of you, your consciousness, is located in your body. This idea is but an illusion, something we merely believe to be true. And if our consciousness is not located in our body, it follows that it must be located elsewhere, in realms that we, likely on account of our limited cognitive ability as a species, cannot perceive of.

Let me tell you that I’ve experienced many phenomena in my time, both in my medical career and in my travels, which made me realise that the conventional understanding of life and death is perhaps not as definitive as people like to think. It happened once, for instance, on my travels in India as a young man, that I was struck down with a terrible fever. I was seriously ill for weeks and bedridden. One day, I awoke thinking I was in my sick bed, only to find that the doctor had pronounced me dead and sent me to the morgue. I had died and come back to life. All my vital signs had been absent for a prolonged period and had then spontaneously reappeared.

And that is not all: at many other times in my life I’ve experienced first-hand happenings that can’t be explained, and felt energies that don’t fit into the distinct categories of the living or dead as we usually understand them. I was alerted to the death of my mother from the other side of the world. I have had prophetic dreams on more than one occasion. I have been visited by ghosts. To dismiss all this as spiritualist mumbo jumbo would be the narrow-minded view. The fact is that such occurrences are backed up by science. Research by Sir William Crookes, the renowned scientist, proves without a doubt that communication with the dead takes place, and more regularly than you might think. Other research, like that of William Kouwenhoven’s, into bodily reactions and energy fields, proves that there is a life after death. It might not be life as we can perceive it, but it is life nonetheless.

After Lina first spoke to me, I visited her at least daily. I would sit awhile and tell her about my day. Sometimes she spoke, sometimes not. Her spirit was exactly the same as it had been in life, childlike and teasing and at times a little shy. I moved a table and chair into the tomb, as well as my portable phonograph and Lina’s records. The songs reminded us both of those happy days we shared during her treatments.

Regrettably, my frequent visits quickly began attracting a lot of unwanted attention, and very soon I could only visit at night. Norra Begravningsplatsen cemetery is in the middle of Solna, surrounded by houses and schools and stores of all kinds, so there was never any shortage of people around. I guess somebody must have heard me playing the records and remembered who I was, because before long people would point at me and whisper when I arrived at the cemetery. I did my best to ignore them, but then the local children got in on the act. One group of boys in particular began lying in wait for me near the cemetery gates, and when I approached, they would pop out of their hiding places like rats.

‘Here he comes!’ they would shout and run up and surround me. They swore and yelled insults as I walked along, trying to mind my own business. Even when I was safely inside the tomb with the door closed behind me, they stayed outside, sometimes for hours, shouting and laughing and trying to peep in at the window. Their language was shockingly foul for such young kids. Many times I tried to talk to them and asked them to behave themselves, but it was no good. They only laughed at me. Once or twice they threw stones, one of which struck me on the head, very nearly breaking my eyeglasses. I was forced to make my visiting times later and later to avoid meeting those boys.

Weeks and months went by like this, with me leading my two lives. Doris continued with her own life and seemed to notice nothing amiss. Lina spoke to me more and more, and as we became closer she began to repeatedly ask when she could leave her house and come and live with me in mine.

‘I want you to take me home with you,’ she’d say in a plaintive voice.

‘Soon, Lina,’ I would say, when in actuality I had no plan to remove her from the tomb. Naturally, I wanted more than anything to take her home with me, but it was impossible because of Doris. Though I spent many long hours thinking up ways I might permanently get rid of my wife, nothing feasible presented itself.

But there came a point when the question of removing Lina’s body from the tomb was something I had no choice in, it was a matter of urgency. I was grateful I’d had the foresight to install the glass viewing panes on the coffin, because this was how I was alerted to the problem. I noticed that the inside of the glass was covered with a fine layer of condensation, as if Lina had breathed against the glass. I thought the ventilation system must be blocked, trapping the moisture from her body inside the coffin. I tried cleaning out the vents from the outer chamber, but the condensation only got worse. After a week it had grown to a thick white film, like mould, blotting out Lina’s face. There was nothing for it but to open the coffin and find the problem. This was a considerable task because I had to remove the inner chamber, which was very heavy, from the outer one in the relatively small space of the tomb.

I came prepared with lanterns and my toolbox. I set up the lanterns and removed the lid of the outer chamber. Even with it off I still couldn’t see Lina; the condensation was also on the inner window. At the sight of that empty white square where her face should have been, an awful dread came over me, a creeping sense that when I opened the coffin it would be empty. Lina had been silent as I worked. With trembling hands I fastened ropes around the inner chamber and slid it out. When I undid the seal and opened the chamber I was unprepared for what awaited me.

A smell came wafting out, a smell of such vileness it was as if I’d opened a portal to hell itself. I reeled back against the wall with my arm covering my face. But it was impossible to avoid the stench. It was a sweet and sickening odour that seemed to seep into the air in a thick vapour, like smoke. It stung my eyes and nostrils. I took my scarf and tied it over my nose and mouth. I opened the door of the tomb wide, fanning it back and forth a few times to create a breeze, but none of this made much difference.

After a few minutes I closed the door and returned to Lina’s side. The level of decay that had set in dismayed me. I had taken so many precautions against decomposition, including devising a special embalming formula that I instructed the mortician to use, but he either hadn’t followed my instructions or it hadn’t worked. Seen at close range, Lina’s face was badly sunken. Her eyes had almost completely disappeared and her nose was in terrible condition. There was a large amount of foul-smelling seepage in the bottom of the coffin. All the padding was completely sodden, and stained a deep tea-leaf brown.

To halt the process of decay, Lina would need to be completely cleaned up and reinterred in a new coffin, but it was impossible to perform this task right there in the cemetery. Even if I could have transported everything I needed to the tomb, it was far too small a space to allow for the reinterment. The whole operation would have to be done elsewhere.

Then I heard a voice, or a sound at any rate. It was a kind of wailing, that rose and died and rose again as if it was being carried on the wind. At first I thought Lina was upset that I’d interfered with the coffin and was announcing her displeasure. But as I stood and listened more closely it became clear that the sound was coming from outside.

I grabbed a lantern and a hammer and opened the door. The weather had turned foggy. I stepped outside. Everything was quiet. There was no wind and I could hear my own breathing. The air smelled of damp earth, and the fog that blew over the pathways in ragged strips. I gripped the handle of the hammer tighter and stepped forward onto the main path.

‘Hello?’ I called.

My voice sounded thin and lonely in the night. There was no answer. I turned to go back inside when the sound came again. My instinct was to run into the tomb and lock the door, but I forced myself to stand my ground.

‘Who’s there?’ I called.

There came a scuffling sound and a shape loomed out from around the side of the tomb. I staggered backwards. The shape was too big to be one of the boys and it was wearing a hood or hat of some kind.

‘Who is it?’ I whispered, almost rigid with terror.

‘Carl?’

The figure pulled off its head covering.

‘Doris?’ I said.

She started howling again. ‘So this is where you go,’ she sobbed. ‘I didn’t want to believe it … but now I know it’s true.’

I almost felt sorry for her, wandering around a cemetery alone on a foggy night.

‘Why, Carl?’ she wailed. ‘Why? Why are you doing this to me?’

Her voice disintegrated into sobs. She turned and ran away down the path until she was swallowed up by the night.

10.

I WAS FRANTIC at the knowledge that Lina, in all her youthful beauty, was slowly disappearing into decay, and the reason I could do nothing to save her was because Doris was standing in my way, exactly as she had when Lina was alive, always managing to come between us.

I would lie in the dark for hours, sleepless, anxious, listening to the bedside clock.

Tick.

Tick.

Every tick of that clock, I thought, marked the emergence of new bacteria and microbes by the thousand, bursting forth and massing together in Lina’s flesh, preparing to destroy her skin, her organs, her bones. If I managed to fall asleep it was only to dream about her beautiful face slowly collapsing. Her eyes sinking further into her head, her jaw hanging lower, and her teeth and hair dropping out. Her flesh melting away, leaving the bare dark cords of muscle and then, finally, nothing more than the pale bones glowing through. Over time even these would be hollowed, ravaged, and would fall to dust.

Doris didn’t mention our encounter in the cemetery, though she was rather more withdrawn than usual. Nevertheless, in the days that followed we continued with our regular routines: washing, sleeping, working, and meals together. I felt it was important to try to keep Doris onside and follow our usual schedule as much as possible. Our Sunday lunch was a long-standing tradition that originated in the early days of our marriage. When I was a newlywed, so many years ago now, I would race home from my morning duties in my eagerness to see Doris, arriving out of breath and red-faced. How very different it had become.

The Sunday after Doris’s appearance at the cemetery I spent the morning in the Scholars’ Room at the National Library. I’d been there since the place opened, deep in various books and articles, and right when I was feverishly noting down a most important discovery, the notes of the Town Hall clock rang out. It was twelve o’clock, time to go.

As soon as I left the library it started to rain heavily, and as luck would have it I was without an umbrella. By the time I reached Sturegatan I was soaked to the skin and my shoes were spongy with water. A cold wind blew up, and soon my fingers turned icy and bloodless. I hurried through the streets, longing to be out of the cold rain, but at the same time dreading going home to Doris.

I was painfully aware that if Doris was gone, most of my problems would disappear. Without her, I could that very day have moved Lina to the apartment and begun the restorative work that was so urgently needed. I had considered renting another apartment, perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of the cemetery, and performing the restoration there, but in the past months my finances had continued to worsen, and the expense was out of the question. And what I really wanted was to keep Lina at the apartment long-term. By now I’d done a lot of research on the effects of radiation therapy on cell rejuvenation, and I wished to seriously attempt it. It was a project that would require months to execute. My research had convinced me that there was a possibility of undertaking some experiments in resurrection.

People hear that word and immediately get the wrong idea. They start thinking of Nosferatu or Frankenstein’s monster in a pantomime. But that’s not what I’m talking about at all. I’m talking on a cellular level. When I was in India, I learned of a certain age-old Brahman cure for any mortal illness. The principle is simple: allow the afflicted to die, and inter them for a full year. At the end of that period they will be fully cured of their illness. That might sound like nonsense, but I ask you to consider it for a moment. It’s ancient knowledge that is one hundred per cent backed up by modern science. Lina died of pulmonary tuberculosis. That’s a fact. We know this because when she was alive the bacilli that were killing her were visible under the microscope. I saw them myself right there on the slides. But since her death I had taken other swabs from her, and I could find no such TB bacilli. Not a trace. The disease that had killed her had been cured. Lina might have died of TB, but she was no longer infected with that disease. To bring her back, all I had to do was stop the decay from progressing until I found a way to rejuvenate her cells. Naturally there was no way I could explain something like this to someone as conventional as Doris.

In the colder months, Doris always put a row of lighted candles in the windows of the apartment. They were meant to look homey and welcoming, and back when we were first married they did, but now the only sight that really warmed my heart was the blue-curtained window of Lina’s little house.

‘You’re late,’ said Doris, before I even had time to take off my dripping coat. I ignored her and went upstairs to change.

When I came down she was already sitting at the table, her mouth pulled down into a sour beak. Anna, the housekeeper, came in with the food. Every outward detail of these lunches was still exactly the same as years ago, like a perfectly preserved relic. Anna served us the same roast or baked sausages or meatballs as before; Doris dressed in the same style of clothes; the same kinds of flowers were on the table. The only difference was now there was also an icy tension in the air.

‘Where were you this morning?’ Doris demanded while Anna was still dishing out the potatoes. I waited for her leave us while Doris glared at me across the table. ‘Well?’ Her hands lay clenched into pink fists on either side of her plate, like two fleshy roses.

‘I was at the library,’ I said.

‘Is that so?’

I unfolded my napkin and sliced off a piece of meatball. I dipped it into the gravy. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’ I pushed the forkful of food into my mouth.

‘Well, now.’ She sniffed. ‘And what did you do there all morning? If that’s where you really were.’

I finished thoroughly chewing my mouthful before I answered. Muller recommends thirty-two chews per mouthful for optimal nutrient extraction. ‘Researching.’

‘Oh, how interesting,’ she said. She picked up her cutlery with an ostentatious flourish, her pinkie fingers hovering in the air like antennae. ‘Researching.’ She speared a potato. ‘Researching about your corpse lover, no doubt.’

I didn’t dignify her outburst with an answer, and we ate on in silence. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly, keeping time to my chews. Doris’s rage was so palpable that it was like an object in the room with us. I kept my eyes fixed on my plate, trying to ignore her anger, but all over my body my muscles began to tense up, as if somebody was tightening them one by one with a ratchet. To calm myself, I began counting the ticks of the clock. By the time we finished eating I had almost made it to a thousand.

Doris rang the bell and Anna came to clear. Under our regular routine, we would move to the sofa to drink coffee and read the Sunday papers. I was surprised to see Doris, despite throwing me a poisonous look, head for her usual seat on the sofa. But she had always been a creature of habit. She settled her plump behind among the overstuffed cushions and silently handed me the Svenska Dagbladet, just as she did every Sunday. I took a seat in the armchair, not knowing what else to do. The library was now closed, and it was far too early to go to the cemetery: Sundays were the busiest days.

Anna brought in the coffee and a plate of cookies, as she had done hundreds of times, and Doris sat there with her cup in one hand and a fashion magazine in the other. I took a sip of my coffee, which tasted bitter, and started leafing through the Dagbladet. My eyes were glazed and unfocused. I could hear Doris’s adenoidal breathing.

I glanced up. She was eyeing me over the rim of her cup.

‘Off to the cemetery again this afternoon, are you?’ she asked with affected unconcern.

I gave no answer to this. Stay calm, I told myself. Don’t antagonise her.

‘Look, Doris, I—’

She gave a kind of strangled grunt and leapt up from the sofa. She slammed her cup down on the side table and hurled herself at me, gibbering and flailing her arms.

‘You’re sick! You’re a monster!’ She cannoned into me and slumped across my lap, then slid to the floor twitching and writhing, as if in the grip of a fit. The whole time she jabbered away, accusing me of all sorts of terrible things.

‘Doris!’ I grappled with her, trying to catch hold of her wrists before she did herself an injury. ‘Please! Calm yourself!’

She was surprisingly difficult to restrain. As soon as I managed to grasp on to one of her soft arms, she’d twist it free again, as if she had no joints or bones. After a minute of this fruitless grappling, I admit I lost my patience and struck her a blow across the cheek. Not very hard, just enough to bring her to her senses, and using only the flat of my hand. She was obviously hysterical, after all. When she made no reaction, I struck her again. This time it was effective. She sat upright on the floor like a stunned rabbit, her face white with a pink patch where I had made contact.

‘I’m sorry, Doris,’ I said. ‘I was just trying to shock you out of it. I don’t know what came over you.’

Her hand drifted to her face to cradle her cheek. Then she jumped up, let out a wail and ran from the room.

I had to get out of that apartment. I hurried to the door, grabbing my still-wet coat as I went. I pulled it on as I jogged down the stairs. I had no clear idea of where I was going. Outside it had stopped raining. It was already getting dark, but not yet dark enough to visit Lina. I went out onto Jungfrugatan and turned right, deliberately heading away from the cemetery. I walked fast, trying to outrun the creeping dread that was overtaking me. The frozen air stung my face and I breathed in great lungfuls of it. There weren’t many people around. I headed down towards the water, all the time thinking about Lina.

All I had left of her, apart from her body, was a single photograph, taken before she was ill. I still keep it in my jacket pocket and look at it often. It’s not a particularly good likeness. In it, she is standing on a street in the sunlight. Her face is screwed up slightly against the sun, giving her a mistrustful look. Her pose is awkwardly balanced and her dress ill-fitting, too tight at the shoulders. In reality she is much more beautiful than the picture shows.

When I reached the water I turned left and could see the Dramaten theatre on the corner, all lit up and with the gold leaf along the front facade gleaming in the light. Even on a gloomy day like this there were crowds of people waiting on the steps. I walked past the entrance and under the gaze of the golden figures of the muses. I stopped and looked up at them for a second. The statues were a life-sized pair, a man and woman. The man was standing, holding a golden helmet, and the woman sat huddled against his leg, with a wistful face.

Lina deserved something like that, I thought, some glorious permanent record of her physical beauty. Something that would never get old and deteriorate as bodies do. And perhaps one day she would have it.

11.

THE CLINIC HAD become a refuge from my problems, a world away from the strife that characterised my home life. My line of work requires the totality of my attention, and for this I was grateful. I threw myself into the daily round, dictated by the appointments book.

Towards the end of the week following that disastrous lunch with Doris, I was in the staff kitchen one afternoon, having a cup of coffee and leafing through the Aftonbladet. I read this paper for the classifieds listings. It was a good way to find out about new medical products on the commercial market. Many of them were obviously nothing more than quackery, but here and there you might come across something worthwhile.

My eye was caught by the name ‘Dahlstrom’, followed by a short article headed: MURDER INVESTIGATION LAUNCHED.

Police say that the death of a Stockholm man, Petter Dahlstrom, twenty-two, is now being reopened in light of new evidence. Information has emerged suggesting that Dahlstrom’s death occurred under suspicious circumstances, rather than due to natural causes as previously believed. Dahlstrom’s body was found in a cabin on the outskirts of Sundsvall in October of 1930. Any persons with information on this matter are encouraged to come forward immediately.

I sat back in my chair. I wondered what kind of information had emerged after nearly six months. And was the report accurate? Aftonbladet was a highly sensational paper. But if it was true, the police would want to question me. I considered whether it would be better to volunteer to speak to them. After all I had nothing to fear from them.

The door opened and Nils came in. I shoved the paper aside.

‘Quiet afternoon?’ He smiled at me and poured himself a cup of coffee.

‘Taking a quick break.’ I made to get up. ‘Time to get back to it, though.’

I thought it might be prudent to take the newspaper with me. I reached over for it but I was too slow. Nils already had it in his hand.

‘Anything interesting today?’ he asked, glancing over the headlines.

‘Er, nothing much,’ I said.

I tried to think of something to distract him with.

‘Oh, I’d almost forgotten!’ he said. ‘Did you hear the news about Petter Dahlstrom? You know, Lina Dahlstrom’s husband? It turns out that he was murdered.’ Nils took a sip of coffee, his eyes eager. ‘I read it in Dagens Nyheter. Isn’t that something?’

‘You don’t say,’ I replied.

I stood up too quickly and knocked my chair backwards. When I rinsed my cup at the sink my hands were shaking under the warm water.

For the rest of the day I felt jittery, as if I’d drunk too many cups of coffee. I started to get the feeling that people were looking at me oddly. Åsa the receptionist, Holm, the patients in the waiting room: their eyes seemed to slide towards me and linger accusingly. Had they all seen the article too?

Even after I left the clinic, the agitated feeling stayed with me. On my walk home through the streets of Östermalm the faces of passers-by flashed up at me one after another, like pictures in a portrait gallery, all of them with narrowed eyes, mouths awry; judging me. I started to get the feeling that I was being followed. I turned around a few times to check whether I was. Once I thought I caught a glimpse of Lina’s sister walking behind me.

I increased my pace and kept my head down, my gaze on the sidewalk, trying to think of other things, but the corner of my eye still caught people turning their heads to stare at me as they passed. I took off my eyeglasses and put them in my pocket. Instantly the world retreated to a hazier, gentler distance, but even that didn’t completely blot out the stares of passers-by. When I reached Östermalmsgatan I noticed two policemen on the corner, outside the fire station. As I approached, they folded their arms and halted their conversation. They turned their heads to watch me pass. All the way to the end of the block my back prickled under their gaze.

At Jungfrugatan I saw right away that the candles in the windows weren’t lit. When I let myself into the apartment, all the lights were out and the place was silent. There was a coldness in the air.

‘Doris?’ I called into the dark room.

The clock ticked. Something about the apartment unsettled me. The pieces of furniture seemed to all have been moved into slightly different positions. I went from room to room, turning on the lights. Doris was nowhere to be found, and had left no note, which was unusual. As a rule she was home for the evening meal, and if she made some other plan she told me about it beforehand. In the kitchen, Anna had prepared dinner, as always, but she herself was likewise absent. The oven was on, and inside were veal cutlets.

I made another tour of the apartment, looking carefully in every room, even in the wardrobes. In all our years of marriage, this had never happened before. I felt a distinct sense of foreboding. The newspaper article, the staring faces, and now Doris disappearing: these all seemed like sinister signs. I went back into the kitchen and took the plate from the oven and sat down at the table. I took a forkful of cutlet, which turned into a rubbery, tasteless substance in my mouth. I chewed and chewed but couldn’t get it down. In the end I spat the mashed mess into my napkin.

When I woke the next morning, Doris still hadn’t come home. Usually she was up long before me, and in the old days I would hear her talking or singing to herself as she went about her lengthy morning toilet. But that day all I could hear was the sound of Anna preparing breakfast downstairs, and the more distant noises of the street outside. I thought I ought to notify the police. I went down to the kitchen to see if Anna knew anything.

‘Well, her day coat’s gone from the hall,’ she told me, ‘and her good Oxfords. Though the Lord knows what she wants with wearing those in weather like this. Ruined, they’ll be.’

I hadn’t realised that Anna was so observant. I wandered into the dining room. That’s when I noticed the envelope that was lying on the mantle.

Dear Carl,

I’m sorry but I have to go away for a while, I simply can’t stand it anymore. Your unnatural behaviour is more than any wife can be expected to bear. I’ve spoken with my friends about this matter and they all agree you are treating me monstrously.

Don’t come looking for me. I don’t know when or indeed if I’ll be back.

Doris.

P.S. Please send any letters for me on to Lotta in Ystad.

I stood there for a moment. Knowing that Doris was actually gone, and without me having to lift a finger to make it happen, pushed everything else clean out of my head. My tension melted away and, in its place, a deep well of joy came bubbling up. Now my dream would come true at last: I would bring my Lina home.

As a precaution, I put a call through to Lotta, Doris’s sister, in Ystad, asking if Doris had arrived. Lotta pretended not to know what I was talking about, but I was certain I could hear my wife’s voice in the background. I ended the call, satisfied that she was out of the picture, at least for the next little while. Then I went and gave Anna her notice. I would do without a housekeeper for the time being.

12.

MY PLAN WAS to build an incubator tank that I would use to repair the damage done to Lina’s body. I had already been working on the design for weeks, and I’d brought my extensive training and experience to the task. Without wishing to boast, I have to say that my design was far superior to anything commercially available in the mortuary industry. The tank consisted of a metal casket lined with a thick layer of white felt. It was to be equipped with a pump and filtration system that allowed round-the-clock circulation of the embalming fluids: oxyquinoline sulphate and a solution of sodium and plasma. I had formulated these fluids myself: I was a trained chemist after all. The tank had a heating system that kept the circulating liquid at a constant temperature of thirty-seven degrees Centigrade, at all times.

That very morning I went out and ordered supplies: sterile cotton, linen, distilled water, phenol solution, the chemicals for my embalming fluid, Dakin’s solution, emollients, some tubing and a pump. I already had the material for the frame of the tank, sheets of 26-gauge stainless steel waiting to be welded together. I estimated that once I commenced assembly, I could have the tank ready within a fortnight. By the time I got back to the apartment, the deliveries had already started arriving. An ever-growing pile of boxes and bottles was amassing in the hall, and I regretted having been so hasty in dismissing Anna, as I found my work interrupted every fifteen minutes to go downstairs and answer the door.

As I headed down yet again, I considered propping the street door open and posting a sign directing the delivery boys to my apartment.

‘Put it in here, please,’ I said as I opened the door.

But this time it wasn’t a delivery boy. It was two policemen: the same men who had paid me a visit before. Larsson and Blom.

‘Good afternoon, Dr Dance,’ said Larsson. Blom already had his notebook ready. ‘We’d like to have a few words with you.’

I led them through to the parlour and they sat on the sofa in the same places they had on their last visit.

‘Now,’ said Larsson, when they were settled, ‘we want to have a little talk with you to help us gather some information.’ He pulled out a notebook identical to Blom’s and opened it.

My palms were sweating but I feared that wiping them on my trousers would be misinterpreted. Instead I clasped my hands loosely in my lap and smiled at the two men.

‘Happy to help in any way I can,’ I said.

‘Good. Now, as you know we have been investigating the disappearance of Petter Dahlstrom. You may be aware that his body has since been found, and it has been ascertained that his death was not a natural one.’

He paused and looked at me, as if to gauge my reaction. Blom seemed to be having difficulty with his pencil, which was of the mechanical kind. He was busy examining the mechanism at the end of it.

‘Shocking news,’ I said.

‘Indeed,’ said Larsson.

‘How did he die?’ I asked.

‘Can’t reveal that,’ Blom said, still looking at his pencil. ‘For operational reasons.’

Larsson consulted his notebook. ‘Last time we spoke, you mentioned that you had met Dahlstrom one evening in February of last year. Can you tell us more about the circumstances surrounding that visit?’

So I told them all about Mrs Dahlstrom and the treatments. I didn’t go into the technical side of it too much; in my experience police are generally not technically minded, and you can get into difficulties when trying to explain these details to such people.

‘It sounds as if you’re very dedicated to your work, Doctor,’ Larsson said.

Blom was clicking his mechanical pencil. Clik-clak. Clik-clak.

‘Thank you. I try to be.’

‘And what about your relationship with the late Mrs Dahlstrom? Were you close? A very beautiful woman, Mrs Dahlstrom.’

‘Very beautiful,’ said Blom. ‘A real stunner.’

I felt a rush of annoyance at the idea of Blom salivating over Lina, but just then the doorbell rang again, and I excused myself to admit a delivery boy. I took a moment for a few deep breaths in the hall. When I came back into the parlour, the police didn’t ask me who the caller was. I resumed my seat.

‘Now,’ said Larsson, ‘we were discussing your relationship with Mrs Dahlstrom. Can you tell us about that?’

‘Mrs Dahlstrom was, as I mentioned, my patient,’ I said. There was a silence.

‘Your patient. I see.’ Clik-clak went Blom’s pencil. ‘Nothing more?’

‘No. Nothing more.’

‘And yet,’ said Larsson, ‘I understand that you paid all of her funeral expenses. A generous act.’

‘I like to help where I can, and I’m fortunate to be in a position where I am often able to.’

He nodded. ‘Highly commendable. Ever been to Sundsvall?’ His voice was casual, but his eyes were sharp.

‘Sundsvall? Ah yes, up north, isn’t it? I don’t believe I have.’

‘Don’t believe you have,’ Larsson repeated. ‘Hmm.’ His eyes were fixed on me, as if he was trying to see into my soul. I smiled at him.

They asked me to repeat the details of my encounter with Dahlstrom a few more times, and then had me write it down in a statement and sign it. When they got up to leave I saw them to the door.

‘The wife been shopping?’ Blom asked in the hall, gesturing to the pile of boxes.

‘Ah, that’s right.’ One of the boxes had LLOYDS MEDICAL SUPPLIES printed in large green letters on the side. ‘And some items for work.’

‘For work,’ Larsson said. He eyed me. ‘Seems to me you’ll have a damned hard time carrying that lot over to your clinic in Karlaplan.’

13.

AFTER I CLOSED the door behind the policemen, I headed straight for the drinks cabinet. I poured myself a generous splash of Macallan and downed it. My body was strangely numb. From where I was standing by the window I could see the two men exit the building and get into their unmarked car parked opposite. The car sat there a moment, and I thought they planned to surveil the building, but a few minutes later they drove away.

Although I knew I had nothing to fear from Blom and Larsson, they had unnerved me. The fact is, anyone would feel that way after a visit from the police. It’s well known that their methods are designed to instil nervousness, even in innocent people. Stories came to my mind of those who’d been falsely accused and punished in America. Leo Frank; Sacco and Vanzetti. All three of these men were outsiders in some way. Both cases show how prejudicial views can influence the so-called impartiality of the legal system and the media. I myself had been part of the letter-writing campaign protesting the charges against Sacco and Vanzetti. It was clear to most right-minded people that they were innocent, and the reason they were targeted was because they were foreigners, as well as politically progressive. That’s what made me, as an immigrant myself, nervous. Granted, I had no quarrel with the prevailing system of capitalism and democracy, as those two gentlemen did, but my status as a pioneering medical practitioner would no doubt put me beyond the pale as far as the average Swede was concerned. Swedes were by and large a conventional and mistrustful bunch, as suspicious of innovation as they were of outsiders.

Sacco and Vanzetti, I recalled, had been executed by means of the electric chair. I read the notice in The Times on the day it happened. To be killed by an electrical charge requires less power than you might think. These days I believe the standard is 2000 volts at 5 to 7 amps for the initial shock, and that is more than enough to cause unconsciousness, ventricular fibrillation and cardiac arrest. A quarter of that level would suffice. Another, lesser, shock of 800 to 1500 volts is then administered to ensure the paralysis of the brain’s respiratory centre, and irreversible nervous damage. Such high levels of electricity travelling through the body cause convulsions strong enough to fracture or dislocate bones, not to mention more gruesome bodily effects. Fortunately, Sweden had abolished capital punishment.

I had another drink before going outside to stretch my legs. I had to put Blom and Larsson out of my mind. It was fruitless to dwell on a situation I could take no action against, and I had much to occupy my thoughts in any case. Aside from building the incubator for Lina’s restoration, foremost in my mind was the question of how to transfer her to the apartment. Naturally the move would have to take place under the cover of night.

I found myself heading towards the cemetery, though it was not yet dark. When I got there I realised that even at night it would be difficult to avoid detection. To begin with, there were lamps installed at every one of the cemetery gates, and the place was in full view of nearby houses. To make it even more difficult, cars were constantly passing along the roads between Hagastaden and Hagalund. The fence surrounding the cemetery was of iron posts, giving passersby a clear view inside. Lina’s little house was not more than forty feet from this fence, and between her tomb and the street were only low-lying graves without headstones.

It would be a delicate operation, but there are few things I love more than pitting my intellect against a knotty logical problem like this one. After considering the matter, I happened upon the solution, which was simple. All I would need was some kind of covering, such as a large piece of cloth, which could be hung over the fence and would act as a screen from the road.

I went back to my apartment and returned to the cemetery with a woollen blanket and staged a dress rehearsal. I also brought along a wooden handcart with rubber tyres, and various tools and ropes. I could see straightaway that my plan was going to work. Once we were outside the tomb and in the shadow of the blanket, we could proceed around the back of Lina’s house and between two rows of graves with larger monuments that were easy enough to hide behind. This would bring us to the northern corner of the cemetery, where I would have my car waiting to take Lina home.

14.

I THOUGHT IT prudent to wait for the darkness of the next new moon. Unfortunately, each day the sunlight bled a fraction more into the night. The sixth of April was the date I had marked in my diary for the move, and by then there would be about five hours of complete darkness at most, according to my almanac. Two months later, when summer descended, it would barely get dark at all. I always felt there to be something unnatural about these northern summers that the Swedes love so much. Perhaps it comes from having grown up in a different part of the world, but for the life of me I couldn’t see the joy in those endless, light-soaked days. In fact, they filled me with panic. Everywhere there would be a sense of escalation, of crescendo. Every tree in the city sent out monstrous shoots, and on the roadsides mushrooms the size of footballs appeared overnight. The border of strawberry plants in the garden sprouted leaves the size of my palm, and it seemed that everything in the natural world became grotesque and strange, a caricature of itself. As the summer wore on I would sleep less and less, but instead of being tired in the ordinary way, a vibrating energy would take hold, until I felt like the strings on a violin, stretched tight, plucked, reverberating.

I had rehearsed the operation more than once at the cemetery, and by the time the sixth of April came around I was ready. That was a Monday, so I had to go to the clinic, and in fact I was quite glad to have something to take my mind off the whole business for a few hours. I went home early and took a small dose of Veronal and slept until the sun went down. My alarm clock woke me shortly before nine, twilight. The handcart, the blanket and tools were already waiting in Lina’s little house. I put on a dark shirt and trousers, pulled a cap onto my head and set off.

The night was warm and quiet. There was no wind and no birds, and the only sound was of my own footsteps, echoing away down the empty streets. My car was parked on Sibyllegatan and I passed nobody on the way there. At the cemetery there was not a soul to be seen. I felt calm and quiet and sure.

‘Lina, my dear,’ I said as I unlocked the tomb. ‘Here I am, come to take you home at long last.’

Thanks to my rehearsal, I swung into action without having to think about what I was doing. Like a machine I performed all the steps I’d practised. I hung the blanket up on the fence. I undid the locks on the outer casket and opened the lid. I piled the cart with blankets and cushions and positioned it at the end of the bier. The coffin was larger than the cart, and I could only manoeuvre it if I kept the door to the tomb open. I slid the inner coffin onto the cart using the ropes. When the coffin tilted downwards, a few drops of the disgusting seepage spilled out, but I managed to avoid getting any on myself. I laid some wooden boards over the doorsill and pulled the cart outside, then closed and locked the door to the tomb. Everything was going without a hitch. If all my plans came to fruition, I would never need to visit the cemetery again.

I pulled the cart onto the grass and around the back of the tomb, keeping behind the blanket. The grass was patchy and uneven, and the coffin heavy. The cart began to rattle loudly, even when we went very slowly. When we got to the path that ran between the graves the cart ran more smoothly. We reached the fence on the northern side of the fence and came to a halt. Now came the riskiest part of the whole operation, and something I hadn’t been able to rehearse. I had to lift the coffin over to the other side. First I went back and took the blanket down: I didn’t want to leave any clue or trace. By then the wind had picked up and was blowing leaves and twigs along the paths. The trees shook their branches and my feeling of calm was beginning to fade.

I could hear Lina calling out words of encouragement, but even that didn’t do much to ease my nerves. I lowered the coffin from the cart onto the ground. Then I lifted the cart over the fence and went back for the coffin. It was more difficult than I thought. The coffin was hard to grasp hold of, unevenly weighted, and very heavy. I had to hoist it up against the fence using my shoulders. As it tilted I felt the seepage drench my shirt. The smell made me retch and I momentarily lost my grip. The coffin fell down the other side with a scraping sound and landed with a loud thud, missing the cart entirely.

Fortunately there was no one to hear the racket. I climbed over the fence and bent down to inspect the coffin. It seemed to be undamaged. When I straightened up again, something in my back gave way and a spear of white-hot pain shot up the left side of my spine. I could hardly move, but now, with the coffin sitting right there in the open, I had no choice but to keep going. My car was not more than a few feet away, but it might as well have been miles.

I crouched down to pick up the coffin, trying to keep my back straight. The pain was intense. I gritted my teeth and exhaled deeply. I managed to lift the foot of the coffin and push it onto the cart, but when I tried to slide the rest of it on, the cart kept rolling away. I had to put the coffin back down again and wedge the cart up against the fence and try again. Every movement I made sent a spasm of pain up my spine. My hands and arms were drenched with the seepage from the coffin, and the smell of it got into my throat. Soon my whole body was covered in sweat. My eyeglasses had slipped down my nose. I held my breath as I pushed and pushed at the coffin, and at last I succeeded in loading it onto the cart. It was only luck that there were no passers-by to observe me.

Shaking with exhaustion, I pulled the cart over to the car. I slid the coffin into the back seat and covered it with the blanket. I put the cart in the trunk and got into the driver’s seat, breathing hard. Through the windscreen I could see the trees tossing their branches around, violently now, but all sound of it was cut off; all I could hear was my own breath, my own heartbeat. Already the sky was getting lighter again. I started the engine and drove away.

‘Lina, we’ve done it,’ I said. ‘We’ve done it! You’re free at last.’

I expected to fall into a heap when we made it home, but the moment I stepped inside, the pain in my back was gone, and my whole body was buoyed with a fierce exhilaration. I put on a record of Verdi’s Triumphal March and fetched a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

‘And now,’ I said to Lina, ‘we celebrate.’

I poured us each a glass and put Lina’s on top of her coffin for her. I held up mine in a toast.

‘To us, my sweet darling. May we have many happy years together, you and I, my own true love.’

Lina’s voice came from inside the coffin. ‘My darling Carl!’ She had never used my first name before. ‘To you, thank you for being brave enough to rescue me. Now we can be together always.’

I drained my glass, and Lina’s too, then I lay down right there on the floor and slept.

When I opened my eyes again a few hours later it was to an unfurling sense of bright expectation. I lay blinking up at the ceiling of the parlour for a few minutes, smiling to myself. I had my Lina with me, and she was here to stay.

‘Good morning, my love,’ I called to her, turning my head to the coffin. She didn’t reply.

I sat up and looked at my watch. I was late for work. My body was stiff and my back ached, but even though I was aware of these sensations they didn’t trouble me. Then I noticed the smell. The coffin seepage. I raised my hand to my face and immediately recoiled.

I ran a bath as hot as I could make it, and tipped in a box of baking soda. My soiled clothes I bundled into the trash. When I got out of the bath I was fairly sure I’d gotten rid of most of the odour, but later at the clinic I kept catching whiffs of it.

That day, the whole world was transformed for me. Everything, every object I saw, vibrated with light and seemed to have more substance than usual. As I went about my daily tasks I felt like a king in disguise. I had pulled it off. I’d done it. I had rescued my Lina, my love, and now I would make her well again.

Nils noticed my good mood. ‘You’re very chirpy this morning,’ he said when he passed me in the lab. ‘Good night last night?’ He smirked at me, one eyebrow cocked.

‘Oh, you know.’ I shrugged, trying to rein in my ecstasy and look like an ordinary man. ‘Probably nothing more than the springtime weather.’

I wished I could tell Nils. It was a lonely triumph, and I knew he’d be interested in the technical side, but I also had a growing suspicion that I couldn’t trust him anymore.

At six on the dot I raced home so fast that I seemed to fly through the streets. I felt oddly shy, like a new husband. I hoped so much that Lina liked her new home.

When I stepped inside, the stench nearly knocked me over. Holding my breath, I rushed over to the long windows on the far side of the parlour and flung them wide open. I went upstairs and opened all the windows there too, and got a bottle of cologne and sprayed it all around the apartment.

It took hours for me to get Lina upstairs to the treatment room: I had to rig up a pulley system to do it. At last I had the coffin lying on the treatment table. This was the moment I had been waiting for.

‘My darling Lina, we are together at last!’

‘Carl, I have waited so long for this moment,’ I heard her say from inside the coffin.

My heart swelled and I blinked back tears. I unfastened the coffin lid and took it off. What I saw inside struck me like a blow. The decay had progressed to such an alarming degree that I could hardly recognise my sweet girl. Moreover, the smell was now even more overpowering, the dank odour of death was inescapable.

‘My poor darling,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

My heart was torn to pieces as I looked upon her in that sad state, and I can hardly bear to describe the abject condition she was in. Her once beautiful silk dress had become a layer of gelatinous slime that clung to her putrefying flesh. Her nose was crushed. I might have injured her when I dropped the coffin, or it could have collapsed of its own accord. Her eyes were nothing but two black, sunken cavities, and her jaw gaped open. I felt so ashamed of what she had become.

‘My love, I hope you can forgive me for leaving you to get in such a bad way.’

She laughed; her light, beautiful laugh that I still remember so well.

‘Oh, Carl! You needn’t worry about that. Of course I forgive you. And I know you’ll soon make me well again.’

I began peeling off the rotten fabric that covered her. I started at her shoulders and chest and worked my way down. The outer layer of her dress had disintegrated into pieces of slimy mould that had to be scraped away. Underneath this, the lining of the dress had a consistency more like wet rags. These were easily pulled off. Next came Lina’s slip and undergarments, which adhered to her flesh and were difficult to remove. I prepared a soap solution and soaked her body until the fabric slowly came away. The reek was so powerful that I could only work in five-minute bursts at most, in between which I had to hang my head out the window and take in draughts of fresh air. When the last of the fabric was gone, I drained all the liquid from the bottom of the casket and washed everything with phenol solution to get rid of the odour. I had to do this a few times over. I carefully dried the coffin and Lina’s body and laid new linen underneath her. She looked so peaceful then, clean and fresh at last.

All this took me the whole night, and with the morning sun coming in at the window I gazed into her beautiful face: altered and unfamiliar yet lovely. Her lips had receded to reveal her strong teeth, still even and unblemished. I looked into the two deep hollows that had once held her eyes and I remembered how her living eyes used to sparkle with joy and laughter. Now it was as if I was looking out of a window into a dark night sky. In the distance I could see something shining, like the cold points of faraway stars, and as I looked closer I saw that it was points of light reflecting off new eyes that were hidden there in the depths. The eyes smiled at me.

‘Carl, my dearest. You know it’s always been you that I’ve loved.’

At her words, my love for her filled my entire being, like the light of the sun fills the sky.

She looked so beautiful lying there that I leaned down and kissed her lips. I let my breath flow into her open mouth and watched her breast rise, exactly like it used to do when she was alive. I went and fetched one of the dresses I’d bought for her, this one a light-blue silk, and laid it over her. I smoothed it down around her and arranged her hair. She looked like an angel. I was helpless against her charms. I slid into the coffin beside her and kissed her once more, and as I held her to me, death was annihilated by the force of my love.

15.

I QUICKLY LEARNED that Lina was indeed living a life of her own, and that she needed my constant care and attention. I adopted a regime of tissue rehydration through the application of both topical and internal nourishment. I fed Lina orally with various liquids, and I was surprised to find how very choosy she was. It took quite some trial and error to determine which ones she liked enough to accept. If I gave her something she disliked, or failed to vary her diet, she promptly disgorged it.

After closer inspection of her body I found some areas of laceration and damage on her trunk and abdomen. I treated these injuries as I would treat living tissue, with antiseptics, followed by emollient creams. Her extremities were in especially bad condition, and these I wrapped in bandages soaked in formalin. I set her collapsed nose in a splint and bandaged it.

Many hair bulbs had come loose from her scalp, and the scalp itself was badly ulcerated. I found clusters of blowfly larvae feeding on the damaged tissue. It was very difficult to remove them without causing further injury. I had to pick them out with tweezers, a laborious task, and one which I quickly found to be futile, as it seemed that new ones hatched every hour. Flies and mosquitoes began to plague Lina, and sometimes I would come home to a chorus of buzzing emanating from the treatment room, and a cloud of bluebottles, blowflies, gnats and mosquitoes swarming around her.

Part of the problem was the temperature. The windows were south-facing, and by midmorning the room was stuffy and warm. I knew this would only get worse in the coming months so I bought a number of electric fans and set them up around the room, but all they seemed to do was blow the air about without making any difference to the overall temperature. As the mercury rose, more and more parasites made their home in Lina’s flesh. I read the daily weather reports with growing trepidation.

I hadn’t had time to finish building the incubator tank before Lina had come home, but as soon as it was complete, I started keeping her in it. This had the benefits of protecting her from the sunlight and insects while the circulating fluid repaired the tissues. She stayed in there for twelve-hour stretches during the hottest part of the day. In the evening I lifted her out to dry. When she was completely dry I made a fine powder of calcium and sodium and applied this all over her body to supplement the nutrients she’d lost. I also concocted nourishing emollients of petrolatum and lanolin, and certain other ingredients that I do not wish to reveal. I may yet patent them for cosmetic use.

And all the while, my darling never complained.

‘Oh, Carl,’ she said to me, at least ten times a day, ‘I am so happy since you brought me to live here with you. Never was I as happy in my whole life.’

She chatted to me like a bird, and joked with me and teased me, just like in the old days. I brought my phonograph into the treatment room and together we sang along to her favourite records as I worked away, tending to her. All in all, it was, as she said, the happiest of times.

Doris had been gone for six weeks or so by then, and I never imagined that Lina and I could achieve so much in such a short period, or that life could be so peaceful. I received no letters or calls from my wife, and she receded from my mind, like an inhabitant of one of my long-past lives. One night, though, when I was awoken by a noise in the house, it occurred to me that Doris could reappear unannounced at any moment, as unexpectedly as she’d disappeared. The very next morning, I had the locks changed.

I was gratified to see that after a few weeks of treatment, Lina’s condition was improving. I weighed her regularly, and in that time she gained almost ten pounds. The lacerations slowly faded, and when I removed the splint from her nose, it had regained its former shape. Two of her fingers and two of her left toes were slow to heal, but even these made progress. Her body was returning to its former living healthfulness.

But my ultimate objective was to awaken Lina back to life. At that time she was in a dormant state, and yet I could see life present in her body. Chemical and metabolic reactions took place in precisely the same way as they did in living bodies, albeit at a much slower pace.

Most people, as I said, have the wrong understanding about death. They see it as a final blow: one minute you’re alive and the next you’re dead, like snuffing out a candle, but this is far from the reality. In actual fact, what people commonly think of as death is only the initial jolt where the soul is temporarily surprised out of the body. Given a little time, however, the soul will always try to return. But it’s impossible for it to do so if the internal structures of the body have been destroyed in the interim. Imagine the horror and dismay of a soul returning to a ruined body, and being unable to reinstate its functions.

My method of resurrection was to be radiation therapy, which would restart the electrical impulses in Lina’s nerves and brain, and allow her soul back into her body again. This wasn’t some kind of crank idea; new research at universities in the US and in Europe was proving it to be effective in reawakening those believed dead. I already had a very powerful ray in the treatment room, but even this was not enough for what Lina would now require, and when I wasn’t tending to her physical needs, I was making modifications to this unit to make it suitable for the task.

I wished more than ever that I had somebody on hand to help me with this work, or at least to discuss it with, and again I considered telling Nils about my plan. I went so far as to test the waters with him one day at the clinic. I’d read about William Kouwenhoven’s research into the power of electrical currents to reanimate hearts, and I showed Nils the article by way of gauging his reaction. Kouwenhoven had administered 1000 volts AC, together with cardiac injections of a sodium channel blocker to successfully reanimate a dog.

‘And if it works on a dog,’ I told Nils, ‘surely it would work on a human.’

‘Ye-es …’ he said after a long pause. He had a strange expression on his face. ‘But Carl, after brain death, that person is gone. No amount of volts can bring them back.’ His voice was excessively patient, like somebody talking to a child.

‘But we used to think cardiac arrest was permanent too, and now we know that’s not the case.’ When Nils didn’t say anything I went on, ‘It’s a question of not knowing, pure and simple. Just because we don’t know something, doesn’t mean it’s not true.’

He avoided my eye.

After that I got the distinct feeling that Nils was keeping tabs on me. I noticed him watching me. He began asking me questions, about what I was doing outside of work, about why I had left Serafen, about the whereabouts of Doris. He would pop into my office at odd moments without knocking, and once he even came around to the apartment unannounced. I let him in, but I made sure the doors to the upstairs room were securely locked first.

‘Funny smell in here,’ he said as he stepped into the parlour. ‘Formaldehyde?’ His eyes darted suspiciously around the room. I had left the components of a new pump lying spread out on the floor and he indicated them with a nod of his head. ‘I bet the wife isn’t too impressed with that clutter. Johanna would kill me for that. How is Doris, by the way? Haven’t seen her around the place in a while.’

After that I never let anyone into the apartment again.

It is a sad fact that in this world most people, even men of science like Nils, are far too closed-minded and prejudiced to accept new ideas. So in the end I was forced to work away on my own, and finally the modifications were complete. By that stage Lina’s condition had improved even further, and it was a good time to induce her to come back to her body in a fully awakened state. I started the radiation doses slowly at 300 volts AC and increased them in both frequency and strength over a period of a week. Very quickly I began to discern changes in her body. At first it was a finger twitching now and then. One day she smiled at me.

‘I can feel myself stirring,’ she said. ‘Slowly I am waking up.’

I rushed to her side, my eyes full of tears, and kissed her lovely face, her lips and throat. I embraced her gently. Her skin was as pink and warm as my own, and her youthful flesh much plumper than mine.

‘My sleeping beauty, my love! Soon you will be whole again!’

1.

I WOKE UP with a jolt, like from one of those dreams where you’re falling. And for a while I did think I’d just woken from sleep. The room slowly slid into focus around me. A beam of thick golden sunlight slanted in from the window, through a net curtain. I lay and watched some dust motes dip and drift in it, not really thinking much, not fully awake, but then I realised that the window was on the wrong side of the room, on my left. They must have turned the bed, I thought, trying to figure out the room, or maybe I was lying upside-down. Then I saw that it wasn’t my room at all.

There was no row of hooks where our dressing gowns usually hung, mine and Petter’s. No bedside table with the blue crocheted cloth. No chair with our clothes thrown over it, my stockings always crossed on top. The wooden chest was gone too, and the travelling clock we’d forget to wind. Instead, opposite me against the wall was a kind of workbench with a washbasin beside it and shelves above, packed full of boxes and bottles and tins and things. On my right, close to me, was a big machine that had a tube pointing at me like the barrel of a gun, and next to that a trolley with different kinds of medical equipment on it, scissors and syringes and thermometers. There were no pictures on the walls, no decorations anywhere at all.

The room seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. I thought I must be in a hospital. But I saw that I had no covers over me, and I was wearing a day dress, one I’d never seen before. Then I heard footsteps coming up some creaky stairs and a voice, a man’s, humming to himself, some tune that I almost recognised. Then all at once everything came flooding back and I knew where I was: in the treatment room in Dr Dance’s apartment.

The first time I ever saw Dr Dance was that day in the clinic at the Serafen hospital. I was a different person then. I’d been ill months before, after losing the baby, but when I went to Serafen I didn’t know what was wrong with me. The illness had no name yet, so it wasn’t real. Back then I thought, we all did, that it was from losing the baby. The baby had no name either, but was all too real even without one.

We’d never been to Östermalm before either. The closest we’d got was Kungsgatan on the way to Serafen. Even the walk to Östermalm—we walked from Söder, to save the streetcar fare—had me in awe. Along Strandvägen, past that row of posh hotels with expensive-looking people sitting under the coloured awnings being served drinks in tall glasses by waiters in bow ties, past the rich people’s boats, not tugs and ships for industry, but sleek yachts and speedboats. It was another world, right there in my own city.

Everything sparkled. The sun glinted off the blue harbour and threw light everywhere. The women’s hair shone, and their teeth and diamond earrings glinted when they laughed, until your eyes were dazzled and full of swimming spots, so that you had to squint and could hardly find your way along the footpath. And those footpaths were so smooth, with no gaps, and the streets were very wide with no trace of rubbish in them, and there were so many trees it was like being in a park. The ladies all walked slowly with their chins up, heel to toe, heel to toe, and they had little dogs trotting along at their feet, some with tiny ribbons in their fur. Those dogs probably had much nicer lives than we did, I remember thinking.

And the houses! White, with big bay windows and lace curtains looped back. Peering through the windows as we went past we caught glimpses inside those rooms, of flowers, and paintings on the walls, and books. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it might be like to live in a place like that, what that life felt like. I thought of us girls in the factory, our fingers stained from the tobacco leaves, clothes dirty, sitting in rows at the benches like dusty sparrows. I bet these ladies with their dogs didn’t know the first thing about my world, the same way I didn’t know anything about theirs.

When we got to the Östermalm clinic the first time, I was paralysed with nerves. Papa and Greta probably thought I was frightened of the treatments, but the real reason was that I was terrified of disgracing myself in front of these rich people. I still didn’t even think there was anything much wrong with me then. I remember Greta showing me the little glass plates with the pink squiggles on them that she said were TB germs. They looked so silly, like the scribblings of a child.

So I wasn’t even thinking about treatments that day. No, what I was worried about was everyone staring at the three of us in our faded old clothes, staring at us because we didn’t belong. Thinking that maybe we’d got lost and wandered into Östermalm by mistake or something. I thought they might order us back to our side of town. I could see people looking at us, I wasn’t imagining it. Their eyes, in their rich clean faces, would slide over us and then flick away, and their smooth mouths smirked, turning up at the corners.

The clinic was in a pink building as pretty as an iced cake. There were flowers in the window boxes, and the brass on the door shone like gold, and the names were written in curly lettering on a plate by the bells. We rang, and as we waited a lady came out, very elegant. She had a lipsticked rosebud mouth and her blonde hair glowed. She was wearing an emerald-green suit with a matching pillbox hat trimmed with a feather; I can still see it. The feather was brown and curved, like a bit of fern, and it swayed and bobbed beside her head with each step, like it was dancing.

We stood aside as she came down the steps, and the usual thing for her to do would’ve been to let us in, seeing as we were clearly standing there waiting and all. But when she caught sight of the three of us, I saw her hesitate with the door. She stood in the doorway for a second too long, while her eyes passed quickly over each of us, up and down. She took it all in, our limp, grey clothes, our lank hair, our dirty shoes, Papa’s old-fashioned suit—his best one—and she gave a little frown. I could smell her perfume: roses, vanilla. She stepped out of the doorway and let the heavy door swing shut behind her.

I don’t think what happened with the woman would’ve mattered a bit to either Greta or Papa. Greta would’ve noticed but wouldn’t’ve cared for a second what some rich woman thought. ‘What about it?’ she’d have said. ‘We work so that these people can be rich and laze around the whole time. They’d have no cigars to smoke if it weren’t for us, no fancy clothes, no servants. We have no reason to be ashamed. If anyone should be ashamed, it’s them. They should be getting down on their knees and thanking us for our hard work, and they know it.’

Papa wouldn’t have noticed the woman at all. He was busy fussing with his collar and I could tell all he was thinking about was being on his best behaviour. He had this stiff smile on his face like a grimace, his lips stretched back so white and wide you could see his missing tooth at the back. When we got to the waiting room he refused to sit down, just stood rocking on his heels with his hands clasped behind his back, looking at the pictures on the walls. The waiting room was like a fancy hotel, not that I’d ever been inside a fancy hotel. It was warm and smelled of lavender, and there were flowers and lamps and two long mirrors and wood panelling halfway up the walls.

Dr Dance came out and ushered us through to his treatment room.

I never really liked Dr Dance. I knew the real reason that he was helping me was because I was lucky to have been born with a pretty face and he’d taken a fancy to it. And though the treatments might have been free, I paid every time his eyes landed on me.

2.

THE FOOTSTEPS CAME closer, up the stairs. I tried to sit up and that’s when I knew something was very wrong. I couldn’t move. It was more than the weak feeling of a long illness—that deadweight tiredness, your arms and legs like sacks full of water—I was used to that feeling. This was different. I couldn’t raise my head. I tried wriggling my fingers: nothing. Then lifting a single finger, but I couldn’t even do that. Couldn’t even twitch it, no matter how hard I tried. It was as if my body wasn’t mine.

I heard the door open and someone step into the room.

‘Now then, how are we getting on?’

It was Dr Dance’s voice.

‘Dr Dance?’ I called out. My voice sounded strange.

He came around to the side of the bed, opposite the window, and glanced down at me.

‘And how was it? Pleasant session, I hope?’ he said.

He busied himself with the machine, fiddling with the dials, unplugging the cord.

‘Dr Dance, something’s gone wrong!’

He didn’t seem to hear me. ‘Another thirty per cent increase in the voltage today,’ he said. ‘We’re doing well, my girl.’

He wheeled the machine away against the wall.

‘No, Dr Dance, I need help!’

He came towards me and stood at my side. The sun shone on his face, lighting up every craggy wrinkle. He looked the same as always with those round spectacles and pointy beard and that silly black suit with the satin lapels. He leaned closer, too close, and brushed my hair back from my face. I could feel his breath on my skin.

‘Dr Dance! Listen, I can’t move!’ I said. There was something wrong with my voice.

‘Now, I know it must be tiresome for you to be always here in this bed,’ he said.

‘No, that’s not what I mean—’

‘But you must be patient, my darling. Like a flower, waiting to bloom. And bloom again you shall.’

‘No, Dr Dance. Something’s wrong!’

His face stayed the same as if I hadn’t spoken. That’s when I realised what was the matter with my voice. I couldn’t hear it in the room the same way I could hear the other sounds. I’d been speaking only in my head, not with my mouth. I must be paralysed, I thought. And there was another strange thing: I felt panicked, but I didn’t have that feeling of my heart juddering in my chest.

Dr Dance stood back and looked me over. ‘You’re looking very well today, very beautiful, if I may say so.’ Then he picked up my hand and started stroking the back of it. ‘More beautiful than ever, my sweet darling.’

I wanted to snatch back my hand. His hands were really warm. He must have felt the difference in temperature too, because he started rubbing my cold hand between his two warm ones, trying to heat mine up. I could see my limp hand flopping back and forth like a flat grey fish.

Something about my hand didn’t look right, but I couldn’t tell what exactly with it flapping around like that. The skin was this terrible muddy colour, for one thing, but it was more than that. When he held my hand still for a second, I saw what it was. The fingernail on my index finger was missing, the whole nail was completely gone, as if it’d been ripped out, and the other nails, I realised, were fakes, made of some kind of shell, stuck on.

He must’ve noticed the missing fingernail at the same time I did, because he tutted at me and pulled the finger straight to take a look at it.

‘You naughty girl. You’ve broken a nail. What have you been doing with yourself?’ Then he brought my nail-less finger up to his skinny old lips and kissed it. It wasn’t just a peck, I mean he really kissed it, so I could feel the heat and wetness of his mouth. I tried again to pull my hand away from him. He had started rubbing it once more.

‘Dr Dance!’ I cried.

My voice was loud in my head, but the room was full of the soft swish of his skin rubbing against mine and the softer hiss of his breathing. His breathing, noisy and wet through his mouth, in and out. His breathing only, not mine. I wasn’t breathing and my heart wasn’t beating. And that’s when I knew.

You know when people say, ‘It felt so unreal, like I was in a dream’? Well, what I felt was almost the opposite. It was unreal because it felt nothing at all like a dream. If it’d felt like a dream it would’ve been alright, I would’ve known I’d be waking up soon. But I knew straightaway I wasn’t dreaming. And I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew I was dead. Dead, but still here.

Dr Dance leaned close again, until his face was a few centimetres from mine, like he was going to kiss me. I wanted to scream, push him off me, to run out of that room and far away. I imagined running from the building, and the cobblestones flashing under my feet, and me flying along and never once stumbling. I saw myself running past the church at the end of Jungfrugatan, through the crowds along Strandvägen, then over Strömbron to Gamla Stan, with its crooked buildings rushing past me, then Slussen and up that steep hill, and down again, and home and upstairs and through the door and to my own bed under the covers. I willed my muscles to move, and I strained and strained with my mind, harder than I had ever tried to do anything in my life, but nothing happened. It was like pushing against the stone wall of a house, thinking you can knock it over. My body no longer belonged to me.

Dr Dance pulled away and started humming that tune again. Then he went over to the gramophone and put on ‘Georgia on My Mind’, my favourite song. I realised that was the tune he’d been humming, or trying to hum, the whole time.

‘Dr Dance, please! Help me!’

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, we’ll soon set your fingernail right.’

He had his back to me and was picking up bottles, measuring things out. The trumpet and the piano notes of the song rang out.

‘Dr Dance? Can you hear me?’

Hoagy’s voice sang the opening lines of the song.

‘Beautiful though you may be,’ said Dr Dance, ‘at the moment you are a very dirty girl. We must make you nice and clean. Clean as a whistle.’

He poured some liquid into a vat and was mixing things together, singing over the top of Hoagy in his tuneless old voice, but changing the ‘Georgia’ from the song to my name.

He came over to me with his hands full of wet cotton, dripping some liquid with a sharp stink. It smelled like the disgusting glue they used for the cigar boxes at work. He pulled up a chair close to my face, still humming along to the record. I wanted more than anything to turn my head away from that stink and from his face. He began slowly wiping my face with the cotton, and the smell was like a raging animal with me in its teeth. Apart from not being able to move, everything else was just like being alive: I could feel, hear, smell exactly as before. Every dab of the cotton, every stroke of his fingers. The cotton stung my skin like ice.

‘Let’s get your beautiful face cleaned up. I know you’ve been neglected a long time, but we’ll soon have you back to normal. Better than normal, my beauty, my queen.’

Starting at my forehead, he wiped my skin in slow, careful dabbing motions, and every stroke stung more than the last. After a few seconds my face was on fire.

‘Stop! Leave me alone!’

The cotton moved down over my eyes, which he closed and then opened with his fingers, down my nose. Then he rolled up the cotton and stuck it right up inside my nose, one nostril at a time. I thought I was going to be sick. Then on to my cheeks and lips. He wiped the inside of them too.

When he’d finished with my face at last, without warning he reached down and unbuttoned the front of the dress.

‘Stop! No!’

He pulled it open. I had no underclothes on. I tried to pull the dress closed again and I screamed at him, as hard as I could, and in my head I was struggling, pushing him off me, straining to get up. He didn’t react. He went and got fresh cotton and cleaned the rest of my body. All of it, including my privates. With his old, wrinkled claws. He was very careful to get every bit of skin.

3.

I WOULD HAVE thought that dying would be the kind of thing you wouldn’t forget—if you were around afterwards, that is—but I couldn’t remember it. The last thing I could recall was finding out that Petter was dead. The police came to tell us that they’d found his body. There were two policemen, and one of them was very young, with acne so deep it was a purple rash over his cheeks and forehead. They weren’t able to explain what had happened to Petter. I remember the police and that I was crying, and later being in bed and being very hot and then very cold, and then—nothing. Until I woke up in Dr Dance’s treatment room. I didn’t know how I’d got from the bed in my room to the bed in this one, and I didn’t know how much time had passed.

And if I really was dead, and Petter was too, then weren’t we supposed to meet again? Isn’t that what’s meant to happen when you die? You go off to some other place and everyone you ever loved is there waiting for you and you have this wonderful reunion, and the sun is shining and there are angels everywhere. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Was Petter lying somewhere stuck in his body too, maybe in a coffin under the earth? Somewhere in Sundsvall, or had his body been brought back to Stockholm? What if he’d been cremated? I understood now why people get buried together. I wondered if he knew I was dead too.

I tried calling to him, speaking to him in my thoughts, sending them into the air and out through the window, like carrier pigeons, but I was only ever speaking to myself. I tried thinking about him, concentrating hard, as if that might make him magically appear in the room. I could picture him as clearly as if he was standing right in front of me. His hair a little too long because he hated going to the barber, and with that tuft at the front sticking out to the side as it always did. His eyes as blue as the sea and his small square teeth, the front one chipped at the corner. His smile, always a bit slow, a bit unsure.

I first met Petter when I’d just turned seventeen, at Mid-summer. That was the first year we hadn’t gone to Oma’s for Midsummer. Instead we went to a grown-up party at the summerhouse of one of Papa’s colleagues. Mama had sewn me a new dress for the occasion: white, with a blue border around the neck and hemlines. The skirt came to my knees and the front of the bodice was gathered in the centre with a floppy blue bow at the waist. I felt like a real lady. We arrived at the summerhouse the day before the party, and on Midsummer morning Greta and I woke up early and went to pick flowers and greenery to make wreaths for the maypole, and flower crowns. We easily found more than the seven different kinds that you were supposed to pick if you wanted to dream of your future husband. The rest of the morning was spent cooking and getting the place ready for the party, and with every hour that passed I got more and more excited.

Petter arrived with his father late in the afternoon, after the dancing had started. I was sitting out for a while, short of breath, and was fanning my hot face when I first saw him. He was standing there talking with two other men, and he was so tall and fair and had some kind of quietness and strength about him that I’d never seen before. Not that I’d had any experience with men at all, or knew the first thing about them. I must’ve been staring at him, because Greta dug me in the ribs with her elbow and laughed at me.

‘Is he the one?’ she asked. ‘The one you’ll be dreaming of tonight?’

I jumped up again to dance, hoping he’d dance too, and dance with me. It was hard not to keep looking over at him. I satisfied myself with quick, secret glimpses. He seemed to be alone, not with any girl.

When we sat down to dinner at a long table in the back garden, Petter was opposite me and a bit further along. I drank aquavit for the first time: all spiky in the back of my mouth before a long, warm roll down my throat to my heart. The aquavit made me braver about looking at him. I listened to the conversations on my side of the table with half an ear and strained to catch what he was saying. Then he looked me straight in the eyes and raised his glass to me. I blushed so hard my face must have been glowing.

After we’d eaten, everyone drifted off and gathered in groups around the garden. I found myself in one with him, trying to decide if we should walk to the lake for a swim or start up a game of Kubb. It was already dark by then, not that it gets properly dark at that time of year—instead of fading away, the light seems to go into things, making the colours deeper and more real.

The swim won out and then he was next to me as we climbed out of the narrow valley that the house lay in. We were walking side-by-side up a narrow path through a stand of silver birch. I could hear the others laughing and calling ahead of us. I looked down at our feet, mine and his, on the dark path, the neat toes of my shoes flashing up with each step beside his brown ones that nosed their way along.

‘I’m Petter,’ was all he said.

He offered me his arm. I looked up at him and his face glowed in the light, with the green of the forest stretching out behind him. Probably I was drunk but still, there was some magic about that night. We looked into each other’s eyes and everything fell away, it was as though we were standing together under a dome of glass, the only two people that had ever lived. The forest and the summer air whirled around us like the skirt of a dancer. After swimming, we left the others and walked around the lake just the two of us, hand-in-hand. He kissed me, my first kiss. By the following February we were married.

Nothing ever turns out how you think. Back then I thought that first evening with Petter was the beginning of a whole life of days like that, days full of magic. I saw them laid out at my feet, making a golden path into the future. That’s what I thought being married, being in love, meant. But that first day hadn’t been the first of a life of golden days, it was the high point. I spent the hundreds of days that came after trying to get back the magic of that first moment in the forest. But I never could, no matter how hard I tried.

4.

DR DANCE TOOK ages to clean me, hours it must’ve been. The whole time he kept playing ‘Georgia’, and the B-side too, the ‘One Night in Havana’ song. Then he put on Al Goodman’s ‘I’m Still Caring’ with Frank Bessinger singing.

The daylight was fading, and from the street came the sounds of streetcar bells and people coming home from work. I heard their voices and footsteps. I noticed the sounds especially, everything was louder, sharper than when I was alive. I seemed to be able to hear sounds from a great distance. I suppose your living body makes a lot of noise that you ignore because it’s always in the background: your lungs swelling and emptying, your heart pumping, your blood rushing around.

Dr Dance fetched a bottle of shampoo, a basin and a jug, and placed his chair behind my head. He wet my hair and began shampooing it. He talked to me constantly, like I was a baby or a dog.

‘Now, my darling, your hair will be nice and clean and fit for a princess. Yes it will! And you are more than a princess, oh yes. You are my queen, my angel.’

He must be crazy, I thought, to believe a dead woman could hear him. But then I remembered that I could hear him, and then I felt like I was the crazy one. Maybe he did know I was here. Maybe he had done this to me on purpose, trapped me here, with one of his machines.

Usually, having your hair washed by someone else feels wonderful. I remembered Mama washing Greta’s and my hair on Saturday evenings when we were little. We would lean over the lip of the tub, clutching our towels around our shoulders while Mama shampooed away. Afterwards she’d make us cups of hot milk with nutmeg on top and we’d drink them sitting in front of the kitchen stove while our hair dried. I loved that feeling of being completely clean and the smell of the soap she used and how steamy the room would get.

Dr Dance’s bony fingers rubbing against my scalp was nothing like that. He was probably trying to be gentle but his knobbly old fingers bored into my skull, and the water he used was much too cold. Then I felt him draw back with a jerk.

‘No! But Lina, this is no good.’ I felt him fumbling around on my head and then heard a slapping sound as he threw something into the basin.

‘Your hair! My darling, your hair!’ He got up in a hurry and went over to the sink carrying the basin, which was full of some dark stuff—my hair. A few strands hung over the side, like the legs of some awful spider trying to escape. I felt sick. I was glad I couldn’t see my face in the mirror, looking out from under a bald head.

When I was a kid there was a peddler woman in Söder who sold old clothes and things and her hair was falling out. She always kept her head covered up with a shawl, but one day I saw some boys run over and pull her shawl away. She wasn’t completely bald, there were still a few stringy locks clinging on here and there, more on one side than the other, like on a dog with mange. Her hair was dark, so you could see the strands standing out against her shining white scalp. I wondered why she didn’t just shave it off and be done with it. She quickly covered up her head again, but the sick feeling of seeing it stayed with me for ages, and after that I always crossed to the other side of the street when I passed her. I got that same sick feeling when I saw my own hair piled up in Dr Dance’s basin.

‘Never mind, my love,’ Dr Dance said, coming back to me with a towel. ‘We’ll get you some new hair. We’ll get you the most beautiful hair in the land. You wait and see.’

He squeezed the water out of what was left of my hair, pulling out more chunks as he did so. I could hear it coming out at the roots with a soft crackle, like when you pull up dandelions. The more I tried not to listen to it, the louder it got. When my head was dry, he put my dress back on me and went downstairs, kissing my forehead before he left. God knows how he could even touch me, let alone kiss me.

I could hear banging sounds coming from downstairs, and the smell of cooking wafted up to the room, the savoury smell of meat, and the steamy, earthy smell of potatoes boiling. I realised Mrs Dance must be there, or their cook anyway. I hoped it was Mrs Dance. Maybe she’d come in—surely she would—and when she did, I could try to give her some sign that I was here. She’d be able to get help, send for Greta, or a doctor. Or a priest. But would Mrs Dance want to help me? She was probably glad I was dead. I remembered her goggle-eyed look when we first met in the hallway downstairs. I was every bit as surprised to see her, of course. We thought Dr Dance wasn’t married. I couldn’t look her in the eye. I wasn’t ashamed for myself, but for her, having a husband who pretended to young ladies that his wife didn’t exist.

The stairs creaked again, but it was Dr Dance who came in.

‘Oh, my Lina! Sitting here in the dark. I’m so sorry, my love. How rude of me.’ He turned on the lights. He was carrying a tray with his dinner and a bottle of wine. It was falukorv sausage and potatoes and lingonberry sauce, my favourite childhood meal, and the first I ever learned to cook, when I was about eight years old. Downstairs it was quiet again. Dr Dance must’ve cooked for himself.

He put his tray on the workbench. He poured himself a glass of wine and drank half. I couldn’t believe he’d want to eat his dinner in this room, among the smell of chemicals and my rotting flesh. Not to mention how I must look, horror that I must be. I’d put anyone off their dinner, that was for sure.

He got a napkin and came over to me and spread it over the front of my dress, tucking it up under my chin. He leaned over and I could smell the sharpness of the wine on his breath. He kissed me again, this time on my cheek, leaving a cooling spot of his spit behind.

‘Dinnertime at last, my sweetheart,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to excuse my bachelor cooking. I haven’t made much of a study of the culinary arts, but one day I’ll be a first-class chef, you can be sure of that.’

He pulled up the side table, put the tray on it, and perched himself on his stool. He tucked his own napkin under his chin.

‘First, some wine,’ he said.

He took a mouthful from his glass and leaned down to my face again. I willed my lips to stay together. I imagined them clamped shut like two iron doors, and I pictured the doors at the factory, dull grey and thick as my arm. Then his mouth was on mine, his lips moving like centipedes. His breath was rancid. He tried to move my lips apart with his own, but he couldn’t. For a few seconds I felt like I’d won, I’d beaten him, and I felt a rush of triumph.

‘Being difficult today are we?’ he said. ‘Sulking because I left you here in the dark?’ He chuckled. ‘I’m sorry, my sweetheart. I’ll make it up to you.’

He leaned back and pulled my jaw open with his hands, like you would with an animal. He forced his fingers between my lips and front teeth and ran them along the inside of my mouth. It made a rasping sound. My tongue lay in my mouth like a dead toad, rotting.

He took another mouthful of wine and his face loomed up again, the light reflecting off his spectacles, and then his lips were back on mine. I felt a warm spurt of bitter liquid shoot to the back of my throat and pool around the root of my tongue. He pulled his face away and pinched my lips closed with his fingers, then tilted my head back so the wine slid down my throat. It gurgled its way down like bathwater in a drain.

‘And does the lady like the wine of this evening?’ he asked, taking the napkin and delicately dabbing it over my lips and chin.

He drank a glass of wine himself, then repeated the procedure with me. Then he tucked into the falukorv, which must have been stone cold by then.

‘Mmm! I’ve got to say, I’ve done a pretty good job with this,’ he said, shovelling forkfuls of pink sausage and mashed potato into his mouth and chewing away loudly. ‘Delicious. Cooking’s not so hard. The way you women carry on about it anyone would think it’s one of the learned sciences.’

Mrs Dance must have gone away somewhere. Maybe to Skåne. I remembered hearing that she had a sister down there. Unless, the thought came, he’d killed her. That must be it. Who else but a cold-blooded killer would sit there munching on falukorv right next to a corpse? I wondered what he’d done with her body. Maybe it was here in the house somewhere. It could be in the room next door, or even hidden somewhere in this room for all I knew. There was no way he would’ve been able to have me in the house with Mrs Dance still living here. And if she had gone to Skåne, she could turn up again any second, and he certainly couldn’t risk that. If she came back and found me here she’d go to the police for sure, and he’d be in prison quick as a flash. No matter how faithful to him she might’ve been, there are limits for any wife.

Dr Dance was finishing his dinner, forking up every last morsel. Then he picked up his plate and licked it clean with his tongue. I’d never seen anyone do that before. He brought the plate right up to his face and his pink tongue was already out, lying in wait.

‘Mmm, mmm!’ he moaned as he licked.

I wished I could still vomit.

He put his plate down and leaned over again, right near my face. Now the sausage smell had overpowered the wine on his breath, which was much worse. He worked his tongue between my lips, and my flesh must have loosened because he got in easily this time, depositing bits of food. Then I felt one of his hands ranging over my breasts, going from one to the other, squeezing and grabbing, while the other travelled down to my waist and my hip bone, which jutted out now like a handle. His fingers wriggled under me and he squeezed my behind. He was all over me, a huge monster, ten times my size.

More than I have ever wanted anything in my life, I wanted to be away from him. I imagined myself floating up out of my body, the way I was supposed to have when I died. I concentrated hard on that picture of myself, a pale ghost, floating up, lighter than a dandelion seed, leaving my poor body behind, drifting out of the window and far away. I willed it, I tried so hard to make it real. But I remained inside myself.

Dr Dance pulled back and I thought it was over, but he was taking off his jacket and shoes. Then he got on the bed with me and started on me again. He unbuttoned my dress and his hands were all over my skin and down between my legs. The whole time he was moaning and murmuring, just like when he’d been busy licking his plate. His hands were smooth and dry, his fingernails were yellowed and ridged, curved animal talons. They dug into my soft skin.

I had to get away. And if I couldn’t get out, I would go in. I made myself smaller and smaller until I was a tiny thing, smaller than a flea, then smaller still until I was nothing more than a speck inside my body. Silent. Still. I waited, not thinking, not feeling, not hearing anything. I couldn’t close my eyes and I had to look somewhere, so I looked at the corner of the window, the way the curtain, unclosed, folded over the rail, and the curves it made, like waves, and my eyes were a little boat rolling over them, carrying me away.

Out the window I could see that a few stars had lit up. I watched the night-time sky. And after a while I felt like I had made myself disappear. The whole thing was happening far away, to someone else, someone I wasn’t even much interested in. That body was no longer mine anyway, it no longer belonged to me. When something belongs to you, you can control it. You decide what to do with it or not to do. Where it goes and what it does. What’s done to it.

5.

THE DAYS WENT by. Each morning, a shaft of sun crept in at the window, lengthened, and licked across the room from right to left like a slow search beam. I still hadn’t been able to find Petter, or anyone for that matter. Not Petter, not my little lost one. It was as if Dr Dance and I were the last people left in the world. Everyone else was a memory, or a sound in the distance. In the nights and through the weekdays I was mostly left alone. Dr Dance slept in another room and in the morning he went out to work. The nights I spent listening to the sounds of the house, of the street, and if the curtain had been left open I watched the stars.

When Dr Dance went to work, I did work of my own. Clearly, I’d had the wrong idea about dying. I’d thought that leaving your body would take the same effort as making your heart beat when you’re alive—I thought it was automatic. That’s what dying is, in point of fact. Your body stops working and off you go to the next world. You don’t have any choice in the matter. But now it was clear that leaving your body required some work, so I spent those days when Dr Dance was out of the apartment trying to will myself out of my body. It was as impossible as it sounds, no easier than if I’d been alive.

Again I tried fixing on some object in the room, as I had with the curtain-rail, and imagined pulling myself from the bed to there. Again I pictured myself floating up out of my body, but again I remained right where I was.

In the evenings the sun receded and Dr Dance came back. I’d hear the building door open and close, his feet coming up the marble staircase. He always fumbled with his keys outside the apartment door, then came the sound of his key in the lock and him wiping his feet on the mat. Sometimes he’d be whistling. He would come up to see me straightaway.

Those sounds of his arrival always jolted me to attention, as if I’d been sleeping and then woken by an alarm clock. He never came at exactly the same time every day—I could tell from the light—so sometimes he interrupted my work but other times I was waiting for him, aware he was late, hoping he’d been in an accident or had a heart attack and was never going to come. But then what would happen to me? Would I have to lie here until my body rotted away to nothing? As much as I couldn’t stand him, it was still a kind of awful comfort when he appeared. And yet when he was in the house I felt panicked, wondering what he was going to do next. Was it going to be worse than the last thing he’d done? Most nights it’d be the cleaning and feeding all over again. On his days off he’d treat me with his radiation machine. And then those other things.

He had different cleaning methods. Sometimes he would use cotton with the stinging liquid, sometimes he would douse me in perfume. It was always the same one: 4711 Original Eau de Cologne. He poured bottles of it over me, head to toe. How I came to hate the smell of that stuff. Other times he would lift me into a kind of bath filled with some pink chemicals that smelled like Clorox. He would push me right under and put lead weights on me to hold me down.

The bath itself was made of metal and had a lid like a coffin. He would shut the lid and lock me in; I could hear him threading padlocks through and snapping them closed. Sometimes I was in there for a long time, a whole day, or even two or three. As it was completely dark, I could’ve been in there for weeks, for all I knew. Why he bothered to lock it I never understood. There was no one else in the house, and he never had any visitors. Or was he trying to stop me getting out?

He did a lot of upkeep to stop my body rotting. Every day there was something. It must’ve kept him on his toes. A bit like tending a garden, I suppose. My hair only got washed a few more times before the rest of it fell out. He had to go over my whole body with a pair of tweezers, pulling out the maggots. At night I could hear them burrowing their way into my flesh, a soft squelching sound. Dr Dance picked them out one by one, and plugged the tiny holes they left with what looked like wax or plaster or something, like you’d fill in a hole in a wall.

One evening he came home very upset. He slammed the door behind him, and instead of whistling, he was muttering under his breath. When he came into the room I saw he was holding a letter.

‘Lina, my sweetheart. Terrible news! Our love nest is on the brink of destruction. I hardly know what to do.’ He sat down beside me. ‘Listen to this.’ He read aloud:

My dear Carl,

I’ve been trying to write to you for days now, and I start letter after letter, but it’s very difficult for me. I can never say what I really mean.

When I left Stockholm I was simply furious with you, and rightly so. All I could think of was how you were in love with Mrs Dahlstrom. I always knew you were in love with her when she was alive, but I never thought it would go on and on like this after she died as well.

This is a monstrous situation, and more than any wife can reasonably bear. I’ve talked things over with my good friend Harald—who has been a tower of strength to me in this dark time—and he agrees that it’s a good idea for me to come to Stockholm to talk things over and decide on the way forward. Things cannot continue as they are.

So I write now to tell you that I’ll be there in the week before Midsummer. We must resolve this situation as soon as possible.

Your wife,

Doris.

He let the hand holding the letter drop to his lap. He took off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

‘Bah! That woman!’ He put his spectacles on again and went over to the window and stood looking out, fumbling with the letter as he folded it up again.

‘It’s dated the second.’ He stood there tapping the letter against his teeth. ‘That doesn’t give us more than a few weeks together unmolested.’

So, I thought, it was June, and I’d been dead eight months.

‘I’ll have to come up with a plan. Good thing I had the presence of mind to change the locks.’

He tried to open the window but it was stuck. ‘Damned thing!’ He wrestled with it and only got it open a little, then gave up. I’d never seen him so agitated.

‘Goddamnit, but that woman’s sense of timing takes the cake. Right over Midsummer! No one can ever get anything done that week, all of Stockholm goes away on holiday. It’s imperative that we move you to your own place as soon as possible and clear the decks here.’

He paced the room, slicing at the air with the letter, mumbling to himself.

Poor Mrs Dance. She’d get the fright of her life if I was still here when she came back. It was going to be quite a job for Dr Dance to move me, that much was clear, especially if he had to do it alone. I wondered for the first time how he’d got me here to begin with. But the thought of his wife’s arrival filled me with relief—aside from the hope that she might be able to help me, now I knew for sure that he hadn’t killed her after all. I felt as happy at the thought of seeing her as I would at the thought of seeing an old friend. But she wasn’t going to be happy to see me, that was for sure. Even if I was dead.

I only ever spoke properly with Mrs Dance one time. We sometimes said a few words if she happened to be home when I came to the apartment for my treatments, but we’d never been alone together. Then, at the start of autumn, I took a walk to the City Hall park in Kungsholmen. I was sitting on a bench trying to get some sun, pretending to myself that I was feeling better, when I saw her coming along the path. She was carrying a shopping basket with lots of wrapped parcels inside. She recognised me, and hesitated. Then she waved and came over.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Dahlstrom. Beautiful sun today.’ She squinted at the sky. She was wearing a long caramel-coloured coat and thin leather gloves, with her hair tucked under a round brown hat.

‘Hello, Mrs Dance,’ I said.

I wasn’t sure if I should get up and shake her hand as a greeting. I didn’t want to. In my mind I could still see that bulgy-eyed look she’d given me at her apartment. Now she seemed different, though, and she looked at me differently. She was shorter than I remembered.

‘My husband, Dr Dance, tells me that your treatments are going well. He’s very pleased with you,’ she said.

I’d thought it was funny that she pointed out that Dr Dance was her husband. As if she knew that he went around saying he was single.

‘How are you feeling now?’ she asked. ‘Better?’ She had a very beautiful voice, like silvery bells ringing.

‘Yes, thank you, much better.’

‘Oh, good. I’m so glad. And you’re looking very healthy too, with those rosy cheeks.’

‘Thank you,’ I said again.

She was staring at me in a strange way, and then she shifted her basket to the other hand and began searching through it.

‘Here,’ she said as she rummaged around, ‘I have something for you. Just a small thing. I got it for myself … but I think you might like it.’

She pulled out a small parcel wrapped in gold Åhléns tissue paper and held it out to me.

‘Oh, no really, I—’

‘Please take it. It will look much better on you than on me in any case. Please. Open it.’

I hated opening presents in front of people. She was standing there with her hand outstretched, waiting for me to take the present. Her face was full of something I couldn’t read. I took the parcel from her and unwrapped it. Inside was a blue scarf, very soft, not like anything I had ever owned or ever thought I’d own. I held it up in the sun. It was made of cashmere or something similar. I looked up at her.

‘Thank you, Mrs Dance. This is so pretty, but I can’t—’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please take it. It’s perfect for your complexion, those pink cheeks. You should enjoy it, you’ll look gorgeous in it. You’re such a beautiful girl. I hope you know that.’ Her eyes looked old and sad, her eyelids were starting to sag at the corners.

It felt wrong to take a gift from her, but the scarf was too wonderful. ‘I love it,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Dance.’

‘Call me Doris, please.’

‘Thank you, Doris,’ I said, my mouth clumsy around her first name. ‘You and Dr Dance have done so much for me and my family.’

‘You’re most welcome,’ she said, turning as if to go. But then she turned back. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I must tell you that you’ve given my husband so much joy.’ Her voice started to crack, like she was going to cry.

I didn’t know what to say. I sat there looking at her.

‘I’ve never seen him as full of energy as these past months when he’s been working on your treatments,’ she said. ‘He’s a different man.’ She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket. It had a narrow edging of lace.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I said, because I had to say something. I hoped she wasn’t going to start crying in front of me.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sniffing and dabbing at her nose with the handkerchief.

And then my shyness disappeared. At the sight of her almost in tears, instead of having any sympathy, all I could feel was scorn. It was awful, looking back on it now, like some devil had taken me over. A voice inside me said, You have the advantage, you’re on top. I could have laughed in her face. Now she wasn’t the grand, posh lady anymore, doling out generous gifts to the poor; she seemed like the most pathetic old creature on earth, grovelling in front of me.

She waved goodbye with her gloved hand and hurried off, still dabbing her face with her lacy handkerchief.

Later, at home, I showed Greta the scarf and told her about Mrs Dance nearly crying and we laughed and made fun of her together.

If I could, I’d squirm with shame.

6.

THE NIGHT OF Mrs Dance’s letter was the first night that Dr Dance completely ignored me. He didn’t speak to me again after reading it. He stayed in the room for a while, not giving me so much as a glance, then he went to his bedroom, which was next door to the room I was in. After that the house was quiet. It was a clear night. Dr Dance had left a narrow gap in the curtains when he was fiddling with the window, and I could see a strip of night sky. I watched the stars move across it. A while later the moon came out and the room got brighter. I saw the edge of the moon slide into the gap of the curtains, a round, curious face peering in. A soft breeze blew in through the slightly open window, and I could hear the blasts of the horn on the Djurgården ferry. A man walked past in the street, whistling, his shoes clacking on the footpath. I lay there and listened to the gentle sounds of the city—it was right there, separated from me only by a pane of glass.

I thought of the cold stones of the buildings and the streets, and the streetlamps and the lights in windows and how it would look to the night birds passing above, those curves and lines of light spread out below and the house roofs and the roads in blackness, and in between, the slicker, blacker threads of the archipelago’s water. And for each lighted window there would be a person who had their own joys and disappointments, that no other person could ever really understand, and one of the lights out there was Greta’s and Mama’s and Papa’s, and they would be sitting after dinner in the warmth of the kitchen, maybe reading, maybe talking. And down by the docks the floodlights would be on and a ship would be coming in, with white and green lights and a throbbing engine, and the men would be busy hauling bales and barrels and boxes along the gangways, and after they knocked off they would go in twos and threes, laughing and dirty, slowly up the steep hill for a beer at the Pelikan, while behind them the black water of the harbour and the lights of the ships on the curve of the bay were like a mirror held to the stars.

And that’s when it happened. That was when I found I was no longer in my body. I was no longer on the bed, but right by the window, with no sense of having moved there. I had made no effort, but there I was, looking out. At the full moon, rising high now, and the wind blowing some thin clouds along and carrying the smell of dust and the flowering heather from Gärdet. I could see right up and down the street. Most of the lights were out in the windows, except the building opposite. It had a round window on each of its three levels, and they were lit up like three yellow moons. Greta had told me that she and Ilse went into that building to check on Dr Dance’s place, before I came here for treatment.

I tried to turn around and take a look at myself, at my body, but as soon as I did I was back inside it again. I hated to be back, but I also felt a kind of peace. If I could do it once, I could do it again.

7.

THE DAY AFTER Mrs Dance’s letter, Dr Dance seemed a lot jumpier than usual. He didn’t go to work, and was busy cleaning me. Every now and then he froze, like a rabbit that had smelled a dog. He sat there holding his breath with his eyes narrowed.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked.

There was nothing to hear. He was imagining things.

He would get up and stand gazing out of the window at the building opposite. He seemed to think someone was watching him. I tried to get to the window to take a look but I remained motionless.

‘She’s out there again,’ he said.

Who? His wife? Or maybe it was Greta? But if it was either of them, they’d ring the bell. Most likely he had gone crazier than ever, and there was no one there at all.

The next morning he came in loaded up with boxes and parcels.

‘Good morning, my love!’ he said.

He was humming some tune I couldn’t recognise and seemed to be back to his old self again. He dumped the boxes and things on the workbench and came over to me.

‘Lina, today is a very special day,’ he said. ‘Do you know why? Today is the day we make you immortal.’

‘Too late, Dr Dance. I hate to tell you, but it seems I’m already immortal.’ Not that I wanted to be.

He pulled up his stool and looked me over carefully, lightly touching my skin here and there. ‘Because, my sweet girl, you are so very beautiful and that beauty deserves to be recorded for the world to see.’

He unbuttoned my dress and took it off, which bothered me a lot less than it used to. Maybe he was going to paint my portrait, I thought. Nude, of course, that would be his style. But he had no easel or brushes with him as far as I could see.

‘It’s only fair to the gods that I do justice to your beauty,’ he said.

He put on a Wayne King record and started whistling along. I used to love listening to music. It was my favourite thing about working at the factory, singing along with the other girls, and kind of dancing too—as much as you could while sitting down and rolling a cigar, anyway. Music made a golden net in the air that drew the room and all of us in it together. I didn’t notice the time as much when music was playing, and I felt like I could’ve been anywhere. The dingy walls and hard benches disappeared and I became the romantic heroine of the song—it was me they were singing about. But now music had the opposite effect on me. Dr Dance only ever put records on when he was doing something to me that was going to take a long time and something that usually hurt, or when he’d drunk a few glasses of wine after dinner and got onto the bed with me, so whenever I saw him reach for that gramophone I froze inside.

I heard Dr Dance opening the boxes and getting something ready behind me. Then he came over with some tools laid out on a tray, like he was going to operate. A few different pairs of scissors, and a small saw, a knife, and a roll of bandages. So it wasn’t going to be a painting after all. I looked at the sharp objects and wondered if I would still bleed when he cut me. Was that what the bandages were for? Or was my blood all dried up like rust inside my veins? Or maybe he had already drained it out like you would from a slaughtered animal. Was he going to cut me up so that he could move me before his wife arrived?

I saw once, in a book, a picture of the organs of an Egyptian queen. They’d been taken out of her body after she died and put in jars, ready for the next life. I thought about how my heart must look, waiting for him under my ribs, dead and black probably, shrivelled, still filled up with old blood. Would he put something there in place of the heart? The roll of bandages maybe, or would he leave an empty hole? And would he put the heart beside me in a glass jar so that I’d have to lie here looking at it forever? At least those Egyptian queens and kings had their hearts put in pretty jars, and they had their servants and animals with them too, to talk to after they were dead.

I tried again to will myself out of my body. But I couldn’t with Dr Dance in the room, not even for a second.

He was fussing around in the boxes again, then he came back and rubbed Nivea Creme all over me, from my face to the soles of my feet. He must have used about four big tins of the stuff.

‘Well, my sweetheart, the good thing is that I don’t have to remind you to hold still,’ he said, and laughed.

‘Very funny, Dr Dance.’

He stood back and looked me over once more. ‘We’ll start with your back; it’ll be the easier part, I think. And it’ll train me up for the front of you.’

He turned me over so I was lying with my face sunk in the pillow. Now I had no idea what was going on. He spread my legs apart and placed my arms away from my sides. I heard him go to the workbench and then bustle around the room, and then he was beside me again.

‘Ready?’ he asked.

I waited for it. I guessed he would start with the knife. That would be the first thing I’d feel, that thin hair of cold metal bearing down harder and harder until the pressure changed into red-hot pain. He’d use the knife until he got down to the bone. And then he’d change to the saw to get through the bone. Could you even feel your bones? The sound of that would probably be the worst thing, like wood being sawed. And the scissors, what were they for? Maybe sinews and muscles. But why on earth would he need such big ones? The surgeons in movies always had tiny silver ones, like elegant nail scissors. But the ones he had waiting for me on that tray were so big they looked like you could shear a sheep with them.

I felt something on my skin, just a light touch, and I tensed inside, but it was his fingers. Looking for the incision point, I suppose.

‘We’ll work in stages,’ came his voice. ‘It’ll make the removal easier later.’

The next second there was something wet and cold around the sole of my foot, but the feeling wasn’t anything bad. It was like a damp towel being laid on me. With his hands he smoothed the wet material over and over.

Whatever he was putting on me had a heavy smell, like the clay earth of a riverbank. I kept waiting for the slice of the knife, but it never came. I felt only the cloths. He kept adding more of them, one on the top of the other, then smoothing them over. He covered the whole foot and then my leg up to the knee, then the thigh, my behind, my back and my neck, and finally the back of my bald skull. It would’ve felt quite nice if I wasn’t waiting the whole time to be sliced open. And it was a long time that I waited. It takes just seconds for me to tell you about this, but it took him ages to do it. I noticed that the cloths around my feet had started to dry and as they did, they warmed up.

‘You’re doing a great job, my darling,’ he said. ‘As am I. Maybe I’ve missed my calling and could’ve been a great artist. But I’m young still. There’s plenty of time for all that, isn’t there, my love?’

‘I hope not,’ I said.

Then I felt a dull blow to my feet. It felt strange and made a hard sound, like someone rapping against a wall.

‘Coming along nicely. Drying much quicker than I expected,’ he said. That’s when I realised what he was doing. It was plaster he was wrapping me in, not cloths; that was what that roll of bandages was for. He was casting me in plaster to make a statue of me. A statue. Which is exactly the kind of thing he would do.

When we were little, Greta broke her arm after falling out of a tree outside the Katarina Church one Sunday. Mama was so embarrassed because it happened in front of practically the whole congregation. And the pastor saw and everything, and his wife too. I went with Mama and Greta to Serafen. Mama’s face had gone a bright, angry pink.

‘This is the Lord’s punishment for being such a rough little girl!’ she kept saying as she pulled Greta along by her good elbow, and then as we sat waiting for the doctor. Greta didn’t care. She was fascinated by the fuss they made at the hospital, and with the X-ray machine in the special room, and then getting a plaster put on.

She loved wearing that plaster. ‘It’s like a suit of armour,’ she’d say as she swung her arm around in the air like a club. ‘I’m invincible!’

I could feel the plaster drying and setting on every part of me now, and it felt good to be lying there under the hardening layer. It didn’t feel quite like being in a suit of armour, though; it was more like being a snail or a turtle in its shell, safe and cosy, the way I used to feel when I got into bed at night and pulled the covers up over my head. It was the first time I’d felt like that in ages. I’d almost forgotten the feeling existed.

‘Now comes the easy part,’ Dr Dance said. ‘Now we wait.’

I heard him moving around, tidying up, whistling as he did. Then there came a banging noise, so loud it vibrated through the whole house. I thought Dr Dance must have knocked over one of his machines or something, but the noise kept going on and on. I realised it was someone pounding at the apartment door. I could hear muffled voices too, shouting. It had to be the police, I thought. No one else knocked that loud.

Dr Dance gave a kind of grunt and ran out, closing the door to the room and the one at the bottom of the stairs, which he usually left open. I tried to follow him, and I made it to the door before I was pulled back again. I heard him open the apartment door and close it behind him. He said something I couldn’t make out, but he sounded angry. There was more shouting; it sounded like many people, but I thought there were only two. I felt I knew those voices. Then I heard one of them clearly, she was shouting so loudly, and instantly I knew who it was: Greta.

‘Dance!’ she yelled. ‘You liar! You—’ She was interrupted, no doubt by Dance. She shouted even louder, ‘Don’t you dare shush me!’ Greta hated to be shushed.

The sound of my sister’s voice made me nearly cry. I tried again to get out, to go to her, but it was no good. A thousand pictures of her flashed up in my mind: Greta as a child winking at me when she was being scolded by Mama for one of her endless misdeeds; an older Greta riding a bicycle overloaded with shopping across a busy road, her hair flying like a flag in the sun; Greta one Midsummer, pushing her way naked through the reeds of a lake, shouting about how cold it was and then diving into the water. She was the person who had been there with me my whole life, my friend and protector. My sister. I always wanted to be more like Greta. She reminded me of the heroine of a novel, always thumbing her nose at life, daring it to do its worst. Her voice yelling ‘Dance’ without the ‘Dr’ made my heart swell with love for her. She was the same as ever. I could picture exactly how she would look as she faced up to him. She’d be standing there with her feet apart and her hands clenched into fists. I bet she wanted to take a swing at him, and I bet she could take him out too, if she did. The other voice, I thought, must be Ilse’s.

Greta’s voice came again. ‘You monster! You killed my sister and her husband too!’

There followed an explosion of voices as they all began shouting at once, then Dr Dance’s voice boomed out over everyone’s: ‘That’s it! I’m calling the police.’

‘Go ahead, Dance. We’ll wait right here.’

There was more confused shouting before the apartment door opened and then immediately slammed shut. The banging on the door resumed, but not as loudly as before. I could hear Ilse’s voice saying they ought to go. Then everything was quiet. I wondered what Dr Dance was doing.

Was Greta right? Had Dr Dance killed Petter? Was that the reason no one had told me what happened to him?

Dr Dance was coming up the stairs again. When he came in he didn’t say anything for a minute. He was breathing hard.

‘My darling,’ he said. His voice sounded different. ‘We had a visit from your esteemed sister. I can’t believe you’re related to that whore.’

I could hear him take a drink of something. Then he was back at my side again, rapping over the cast with his knuckles in different places, to check if it was dry. He smelled of alcohol. He rapped around the top of my back and down my spine and then I heard him grunt. I felt something working on the plaster at my hip—the scissors. He cut up and across the small of my back and removed the parts in two halves. His hands seemed to be shaking. He pulled off the lower half first, and it came away without a problem. Then he did the upper half, but this time I felt a pulling sensation, not too painful, over my neck and head and I heard Dr Dance swear. The skin had come away with the plaster.

Dr Dance suddenly got up and I heard a loud crash. At first I thought Greta must be back, but it was him, shouting and roaring.

‘Fuck it! Fuck that goddamned whore!’ With every word he threw something across the room. There was the sound of breaking glass and objects crashing around. I’ve always hated loud, sudden noises. I wished I didn’t still have my face in the pillow, I tried again and again to get out. Dr Dance gave a kind of groan like a tree being felled, and something heavy, maybe the workbench, tipped over with an almighty crash. This was followed by more noises of smashing and tinkling and rolling. Then silence. The sound of his breath. He came over to me. I wondered if he was going to beat me, but he started washing my body, cleaning off the remains of the plaster.

He turned me over onto my back again. The room was in chaos. He’d pushed over the workbench that had his tools on it. They lay on the floor all mixed up with bits of broken glass and blobs of plaster. I was surprised that such a skinny old man could cause so much damage. He was standing amidst the wreckage staring at me. There was a broken bottle of brännvin on the floor and a glass of it in his hand.

‘The bitch is onto me,’ he said. He gave a dried-up laugh, like a bark. ‘Cracked the case at last.’ He took a step closer. ‘Bet you didn’t think I’d do it, did you, my sweet darling? I bet it wouldn’t have even occurred to you, my little innocent.’ He reached down and stroked my cheek, my throat. ‘You know I’ll do anything for you, my sweet love. Even that.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not true.’

Dance was no match for Petter.

‘Yes, my darling. I had to have you. Nothing was going to stand in my way. And it was a pleasure, let me tell you, an absolute pleasure to get that bastard out of the picture.’ He pressed his thumb on my lips. ‘And what’s more, I’d do it again if you asked me. In a heartbeat.’

His eyes behind his spectacles were like the unseeing eyes of a puppet. I had the earthy taste of plaster in my mouth.

‘You’re sick, Dance,’ I said. ‘Even sicker than I thought.’

His thumb was still on my lip and he pulled it down, but I hardly felt it. He started touching my legs. His hands were gritty and rough with dried plaster. I could smell the brännvin more strongly than ever. He moved my legs apart. He was frowning the whole time, like a sulky child playing with a doll. Then he reached for my breasts, grabbing them one in each hand and mashing into them with his palms, fingers splayed. He leaned down and kissed me on the lips. He was breathing through his mouth into mine while his tongue flicked around. Still I couldn’t get away from him.

If only Greta would come back. I could just see the way she’d burst in, flinging the door open and standing there with her hand out like a traffic policeman.

‘Dance!’ she would shout. ‘You stop right there, you filthy old pervert!’

Meanwhile he was still going at it, switching between kissing my lips and kneading away at my breasts. Those hands that pawed at me had killed my husband. I wanted to sink into the bed and through the mattress, through the floor, and all the floors of the building, deep into the soft earth. I called for Petter. Where was he? I tried to see the city spread out around me, tried to listen for him among the clamour of the living bodies and the dead stones, but all I felt was empty space. I was more alone than I had ever been.

Dr Dance was still on me, his fingers digging into my flesh, his hands gripping my ribs. Those hands that had killed. They seemed to have grown in size and strength and they wrapped almost the whole way around my torso. He leaned on me and was so heavy, despite being so skinny, that I could feel my ribs straining. I was afraid they would snap. I was afraid. I called again for Petter, but even as I did, Dance squeezed harder.

And then I thought: So what if he broke my ribs? Let him. Let him break every one. It wasn’t like I was using them. Let him beat me and cut me with a knife and strip away every piece of my skin. Let him slice me up into tiny pieces and set me on fire until I was nothing but ash and bits of charred bone. What did I care? I was already dead. I didn’t need Greta to save me, or Petter. I didn’t need this body. It was nothing to me, and I’d be better off without it. There wasn’t a thing left on this earth that Dance could do to me—everything bad that could happen to anyone had already happened to me. There was nothing to fear. If anyone should’ve been afraid, it was Dance. He was the one who was still alive, the one who had his life to lose, his body to be injured. His weak, old body. I didn’t need my body. I had become something else. Something fearsome, something unnatural and not from this world. Something he ought to be terrified of.

I looked at him labouring away in his ecstasy, and had a picture of myself throwing him off me and into a heap on the floor, so hard that it would shatter his brittle old bones. I could see myself doing it clear as day. I didn’t need anyone’s help. It would be easy as anything. He was such a skinny slip of a thing, his muscles wasted with age, bones hollowed. He was nothing. I felt a tightening under my ribs, around my heart, like a fist clenching, and the tightness swelled within me, round and smooth and hot and the colour of my blood. He was going to pay. I rose up from the body, steady and sure.

I tried to push his head, push his face backwards, but I couldn’t manage it. But I could imagine it. I saw myself throwing him off me with such force that he flew through the air, reeled against the wall and slid down it, like a man in a movie brawl, like an old rag doll. I could see the surprised look on his wrinkled face, see his spectacles flying off in a graceful arc. I envisioned biting off his filthy tongue with my teeth, biting it cleanly and spitting it across the room. It sailed through the air, a pink comet with a tail of blood, arcing, landing, and slithering wetly across the floor.

By now he’d moved on to touching me between my legs and I realised I could no longer feel it. He may as well have been touching someone else. He had knelt on the bed beside me and was moving his hand in a rough, jerky motion. The other hand was down his trousers—he had to pause a moment to unbutton them, and to pull off his fogged-up spectacles. His mouth was open, his lips drooping loose. He worked his scrawny arms until he tensed up, his eyes glued to my genitals, hardly blinking at all. If I could’ve spat on him I would have.

I could see the purplish head of his little dick popping in and out of the cup of his palm. Every time it did it made a soft rasping sound. He breathed in wheezy gasps, and a glistening blob of spit gathered at the top of his lower lip, ready to drop. With each pump of his hand his body tensed more, until the sinews in his neck stood out like cables under his papery skin. Then his mouth fell into a slack O, spanned with a string of saliva, and his head dropped back a bit and he came. It went over me and also his trousers a bit. He fell forward. I hoped he was dead of a heart attack but I could hear him breathing still.

8.

DANCE GOT WOKEN up very early the next morning. It was already light but the streets were quiet and empty still when someone rang the bell. There were a few rings before I heard him stumble off downstairs, clearing his throat and forgetting to close the doors behind him. I hoped it was Greta paying him another visit. I tried to follow him but couldn’t get past the door. As soon as I got there I was pulled back to the body.

I heard Dance open the apartment door and then croak out, ‘Yes?’ in an early-morning voice.

‘Good morning, Dr Dance. Perhaps you remember us? Detective Inspector Larsson, and I’m Sergeant Blom. We’re here to ask you a few more questions.’

There was a pause, before Dance said, ‘Yes … er, no problem. No problem at all. Come in.’

His voice had recovered from sleep but was of a higher pitch than normal. I heard them troop down the hallway towards the living room.

‘We’ll be brief, Dr Dance,’ said the second voice, Larsson’s, I supposed. ‘Where were you in the first week of October last year?’

‘What?’

‘Can you tell us your whereabouts on the first week of October, 1930?’ said Blom.

‘October? Well now, that’s rather a long time ago. I’m not sure that I … How could I be expected to … I’d have to check my calendar.’

‘If you wouldn’t mind. We’ll wait.’

I heard him walk a few steps across the floor and then stop.

‘On second thoughts,’ Dance said. ‘No, I can recall it now.’

‘Oh, you can recall it?’

‘Yes, I was here, right here in Stockholm. Here in this apartment, and at the clinic.’

‘And do you have anyone who can vouch for your whereabouts?’ asked Larsson. ‘Your wife, perhaps?’

‘Certainly she can,’ said Dance. ‘She was here with me.’

‘In that case, can we have a quick word with Mrs Dance now?’ asked Blom.

‘As a matter of fact, you can’t. She’s away. Visiting friends.’

‘Visiting friends. Hmm,’ said Larsson. ‘And, do you drive a LaSalle 328? Black?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘A nice car.’

‘It’s not too bad.’

‘A popular model, as I understand. There are eleven of them registered in the city of Stockholm alone. And it turns out that one of them is registered to you.’

There was a silence.

Larsson went on, ‘Isn’t that interesting?’

‘Er, I wouldn’t actually—’

‘I say it’s interesting because that model car was seen, with a driver matching your description, in Sundsvall in the first week of October. On Thursday the ninth, to be exact.’

‘Huh. Is that so?’

‘It is. And yet you maintain that you were here.’ Larsson paused. ‘And do you know what else happened in Sundsvall on the ninth of October, Dr Dance?’

When Dance made no reply, Larsson said, ‘On the ninth of October, 1930, a man that you’re acquainted with died in suspicious circumstances.’

‘I see.’

‘Oh, you see? Do you know to whom I’m referring?’

‘Dahlstrom, is my guess. Yes, I read about that in the papers. Terrible tragedy.’

‘Terrible,’ said Larsson.

‘Very sad,’ said Dance. ‘But as you say, there are eleven 328s registered in Stockholm. And surely more in other localities. So I fail to see what it has to do with me.’

‘It’s unlikely that any of those other ten drivers are acquainted with Mr Dahlstrom, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘And have you asked them? All ten?’

‘We’re asking you, Dr Dance.’

‘And I’m telling you I wasn’t there!’

‘Mr Dahlstrom wasn’t too happy with you treating his wife, was he?’ It was Blom speaking now. ‘Jealous type, wasn’t he? Jealous of you?’

Dance gave his little barking laugh. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say that.’

‘No?’

‘No. My clinical methods are somewhat … unorthodox. Sometimes people are resistant to them.’

‘Unorthodox, eh?’ replied Blom, with a smirk in his voice. ‘Never had any quarrel with Mr Dahlstrom?’

‘Listen here, I told you last time, I met the man but once. A single time. I hardly remember him, or had an opportunity to quarrel with him. I treated his wife. That’s all. Do you expect me to remember every family member of every one of my patients?’

‘Now Dr Dance, please remain calm.’ Larsson’s voice again. ‘We’re simply asking a few routine questions.’

‘I am calm!’

‘Right,’ said Larsson. ‘Now, just to confirm: you maintain that you were in Stockholm on the ninth of October of last year?’

‘Correct. I was here in this apartment, and then at work.’

‘And you drive a black LaSalle 328 and met Dahlstrom through his wife.’

‘Correct.’

‘Mind if we take a look at her?’

‘Who?’ His voice rose to an even higher pitch.

‘The car, Dr Dance.’

‘Ah, the car. Yes, of course. Please follow me.’

There was the shuffling sound of them getting up and their footsteps in the hall and then the door opening and closing as the three men left the building. They were gone a long time. When Dr Dance came upstairs his face was grey and flat in the morning light.

9.

FOR THE NEXT three days Dance was very busy around the house. Summer was well underway, and every other resident of Stockholm had thrown open their doors and windows to let the sun and warmth into the house, meanwhile Dance was doing his best to shut it out.

He nailed the window closed in the room I was in, and filled the gaps in the frame with plaster. He took off the net curtains and replaced them with a thick grey blanket that he kept open only when he was at home. I heard him nailing other windows too, downstairs and in his room.

‘Getting scared now, aren’t you, Dance?’

Once, he went out of the apartment and then gave me a shock by appearing right outside the window, as if he had learned how to levitate. He was holding a hammer and set about nailing something to the wall. It was two round mirrors, one on either side of the window. He came back in and adjusted the mirrors, angling them so he could keep watch on who was coming up and down the street.

‘There, that should do it,’ he said.

‘Seeing them coming isn’t going to stop them, you know.’ I told him. ‘They’re going to get you, Dance. Any day now.’

He moved a camp bed into my room, so I didn’t even have the peace of the nights alone anymore. But at least he didn’t try sleeping in the bed with my body. The white nights of summer must have been bothering him, because in addition to the heavy curtain, he used an eye-mask, and even with that on he didn’t sleep all that much. He would get up and spend hours looking out the windows, watching the street. His head swivelled left and right, like he was at a tennis match, from one mirror to the other.

‘There’s no one there,’ I told him. ‘You’ve lost your mind.’

He spent the third day taking apart the radiation machine and tinkering around with the parts. He replaced the fat white metal tube coming out of the front with a long cone-shaped funnel.

‘Perfect,’ he said as he stood back to admire his handiwork, leaving his tools spread out on the floor. ‘Now Lina,’ he said, ‘today we try something new. What you see before you, my darling, is something very special.’

He wheeled the machine over to me.

‘This machine here,’ he patted the side of it, like it was a horse, ‘is the only one of its kind in the whole country.’ He aimed the thin end of the funnel right at my heart. ‘You lie still, my love. This won’t hurt a bit.’

He pressed the switch at the side and the machine hummed and gently vibrated. It sounded different to usual. He’d used this thing on me nearly every day, and I’d never been able to feel its action, not since I died anyway. But this time when he switched on the current, I felt it. Something passed through me in a trembling wave, a vibration that seemed to radiate out from the centre of my heart through my ribs and out of my fingertips. Dance was right—it didn’t hurt.

Dance stood in the corner, timing with his watch. He looked different to me too: more shrunken, even thinner. Maybe he’d been like that for a while and I hadn’t paid attention, or maybe it was because of his recent worries and sleepless nights.

I noticed that he got out of breath wheeling the machine away and fetching the basin of water to clean me. His knees cracked like pistols when he sat down on his stool.

‘You better watch yourself, old man. Sounds like your joints aren’t what they used to be.’

His body was slowly coming undone, I realised, just like mine was. The difference was, he still needed his.

‘Oof. Tired today,’ he said.

‘Tired? Sounds like you’re about to drop off the perch. How old are you, anyway? A hundred?’ I had no idea.

When I thought about it, it was surprising he’d survived this long. There were countless accidents lying in wait for him in that room alone. Moving the radiation machine, for example—a great, ungainly thing it was, on ridiculously tiny wheels. And if he was so careless as to leave his tools lying about, he shouldn’t be surprised if one of the wheels were to catch on a discarded wrench, causing the machine to topple over onto him—and then how would he get out from under it? There was no way he’d be strong enough to lift it off himself. It wasn’t like I could help. Or would.

And even cleaning me, as he was right now, was a task that always resulted in the floor being covered in puddles of water, which he never mopped up, the lazy man. It would be all too easy for an old man to slip in conditions like that. He usually wore these funny tennis shoes that looked like they’d not have much grip in the wet. And if he did slip, chances were that he’d fall backwards. Maybe he’d try to grab something to hold himself steady, but his reflexes weren’t so good either. It stood to reason that the back of his head, right at the base of his neck, that very tender spot, would strike something on the way down, the corner of the stool or the workbench or one of the machines, or the head of the hammer he’d left on the floor—there were so many things in that cluttered place. Then he’d lie sprawled over the floor, maybe not instantly dead, but unconscious. He might wake up later in awful pain. Maybe he’d be paralysed.

As I lay there while he washed me, I considered these possibilities in the minutest detail. I pictured his tennis shoe in the puddle, the water rippling around the rubber toe, the sudden jerk he made when he lost his balance, his head snapping backwards. I knew the exact pitch of the crack of his skull against the table, the sound his flesh and bones would make as they hit the floor, his gasp of surprise: ‘Uh!’

I concentrated so hard on this sequence—the shoe, the water, the jerk, the cracking sound, the gasp—that this concentration was all that was left of me. The shoe, the water, the jerk, the crack, the gasp. Shoe water jerk crack gasp.

Dance stood up then and as he walked over to the workbench he stepped in a puddle and skidded on the slippery heel of his shoe. Something light rushed through me and I leapt up and out of my body, like a cat springing up onto a table, in time with his jerking motion. He flailed his arms and managed to right himself, but by then I was out of the body and this time it felt different. I realised I could move around the room in any direction I chose. I turned to face the bed, and that’s when I saw myself for the first time, saw my body.

I say ‘my body’, but I would never have known it was mine if I hadn’t just come from it. I wouldn’t have recognised it. The hair was gone, I knew about that, but seeing something is a whole different thing to knowing about it. The skin on the scalp was ulcerous and patchy. The face had collapsed into a moony disc, like a failed cake, and the nose looked to have been replaced with wax or plaster. It was a bad job, it was much too narrow and curved to one side, and so clumsily formed it looked like a kid had made it in craft class at school. The ears, too, were lumpen blobs. The eyes were the glass eyes of a toy animal, with the large iris as black as the pupil. The eyelashes were gone and the eyes were lined all the way around with kohl. The eyebrows had been painted on but were nothing like how my eyebrows used to look. Had he even seen my living face? The fake brows were much too high and long—two arcs like black rainbows. Together with the shrunken nose, they gave the face a surprised expression, surprised but not pleased, as if I’d come home to find someone I didn’t much like had invited themselves over for dinner.

Looking at the body, I didn’t feel anything in particular. Not angry, or sad. Only that it was strange to think I’d lived in it for more than twenty years. Now it was hard to know what it had to do with me at all. And what Dance saw there, I had no idea.

Still free of the body, I went straight for the door to get out. Out of that room and out of that house. But the door was closed and I couldn’t make my way past it. I couldn’t understand why a door should make a difference if I was free of the body. I tried the window, which was nailed shut, then I went over every inch of the room, floor to ceiling, but the place was sealed.

Dance was at the workbench, busy filling containers with chemicals, measuring things out. I went and placed myself behind him. I found I was any height I chose. I made myself taller than he was.

‘Hello, Dance,’ I said.

I looked at the back of his crepey neck, and the white hairs crawling up from his collar. He swivelled around and stood looking through me. His weak, watery eyes glistened behind his spectacles.

‘Lina, my sweetheart? Did you say something?’

It was strange to look at his face so close up, with him standing upright. The overhead light glanced off the bald dome of his head.

‘I know I’ve been neglecting you,’ he said, and went over to the bed. He leaned down and stroked the face with the back of his hand. I couldn’t feel his touch.

‘No, Dance, you blind old fool,’ I said. ‘That’s not me. I’m over here.’

He paused for a moment and glanced around, then kept on stroking the face.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the body. ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind.’

He went back to the workbench and started taking bottles down from the shelves above. He had to strain to reach them, standing up on his toes and edging them out with his fingertips.

‘Why don’t you use your stool for a stepladder, Dance?’ I asked. I willed him to do it. I imagined kicking the stool out from under him. I imagined his head cracking against the floor. Every now and then he’d stop what he was doing and half turn and look around the room.

From up close I could read the labels on the bottles and tins that he used on the body. Some of them were familiar to me: olive oil, beeswax, iodine, turpentine. Others I’d never heard of: formalin, phenol solution, hexaphene, Sircol. I noticed a large bottle that Dance had knocked when he pulled out the one beside it. Now it was balancing on the very edge of the shelf, right over his left shoulder. If it fell, it’d hit him for sure. And if he were to shift to the left a bit it might even hit him on his head. I reached for the bottle, but I couldn’t make contact.

Instead, I concentrated hard on the bottle. It was almost full, it would be heavy. It was made of thick green glass and embossed with the brand name Borup, which was also written in fat yellow letters on the label. Borup. I focused so hard I became the bottle. It just needed a tiny push, and then it would drop. Dance wouldn’t hear it coming. It’d tilt slightly and then start a silent slide through the air until it met with his bald, shiny head. The bottle wouldn’t break but Dance’s skull would crack. He’d crumple to the floor like a puppet, all knees and elbows, stunned. There wouldn’t be much blood spilt, barely a drop.

Dance was now going back and forth to the coffin bath. He filled a basin with water and rested it on the workbench for a second. When he picked it up again he knocked it against the upright of the shelves and the Borup bottle came tumbling down, exactly as I had willed it. I cheered with excitement. He saw it coming, though, and dodged out of the way, slopping water down his front. Even so, the bottle hit him on the shoulder. He stumbled and slopped more water from the basin.

‘Goddamnit!’

The Borup bottle rolled away under the bed, unbroken.

‘Better watch yourself, Dance. Better be careful.’

The water trickled under the radiation machine. Dance put down the basin and cursed under his breath as he shook water off his hands and tried to mop his suit with his handkerchief. He fetched a rag from the cupboard and got down on his hands and knees to wipe the floor. Now and then he reached up to feel his shoulder.

I went to the window and looked out. It was late afternoon and the sky was a flat chalky blue. The sun’s heat came through the glass, though I couldn’t feel it in the same way as before, it was more like being inside the heat, breathing it, and even with the window closed I could hear all the sounds of summer: the voices of swimmers and fishers and people on boats echoing out over the water at Djurgårdsbrunnsviken, the ferry horns and the screams from the rollercoaster at Gröna Lund. Two small girls walked past in floral sunhats, carrying a wicker basket between them, heading in the direction of the water. From the other direction a woman turned into Jungfrugatan from Linnégatan. She was also in a sunhat and wore sunglasses, and carried a Japanese fan which she flapped lazily in front of her face. The woman looked familiar. I could hear her heels click neatly along the footpath. She came closer in brisk steps. It was Mrs Doris Dance.

‘Hey, Dance,’ I said. He was still crawling around on the floor, mopping up under the bed. ‘Looks like you’ve got a visitor.’

Two minutes later I heard the street door open and close and then the clack of her heels up the staircase. Dance heard the heels too, and at the sound his head swivelled towards the door and he sat back on his haunches like a nervous dog.

‘Get ready,’ I said.

He leapt up and out the door in one surprisingly agile motion. There was the sound of keys jangling outside the door to the apartment and his feet thundering down the stairs. He’d left the door of the room open and I wasted no time trying to get out, but it was as impossible as when it had been closed. I heard him open the apartment door.

‘Carl!’ came Mrs Dance’s voice.

There was a scuffling sound and then the door closing.

‘Carl? What are you doing?’ Mrs Dance’s voice came from outside the apartment.

‘Hello, Doris,’ said Dance. He must have stepped outside to meet her. ‘Look, I’m afraid you’ve caught me at rather a bad moment. I’m on the way out. Urgent appointment.’

She gave a laugh. ‘Carl, come now. You haven’t seen me in months! Surely you can spend a few—’

‘Come on.’

There was the sound of their feet going down the stairs, and Mrs Dance’s voice receding into the distance. ‘Carl! What in god’s name has happened to your suit? You’re soaked!’

I went back to the window and saw them come out of the building and step onto the footpath below.

‘… and I said in my letter, you and I need to have things out.’

‘Mrs Dance! Up here!’

She glanced to her left and to her right. Had she heard me? But she went on talking. ‘Things simply can’t go on like this.’

I tried to bang on the glass or make some kind of noise but I couldn’t, all the objects in the room had become as soft as whipped cream.

‘Mrs Dance!’

She turned her face up and looked at the windows of the apartment.

Dance grabbed her by the elbow. ‘Come on, Doris, I’ve got to get on. If you want to talk, fine, we can walk and talk.’ He steered her away down Jungfrugatan towards the church. As she trotted by his side she turned to look back. It seemed like she was looking at me.

10.

I REMAINED FREE from the body. Out of habit, I tried the door and the window again after Dance had left. I made myself flat to get under the door, but would always find myself pushed back again. I slid along the walls looking for any tiny gap along the window frame, over the wood looking for any opening. But the floorboards fitted perfectly into one another, the walls had no cracks. I drifted through the room, taking another look at everything. The room was always so full of objects, and Dance wasn’t much of a housekeeper, that was for sure. There were dirty plates stacked up on the floor and glasses in the sink. Splatters of plaster still covered the floor around the bed, and under the bed were the pieces of the plaster cast of the body. They had no more meaning for me than the thing lying on the bed.

On the workbench Dance had left a notebook open, where he was recording things about the dead body—the weight, what looked to be a list of chemicals he was treating it with, and the radiation times. There was also a magazine open to a page with pictures of dogs with wires attached to them. Underneath was an article:

Mechanised Blood Circulation as a Method of Revivifying Animals by Professors K.L. Smythe and E.W.R. Battencourt.

Recent developments in the field of biological experimental research have established that animal tissues, and indeed complete organs, can be perpetually conserved in a living state under laboratory conditions. Further, animal organs, and even an entire organism, can be revivified through the application of electrical currents. William Kouwenhoven’s research …

On the opposite page were diagrams of hearts with arrows showing where the blood went in and out. These professors, and Dance, completely had the wrong end of the stick: they didn’t know that bodies meant nothing.

It was Midsummer Eve, so it stayed dusk until morning. Dance was out the whole night. The city was quiet for the holiday, all empty streets and bridges, shuttered shops and silent houses. Everyone had gone to the country and not a car or person or a barking dog could be heard. That night, Stockholm belonged to the birds. They wheeled and cried, making sharp black shapes against the lavender sky, they chattered in the trees and snatched after mosquitoes. I could hear the buzz of the cicadas at Gärdet, and the fish leaping in Djurgårdsbrunnsviken.

When the sun started to climb again a car appeared, a large black one. It drove slowly along Jungfrugatan, lurching over the cobblestones. It ground to a halt right outside. I couldn’t tell if it was Dance’s car. No one got out. Then the light started to change. Instead of getting brighter as the sun rose, the sky darkened again, and became that sick yellow colour that tells you a storm is coming. The birds went away, and the quiet was like a held breath.

Dance appeared, walking up Jungfrugatan from Storgatan. I could hear him whistling, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He was carrying a bunch of flowers and a parcel. His footsteps made a quickfire echo as he ran up the stairs.

‘Lina! Good morning, my darling, and happy Midsummer!’

He kissed the forehead of the body on the bed. His suit definitely looked the worse for wear.

‘I have some wonderful news,’ he said. He was leaning over the body and addressing its face. ‘Doris will shortly be out of the picture.’

He chuckled.

‘She has requested a divorce. And you know what that means, don’t you?’ He stroked the corpse’s face. ‘Now you will be my bride, not only in my heart, but in the eyes of the law.’

‘Pretty sure you can’t marry a rotting corpse, Dance.’

He held out the bouquet with a flourish. ‘And here are some lovely flowers for you, my queen!’

It was a bunch of wildflowers that he’d obviously picked himself. I could see that he had some smörboll along with the chickweed, cornflowers and dandelions, and the foul smell of it was already wafting through the room. Maybe he thought it was the body that was making the stench, or, mad as he was, maybe he even liked it.

‘Your flowers stink.’

‘Now, I’m going to make a wreath for you,’ he said. ‘A Midsummer crown for my queen!’ Only Dance would think of adorning that ulcerated head with flowers. Though at least then it’d be covered up.

‘But first,’ he said, holding up the parcel, ‘I have a surprise for you.’

He sat down on his little stool with the parcel in his lap and started untying the string. ‘I had this made especially for you in Germany. By the finest craftsman, just for you, my darling.’

He pulled a brown hairy lump from the paper and held it in the air, where it dangled limply, like a dead kitten. He shook it out and placed it on the bald head. It was a wig.

‘It’s made of real hair,’ he said. ‘Not your own, unfortunately, there wasn’t enough of it. But it is real human hair.’

He was fussing with the thing, trying to get it in position. I watched from the windowsill.

‘There!’ he said ‘A perfect fit!’ He stood back to take in the full effect. The wig looked like a bird roosting on the corpse’s head.

‘The bald head was better,’ I told him.

‘It’s perfect! Just gorgeous,’ he said, then he jumped up and scuttled from the room as if he’d remembered something. I heard him go next door and he came back with a hand mirror, which he held up in front of the corpse’s face.

‘See? They did a great job. It’s different from your natural colour, but I like it better this way.’

He put on a Bix Beiderbecke record, ‘Rhythm King’, and started messing around with the flowers. He began cheerfully enough, whistling and humming along to Bix, but after about half an hour the cheeriness had given way to cursing. I couldn’t stand watching his fumblings. He got up and poured himself a glass of aquavit. Maybe another hour passed, or even more. He kept drinking and working away at the flowers, dripping sweat and repeatedly pushing his spectacles back up his nose. Now, I’ve seen some terrible flower crowns in my time, but they were nothing compared to what Dance came up with that day. His clumsy fingers had mashed the stalks to a pulp as he tried to weave them together, and he’d lost most of the blooms. Eventually he gave up and draped his mauled string of flowers on the corpse’s forehead and sort of tucked it in behind. At least it covered up part of the wig.

By then the weather had really turned. The sky was darkening with the coming storm and the wind was rushing through the trees and rattling against the windows. Dance kept drinking. He took the corpse’s dress off and carefully washed and dried the body.

‘And now you get another surprise, you lucky princess,’ he said.

He went out again and returned with a dress I hadn’t seen before. He turned it back and forth, showing it to the corpse.

‘Only the best for my girl,’ he said.

It was floor-length, of creamy silk, with a short train. The front was plain, but it had a very low scooped back and thin straps that fastened behind with a tiny jewelled clip. It must’ve cost him a fortune.

He had a bit of trouble putting the dress on the body, he must’ve been pretty drunk by now. He got the straps tangled up and threaded the arms through the wrong holes. He had to keep lifting up the body to get the dress under it. It was like watching someone try to set up a tent for the first time. The effort sent his breathing all jagged and he kept stopping to mop his brow with his handkerchief. By the time he finally managed to get the dress on, the sky was almost as dark as at night-time. The wind howled in loud bursts and raindrops cracked against the window glass. There was a flash of lightning that lit the room and reflected off his spectacles, and thunder that shook the walls.

‘Oh, Lina!’ he said. ‘If I knew how to harness that power.’

I wanted to laugh. ‘What, do you think you’re Dr Frankenstein?’ I asked him. ‘You know he’s not real, don’t you? He’s just a character in a book.’

‘I would wake you like a princess, like Sleeping Beauty,’ he said.

He kissed the corpse on the lips, groping with one hand at the silk that covered the bony chest.

There was another clap of thunder as Dance retrieved the radiation machine and wheeled it to the bed. His movements were loose and unsteady, he was drunker than I had ever seen him. He adjusted the dials on the machine and positioned the funnel at the corpse’s chest.

‘Now, my darling,’ he said, ‘Now you will awaken!’

He flipped the switch. The machine started to hum and Dance rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet with excitement. After a while he shut it off, went to the body and lifted up a wrist, as if to check the pulse.

‘You’re too late, Dance. She’s long gone,’ I said.

He gasped and let go of the wrist. The arm flopped down over the edge of the bed. Dance put his ear to the rib cage. He listened.

‘What? My Lina!’ He stood upright. ‘Can it be true?’ He started feverishly massaging the arms and legs.

‘It’s true that you’re completely insane,’ I said.

‘Lina? Lina?’ He leaned in close to the dead face, studying it. ‘I’ve done it!’ he crowed. ‘I knew I’d do it in the end!’ With his finger, he opened the corpse’s mouth as wide as it would go. He took a huge breath in and breathed out into the open mouth. The chest moved up and down when the air went in, like bellows. He came up for air again like a swimmer, his lips gaping as wide as the corpse’s as he sucked in more air and then blew again into the mouth. The ribs creaked as the chest rose and fell. He did this for about two minutes. He started to laugh like a maniac and the sound of it bounced off the walls.

‘You need help,’ I told him.

‘I knew it! I knew it!’ he shouted and leapt about the room.

By now the storm seemed to be right overhead. The thunder rumbled along like a machine on metal rollers, and lightning flashed. Dance threw off his jacket, which he’d still been wearing even in the heat, and fumbled to undo the buttons of his shirt. As he did, he tried to kick off his shoes, but couldn’t manage it and had to stoop down and untie them first, slowly, one by one. He whipped off his belt and dropped his trousers and underpants and pulled his undershirt over his bald old head. His body was nearly as skinny and sick-looking as the corpse’s, with the skin hanging loose and tired from his limbs. He rushed back to the body and began kissing the mouth again.

‘Lina … Lina! My darling! Oh, Lina!’ he moaned between kisses.

I say ‘kisses’, but it was more like he was trying to put the whole chin and lower face inside his mouth. It must’ve tasted awful. I couldn’t stand to watch so I looked out of the window at the rain, white like a veil, and the trees straining against the wind. The buildings and cobblestones were darkened with water, and the car was still parked there across the street.

‘Now!’ I heard him say. ‘Now you will awaken!’

When I turned to look he’d wrenched the dress up to the waist and spread the legs. His hand was around his limp dick, trying to make it hard enough. I could see that the genitals of the body were reinforced or replaced with plaster or wax, the same as the nose and ears. He must have done that before I was awake. They must have been the first parts to decompose. Unless they’d become worn away with use. I rode a wave of disgust and when I looked at Dance again I really saw him for the first time. His skin hid a tangled and dark mass of cruelty, sickly-green and black, senseless.

He crouched over the body in preparation, and after more fumbling, thrust himself between the yawning legs. I saw the slack skin on his flat arse shudder with each pump of his skinny hips.

‘No.’ I said. Even though that body had nothing to do with me. ‘No! You get off her right now!’

He was propped over the body, resting his knuckles on the bed as he laboured along. The wig and flowers had started to slip off the corpse’s head, a bit further every time he pounded into the body. His spectacles had slid to the very tip of his nose. Sweat dripped from his face and slid down the knobs of his spine. I flew at him like an arrow.

‘Stop right there, you goddamned pervert!’ I yelled. ‘How dare you? You filthy, pathetic rat. Go to hell.’

As I came closer, he turned his head towards me.

I cannoned into him and willed him away from the corpse with every bit of concentration I could muster. Time seemed to slow down and I saw his eyes and mouth stretch wide in astonishment. He gave a kind of grunt before he toppled slowly to the side and off the bed. He hit the ground with a dull thump and his spectacles flew off and slid across the floor. He lay there in an untidy heap.

I thought I’d managed to kill him, but a few minutes later he started to snore.

11.

DANCE SLEPT ON the floor the whole night through, not once changing position. Early in the morning he got up and filled a glass at the sink. His eyes made a nervous tour of the room as he drank. I went and stood behind him.

‘Hello, Dance. Sleep well?’ I said in his ear.

He turned his head towards me. I puffed some cold air onto the back of his neck and watched him shiver as the goosebumps rose. He scurried back to his camp bed, but he didn’t get a chance to go back to sleep—before he was even under the covers the doorbell rang, one long ring that went on and on. Dance groaned and slid off the bed. He started looking for his spectacles. The whole time the bell kept ringing and ringing. I bet the noise was doing terrible things to his hangover.

‘Alright!’ he snapped, and hurriedly pulled on his dressing gown before padding down the stairs. The ringing stopped and someone immediately began pounding on the apartment door.

‘Open up, Dance!’

It was a woman’s voice. I knew it well.

‘I’m not letting you in,’ Dance yelled. ‘Get lost!’

‘Greta!’ I called out.

‘Open up! Open up or I’ll get the police!’

‘This is harassment!’

The pounding got louder. It sounded like she was throwing her whole body against the door.

‘Dance!’

He opened the door and Greta’s voice drifted up the stairs. ‘What’ve you done with her? Where is she?’

‘Greta, I’m up here!’ I called.

‘Hold on now, please calm down.’

‘Don’t you tell me to calm down. You tell me where my sister is. What’ve you done with her?’

I called to her again, though I knew it was pointless.

‘Listen,’ said Dance, ‘Let’s just—’

‘Dr Dance,’ said a man’s voice. Papa. ‘We’ve come from the cemetery, and—’

‘Where’s the body?’ Greta said.

‘Hold on a minute,’ said Dance. ‘Hold on. Everyone please calm down. Let’s all have a seat and—’

‘Where is she?’ demanded Greta again.

‘She’s in the tomb—’

‘You liar,’ said Greta. ‘She’s here. I know she is.’

She must have pushed her way past him because I could hear her moving around on the floor below. I wondered if she might be able to sense me, even if she couldn’t hear me. I tried again and again to get through the door but I still couldn’t move beyond it. I concentrated hard on Greta. I pictured her face, the furious expression she’d have, her eyes flashing black and her jaw set like stone. I willed her to move so that I could see her through the open door.

‘Okay, okay,’ said Dance. ‘Hold on a minute. Let’s keep calm. I know you’re worried about Lina’s body but listen, I’ve taken full responsibility for it.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Greta. ‘What are you talking about? It’s gone from the tomb.’

‘I know it has. I know. Listen, I can take much better care of your sister’s body than the people at the cemetery can. I am—’

‘Where is she? Upstairs? If you don’t answer me I’m going to the police station right now.’

‘She’s perfectly safe, I assure you,’ said Dance, ‘and well taken care of. Look, I’ll show you. You have absolutely nothing to worry about, I promise.’

Dance appeared at the foot of the stairs and then I could see Greta, followed by Papa, coming up behind him. I saw the top of Greta’s head, her glossy curls; she took the steps two at a time and when she looked up I saw her eyes darting around, watchful. Papa came into view, looking much older than he should have, uncertain, shrunk with worry into his wrinkled skin.

When they reached the top of the stairs Dance stood aside to let Greta come in. She stepped forward, into the doorway, and I reached out to her. Her hot anger made a high-pitched note in the air and I heard her heart beating fast.

‘Greta,’ I said. She didn’t know I was in front of her. Her eyes were wide and had become scared now. They were surrounded by a tense net of new lines, that hadn’t been there when I last saw her. She had her hands balled together in front of her, each holding on to the other, making one big white fist. I rested on her shoulder, listening to the quiet singing of her body that made a celestial music. I spoke to her, telling her I was here, I was with her. But still she didn’t know. I wrapped around her and then I felt a shift. Her heart changed pitch and I saw her see me. I saw her recognise me. Her eyes were the same deep golden colour they had always been, and in that moment I could see every one of the thousands of times she’d ever looked at me over all the long years, every smiling glance, every flash of fury or triumph or sympathy or blame or love, and I knew we were both seeing these things together. The muscles around her eyes relaxed.

Her eyes swept the room and I felt her take in the scene: the discarded tools and dirty dishes, the machines and equipment, the dismantled plaster cast, Dance’s clothes strewn about the place and his spectacles under the bed. And the body. The body.

It lay there facing the ceiling. The wig had fallen back and you could see the blistered naked scalp; the flower crown lay on the floor, a damp and mangled mess. The legs still gaped wide and the dress was hitched up high. Not more than half a second passed before Dance registered the state of the room and tried to pull Greta back out onto the landing. But by then she was doubled over, retching. She vomited on the floor. Then she ran down the stairs and out of the apartment. Papa threw Dance a horrified look and followed her. I tried to go after them but couldn’t.

‘Greta! Papa!’ I called.

I went to look out the window. I saw them get into a car and drive away. I wondered whose car it was. The other car was still there.

Dance had gone down after them to lock the door. When he came back he cleaned up the vomit, still wearing his dressing gown. He worked very slowly, using a rag and basin of water. I stayed at the window, hoping Greta would come back, watching for her. I saw a car pass along Linnégatan, at the end of the block, and then a moment later a man walk by. The streets looked desolate, filled with pieces of rubbish and leaves and twigs scattered by the storm.

Then a car came up Jungfrugatan. A police car. It slowed down as it approached. Another followed, and then a third. The first one pulled up outside. Two policemen in uniform got out. I had seen one of them before. Then two men in plain clothes got out of the car that had been parked opposite, and I recognised one of them too. All four went to the door and out of my view. The doorbell rang, a short burst this time. Dance came over to the window. He swore when he saw the cars. The bell rang again and he grabbed his trousers and pulled them on. He took a sheet from the camp bed and hastily threw it over the body, leaving the feet exposed, and ran downstairs. I heard him open the door.

‘Inspector Larsson, Sergeant Blom,’ said Dance in an oily tone.

‘This is Commissioner Wahlgren and this is Inspector Ehrling.’ It sounded like Blom speaking. ‘Can you confirm that you are the person whose name is on this piece of paper?’

‘Yes, that’s my name alright.’

‘Can you show us the body?’

‘What body?’

‘Dr Dance,’ said another, unfamiliar voice, ‘we have reports that you are harbouring a corpse in this house.’

‘Show us the body, Dance,’ said Blom. He sounded like his patience had run out. ‘We know it’s here.’

There was a silence. Then Dance cleared his throat. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

The heavy shoes of the four policemen made a racket on the stairs. Just as he had with Greta, Dance stood aside to let them into the room. They stood around the bed. I took in their square faces and knew these men would never be able to help me. The unfamiliar one in plain clothes lifted the sheet from the face and peeled it down to the waist. I could feel their fear. The four of them stood there for a minute, looking down at the body.

‘Is it true that you’ve had this body on your premises for a period of three months?’ Larsson asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And who is she?’

When Dance said nothing Larsson repeated, ‘Who is she?’

‘She is … ah … she is my bride, Lina Dahlstrom.’

The men glanced at each other.

‘Your wife is Doris Dance,’ said Larsson, but the other man in plain clothes gave him a warning shake of the head. This man said in a louder voice, as if Dance might’ve been hard of hearing, ‘And do you have a certificate for this body?’

‘Yes I do,’ said Dance. ‘No need to shout.’

He took down a box from the top shelf and after shuffling around in there, pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper and handed it to Larsson.

‘This is the death certificate,’ said Larsson, glancing it over. He looked up at Dance. ‘That’s not the certificate we need to see.’

Dance shrugged, spreading out his hands, palms up. ‘I don’t know what other kind of certificate you could possibly need,’ he said. He still had his old dressing gown on over the top of his trousers. It hung loose, and you could see his upper chest, sunken, pale. The long sleeves almost covered his hands. He was without his spectacles, squinting, and his face looked obscene in its nakedness.

‘I’m afraid, Dr Dance, that you’ll need to come down to the station if you have no certificate. You can explain the whole story to us there,’ said Larsson, making as if to take him by the elbow.

‘Wait! Please!’ said Dance in a high panicky voice. ‘Can I at least get dressed first? And I need my eyeglasses. Can I have five minutes?’

Larsson looked over at his colleague, who nodded.

‘Five minutes,’ said Larsson. He folded his arms and leaned against the doorjamb. Blom joined him and the other uniformed man pulled the sheet up over the face of the body. He went around to the end of the bed and covered up the feet too.

Now the body was out of sight. It had disappeared, like in a magic trick. Now it was nothing more than a shape with a series of ridges and hollows. Now the only body left in the room was Dance’s, as he scrambled around on the floor looking for his spectacles, and when he and the other men went out of the room and down the stairs and out of the house, there were no bodies to be seen in the room at all.

In the street Blom tied Dance’s hands behind his back. He was pushed into a police car. I could see him sitting with his head bowed. The car drove away. I would never have to be near him again.

All around me the house settled itself into silence. It loosened its timbers and the dust snowed down with a sound like stars. I let myself stretch out with the air. There was no hurry. I let myself drift. The sun dropped low and the pale night came bringing cooler air and birdsong.

In the peace of the night I found I could let myself grow so large as to fill every corner of the room. And then I knew I had been going about it in the wrong way, like trying to swim by walking. Now I knew there was to be no effort. It was more like singing, it was more like sighing, like recognising a song. I launched myself in a smooth fluid move, a wave that unfurled in all directions, and as it unfurled it grew. I felt myself growing larger, until I was beyond the walls of the room, and of the house, beyond the street, beyond the city. I was the clouds, I was the trees, I was the air, and the birds in the air, and their song. I was all the waters of all the seas, every star that’s ever been. I was everywhere. And I was nowhere.

1.

I FIRST SAW the news about Carl when I was on my way to a party at Christine’s place. I’d seen him only two days before, so it came as a shock, to say the least. What happened was, I had just sat down in my seat on the streetcar when I realised I’d forgotten to bring a novel with me, which was annoying because it’s quite a long ride to Danderyd, where Christine lives, from Gamla Stan, which is where I was staying. The thought of having to sit there staring out of the window with only my own thoughts for company was too tiresome to contemplate.

Luckily, the man sitting beside me pulled out a copy of the Dagbladet. I slipped on my spectacles and glanced over to see what the headlines were. The front page had RUSSIAN–ENGLISH DEAL. The man turned the page, and there was a picture of a fellow with very impressive moustaches, and underneath: GERMAN CHANCELLOR INTRODUCES NEW POLICIES, and underneath that: CATALONIA VOTES FOR AUTONOMY. He turned the page again, and there was SCIENTIST DANCER HELD ON MALICIOUS AND WANTON CHARGES. I remember thinking that sounded interesting, and how funny that someone might be both a scientist and a dancer—how would he find the time?—but then something caught my eye further down the page, and there was my husband looking up at me. I thought my eyeglass prescription might need renewing: surely it couldn’t be Carl’s picture there in the Dagbladet. But I leaned closer and saw that it was him, plain as day. They had made a mistake with the name. The photo was a close-up of his face, and I recognised it as having been taken at a Holm Clinic Christmas party. Carl was wearing his glasses and a bow tie, which as always was a little bit crooked. Underneath it said:

CASE ATTRACTS INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION

All Stockholm was abuzz with talk yesterday about the most fascinating case to appear in the city, or indeed in the whole of Sweden, in decades. Dr Carl Dancer, sixty-three years of age, an American national who now lives in Östermalm, is the talk of the town after revelations that he stole the decaying body of his young sweetheart from its crypt, and kept it with him in his house on Jungfrugatan for—

I suppose the man noticed me reading, because he gave the paper a tremendous shake, and turned the page with a lot of huffing and rustling. He was now onto a feature about the newly completed Empire State Building in New York.

I couldn’t believe what I’d just read.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said. ‘I normally wouldn’t ask this, but there’s an article in your paper, and … would you mind possibly going back a few pages?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Just take the damned thing,’ he said, and thrust the open Dagbladet at me. He got up and moved to another seat and I read the rest of the article.

According to Dancer, a scientist and doctor who runs a private practice in Östermalm, it all started back in America when, as a teenager, he had ‘visions and dreams’ of a ‘beautiful lady’ that so compelled him, he decided to search the world for her. He found her at last in Stockholm, but then temporarily lost her again to tuberculosis and death. She was buried in the Norra Begravningsplatsen cemetery. There then followed a series of events that some call gruesome, but which for others lift Dancer to the enviable position of the truest romantic of all time.

Little did police think investigations into allegations of ‘grave-robbing’ would lead to this sensational discovery. For it was found that the body of twenty-year-old Lina Dahlstrom, née Fredelius, was missing from the vault in which she had been buried, and that the disappearance was not recent.

It was Dancer himself who had, more than eight months earlier, placed her in the vault. Dancer had also designed, funded and built the vault, and, according to reports, the aged lover spent many nights visiting his dead sweetheart in the cemetery, listening to her favourite records in her tomb. Sources say that Dancer could not bear the ‘beauty of her body slowly rotting away to nothingness’, and believed that ‘such beauty must be preserved’.

It is reported that Dancer, a learned chemist and scientist, invented treatments to defeat the process of bodily decay, especially in regards to odours that may otherwise have been detected near his home.

According to a source close to the dead woman’s family, these treatments were so successful that even so long after death the body looked ‘surprisingly like it did in life’. The body was found on a bed beside the one on which Dancer himself slept.

Though Dancer’s actions are criminal, many of Stockholm’s female population give no importance to this and instead herald him as a great romantic, a man who sacrificed everything for love and would not let even death put an end to his devotion. Tributes for Dancer have poured in to Långholmen prison from ladies across the city.

Detective Inspector Per Larsson and Sergeant Olof Blom made the arrest Monday morning and Dancer has been taken to Långholmen to await a hearing. How he removed the body from the vault remains a mystery.

Visions and dreams? Grave-robbing? Prison? There was a rushing and prickling in my head, as if it was slowly being filled up with soda water. I knew Carl was a little in love with Mrs Dahlstrom, that was clear as day from the first moment, but living with her decaying body? The Dagbladet must be sensationalising the story to sell more copies, that must be it. That paper was always printing such fantastical things. All the same, it was more than a relief that soon Carl and I would no longer be married. How lucky that I’d asked for a divorce when I’d seen him a few days before.

At the beginning I thought the whole thing with Mrs Dahlstrom was harmless, nothing more than a silly infatuation. I thought it would fade with time and that Carl would come to his senses, but then all that nonsense started with the funeral, and his mania for visiting her at the cemetery. It was a very sad thing of course that such a young woman, and such a beautiful one, had died so soon; it was tragic, really. And she had been so very beautiful. It gave me quite a shock when I first met her. As soon as I laid eyes on her I could see why Carl was so interested in helping her. It’s quite natural that one is affected by beauty—it shows an artistic temperament, especially if one is a man of a certain age.

But the poor woman. I think her life had been an awfully sad one, what with spending her days working in that dreadful factory and then getting ill and her husband being killed. And Carl had told me, or perhaps I’d read it in her file—I sometimes liked to cast my eye over Carl’s work files when he happened to bring them home, just to find out a little bit about his patients and to keep myself informed of his work—but I’d read or heard somewhere that she’d had a miscarriage too, so we had that in common at any rate.

In fact, I don’t mind telling you that I think the miscarriage must have been what made her ill in the first place. Oh, I know doctors and medical people say you can’t get ill from having your heart broken, but that is rubbish. And if anything will break your heart, losing a baby will. Believe me, that’s something I know about. I lost three babies in a row and was very ill indeed, even though I was taking the medicine Carl gave me. After the third miscarriage he refused to let me try for any more children and I had that procedure done. But I try not to think about that now.

It’s funny, though, how one can find connections—things in common, I mean—with the unlikeliest of people. One wouldn’t think that Mrs Dahlstrom and I should have anything in common, we appear to be so very different after all. I an older woman, and perhaps someone she would think of as a grand lady, and she so much younger and of a different station in life. And then it turns out that we shared this very significant life experience.

Yes, the article was just too outrageous. It had to be a fabrication, an exaggeration at least. But still, as I sat there gazing out the window, unsettling questions about Carl kept sliding into my mind like serpents. Why wouldn’t he let me into the apartment that afternoon? Why had he been in such an awful rush? Why did he arrange to meet me at Blanch’s Cafe instead of at home the next day? And why had he failed to keep that appointment?

My husband had changed so much since I first met him. I was only a girl then, a country girl, and he was unlike anyone I’d ever seen before. He was the first American I’d encountered, for one thing, the first real foreigner, and he was so different from all the small-town Swedish men I’d known. I came across Carl early one morning on the side of the road in to Råsa. He was trying to fix his bicycle, and had grease all over his hands and the front of his shirt. I took him back with me to the farmhouse. We walked side-by-side, with him wheeling his broken cycle.

He told me he was on a cycling tour, and I’d never heard of one of those. No one in Råsa did such a thing; people only travelled with the aim of getting to a place. I had no idea anyone would cycle just for the pleasure of it, and I kept asking him where he was trying to get to, but he seemed not to understand me. I thought it was due to his bad Swedish, until it dawned on me.

‘So, you mean to say you’re spending the summer just riding around?’ I said at last. ‘You don’t even know where you’re going, really?’

He beamed at me. ‘Now you’ve got it!’

He was so tall and lean and he crackled with energy and ideas and excitement, he seemed to be twice as alive as all those dull, quiet Swedes, and being around him made me feel more alive too.

A familiar voice cut through my daydreaming. ‘I had a feeling you might be on this streetcar.’

‘Harald!’

Dear Harald. The man was like a guardian angel, appearing at exactly the right moment. I’d known Harald Blomkvist for years, and he had been a great friend to me during my recent troubles with Carl. He himself had lost his wife to cancer a number of years ago, so he knew what it was to go through difficult times. Harald had become very dear to me in the past months. He was going to Christine’s too, of course. He sat down in the seat beside mine.

‘Oh, Harald,’ I said. ‘Have you seen the Dagbladet?’ I handed him the article and watched his face harden into a serious expression as he read.

He looked up. ‘Good lord! I certainly didn’t see this coming.’

‘Neither did I.’ I shuddered. ‘Do you think the article can be true? No matter, though, soon it won’t have anything to do with me. Carl won’t at any rate. He’s agreed to a divorce.’

‘He has? That’s a relief. Signed the form, did he?’

‘Well, not exactly. But we have a gentlemen’s agreement. And when I asked him, he was almost happy that I had.’

‘Hmm.’ Harald looked thoughtful. ‘Are you sure you still want to go to Christine’s party tonight?’

‘Why ever not? It’s not me who’s the grave-robber. And I haven’t seen Christine in simply ages—and besides, I’m wearing this new blouse. It’s modelled on a Schiaparelli, you know.’

Christine opened the door herself.

‘Doris, my darling!’ She kissed me hello. ‘Harald. Oh, you two have come together, have you?’

She didn’t ask me where Carl was.

There were already a few people there: Christine’s husband, Ulf, of course, and Ida and Erik, Henrik and Charlotta, and Edit and Claus, all old friends from my early days in Stockholm. There was also a very pretty young girl, a Miss Brun I believe, who was one of Ulf’s students. Just after we got there, Arne and Hilde arrived with their two little ones. Not one of them asked about Carl, and I thought I ought to say something. I hadn’t told anyone about the divorce yet either—that kind of thing wasn’t so easy to bring up in those circles. Everyone thought I’d been away visiting Lotta in Ystad, the same as I do every year.

We all went out to the garden for a schnapps before dinner, and we sat wrapped in blankets at a table under an apple tree. It was still light, just past nine, with a summer evening sun spilling down over the wall and filling the garden with a soft-edged glow, thick and sweet as honey. Some sill and cheese and bread and more schnapps were brought out, and everything seemed just as it had always been.

‘Erik and I saw Almost a Honeymoon last week at Oscars,’ Ida was saying. ‘Have you seen it yet?’

‘Lochers was wonderful,’ Erik said. ‘Such energy.’

I cleared my throat. ‘I haven’t seen that show yet. But did any of you see the Dagbladet today?’ I saw Harald glance at me. ‘I wonder what you all thought of it.’

A few looks were thrown around and then everyone became very busy with their drinks. I realised they must have been discussing it before I arrived.

‘Oh, Doris,’ Christine eventually said. She was sitting next to me and squeezed my arm. ‘I did see it, and I said to Ulf that Carl is such a good man—didn’t I, Ulf?—so generous and always helping those less fortunate, and it’s simply monstrous that the press is going in for him like this.’

‘Monstrous,’ Ulf agreed.

‘Absolutely,’ said Henrik. ‘Carl is a leader in his field. It’s a disgrace. I must say, one does wonder whether Carl’s being a foreigner has anything to do with him being attacked in this way.’

‘Like Sacco and Vanzetti,’ said Ulf.

I thought Carl was not remotely like Sacco or Vanzetti, but I kept quiet about that.

Erik was nodding in agreement. ‘I thought the same,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think it’s a sad fact that Sweden is a place that never got used to foreigners.’

Ida leaned forward in her chair. ‘Doris, I think you’re being so brave. We’re all right here behind you and Carl. If there’s anything you need, anything at all, don’t hesitate. I mean it.’

Hilde, Christine and Charlotta were all nodding too.

‘Anything,’ Edit said.

‘Yes, Doris, anything at all,’ put in Hilde. ‘Carl’s a lucky man to have a wife like you standing beside him.’

‘A pillar of strength!’

‘I’m not so sure if I’ll be—’ I said.

‘You must be such a comfort to him. We’re all so proud of you, Doris.’

‘Yes, chin up, Doris! We know you and Carl will get through this.’

‘And what’s more, be all the stronger for it!’

I realised then that perhaps these people were more Carl’s friends than mine. Perhaps I didn’t know them as well as I’d thought.

After the party was over, Harald walked me to the square to find a cab. I’d been staying at the Hotel Reisen for the last three days. When we were out of sight of the house, he put his arm around me. I leaned my head into his shoulder.

‘Doris, you know I’m here, no matter what you decide.’

‘Decide? I suppose you mean the divorce. It’s not a topic for discussion. Carl and I are finished. There’s nothing clearer, and it’s all agreed between him and me. It just remains for him to sign the documents, pay the fee, and lodge the form. It’s that simple.’

‘Well, I hope it is.’ He lightly kissed the top of my head. ‘I’d like you to be a free woman.’

‘I suppose if I want him to sign I’ll have to go and visit him,’ I said. ‘At Långholmen.’

2.

THE NEXT MORNING I found that the visiting hours for Långholmen prison didn’t begin until eleven. I thought in the meantime I would go and take a look at the apartment. I wanted to see the situation for myself. I put on my navy day dress, a straw cloche, white gloves and my low-heeled white pumps, slid the divorce forms in to my handbag, and set out.

It was the brightest, most perfect summer’s day. I decided to walk, it wasn’t more than twenty minutes by foot. The sun was absolutely blinding, and I’d forgotten my sunglasses. It’s true that in summer Stockholm is the most beautiful city in the world, but it can be so very dazzling to the eye, what with all the water and white buildings everywhere.

When I reached Storgatan it occurred to me that there might be police officers posted at the building: the apartment would surely be considered a crime scene. I didn’t want to have to speak to the police, and I decided that if there were any about I would simply walk straight on. It wasn’t as if they would know who I was. Well, Larsson and Blom knew me, but I didn’t think it likely they would be posted there. I started to feel a bit nervous, as if I were trespassing, which was ridiculous—it was my very own home.

The apartment building came into view and there were no police outside, in fact there was no one around at all. I didn’t fancy meeting my neighbours any more than I fancied meeting the police. I could just picture their curious eyes and their whispers. I had the key for the street door ready in my hand and I opened it a crack and slipped in like a fish.

The entrance hall was cool and smelled the same as ever: a bit like paper and a bit like smoke. I could see the cage of the lift sitting on the ground floor, empty. I crept up the staircase, taking care to step only on the carpet runner and not on the stone, feeling just like a burglar. The sound of my breathing was loud in the marble stairwell. When I got to our landing I noticed a funny smell, like nail varnish. I couldn’t get the apartment key to work. It was so dark on the landing and my eyes were dazzled from the sun so I could hardly see what I was doing, but I was certain I had the right key: I knew it by feel. It went into the lock just fine, but wouldn’t turn. I took off my gloves and wrenched at the key until my fingers were raw.

I heard a noise upstairs—a door closing and then footsteps, followed by the screech and whirr of the lift. The empty cage went past me on its way up and I heard it clank to a stop on the floor above. I got into a kind of panic then, and started jamming key after key into the lock. I simply couldn’t stand the thought of the people upstairs, Margit and Knut Bergen, seeing me there, locked out of my own apartment. Carl must have changed the locks on me. I wondered when.

I could hear the lift coming down again and I froze with the useless keys in my hand and my forehead pressed against the door, my white gloves between my teeth. I heard the lift doors open and close on the ground floor and then the street door and then everything was quiet again.

Outside it was stifling. By the time I got to Östermalmstorg, my left shoe was pinching at the toe and my head was sweating into my hat. I got on the number 54 bus to Långholmen. There was hardly anyone else on it, just a lady and her young son sitting near the front and an old gentleman at the very back. I couldn’t help wondering whether they were also going to the prison. They didn’t look the type, but then neither did I.

Långholmen was only a short ride away, and it wasn’t anything like what I’d expected. I had pictured a huge building of grey stone and barred windows, perhaps with a few prisoners gripping the bars and gazing out with mournful faces, and guards with guns everywhere, but it was nothing like that at all. I crossed the bridge onto the island and stepped into the cool of a grove of birch trees. In the distance I could see the prison building, which was a mansion of yellow stone with columns and a gabled roof, surrounded by a garden. There was a low wall all around, but it was nothing very different from what one might see around any large private house.

A guard met me at the gate and showed me to a room where another guard wrote my name in a book and told me to sit down and wait. He went away and came back a few minutes later and said that Carl was with a visitor and I would have to wait for them to leave before I could see him. I didn’t have to wait long. The guard led me across a lawn to another wing, up a flight of stairs, and down a long walkway with many locked doors. He stopped in front of the last one and unlocked it.

‘Ten minutes,’ said the guard.

I heard the door clang shut behind me. The room was cold and damp and smelled like bleach. There were windows high up along one wall, with thin iron bars over them. All around, people sat in pairs at metal tables, talking in low voices. I spotted Carl right away. He was at a table by the windows, and he had a guard standing beside him. Though I’d only seen him a few days before, he was greatly changed. His hair looked whiter and his spectacles were huge on his face. His body seemed shrunken and withered, as if his clothes were a size too big. He was wearing that old suit with the satin lapels and he had tennis shoes on his feet.

I sat down in the small metal chair opposite him and put my handbag on my lap.

‘Doris.’ He reached out and grabbed my hand in both of his and kissed it. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

I quickly pulled back my hand. I wondered if this meeting was going to be as straightforward as I’d imagined.

‘Listen, Doris, I know I’ve done a lot wrong by you these last years. I haven’t been the husband I ought to have been. And I’m sincerely sorry. I have to do better by you, and I promise I will. Doris, I love you.’ His eyes were watery and pleading behind his spectacles.

‘Carl, it’s really too late for that. I’m sorry.’ I undid the clasp of my handbag and drew out the envelope that contained the forms.

‘No, wait,’ Carl said. ‘I know we talked about going our separate ways, but now that I’ve had the chance to think on it, I realise that’s the last thing I want.’

I put the envelope on the table between us. ‘Carl, we had an agreement. One that you were very pleased about.’

‘But I can’t live without you.’

I laughed without meaning to. I saw I had to take care. I pushed the envelope towards him but he wouldn’t look at it. He grabbed my hand again and held on to it. I could feel the cold metal of the table top through my sleeve.

‘I’m so lucky to have a wife like you,’ he said. ‘I was crazy to ever talk about leaving you, to behave in the way I did.’ He squeezed my hand. ‘Just crazy!’

The guard took a step forward. I’d forgotten he was there. ‘Pipe down, Dance,’ he said.

‘Doris, please.’ Carl leaned over the table, still gripping my hand. ‘I’m begging you. Please, just give me one more chance.’

‘But Carl, we talked about this. We were in agreement. It’s over between us, we both know it is.’

And then the time was up. The guard appeared and escorted me back down the long walkway and across the lawn. I had the envelope still clutched in my hand. As we walked along my head started to feel very peculiar, as though the top of it had lifted off. Brightly coloured spots floated in front of my eyes and I hoped I didn’t have a migraine coming on. We entered the waiting room and it was so packed that I had to push my way through. The place was full of women, all of them dressed up in flounced dresses and hats with ribbons, carrying bouquets of flowers and wicker baskets of fruit that jabbed into me. It was an effort to set one foot before the other.

As I was passing the desk a voice said, ‘I’m here for Dr Dance, please.’

‘One at a time, miss, one at a time,’ said the guard.

But perhaps I had misheard, because there was a tremendous rushing noise in my ears.

Then I felt someone grab me by the arm. ‘Mrs Dance? Doris Dance?’

A very tall man had hold of me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, pulling away from him, ‘I must …’ I gestured to the door, unable to speak.

He went ahead of me, clearing a path. I followed him down the steps and then I stood a moment with my eyes closed, breathing the fresh air. I listened to the wind in the trees and the birds and the sound of my breath going in and out. I felt my body come back to me.

‘Mrs Dance?’

I opened my eyes, remembering the man. He was standing in front of me.

‘Are you feeling alright?’ he asked.

I nodded, even though any fool could see I wasn’t.

‘I’m your husband’s lawyer,’ he said, holding out a card.

I looked at him. He was in his late forties, smartly dressed, with distinguished grey hair and a tanned, expensive face. I took the card but I had to hold it out at arm’s length to read it because I didn’t have my spectacles.

Sten Strid

Attorney at Law

‘Your husband asked me to contact you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come past my office in the next few days?’

I made a time for Thursday morning. His office was close to the apartment in Östermalm, but that was neither here nor there, I remembered, because I didn’t live there anymore.

3.

I HAD ARRANGED to meet Harald at Blanch’s Cafe after my visit to Långholmen. I’d always loved Blanch’s, with its airy high rooms and rows of lamps and potted palms, and seeing everyone sitting there in their colourful clothes, and when you managed to get a table in the side section with the glass roof, then it was just like having your meal in a greenhouse. Carl and I used to go there often in the evenings when we first moved to Jungfrugatan, just after we were married.

Blanch’s was almost empty; it was that awkward time after lunch but before afternoon tea. Harald was already waiting for me.

‘Well? How was it?’

He had ordered coffee and a plate of petits choux cheese pastries, my favourites. I realised that I was famished.

‘You were right,’ I said. ‘It’s not going to be as easy as I thought.’

I sat down and ate two of the pastries before I’d even taken off my gloves. The waiter came over and I ordered a few more things from the menu.

‘Yes, I suspected he’d try to go back on his word,’ said Harald. ‘You’re the perfect cover for him, you know. Respectable, upstanding. He’ll be depending on you to make him look good.’

The waiter brought some tomato sardines gratin, then came back with a mushroom-filled soufflé omelette, salmon sandwiches, a plate of cinnamon buns, a bowl of fruit salad and another pot of coffee. There was barely enough room on the table for all the dishes.

‘My word, Doris!’ said Harald. ‘Not worried about slimming, are you?’

‘What?’ I tucked into the sardines and felt better than I had all day.

A man came in, and out of all of the empty tables, took the one right beside ours. He was dressed in a suit, not a very good one, with very grubby cuffs. I angled my chair away from him a little and lowered my voice.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I believe you’re right about Carl. You ought to have seen the performance he put on when I visited: can’t live without me, loves me more than anyone, you know the kind of thing.’

‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly what I said.’ I tried the mushroom soufflé omelette. It was most delicious, buttery and crisp and fluffy all at once. ‘The funny thing about it is, Carl’s acting isn’t up to much. Hammy, you know.’

‘It certainly is deuced bad luck about the timing. If only you could’ve gotten him to sign when you met him last week.’

‘He seemed so happy about it then.’

The man at the next table cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me?’ I heard him say.

I had another mouthful of omelette. ‘He was positively jubilant in fact. He all but broke out in a jig on the spot.’

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned. It was the scruffy man.

‘Would you happen to be Mrs Dance?’ he asked. I saw he was holding a notepad and a pen.

‘What business is that of yours?’

‘Do I understand correctly that you’re filing for divorce?’

‘Excuse me?’ I said. ‘And who are you?’

‘Jost Ahlm, with Nationen.’

Harald stood up. ‘Now, you listen here, you, you … you cad! What a nerve! Can’t you see we’re having a private conversation?’

Right then another man popped out from behind a potted palm, like a mouse from the skirting board. He also had a notebook in his hand.

‘Kaleb Bovin, Stockholms-Tidningen,’ he said. ‘Mrs Dance, would you like to make a comment on your husband’s conduct?’

‘You leave her alone! Both of you!’ Harald said.

The waiter came running over and tried to shoo away the reporters, but they stood their ground.

‘What’s your opinion of the allegations against your husband?’ asked Jost Ahlm, dodging the waiter’s waving arms.

Kaleb Bovin approached the table. ‘Mrs Dance, did you have any suspicions about your husband’s behaviour? Why didn’t you raise the alarm?’

He was standing over me now. I got up. I was taller than he was. Another man appeared, holding a camera. There was a tremendous flash. Harald covered his face and I was quite blinded.

‘Mrs Dance, did you know about Lina Dahlstrom?’

‘Did you act in concert with your husband?’

‘Harald,’ I said. ‘This is monstrous. We must get out of here.’

I snatched up my handbag and gloves and made for the door without once looking back.

4.

WHEN I GOT to my hotel, I thought I had escaped the reporters, but every time I so much as put my nose outside, they appeared from all sides and pestered me with their questions. They seemed to have set up camp outside the hotel—from my window I could see them in the street below, leaning against lampposts, their notebooks at the ready. I spent the next day in my room, but the following day I had my appointment with Strid. I was wearing my chocolate gaberdine suit and a cream silk blouse with a bow. As an afterthought I added a paisley silk headscarf and large sunglasses and braced myself for the onslaught. As soon as the lift doors opened onto the lobby they were all around me like a pack of hounds around a rabbit.

‘Mrs Dance! Mrs Dance!’

I sped from the lift through the lobby with three of them on my tail.

‘Mrs Dance! Erik Andersson, Aftonbladet. Would you mind answering a few questions?’

‘Yes, I would mind,’ I said, without turning or breaking my stride.

‘Mrs Dance!’ another man called. ‘Mrs Dance, what’s your opinion of your husband’s involvement with Mr Dahlstrom’s death?’

I got out of the hotel door and started walking along Skeppsbron, scanning the street for a taxi. I ought to have called for one from my room.

‘Mrs Dance!’

One of the reporters followed me and seized my elbow.

‘Hands off, you blighter!’ I said and shook myself free. I walked on briskly, keeping up a very smart pace. Another reporter appeared alongside me and matched my speed at a jagged sideways trot.

‘Mrs Dance, our readers are interested to know your opinion of Dr Dance’s relationship with Lina Dahlstrom. Did you know about it?’

A few passers-by turned their heads to look as we sped past in our little formation. I could see a taxi approaching up ahead, and I waved it down and got in the back. The reporters pounded on the windows. The driver accelerated and we left the men behind, all still shouting my name and waving their notebooks.

Sten Strid’s rooms were on Nybrogatan, just around the corner from the apartment, and I must say, the waiting room was altogether shabbier than I would have expected, considering Strid’s own appearance. There were no plants or mirrors or magazines even, just a mismatched row of three chairs with worn vinyl covers. The place smelled like dusty carpets. Strid’s secretary was sitting behind a scuffed desk and looked as though she’d arranged her hair without the aid of a mirror.

Strid’s office wasn’t in much better condition. There was dust on every surface and the desk was piled high with untidy stacks of files and papers. Strid sat among this chaos seemingly unconcerned by it. He was once again elegantly presented, and rather handsome in fact. His hair was thick and well cut, his linen suit a cool dark blue that brought out the colour of his eyes.

‘Mrs Dance, I’ll get straight down to business,’ he said. ‘I must start out by telling you that I’ve never handled a case quite like this before, but don’t let that alarm you: I doubt anyone else involved will have either. It is a most unusual case, and your husband certainly is an unusual man.’

‘Yes. He is that.’

‘Dr Dance recommended you as his primary character witness for the preliminary hearing. Our objective at this point is to have this matter settled in the hearing, and avoid going to trial. The date for the hearing is …’ He shuffled his papers around. ‘Monday next week, eleven o’clock.’ He looked up at me. ‘Do you agree to act as his witness?’

‘Thank you, Mr Strid, but first I have some questions for you,’ I said. ‘To begin with, what exactly has Carl been charged with?’

‘Ah yes. Your husband is charged with,’ and here he read in a calm voice from a piece of paper, ‘wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave, and removing a body without authorisation.’

I had to admit that the charge didn’t sound all that serious. ‘And what would the penalty be if he is found guilty?’

‘It can vary, but Dr Dance would be facing incarceration of perhaps up to fifteen years, and perhaps also fines of up to fifty thousand kronor.’ Strid put his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. ‘But Mrs Dance, I must warn you, your husband’s case is not quite as straightforward as it may appear. Nor is it benign. The possibility exists that some, ah, complications could arise.’

‘What kind of complications?’

‘First of all, there is the chance that he will also be charged with assault, of a … ah, sexual nature.’

I had to take that in. ‘Do you mean Carl assaulted Mrs Dahlstrom?’

‘The charge pertains to that lady, yes, but er … when the lady in question was in a deceased state. The lady’s body, that is.’

‘You mean the corpse of Lina Dahlstrom?’ My mouth filled with sick-tasting bile. I reached for my handkerchief and spat it out. ‘You mean to tell me he fucked that corpse?’

Strid held out his palms towards me. ‘Look, Mrs Dance, I’m not making any such allegations. Nothing of the kind. I’m merely pointing out some eventualities that may arise. The legality of that point is still under question.’

I took a deep breath in and out, and then another.

‘Alright,’ I said. ‘I assume that would make it a much harsher penalty?’

‘Correct. Then there is another matter, that of Petter Dahlstrom.’

My head had started to throb.

‘As you may be aware, there is a degree of uncertainty around Mr Dahlstrom’s death, and it seems that there is some circumstantial evidence that may link Dr Dance to his death.’

‘You’re saying he killed Petter Dahlstrom? So that he could fuck his dead wife?’

‘Mrs Dance, please remain calm. I’m not saying that. Not at all. This is only a very remote possibility at this stage. I only mention it to make clear to you every eventuality as regards your husband.’

He had his secretary bring in a glass of water for me. The glass she handed me was finger-marked and the water was warmish and tasted of rust.

‘Have you got anything stronger?’ I asked when she had gone out again.

Strid poured the water out of the window and took a bottle of cognac from the filing cabinet beside his desk. He poured a glass for each of us.

‘As I was saying earlier, Dr Dance has recommended you as his primary character witness—’

‘And what would happen if I refuse?’

‘Dr Dance needs all the support he can get.’

‘And if I refuse?’

Strid gave me a long look and then sighed. ‘Mrs Dance,’ he said. ‘I understand that you’re considering separating from your husband.’

‘Well, wouldn’t you be? Given all this …’ I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.

‘You know, Mrs Dance, even with the divorce law reform of recent years, you would still require Dr Dance’s agreement in order to obtain a divorce. I understand that he is reluctant.’

‘But would I still need his agreement if he’s in prison for this … assault of a sexual nature?’

‘It’s true that there exist provisions for such circumstances. But it can be a complex process.’

He watched me over the rim of his glass as he took a swig of cognac. He was cleverer than he looked. I rarely think of the possibility of handsome, well-dressed men also being clever.

‘Think of it this way: you would be doing him a favour if you agreed to act as a character witness. He would be in your debt.’

5.

WHEN I STEPPED out of Strid’s office I realised that the one thing I needed most at that moment was a cigarette. I don’t smoke as a rule, Carl made me stop when we were married, but cigarettes have remained an illicit comfort to me now and then in a hard time. I turned into Karlavägen, keeping an eye out for reporters. At Karlaplan I bought a packet of Pall Malls from the kiosk and lit one up right away. I sat down on a bench under an aspen tree. The smoke spiralled into my lungs, weighing and warming them. I leaned back to stretch my neck. Above my head the filmy leaves quivered in the breeze. I could see their pale veins and the sun glancing through between them and the flashes of blue sky behind.

I still had the divorce papers in my handbag. I had the urge to keep them with me as I would something precious. I wanted that divorce more than I wanted anything. The idea of being free, free of Carl, and becoming Doris Ekman again made me feel as I did when I skated as a girl, flying over the ice in long, smooth strides like an arrow from the bow. Doris Ekman’s life would be peaceful, perhaps with a man who was caring and kind. I already knew one such man.

I don’t mind telling you that I had for a while been thinking of Harald in a romantic way. Some nights, as I lay alone, I let myself imagine what a life with him might be like. We had become so very close—closer, in some ways, than Carl and I had ever been. Whenever anything interesting or funny happened my first thought was always: I must tell Harald about this. A few times I’d been on the verge of telling him how I felt, but I always hesitated. It is no small thing to tell a person that you love them.

I could hardly bear to think about the things Strid had told me Carl had done. Carl would never agree to a divorce now. Maybe Strid’s suggestion was a good one: I could agree to speak well of him at the hearing in exchange for him signing. That way we would both get what we wanted. If not, I would have to hope that all of Strid’s worst eventualities came to pass and Carl landed in prison for a long time.

I ground the cigarette out on the pavement and got a taxi to Långholmen.

Carl looked even more shrivelled than he had last time, and more unkempt. What meagre hair he had left was fluffed up around his head like a ring of wispy cotton. The moment I sat down at the metal table he started with his romantic nonsense again, but I cut him short.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to drop this act.’

‘Act? What act? Doris, I’m telling you, you’re the love of my life.’

He reached out across the table. I put my hands in my lap.

‘Drop it, Carl,’ I said. ‘We both know the situation here, and the situation is this: you don’t want to go to prison, and I—’

‘No, no! It’s not like that! You’ve got it all wrong. Doris, I love you.’ He was slumped forward, his arms stretched out towards me.

‘Carl, stop it. You want me to play your respectable, upstanding wife who sticks by you so that everyone will think you’re the kind of man who shouldn’t go to prison.’

‘No, Doris, you’ve got the wrong—’

I held up my hand to silence him. ‘Look, I don’t particularly want to send you to prison for twenty years, but I also don’t want to be your wife anymore. So how about you and I make a bargain.’

His eyes had grown narrow and wary but he didn’t interrupt me.

‘I’ll agree to act as a character witness for you, and I’ll do the very best job I can, in exchange for you agreeing to the divorce.’

‘But I don’t want a divorce.’

‘But I do.’

‘Oh, Doris …’ But his voice was uncertain. ‘You know I’ve always loved you.’

I shook my head and leaned back in my chair. ‘This way, we both get what we want,’ I said. ‘What do you say?’

He was watching my face closely. I suddenly realised that we’d had very few honest conversations in our time together. He turned his head and looked around the room at all the other prisoners sitting at the tables with their visitors. He sighed.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘You have my agreement.’

I pushed the envelope towards him over the table. He pushed it back.

‘I’ll sign after the hearing,’ he said. ‘You have my word.’

We shook hands on it.

‘But you ought to know,’ he said, ‘I’m only agreeing because I’m confident I can change your mind later. I still want to be with you, Doris, always. You’re my love, my darling wife.’

I stifled a snort. He was agreeing because he knew we only had about a minute left before the guard escorted me out, and he knew a good deal when he saw one.

There were no reporters outside the prison so I decided to risk walking back to the hotel. Walking is something that never fails to calm my nerves. Years ago, on the farm, whenever I was feeling agitated I would set out to walk the boundary, which was marked by a wooden fence. One circuit didn’t take too long, but I’d go round and round for hours sometimes, until I forgot where I was. I think there’s something in the motion of walking that gets the brain going differently, it’s as if there’s a deep part of yourself that can only come alive through the action of the muscles in the legs. It makes sense, because deep down we are all animals.

I kept to the back streets. By the time I reached Bastugatan, I thought I might need to stop for a cup of coffee—it was further than I’d thought to the hotel. I came across a small bakery with a display of pies and cakes in the window. I looked up and down the quiet street; it seemed unlikely that anyone would bother me there. I kept my sunglasses on, just to be on the safe side, and went inside.

There was a free table right at the back, next to a young lady and a man. As I was about to sit down, the man turned around. I peered at him over the top of my sunglasses.

‘Harald?’

‘Doris?’

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘Well, I’ve had to go somewhat undercover since our lunch the other day. My word, those reporters are a dreadful nuisance, aren’t they?’

The young lady sitting with Harald looked familiar.

‘Oh, how rude of me!’ he said. ‘Doris, you remember Miss Brun, from Christine’s party?’

I did remember Miss Brun. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, and had a clear-skinned, fine-boned face and smooth chestnut hair.

‘Indeed,’ I said.

She stood up to shake hands. She was as slender as a poplar. ‘Nice to see you again, Mrs Dance.’

‘Miss Brun’s family have their boat moored beside mine at Wasahamnen,’ said Harald, by way of an explanation. ‘We’re just having a spot of afternoon tea.’ He smiled at Miss Brun across the table.

I decided I was no longer in the mood for coffee.

6.

THE DAY OF the hearing came around dreadfully quickly. I had trouble sleeping the night before. I got comfortable in the bed and closed my eyes and I did feel as if I had slept a little, but when I looked at the hands of the bedside clock they seemed not to have moved at all. At first I thought that the clock had stopped, but I could hear it ticking away as usual. I watched the thin second hand making its way round and round the face until it felt like an eternity had gone by, me lying there in the dark staring at that blasted clock.

In the end I got up, pulled a chair over to the window and lit a cigarette. The window had a view over the water of Riddarfjärden and I could see the lights of the Gröna Lund amusement park in the distance. The sight of it always reminded me of my childhood, even though I’d never been there. The Djurgården ferries beetled back and forth between the islands, and past a row of white ocean liners docked near Slussen that rose like icebergs out of the black water.

Earlier that day, I’d been trying to prepare for the hearing, and for the questions the magistrate might ask me about Carl. Strid had told me to think of instances where Carl had shown himself to be honourable, trustworthy and decent. I should talk about how he had been a caring husband to me, and an upstanding citizen. I’m not opposed to lying on any moral grounds, but I find it a difficult thing to do in the moment, so I tried to list Carl’s positive points honestly.

‘Carl is hardworking,’ I said out loud. That surely was a respectable thing, and it was true. ‘Carl is extremely dedicated to his work in medicine.’ Though that might perhaps not be suitable in this case. ‘Carl cares about helping those in need.’ If those in need are attractive young women. ‘Carl was a good husband to me.’ But that was the wrong tense. ‘Carl is a good husband to me. Very good.’ He never let me go hungry.

The next morning I dressed in my double-breasted herring-bone jacket and skirt, with a high-collared peach blouse. I had the divorce forms in my bag like a talisman. Harald picked me up by taxi and we held hands in the back seat. Seeing him always made me feel better—he was a calming presence. Both of us were wearing sunglasses and hats, but this did nothing to deter the swarms of reporters. By the time we made it to the room where the hearing was to take place, it was already full. I got rather a shock when all those faces turned towards us as we came in.

Harald went to sit in the public gallery and a court official showed me to a seat near the front. Sten Strid was there, nattily dressed as usual. There were a few faces in the crowd that I recognised: Christine and Ulf were sitting beside Harald, and Nils Persson was there, and Dr Per Holm, and on the other side of the room was a familiar-looking young woman that I couldn’t quite place, who looked as though she’d been crying. In the upper gallery I saw our neighbours, Margit and Knut Bergen.

The room was very hot and so crammed full of people—one would think they would have set a limit—that after about ten minutes it seemed like all the air had been used up. Luckily I’d had the presence of mind to bring my Japanese fan with me, and I waved it back and forth in front of my face, not that it did much good.

Then Carl appeared. All talking stopped and all heads turned towards him; it was a bit like the moment when the bride enters the church. I half expected someone to strike up the organ. Carl was being led by two police officers. He was wearing that jacket together with tennis shoes again, but now he had put on a bow tie as well, and his hair looked rattier than ever. They had him in handcuffs, which seemed very dramatic and more than a little unnecessary.

Next, the magistrate came in and we all had to stand up, again like in church, and after that everything seemed to happen very fast.

A police officer called Sörensen got up and told the story of how Mrs Dahlstrom’s body was found in our apartment, and some things he said were so gruesome that people in the gallery groaned and covered their ears. I kept my eye on Carl to see his reaction, but he didn’t seem to be paying very much attention and was busy gazing at the people in the gallery. He certainly didn’t look ashamed or apologetic. How I wished that I’d already left behind being Mrs Dance.

A young woman got up next, the familiar-looking one with tears in her eyes, and I realised that it was Mrs Dahlstrom’s sister, who had come to our apartment a few times with Mrs Dahlstrom. She started telling how she had seen the body and the terrible shock it was. I could see that she was trying hard not to cry. She started to speak about Carl, saying he’d had designs on her sister all along, and that she thought the treatments were Carl’s way of getting close to Mrs Dahlstrom. Then she did start crying and had to keep wiping her eyes with her handkerchief and blowing her nose. She was a dreadfully sad sight standing there with her pain exposed for all the world to see, and no one trying to comfort her.

The whole meantime, the room was getting hotter and hotter. I could feel the sweat gathering on my forehead. It felt like hours had passed but when I looked down at my watch I saw that it had hardly been thirty minutes. The heat made my blood beat thickly in my head and I felt stupid and dazed. I practised my sentences about Carl in my head. Carl is hardworking, Carl is hardworking, I said to myself. He was a good husband. Is. Is.

Carl took the stand, and the people in the public gallery started whispering and pointing and jeering. Some stood up and craned their necks to get a better look at him. The magistrate called for quiet, but there was a commotion among a group of women in the upper gallery, and the next instant I saw a little coloured object floating down through the air from up there, down to where Carl was sitting. Another one followed, and then more and more in a shower. My first thought was that these women were throwing bits of rotten food at him, until I saw that it wasn’t food, but flowers, single roses, nosegays of violets and wildflowers done up in ribbons. They sailed through the air, shedding petals like confetti, and landed all around Carl, making coloured splashes on the wooden floor.

‘We love you, Carl!’ a woman’s voice called out.

Carl was smiling. He gave a little bow in their direction, like an actor at the end of a performance. The journalists were all scribbling away in their notebooks and the magistrate was shouting, ‘Order! Order!’ Someone went up to remove the women—there were about five of them—and they were escorted out amid hoots and laughter.

It took a while for everything to quieten down again. When the hearing resumed, Strid asked Carl a lot of questions. Then the magistrate spoke. He was a little round man, bald as an egg, with a spongy pink nose.

‘Dr Dance,’ the magistrate said. ‘I’d like you to tell us more about the methods you employed, with Mrs Dahlstrom.’

‘Well, first I built an incubator tank—’

‘Was this of your own design?’ asked the magistrate.

‘It was,’ said Carl, inclining his head a little, as if in modesty, ‘with a system of circulating filtration pumps and an electron cell. I filled it with a plasma solution, also of my own formulation, and kept it at a constant blood-heat temperature of thirty-seven degrees Centigrade. This solution remained circulating automatically, twenty-four hours a day.’

The magistrate was nodding as he listened, as if he approved of Carl’s methods.

‘After the first twenty-four hours,’ Carl went on, ‘I introduced the radiation element of the regimen, which consisted of high-voltage radiation once a day for five minutes at a time.’

‘And what kind of radiation was this?’ asked the magistrate.

‘X-ray. I built and installed the machine myself, which ran on a transformer of ten thousand volts that I also installed.’

‘And how did you develop these methods?’ asked the magistrate.

‘I am a trained chemist and it has been my personal interest—my passion, you could say—to study the effects of radiation and chemistry on the human body. You might call it my life’s work.’

‘Dr Dance,’ said magistrate, ‘to the best of your knowledge, has anyone attempted such an experiment before now?’

‘Not to my knowledge. As I said, the machines and solutions were all of my own design.’

‘An innovative man!’ the magistrate said.

Then the police officer, Sörensen, got up again. Mr Sörensen was a weak-chinned fellow with heavy eyebrows that came down in a V-shape over his nose.

‘Dr Dance,’ he said, smiling with his lips only, ‘or is it Mr Dance?’ His voice had a whining note like that of an insect.

‘I am a doctor, yes. But you may call me Mr Dance if you prefer.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sörensen. ‘You are a doctor and you practise medicine, so I take it you are a medical doctor?’

‘I do practise medical treatments, but I do not claim to be a physician. My doctorate is in chemistry.’

‘I see,’ said Sörensen. He frowned, as if considering a difficult problem. ‘And you completed a doctoral degree at … ah, the University of Texas, I believe?’

‘Yes, that’s correct.’

‘Yet there is no record of the completion of your doctorate at that institution. How can that be, Mr Dance?’

Carl gave a kind of sigh. ‘I completed all the required academic work and examinations for the doctoral degree,’ he said, ‘but I never collected my formal award. There was some technicality that caused a problem with it being conferred.’

‘Ah, a technicality. I see,’ said Sörensen. ‘So you are not, in fact, a doctor?’

‘As I say, I completed the work of a doctoral degree,’ said Carl.

‘Hmm … thank you,’ Sörensen said, glancing around the room as if he expected applause. ‘And now,’ he went on, ‘I would like to ask you about your methods.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘You mentioned in your statement that you used, ah, “nourishing solutions” to restore the body. How were these solutions applied to the body of the deceased?’

‘I applied various solutions topically to areas of damaged tissue.’

‘Topically—meaning you applied these to the exterior of the body?’

‘Correct.’

‘And were these topical solutions the only way that you “nourished” the body of the deceased?’

‘No, I also nourished the body internally.’

‘Would you explain what you mean by internally?’

‘With edible nutrients,’ said Carl.

‘Could you give us an example?’

Carl gave a wave of his hand. ‘Common foods one would give in illness: beef tea, chicken broth, sometimes wine,’ he said.

‘I see,’ said Sörensen. ‘And how did you go about administering these nutrients?’

‘By mouth.’

‘By mouth. I see.’ Sörensen was bobbing up and down on the spot. He looked excited.

‘And, Mr Dance,’ he went on, ‘what other forms of physical contact did you have—’

‘Objection,’ said the magistrate.

‘Very well,’ Sörensen said. ‘Mr Dance, was a Mr Petter Dahlstrom known to you?’

Carl seemed to consider the name for a moment. ‘Yes, he was. He was the husband of Mrs Dahlstrom.’ His voice sounded perfectly bland. ‘But then it appears that he abandoned her.’

‘Abandoned? Can you explain what you mean by this?’

‘He abandoned her in her illness; he left Stockholm to seek employment elsewhere, at a time when his wife and her family most needed his support,’ said Carl. He sounded calm and reasonable. ‘It caused his wife much distress. A husband’s duty is to stand by his wife through thick and thin.’

‘So you feel that Mr Dahlstrom had wronged his wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see,’ said Sörensen. ‘So it’s fair to say that you disliked Mr Dahlstrom? That your relations with him were not good.’

Carl shrugged. ‘I didn’t know him well enough to be said to have relations with him.’

‘Yet you got into an altercation with him on one occasion, I believe, at his residence?’

‘No,’ said Carl. Then he shut his mouth like a trap and folded his arms.

‘So you deny that you—’

‘Objection,’ said the magistrate. ‘This line of questioning has no bearing on the matter at hand.’

Nils Persson got up next. Strid asked him a lot of things about his work with Carl, all the technical details about voltages and wattages and ampages, and the magistrate appeared quite interested in these particulars.

‘Mr Persson, how would you describe Mr Dance?’ asked Strid. ‘As a man?’

Nils looked over at Carl. ‘Carl?’ he said. ‘I would describe him primarily as a man of science, a leader in his field, an innovative and even visionary medical practitioner.’

‘Thank you, Mr Persson. A man of science, you say,’ said Strid.

The magistrate was nodding his round little head. ‘A man of science,’ he repeated. ‘Very good.’

Then it was my turn. It was now so hot in the room that I couldn’t breathe easily. Carl is a good husband. Carl is a hardworking man, I recited in my head as I made my way to the stand. My body felt far away from me, numb and foreign, of an indeterminate size.

All those people’s faces were watching me, still as anything, as though they weren’t people at all, but paintings—a great mural of pale faces and bodies that covered the walls all the way up to the ceiling. I saw the face of Mrs Dance’s sister, raw with tears. Beside her sat her father, his expression stony. On her other side, dressed all in black and holding her hand was her mother, who had tears running freely down her pallid cheeks. I saw Harald’s face, and next to him Christine, both of them nodding encouragingly.

Strid asked me to describe Carl. Carl is a good husband. Carl is a hardworking man. I reached into my handbag and touched the envelope.

‘Carl is a hardworking man,’ I said. I was an even worse actor than Carl. A droplet of sweat inched down the side of my face. ‘He is intelligent, and he is disciplined. He is meticulous, when he chooses to be.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Dance. And would you say your husband is an honourable man? Might you tell us about an instance when he behaved honourably?’ He smiled at me and the light bounced off his even white teeth.

The magistrate was watching me with raised eyebrows, his thin lips pinched and expectant. I looked at Carl. He was busy examining a button on his jacket. God knows, I wanted to be free of that man, and earlier that morning I’d have told you I was prepared to do anything to get that freedom. But sitting in that court in front of the Dahlstroms, and all those judicial men, and the magistrate who had been so impressed by Carl’s scientific credentials, the thought of chiming in with the chorus about how wonderful Carl was, how clever, how visionary, all the while knowing what he had done to Mrs Dahlstrom, and what he’d done to me over the years, was more than I could stand. I saw in that moment that if I chose to speak up for Carl then I wouldn’t belong to myself anymore. I would be giving a part of myself away.

‘Mr Strid,’ I said. I looked him in the eye. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t believe I can honestly describe him as honourable.’

‘Ah, Mrs Dance, surely you could think of an example, from your personal life, perhaps?’

‘In actual fact, Mr Strid, and perhaps I’m a poor choice as a character witness, but I don’t believe I can.’

I glanced up at the public gallery and caught sight of Christine and Ulf’s outraged scowls.

‘Mrs Dance—’

‘Although I am Carl’s wife, and have spent many years with him, if I am to speak truthfully I am bound to say that I doubt I know very much about him at all. And what I do know would not serve to illustrate an honourable strength of character.’

‘In that case, Mrs Dance, that will be all. Please take your seat.’

I felt Carl’s eyes on me throughout the rest of the proceedings.

7.

IN THE MORNING I had the newspapers sent to my room. Carl’s picture was on the front cover of every one. Seeing his image in print like that made him seem very foreign to me—he finally appeared as the stranger he’d always been. The Aftonbladet’s half-page photograph of Carl’s face was taken at the hearing, with his hair all wild and the light glinting off his spectacles so that he looked completely deranged. DOCTOR SOUGHT TO BRING HIS DEAD LOVER BACK FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE ran the headline, with ‘Eccentric doctor “Frankenstein” returned to jail’ underneath. Dagens Nyheter had a more respectable photograph with the headline DANCE RETURNED TO JAIL: MAGISTRATE DEFERS DECISION.

Svenska Dagbladet had three pictures on the cover. The first two were side-by-side, one of Carl and one of Mrs Dahlstrom, with DEAD GIRL’S ‘MAN OF SCIENCE’ LOVER SEES NO WRONG IN BODY SNATCH. A short article underneath was headed MRS DANCE LEAVES HUSBAND IN THE LURCH, and below that was a photograph of Harald and me at Blanch’s, Harald with his hand partly covering his face and his other hand thrust out in front of him, me standing on the other side of the laden table with my mouth open, shouting something. The caption read: ‘Mrs Dance plots divorce in lunchtime tryst with mystery man’.

Stockholms-Tidningen had SCIENTIST’S FUTILE LOVE GAINS PUBLIC SYMPATHY, and an article about the women who had thrown flowers to Carl. It seemed there was a whole group of them, not just those at the hearing. I remembered all the women in the Långholmen waiting room. One woman was quoted in the article saying, ‘I wish my husband was as romantic as Dr Dance. Mrs Dance doesn’t know how lucky she is.’

As I read the papers, any regrets I might have had about what I said at the hearing melted away. I knew I’d done the right thing. But it meant I’d have to find another way to secure a divorce, with or without Carl’s agreement.

There were two things of note that I discovered from the newspapers. First, that there would be what one of them called a ‘sanity hearing’ in the magistrate’s office on Friday week, which would help decide whether or not Carl would be freed or placed in an asylum. And the second thing was that the inquest into Petter Dahlstrom’s death was to be reopened.

Then I was called to the telephone downstairs, and it was Carl.

‘Doris, I need to see you,’ he said. His voice was flat and weary, not at all what I would have expected after my testimony yesterday. Usually, Carl is a man with a temper when he doesn’t get his own way. ‘Please. Please come,’ he said.

I was curious as to this sudden difference in him. I took the divorce papers with me, on the off-chance that he had changed his mind.

He was waiting at the same table as on my previous visits. He stood up when I came in.

‘Doris,’ he said. He held out his hands towards me. ‘Thank you for coming.’

I sat down and waited for him to begin raging at me.

‘Thank you for being at the hearing yesterday,’ he said. ‘I know it was difficult for you.’

This behaviour was a little disconcerting. ‘Yes, it was,’ I said. ‘And I realise I didn’t keep my end of the bargain.’ I stopped myself from apologising.

He shrugged. ‘I understand why,’ he said. ‘Doris, I know I haven’t been a good husband to you. I treated you badly over the years, and I’m sorry.’

He had said this before, of course. I waited for him to go on.

‘I know that just saying sorry isn’t enough, and I know it will take a lot of work on my part to rebuild your trust in me. I want you to know that that is what I intend to do when I get out of here.’

He was sitting straight-backed in his chair, and made no move to try to touch me.

‘Thank you, Carl,’ I said. ‘But I have had no change of heart.’

He nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said again. His voice was soft and downcast. ‘Perhaps, given time …’

I admit that he looked pitiful to me, grubby and creased, shrunken, and probably terrified about the verdict. And it was so cold in that place, and he had none of the comforts of home. But he was the one who had put himself in this situation.

‘No, Carl,’ I said. ‘I won’t change my mind. And you shouldn’t hope that I will.’

‘You sound so cold, Doris,’ he said. ‘You never used to be like this.’ His eyes were on mine, imploring, trying to weaken me. I didn’t look away. My hands gripped tight onto the handle of my bag.

‘Carl, I mean you no ill will,’ I said. ‘But my feelings remain the same. I simply wish to resolve this situation as soon as possible.’

‘To resolve it,’ he said. ‘Hmm. I see.’

I kept silent.

‘Well, can I at least ask you for one favour? To do one small thing for me?’

‘I don’t see that I should—’

‘Please, Doris?’

He took something from his pocket. It was an envelope. He laid it on the table and pushed it towards me. ‘Would you be so good as to post this for me. Will you do this for me?’

‘What is it?’

‘Some technical things, for work. But it’s confidential, and I don’t trust the guards here to do it.’

I wondered why he didn’t ask his lawyer to post it. I picked up the letter. It was addressed to G. Fredelius, at an address in Södermalm. I knew that name.

‘Of course I will.’

I put the letter in my bag.

‘Thanks Doris. I know I can rely on you.’

As soon as I was out of the prison gate I examined the envelope. It was sealed. I tugged gently at the closed flap with my finger.

When I got back to the hotel, there were two more envelopes waiting for me, a courier’s and a telegram. The telegram was from Lotta, my elder sister: DEAR DODO YOU MUST STOP THIS NONSENSE AND RETURN TO CARL AT ONCE. THINK OF YOUR WIFELY DUTY.

She must have seen that photo of Harald and me in Svenska Dagbladet. Lotta never felt shy about telling me what she thought I was doing wrong in my life. I hadn’t mentioned the divorce to her, I hadn’t really mentioned it to anyone except Harald. I didn’t have anyone else to mention it to.

I opened the courier’s envelope. It was from the police—the keys to the apartment. There were five keys on the keyring, and a green and white tag advertising Lloyds Medical Supplies. The apartment used to have only three keys—Carl must have had extra locks installed. The keys were heavy in my hand. I had the sudden impulse to go to the apartment. After hearing all those stories in court about what had happened there, I wanted to have a look at the place for myself, besides, it was my home.

It was another glorious day, so I decided to walk. The reporters seemed to have departed as suddenly as they had appeared, like locusts. In the streets that day there was a real holiday feeling in the air; the sun sparkled off everything, and there were little pots of purple and pink petunias lining the rail of the bridge, and everywhere people were smiling and chatting, squinting a little in the hard sunlight. All the way along Strandvägen, tourists were strolling, children were eating ice-creams, and the pleasure boats were out, their flags and sails flying. I knew I was no longer young, but the thought of being there in Stockholm, and being Doris Ekman again, which one day I knew I would be, filled me with optimism. There was so much ahead of me still, so much to look forward to. And perhaps I wouldn’t remain Doris Ekman for the rest of my life either. I smiled to myself as I walked.

As I passed the newsagent in Gamla Stan, I happened to glance at the headline board outside: HUNDREDS OF CURIOUS VISITORS GATHER AT BIER OF DANCE’S LOVER. That was a story I hadn’t yet read. I went in and bought a copy of the paper.

The fantastic tale of a man so much in love that he tried to reverse death itself so he could be with his beloved has captured the hearts and minds of our nation.

The body of Mrs Lina Dahlstrom (twenty) was discovered over Midsummer in Dr Carl Dance’s Östermalm apartment, where he had been keeping it for several months, along with various machines and devices designed by Dance to bring his lover back to life. Dance faced a hearing on Monday, with the magistrate’s ruling remaining undecided.

Mrs Dahlstrom’s body was put on display at a memorial service yesterday at the Norra Begravningsplatsen Cemetery Chapel, and already hundreds of curious visitors have taken the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the famous woman.

‘She looks just like she did when she was alive,’ an unnamed family friend of Mrs Dahlstrom’s is reported as saying.

The eccentric Dr Dance, scientist and inventor, may be an alleged body-snatcher, but the public is overwhelmingly on his side: ‘He only did it out of love’ is the resounding opinion of Swedes everywhere.

But not everyone shares this view. Greta Fredelius, the sister of Mrs Dahlstrom, who organised the viewing, told reporters: ‘I want the public to see what this criminal did to my sister in the name of science, and in the name of so-called love.’

But nevertheless, Dance is being hailed as the romantic hero of the age by the female population of the country. ‘I wish my husband was more like Dr Dance,’ more than one lady at the memorial told reporters.

Mrs Dahlstrom’s body is open to public viewing until this Sunday evening.

It certainly seemed a strange thing for a body to be put on public display—it sounded positively medieval to me. All the same, I have to admit that I was a little curious. But the idea of queueing up with a whole lot of strangers to goggle at Mrs Dahlstrom’s body, after all that she had been though, was too unsavoury to seriously consider.

By the time I reached the end of Gamla Stan, I was getting tired. What had started off as a beautiful day had become hot and muggy. I was sticky with half-dried sweat, and I could feel a blister forming on my right heel. There was a number 37 streetcar up ahead and I ran to catch it. The 37 wouldn’t take me direct to Jungfrugatan, but at least I’d have a chance to catch my breath out of the sun.

When we passed over Strandvägen I realised the route would take me past Norra Begravningsplatsen cemetery, and while it felt wrong to actually go in, I was most intrigued about what kind of people would. My carriage was almost empty, but there was one spinsterish-looking woman with wire glasses and a prim bun sitting at the other end who seemed just the type. I was so busy thinking about the memorial that I missed my stop—two stops in fact. I decided to stay on the streetcar until we got to the chapel, just to see it from the window, even though it would take me out of my way.

Sure enough, I had been right about the spinsterish woman; as we slowed down for the chapel stop, she gathered her string bag and got off the streetcar. Without giving it a thought, I followed her.

When I entered the cemetery, I was surprised to see not only a long queue of people waiting to enter the chapel, but also that a kind of marketplace had sprung up outside. There were several flower stalls, a farmer selling strawberries, and a balloon man. It was like a carnival. Children ran screeching around the waiting crowd and the women—it was mostly women—chatted and laughed with each other.

I was standing near the end of the queue, not actually in it, but I found myself wedged in the crush steadily filing towards the chapel doors. I could have struggled out, but instead I allowed my curiosity to get the better of me and let myself be carried along by the crowd.

The chapel was decorated with bunches of orange blossom, and the summer scent filled the air. At first all I could see were the backs of people’s heads as they craned to get a look at the body. Everyone was silent; the only sound was of people’s excited breathing and their feet on the flagstones. We shuffled forward. I could see the drapes on the foot end of the bier, then the whole body came into view.

It was lying not in a coffin, but directly on the bier, surrounded by white roses and lilies, but the funny thing was it didn’t even look like a human body. The face, which was the only exposed skin, seemed to be a mask made of wax with the features painted on, badly; the hair was a dark mop sitting askew. The hands were in white gloves and the rest of the body was wrapped in a pale cream silk. I noticed how small she was—tiny, the size of a child. She must have shrunk after her death.

I shuffled past with everyone and then I was out in the sunshine again. The day was so bright that for a moment I was blinded. I stumbled coming down the steps and dropped my bag. A man bent to retrieve it for me.

‘Mrs Dance?’ he said.

I froze. The last thing I wanted was for someone to recognise me. My vision cleared and I realised it was a man who lived in our building, but whom I didn’t know personally. I took my bag from him and hurried away with my head bent low and my heart hammering. I spotted a streetcar coming down Uppsalavägen as soon I was out the cemetery gate. I got on.

The carriage was quite full but I found a seat near the window, and I sat staring out. I couldn’t get the image of the body out of my mind. It was so tiny, and so utterly unlike how Mrs Dahlstrom had been in real life—so utterly unlike any human. When I thought of Carl mistaking that waxen doll for a living woman I got an uneasy feeling. I had lived for years with the man who had done that to her. A prickling sensation started at the back of my head.

I heard someone mention Carl’s name. It was a woman with tight straw-coloured curls and crimson lipstick sitting halfway down the carriage. She was saying in a loud voice to her friends, ‘Well, I still say it’s romantic. I can’t get my Paul to cook even a single meal for me, and I’m alive!’

A pink-faced woman in a cloche sitting beside her tittered.

‘Bit unhygienic, though, wouldn’t you say?’ asked a dark-haired man opposite her. He took a puff from his cigarette. ‘Think of all the diseases he might’ve picked up.’ He nudged the man sitting beside him, who smiled and then looked down at his feet.

‘And he is married, you know,’ the pink-faced woman said in a squeaky voice. ‘I’m sure Mrs Dance doesn’t think it’s all that romantic.’

She was right about that.

‘Well, all I can say is,’ said the lipsticked woman, ‘the wife mustn’t’ve been taking good enough care of him in the first place. I ought to get in touch with her and tell her to send him my way. I’ll show him some real love. If he ever gets out of prison, that is.’

‘I don’t think he will get out,’ said the dark-haired man. ‘Did you hear about that murder? Apparently it looks like someone bumped off the sweetheart’s hubby … I wonder who?’

‘Oh no! Not Carl!’ The lipsticked woman sounded as offended as if she herself had been accused of murder. ‘All that’s just a beat-up from the girl’s family. I’d bet on it. Carl is most certainly not a killer. He’s every bit a gentleman.’

‘I’m with you,’ said a third woman with bobbed dark hair, who was standing in the aisle. ‘I think he’s simply a dreamboat! So clever. Imagine, a man inventing things to bring you back from the dead. It’s just like a fairy story!’

It certainly wasn’t just like a fairy story to me, it was more like a horror story.

The gossiping group got off at the next stop and I remained staring out the window at the city sliding past. I was starting to feel very strange—my head felt hollow, and my mind had gone quite blank. I couldn’t think about anything at all, it was as if I’d forgotten all about the memorial, the apartment, everything. If you’d spoken to me I probably wouldn’t even have been able to tell you my own name.

I got off the streetcar with no idea where I was, and found myself walking down a road I didn’t recognise. I passed a row of shops: a baker, a florist, a shoe shop. I had an odd sensation of being separated from my surroundings, of being behind glass, as I had been when looking out of the streetcar window, seeing everything drift past me: untouchable, unreachable. My head felt thick, foggy, as though packed with cotton. I stopped outside a butcher’s shop. My reflection in the glass was superimposed on the meat laid out on trays. I was hypnotised by the display—the lurid red falukorv, Carl’s favourite; the pale pork sausages, the slabs of ox tongue, the lamb cutlets, and ground beef seeping blood. My stomach clenched in a violent spasm that doubled me over. I leaned one hand on the window to steady myself, and my body curled in on itself as I retched and then spat on the ground. When I stood upright again I was dizzy, but after my vision cleared I could see the surprised faces of customers in the shop staring out at me. I staggered away.

After that I seemed to lose control of my body. I was shaking all over so that my teeth clattered against each other, and it was almost impossible to direct my legs; they seemed to belong to another person. I found I was on a main road, lurching along with no clue where I was going, when I saw a taxi. I got in, mumbled the address of the apartment, then wound down the window and took gasps of moving air. The taxi driver no doubt took me for a dipsomaniac.

I was feeling a little better by the time I reached Jungfrugatan, but my legs were still watery. This time the apartment door opened without issue. Inside it was dark, I could hardly see a thing, and there was a strange smell: sweetish and musty. I opened the curtains and windows of the downstairs rooms and the first thing I saw was that two of the palms and a lily plant had died; now they were nothing but withered sticks in their dried-up pots. When I turned to look at the room in the daylight I got rather a shock. Everything was covered in thick dust and even cobwebs, as though the apartment had been empty for months. There were plates, some with food on them still, on every surface, and books and papers all over the sofa and floor.

I went into the kitchen. The sink was full of unwashed dishes, which rose in stacks from the dirty water and were covered in a layer of rancid grease. The kitchen bench was littered with scraps of rotting food, some with mould growing on them. Fat bluebottle flies flew in circuits and waddled over the debris.

I went to the telephone and put a call through to Harald.

The sound of his deep voice calmed me instantly. He always gave me the feeling that things were going to be alright.

‘Harald … I went to see Carl, and then, well, I think I’ve had a bit of a turn.’ I didn’t want to tell him about Mrs Dahlstrom’s body over the phone.

‘Sorry to hear that. Are you alright, old girl?’

‘I’m feeling a bit better, but might you be able to meet me down here rather than over your way?’

‘Oh, Doris. I’d love to, but I’m on my way out for lunch.’

‘I thought we had plans to meet this afternoon,’ I said.

‘Blast! You’re right. I’m awfully sorry, it went right out of my head. The thing is, I’ve promised to take Miss Brun for a spin in the old Racy Lady right after lunch.’

That was the name of Harald’s speedboat. I pictured Miss Brun with her long hair flying back from her head as she and Harald zoomed through the archipelago.

‘She’s already on her way, so it’s an appointment I must keep,’ he said. ‘Maybe a little later in the evening? Or what about tomorrow?’

I rang off.

My head was throbbing, and I sat down for a moment in the kitchen. I opened my handbag for my handkerchief and caught sight of Carl’s letter to Greta Fredelius. I’d forgotten all about it. I filled the kettle and put it on the fire. As I waited for it to boil I pinched the letter between finger and thumb—it was quite fat. The kettle was taking too long. I ripped open the envelope, not at all carefully, leaving a messy tear right across the front and through the address.

Dear Miss Fredelius,

I know Lina was your sister, but she was also my patient, and she was very dear to me. I took the very best care I could of her, when she was alive and after she died. I know you loved your sister, but I love her too, more than you might …

The letter went on for pages and pages. I only glanced through the rest of them.

… I promised to care for her and protect her … I have heard from my lawyer that her body is not to be returned to me, but to be dismembered and buried in secret places … Please, I beg of you not to do this. Please return her to me …

I scrunched the pages into a tight ball and threw it into the kitchen sink, with all the filthy dishes. My mouth was dry. I filled a glass of water and took a mouthful but I no longer knew how to swallow. I spat it out into the sink, all over the letter. My head was throbbing harder and a flashing light appeared in the corner of my vision—a sure sign that a migraine was coming.

I always kept some tablets in my bedside cabinet. On the stairs, I noticed that musty smell again, stronger now, and when I reached the landing I saw that the door to Carl’s treatment room was ajar. A high-pitched humming sound came from within. I opened the door and the smell wafted out; it was suffocating. I turned on the light. There were two beds, one very high and narrow, one a kind of camp bed on the floor. The window was covered with the old blanket we used to take on picnics, and the place was crammed with far more kinds of equipment and machines than I remembered. Everything was in disarray. Bottles and boxes lay scattered over the floor and the beds were unmade. The floor was covered in blobs of white mud and pieces of torn-up leaves and flowers. In one corner was what looked to be a pile of plaster limbs. The humming sound I’d heard was flies—they were buzzing against the window and in the air all around me, and they crawled over every surface.

The high bed must have been where Carl had kept the corpse, the very same as what I had just seen in the chapel. I took a step forward. The sheets trailed down onto the floor. Automatically I bent down to straighten them, and saw that they were my own sheets, from the trousseau that I’d put together all those years ago. I remembered sitting with Mother and looking through the catalogue, both of us pointing out these sheets, I remembered her hand holding the pen as she wrote out the mail order.

‘I always knew you’d make a good marriage,’ she said, and she took both of my hands in hers. ‘But to be marrying a man like Carl, so elegant, so American, I never dared to dream of such a thing.’ My mother had died shortly after our wedding, and long before I got to know what Carl was really like.

I put the sheets on the bed. There was another piece of fabric lying on the floor and I picked it up. It was silky to the touch, an evening dress, but not mine. I held it up in front of me. It was beautiful, made for a woman far slimmer, far younger than me.

As I stood there with the dress in my hand, I seemed to fly out from my body. From across the room I saw myself standing by the bed, my face as pale as the silk fabric. I let out an ungodly roar. I tried to tear the dress apart and when I couldn’t, I threw it across the room. Clouds of flies, disturbed by the commotion, flew into my face. I pulled the sheets from the bed and flung them across the room too. They hung in the air for a moment, like a fishing net cast over the sea, and then I ran to the window and tore down the blanket that covered it. Still screaming, I went to the shelves lining the walls and started throwing things onto the floor—boxes, books, jars, bottles—some of which broke into pieces when they landed.

The funny thing was, as I saw myself behave in this manner I remained completely disconnected from the scene, and even remarked to myself, ‘Well, she’s really lost control now,’ as if I had nothing to do with the woman I was watching. Presently I became aware of a shrill noise that could be heard under the screaming. The screaming stopped and I recognised the other sound as the doorbell. I saw myself go downstairs and open the door, but there was no one there.

I returned to the hotel, packed my bags, and caught the train back to Ystad.

8.

COOKING HAS ALWAYS been a comfort for me. My mother taught me how to cook when I was just a little thing—apple pancakes, cinnamon bread, semolina pudding. We used to collect eggs and make fresh omelettes, with chives from the garden. Even after I was married and we had Anna to cook for us, I never lost the desire for it. Sometimes, when Carl was out, I would sit in the kitchen with Anna while she cooked and watch her. The best thing about being in Ystad was that it was seemly for me to cook for myself once more. Meatballs, herb potatoes, stewed fruits, I got to know all these old recipes again. Making them helped me settle into my strange new life more than anything else did.

I was only able to stay at Lotta’s house for two weeks before the situation became unbearable. There wasn’t any particular incident, but every day it was made clear to me that I wasn’t welcome. Lotta is seven years older than me and even though we were both past fifty, she was as proprietorial as when we were girls. She’d loved Carl from the very beginning, and was even more bewitched by his foreign ways than I had been.

Lotta didn’t understand how I could leave Carl and my life in Stockholm—the apartment, our friends—behind me, and asked me constantly when I was planning to go back. She left train timetables lying around, and never failed to point out at any opportunity all the things she liked about Carl.

The date of the sanity hearing came and went, and I received a telegram from Carl saying he had been released, that he missed me and wanted to know when I was coming home. I didn’t reply. Thereafter he telephoned Lotta’s house most days, and she insisted on calling me to the telephone, though I’d told her I didn’t want to speak with him. Harald telephoned too, at first often and then less frequently. I never returned his calls. A distance had grown between us, vaster than the miles that separated him from me. After a while he stopped telephoning at all.

When I could no longer bear it at Lotta’s, I rented a couple of rooms in a boarding house off the main square. The place was tiny. There was a living room with a grubby floral sofa, an easy chair, a table with uneven legs and two Biedermeier chairs. Against one wall was a kitchen area—two gas rings, an icebox and a sink. The bedroom had space only for a bed and a clothes rail behind a curtain. The bathroom I shared with the other lodgers. Both of my rooms were poky and dark, and a murky, pond-like smell drifted up from the kitchen sink. I tried to remember that I wouldn’t be there forever.

The days felt endless, each one the same as the last. I filled the hours with shopping and cooking and waiting for the release of the newspapers. I read every edition of Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter to follow the process of the inquest, which I’d learned might take months. If it was found that Carl had been involved in Petter Dahlstrom’s death, I could apply for a divorce on my own, though this could take some time, up to a year perhaps. If Carl was found to be innocent, my situation would be more complicated. It was at that time still difficult to divorce a man who refused his consent.

Sometimes the walls of my rented rooms oppressed me so much I’d rush out to walk the streets of the town, or along the sandy paths that ran by the seashore. The country around Ystad is flat and wide, with long horizons, and a light that seems to come not from the sun, but up from the earth and the sea. The ocean, the heather, the birds and the sky are all in soft shades of grey. I would walk for hours, listening to the suck and sigh of the pearl-coloured sea, but in Ystad, walking failed to calm me. I was stalked by a foreboding, that at times enveloped me in a poisonous fog. My limbs would move in an unsteady rhythm and my heart would pound with a sick-making relentlessness, getting in the way of my breathing. When the nervousness subsided, there remained a flatness within me, a deadness. I felt like a machine, automatically running along fixed circuits. My body was heavy and slack.

I went from one day to the next blindly, dragging myself around, sleeping and waking and sleeping again. Walking. I could hardly think about anything at all, beyond seeing out the day. Sometimes I couldn’t remember why I’d left Stockholm in the first place.

Summer had long ended and the trees had lost their leaves. Lotta softened; I think she understood that there was no going back for me. She stopped enumerating Carl’s good points, and lecturing me about my wifely duties, and started taking me out gathering berries and mushrooms. She invited me to concerts, to plays, and did her best to involve me in the life of the town. She even arranged a job for me, as a kindergarten teacher, remembering that I had many years ago, back in Råsa, dreamed of becoming a teacher. As well as filling the days, it gave me a small income. As Lotta pointed out, when I was finally free of Carl I would need to earn something of my own, even considering any money that might be settled on me in the divorce agreement.

Afternoons at the kindergarten—when the children had eaten their apple slices, finished listening to a Brothers Grimm story and were taking their afternoon naps—were the only quiet moments I got to myself during workdays. I used the time to read the newspapers. Most days there was no report on the inquest, and on the days there was, it would be only a small detail. One afternoon at the tired end of winter, when the sun had already set and the snow was falling, I was leafing through that day’s Dagens Nyheter when I saw Carl’s face printed there on the page.

CORONER DELIVERS OPEN VERDICT ON DAHLSTROM’S DEATH

The coroner has delivered an open finding at the inquest into the death of Petter Dahlstrom, husband of the so-called ‘corpse bride’, Mrs Lina Dahlstrom. The inquest was unable to determine whether the death occurred from poisoning or natural causes.

Dahlstrom was found dead at a property near Sundsvall in October 1930. The initial cause of death was given as a heart attack, but a murder investigation was launched the following May after a pathologist’s report stated that the death had been caused by poisoning.

Three subsequent pathologists’ reports found that poisoning was not the cause of death, and that Dahlstrom had suffered from a number of undiagnosed health problems, including an enlarged heart, which may have contributed to his death.

There was also dispute among the pathologists over toxicology tests, which initially showed no evidence of poisoning, but contained various irregularities.

The judge was unable to determine the cause of death and refused to rule out poisoning.

Dahlstrom’s late wife, Mrs Lina Dahlstrom, was at the centre of a controversial case last August involving the eccentric scientist Carl Dance.

I had expected to have some kind of reaction on finding out this news, but I felt nothing. Not trepidation over the complication to divorce proceedings, nor relief that Carl turned out not to be a murderer. It was as if I were reading an article about people I had never met and didn’t much care about one way or the other. I turned the page and skimmed a story on the figure skaters Andrée and Pierre Brunet winning a gold medal at the Olympics.

When I came home, Lotta was waiting for me in the hall; she had torn the article from the paper and was waving it at me like a flag. Her round face shone with elation.

‘He’s innocent, did you see?’

We went upstairs and I made tea. The tea set was mismatched and each cup cracked. They had come with the rooms. There was no milk jug and I hadn’t made any biscuits.

Lotta couldn’t stop talking about Carl. ‘What did I tell you, Dodo! I always knew he was innocent. He might be eccentric, that much was clear all along, but he’s not a killer. Not a chance!’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose it is a bit of a relief.’ Sitting opposite Lotta I was struck by how very much alike we looked; everyone could always tell we were sisters. Just as our mother had been, we were tall, dark-haired, with wide hips and large hands and feet—too substantial for the fashion of the day. But there the similarity ended.

‘And?’ she said. ‘What are you going to do now? Go back to Stockholm?’

I poured the tea.

‘I don’t know, Lotta. I haven’t really had a chance to think about it.’

‘Haven’t thought about it? Oh, Dodo, can’t you see this is no life for you? A life of poky rented rooms and looking after other people’s children?’

I felt tears in my eyes. It was true that this was not what I’d been imagining in the jubilant visions of freedom I’d had in Stockholm the previous summer. I’d pictured quite a different kind of life.

‘Dodo, you ought to put all this divorce nonsense behind you. Now that Carl is in the clear, perhaps it’s time you and he set your differences aside. Go back to Stockholm. You’ll see—things have a way of working out better than you think they will.’

We drank our tea in silence. When I was seeing Lotta out, she said, ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ and reached into her handbag and took out an envelope. ‘This came for you yesterday.’

It was a letter from Harald. I hadn’t heard from him in months.

The letter started off in a perfectly ordinary way, as if we had been in regular correspondence. He wrote about a hiking weekend he’d been on, and the wildlife he’d seen. Harald is a great naturalist and knows all the different plants and their properties and their botanical names, and he can tell birds from their call. Then it went on:

I hope you’ll come to Stockholm again soon. I do miss having you around. Also, I have some rather exciting news. It’s still all a bit hush-hush but I know it’ll be safe with you. I’ve been seeing a lot of Miss Brun (Albertine: you remember her. I think you met her once), and we’re going to be married. I can hardly believe my luck, she’s such a terrific girl, so bright and full of energy …

Of course I remembered Miss Albertine Brun.

9.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK I packed my overnight bag and got on the 9.10 am train to Stockholm, but not because I was following Lotta’s advice. I had consulted with a lawyer, who had advised one last effort to discuss the divorce with Carl before I launched proceedings on my own. I had the form, now dog-eared and furry, in my handbag, along with a whole lot of other paperwork in case Carl still didn’t agree. When I’d spoken to him on the telephone he was just as contrite and polite as when I’d last seen him. He told me to come to the apartment at five o’clock the next Wednesday.

When I got out at Central Station the city looked very different to when I had left. Dirty snow lined the streets and people shuffled along, bundled in hats and overcoats, their faces set against the icy wind. I got on the 91 bus to Östermalm and watched the familiar streets and buildings pass. The closer I got to Jungfrugatan, the more nervous I started to feel. I wished that I’d insisted on meeting somewhere else.

From the outside, our apartment building looked the same as it used to, as if nothing terrible had ever happened there. I was fifteen minutes early, but I thought I would wait for Carl in the apartment if he wasn’t yet home from work—it was still my apartment after all. I went into the building and up the stairs and everything was still exactly like it had always been: the noticeboard in the downstairs hall, the burgundy carpet in the middle of the staircase, the rickety lift making its same clanking racket. It felt like home.

But when I got to our door, I found I couldn’t unlock it. Again. This time the key turned in the lock with no trouble, but the door seemed to be bolted on the other side. I pressed the bell and heard it ring, but no one answered. I thought I could hear voices inside. I rang the bell again and knocked and called, ‘Carl!’ Still nothing. Then I noticed a sign beside the door:

DANCE MUSEUM

Tours: on the hour, every hour, from noon to five o’clock, Wednesday to Saturday.

I had no idea what to make of that. I decided to go for a walk until the fifteen minutes were up. When I went downstairs I could see that it had begun to snow, but I wrapped my scarf tighter and went out regardless. I had really chosen the wrong shoes, I was wearing my two-tone Oxfords with the leather fringe below the lace. I should have worn my grey boots. It made me quite distressed to look at my poor Oxfords making their way along the wet footpath, getting stained from the snow. I made it only as far as the end of the block before turning back.

A small crowd was waiting on the landing: a gentleman and five or six ladies. I tapped one of the ladies on the shoulder.

‘Excuse me, are you waiting for Dr Dance?’

‘Oh no! We’re here for the tour. We’re up from Malmö for the week and our friend said it was quite the thing.’

I hung back, not wanting to be seen as part of the group. Five o’clock came and the apartment door opened to reveal another group, putting on their coats and retrieving their umbrellas. They trooped out and the group outside started going in. I followed, and didn’t see Carl until I was right inside the hall. He was standing in the living room talking to a small, dark-haired man. He didn’t seem to see me.

Everyone else was taking off their coats and scarves so I did too, and then we all stood around awkwardly. After a few minutes Carl shook the hand of the man and came to greet us.

‘Welcome!’ he said, spreading out his hands. I was at the back of the group, where he didn’t notice me. ‘Welcome to Dr Dance’s Museum.’

He coughed, turned away and led us into the living room. As we shuffled our way around the room, listening to him explaining every object in his exhibition, I wished I’d never come. The apartment was completely changed. The sofa, the table and chairs, the vases and paintings and houseplants were all gone. Along the walls were framed photographs and diagrams and plans, with little plaques beside them. Carl’s machines stood in one corner, polished and shining, and in another corner a plaster cast of a body hung from the ceiling; it was held together by wires like a ghostly marionette. In the middle of the room was a bed, upon which lay a shrouded figure surrounded by flowers, just like at the memorial. My stomach lurched at the sight.

Carl looked terribly old, and when he spoke his breath rasped in his chest; he had to keep stopping to cough into his handkerchief. He had gone to the trouble of putting a carnation in his buttonhole, but it was wilted and drooped to one side. We trailed from exhibit to exhibit, with Carl talking the whole time. A good twenty minutes passed and Carl still hadn’t seen me. Once he seemed to look directly at me, but his face was quite blank.

We were going so slowly, and Carl was talking on and on—he never could stop once you got him started on a subject—that my legs began to ache. Carl explained all the workings of his equipment—only the gentleman in the group was interested in that—and he read out every one of the articles he had framed on the walls. At last the tour was over and Carl picked up a little box and told us that the fee was two kronor. Two whole kronor! To my surprise, everyone got out their purses and not a single person complained about the expense.

Carl went around the group with the box and everyone put in their money. When he reached me he still had that bland expression on his face. He wasn’t even looking at me, but at the air above my head.

‘Carl,’ I said. ‘Stop this nonsense. It’s me.’

‘Oh, Doris,’ he said, ‘I didn’t see you there. I’m so sorry. I completely forgot it was today you were coming.’

Carl ushered everyone down the hall and out of the apartment.

‘What in god’s name is all this?’ I asked when we were alone.

‘You like it?’ He swept his arm around the room. ‘It took me months to put it all together, and as you can see I’ve been getting quite a good flow of visitors. A nice little earner. I wanted you to see it in action.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘Coffee?’ he asked.

He led me into the kitchen, where there were two small stools, the only seats in the whole lower floor. I watched him shuttle slowly about with cups and tins, stopping now and then to press his fist into his chest and cough into his handkerchief.

‘Carl, I don’t understand any of this. What’s going on?’

‘It’s one of a few projects I have on the boil. The fact is I’m a little hard up just now. I’m looking in to a few sidelines. One of my ventures is cosmetics, creams and whatnot for women’s faces. You’ve got no idea how much ladies are willing to pay for a fancy pot of some concoction. But that one’s still in the development stage. Then the other …’

He droned on. Carl had always been a great one for making plans. And when he got going it was impossible to get a word in.

‘Carl,’ I interrupted. ‘Carl!’ I wasn’t there to discuss his business plans. He ignored me.

‘… naturally I would never put the actual replica on display, oh no, I couldn’t have all these people gawking. And I can see now that the job does need to be done by a professional, and in fact that fellow I was talking to when your group arrived—perhaps you saw him?—he’s big in the toy business and he said he could help me out. It’s just the one that I want, and it’s got to be full-sized.’ He was talking so much it was almost as if he was delirious with a fever.

‘Carl! Stop!’

He did stop then and looked at me, as if he’d only just realised that I was there. I reached into my handbag and took out the tattered envelope.

‘I came here to today to discuss our future.’

Carl doubled over and went into a fit of coughing that left him weak and wheezing. His face had turned a deep shade of purple.

‘You don’t sound at all well.’

‘I’m fine … just fine.’ He spat into his handkerchief. His breathing sounded like wind whistling down a chimney. ‘I’m fighting fit.’

‘Well then, let’s get down to business,’ I said. ‘The fact is that whether you agree to it or not, I will divorce you. So you may as well just sign now.’

His eyes narrowed and he had a look on his face that I recognised.

‘I think, Doris, you’ll find that it does matter whether I agree or not.’ He started coughing again. ‘If you think … you can just blaze in here and start issuing orders …’ He struggled to get the words out between coughs. ‘And don’t think … I don’t know about you and … that, that … Mr Harald Blomkvist … gallivanting about …’

‘Carl, please!’ I said. He was fighting for breath, and his face was red and angry. His hands were shaking.

‘Please calm down. We need to discuss this in a reasonable manner.’

He shot me a venomous look and stood up, breathing hard.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘I have a business meeting.’

‘What? Now? But we haven’t even—’

‘You’ll hear from my lawyer.’

10.

A FEW HOURS later I got a telephone call at the hotel. It was Nils. Carl had been admitted to Serafen. He had collapsed in the middle of Central Station and his condition was apparently serious. It was lucky for him that I’d decided to stay in Stockholm for the night. Nils said that Carl desperately wanted to talk to me, so I went in to the hospital.

A doctor met me in the corridor, his face grave. ‘Mrs Dance, I’m afraid the news isn’t good,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to inform you that your husband has tuberculosis. It’s a very advanced case. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do.’

‘How long does he have?’

‘A matter of months, weeks perhaps.’

When I approached Carl’s bedside, I thought at first that I’d got there too late. His body was so shrunken and thin under the hospital sheets, he appeared to be nothing but a heap of bones. But when I got closer I could hear the sound of his breath rattling in and out. He raised his hand when he saw me, and tried to speak.

‘Shh,’ I said.

He turned his face towards me and his eyes were wide and frightened. ‘Doris … please … help me.’ His voice drifted from his lips in a reedy whisper.

Seeing him lying there like that made me think of lambs in the springtime. If you’re not from the country, you probably think that all lambs are sprightly bouncing things, full of life and energy, and it’s true that most lambs are like that. But there are always one or two in every lambing season that aren’t the pink and white animals you imagine. Perhaps they’re orphans, or perhaps they get too cold, or are born with something wrong, but these lambs are thin and greyish, with watery eyes and dirty fleeces. On our farm, I had always been the one to take care of these pitiful creatures, even though Papa would tell me not to. I would wrap them in blankets and sit with them by the kitchen hearth, convinced that I could keep them alive by the force of my will. Most of the time it did no good and I’d wake to find the lamb just a lifeless bundle on the floor. I would cry for days afterwards, and be so upset that Papa would forbid me from taking in any more lambs. He said that to do so was prolonging the inevitable, and only served to increase their suffering. Carl was looking at me now with the same dulled eyes that those lambs had had: desperate, begging for help and comfort. I knew Carl wouldn’t last for very long.

‘It’s alright, Carl,’ I said. ‘I’m here now. I’ll take care of you.’

Carl was certainly telling the truth when he said he was hard up. All the money was gone; the apartment had been mortgaged, and where we used to have savings there were now only debts. Carl had run up enormous legal fees during the trial, and that was on top of the fortune he’d already spent building those machines.

I had to sell the apartment. With what was left from the sale I managed to buy a small house on the outskirts of Luleå and I got a job working at the nursery school there. It was clear that I would have to be the one to earn our keep for the next little while.

And so I started a new life with Carl. It was nothing like our old life in Stockholm, and it was nothing like any kind of life I had ever pictured, or dreamed about. I had to work harder than I would have if I had stayed at my parents’ farm. When I wasn’t taking care of the children at the nursery school, I was taking care of Carl at home. He had become in many ways nothing more than a child. Very soon after we arrived in Luleå, about two months after his collapse, his decline began in earnest. He was so thin and weak that he could hardly speak properly anymore, and his mind began to suffer. He had obsessions and some very strange ideas—stranger than was usual for him, I mean. He talked about one money-making scheme after another, each one wilder than the last. It seemed that he had embarked on some kind of writing project, but I could never gather just what it was, and he was somehow involved with a toy manufacturer, at least as far as I could make out.

One day a letter arrived for him, with a German postmark. The sender was a Herr A. Kestner of Gräfenhain. Carl got very excited when I gave him the letter.

‘He’s done it!’ he said, as he struggled to open the envelope. ‘The bottle!’

At least that’s what I think he said. I often had difficulty understanding what Carl was talking about in those days, his mind was that far gone and his speech had become much weakened.

‘What bottle?’ I asked. He was still struggling to tear open the envelope. ‘Here, let me help you.’

I tried to take the letter from him, but he snatched it away and took it with him into his study.

When I went in to check on him I found him collapsed on the floor, clutching the opened letter. He was crying and I let him mumble away through his tears while I got him back into bed.

‘The bottle … she’s gone … nothing left now …’ he kept saying, and then something that sounded like: ‘He robbed me, the thief … that lying bastard …’

‘Nobody’s robbed you, Carl,’ I told him. ‘You’re dreaming.’ He became quite hysterical then and started howling and ranting. ‘I just wanted her all to myself … now they can all see her, touch her … that bastard—’

‘Now, now!’

It took me an age to get him settled—he was very agitated and wouldn’t let go of that silly letter. He even insisted on taking it to bed with him.

‘… Just let me die … please …’

Well, sometimes he did get a bit down in the mouth: it’s quite common with people suffering from long illnesses. I gave him a double dose of sleeping-draught, which I did whenever he was being troublesome, and sat with him to make sure he quietened down.

When he dropped off I took the letter from his hand. I saw it wasn’t a letter at all but a page clipped from a catalogue with an advertisement for dolls. I glanced down at the page, and you know, it was a funny thing, because one of the dolls looked just like Mrs Dahlstrom, and was even called ‘The Sweetheart Lina Doll’. The more I looked at the doll, the more it resembled her. Underneath the picture it read: 26 inches of true Swedish beauty! Real life scale model! $1.98.

Who would have thought that a picture of a doll would have such an impact on him.

The next day I took the advertisement to the toyshop on Teatergränd street.

‘You’re in luck,’ said the sales clerk, ‘We have one left in stock. It’s a very popular item.’

The doll really did look so much like Mrs Dahlstrom, even more in real life than in the catalogue picture. She had her dark hair done in waves and pinned back, and she was wearing a black-and-white spotted dress with a wide white Peter Pan collar, and on her feet she had little black pumps. She was much more like Mrs Dahlstrom than her own dead body had been. I paid cash and had it gift-wrapped.

When I got home Carl was still in bed. The sleeping-draught always lasted a long time. I told him that I had a surprise for him. While I waited for him to come downstairs, I put on some coffee and cut up the cinnamon cake I’d bought as a special treat. I set the table and put the wrapped-up doll at Carl’s place. His eyes lit up when he saw the present waiting for him. He’d always loved surprises. We sat down and I poured out the coffee. Carl picked up the present.

‘Do you need help unwrapping it?’ I asked him, taking care to speak loudly and clearly.

He didn’t reply, but picked up the box in his trembling hands and started to tear off the paper, strip by shaky strip.

‘Oh, good work, Carl—I see you can manage very well on your own.’

I took a bite of cinnamon cake and watched him slowly unwrap the box. At last all the paper lay on the floor around his chair. He sat there squinting at the box, turning it this way and that and trying to read what it said on the back.

‘See, Carl, a present for you,’ I said loudly. ‘Here, I’ll help you open it.’

I reached over to undo the flap on the top of the box—they can be tricky with those sharp corners—but all of a sudden Carl gave a yell and lurched backwards so violently that he almost tipped over the chair he was sitting in. He flung the box away from him across the room as though it was on fire. It shot through the air and hit the wall opposite with quite a crash—I was rather surprised at Carl’s strength. Then he stood up, gripping the tabletop to steady himself and saying, ‘Oh … Oh … Oh …’ over and over.

‘Carl? Whatever’s the matter?’

He was swaying as if he was about to keel over. I picked up the doll and brought it back to him. He inched his way back, away from me, as though I held a live viper in my hands.

‘Carl, don’t be scared—it’s only a doll, you silly old thing!’

I gave him a gentle push back into his chair and set the doll on the table in front of him.

‘You see,’ I said, ‘it’s the doll you saw yesterday, remember? In the catalogue?’ I gave him a pat on the shoulder. He had tears streaming down his face.

‘That goddamned bastard …’ Carl wheezed in his breathless whisper. ‘All I ever wanted … was for her to be mine …’ He slumped forward onto the table, his sobs wracking his whole body. The doll dropped to the floor. After that, Carl got very ill and he never recovered. He died the following week.

It took me a long time to sort through all of Carl’s belongings. We’d left Stockholm in a rush, and I’d thrown a whole lot of his things into storage—there were all kinds of odds and ends in there: parts of machines; boxes full of tools and wires; empty bottles of chemicals; and notebooks filled with designs and plans for machines and equipment. I got in touch with Nils to see if he wanted any of it—it all looked like junk, in my opinion—but he was quite excited to take some of it away, and even paid me quite a tidy sum for it.

There were also two filing cabinets in Carl’s study in Luleå, which were full of papers. When I started to go through them, I discovered that they contained Carl’s writing project—he had been writing a memoir. Most of it had been done on a typewriter, which was a relief because his handwriting was the worst I’d ever seen—even some of my six-year-olds could do better.

I spent a week reading through the contents of those cabinets, and I must admit, some of the subjects he had written about were difficult to read—there were details about Mrs Dahlstrom that absolutely made my eyes water. There were also a whole lot of other things written there, incriminating things about Mr Dahlstrom’s death. Reading through them, I wasn’t quite sure whether they were true, or whether they were nothing more than jealous fantasies.

It transpired that Carl actually had an agreement with a publisher for his memoir. A few months after his death they wrote to ask about the manuscript. I made a few small changes, and sent it off to the publishers, and I must say, I was surprised at how well the book did. The sales are still so good that with the money it brings in, and having no one to support, I no longer have to work. These days I live a very comfortable life. I’m back in Östermalm again, but I’ve left behind everything of my former life in Stockholm—Christine and Ulf, Hilde, Charlotta. Even Harald. Now I have a new circle of friends, friends of my own. I’m back to being Doris Ekman, and I’m having a much better time than I ever had when I was Doris Dance, or I ever would have had as Doris Blomkvist.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MY THANKS GO first to my agent, Sarah McKenzie: thank you for your belief in the manuscript, and your guidance and support.

Thank you to everyone at Ultimo, especially Brigid Mullane: Brigid, it was a pleasure to work with you to get this book into shape. I’m so grateful for your encouragement, vision and insightfulness. Thank you also to Meredith Rose, for your sharp eyes and your meticulous attention to detail in the edit.

I am grateful to have received funding from Australia Council to develop the first draft of this novel. This support was invaluable, and the book would not have happened without it.

The narrative of this novel and its characters are loosely based on the true story of Elena Milagro de Hoyos and Georg Karl Tänzler (also known as Count Carl von Cosel).

When researching this novel, I drew upon von Cosel’s memoirs, which were published in the September 1947 edition of the magazine Fantastic Adventures (The Secret of Elena’s Tomb), as well as Ben Harrison’s Undying Love.

Thank you to the early readers of the manuscript: my mother, Annette Castillo, and Vignesh Chandrasekaran. Thanks also to my stepfather Miguel Castillo for round-the-clock technical advice on electronics and medical equipment. I’m grateful to Christina Höglund for so generously welcoming me while I was in Stockholm: husen i romanen är alla baserade på ditt.

Finally, Gavi: thank you for everything.

Marija Peričić is a writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her first novel, The Lost Pages, won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award 2017 and was shortlisted for the 2017 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. She was named as a 2018 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Exquisite Corpse is her second novel.

Published in 2023 by Ultimo Press, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

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Copyright © Marija Peričić 2023

Exquisite Corpse

eISBN 978 1 76115 134 7

Cover design Andy Warren Design

Cover images Front cover rose by Pradit_Ph / iStock; back cover rose by Pannawit Khongjaroenmaitree / iStock; textured background by Annie Spratt / Unsplash

Author photo Courtesy of Brent Lukey

Copyeditor Meredith Rose

Proofreader Lauren Carta

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