The Weeping Girl by Håkan Nesser

the eighties, when I was about fifteen or sixteen.
One of my sisters had a friend who was mixed up in something. I can’t remember what . . . Or didn’t know, to be more precise. Anyway, he came to interview Louise . . . Or perhaps he
interrogated her? Tall and red-haired, this Vrommel, right? A bit of a rough diamond.’
    ‘Bald as a coot nowadays,’ said Moreno. ‘But he’s certainly a rough diamond . . . But why the hell are we lying here nattering on about bald policemen?’
    ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Mikael. ‘It seems daft when there are hairy cops at much closer quarters.’
    He took hold of her bare feet and started massaging them.
    Hairy cops? Moreno thought.
    Then she burst out laughing.
    ‘I think I need a walk along the beach,’ she said. ‘I’ve drunk too much. And gobbled too much sauce.’
    ‘Same here,’ said Mikael. ‘Shall we take a blanket? The moon’s shining.’
    ‘We can’t possibly manage without a blanket,’ said Moreno.
    They got back from the beach shortly before dawn, and on Sunday she slept in until noon.
    So did Mikael, and after breakfast, which consisted mainly of juice and coffee, they went out and lay back in a couple of deckchairs in the garden with more juice and mineral water within easy
reach. Now that she’d had time to think about it, Moreno began to realize what a marvellous house she had come to stay in. A big and somewhat ramshackle wooden building with a veranda all the
way round it and balconies on the upper floor. Creaking staircases and lopsided nooks and passages that were bound to make an indelible impression on any young child’s mind. Bay windows with
dried flowers, old-fashioned scratchy window panes, and furniture from four or five generations and in ten times as many styles.
    How the Bau family had come to own a place like this – its name was Tschandala, for some unknown reason – was hidden in the mists of time: nobody in the family had ever been known to
have more money than was needed to buy their daily bread, Mikael insisted; but according to the most persistent theory of how the house had been acquired, it had been won by a certain Sinister Bau
at a strange and notorious poker party at the beginning of the 1920s. It was also rumoured that the same evening he had lost his young fiancée to a Ukrainian gypsy king, so the family
reckoned that honours were even and they had every right to own Tschandala.
    Mikael Bau told her all this and more besides while they lay back naked in their deckchairs. The thicket of scraggy dwarf pine trees and Aviolis bushes was rampant and formed an effective screen
so that they couldn’t be overlooked. Moreno kept asking herself if he were just making it all up on the spur of the moment.
    But then, perhaps the whole situation was some kind of illusion? The house and the weather and the naked man who had just stretched out his hand and placed it over her left breast – surely
it couldn’t all be real? It was more likely to be something she had dreamt up at home while lying in bed and waiting for the alarm clock to announce the arrival of yet another rainy Tuesday
in November – that seemed to be far more likely, dammit.
    She eventually decided that it didn’t matter in any case. She recalled that
the Chief Inspector
– Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, that is, who had weighed anchor and left the
police station some years ago, and now spent his days in Krantze’s antiquarian bookshop in Kupinskis Gränd – had once talked about that very thing. The fact that it didn’t
matter two hoots if everything turned out to be no more than a film or a book. Or if it was real. The conditions were the same – even if it was by no means clear what they were, they were the
same anyway.
    So she stretched out her hand and let it stay where it ended up.
    At about four they went down to the beach for a swim. There were lots of people around, of course. Summer, sunny and Sunday; mums, dads, children and dogs; frisbees,