came back to the hall, she sat down on the stool by the telephone. The light on the answering machine was flashing. She pressed the appropriate button. The first message was from somebody called Hans who wondered if Henrik had time to go to the Ethnographical Museum to see an exhibition of Peruvian mummies. Then came a click, and a call but no message. The tape kept running. Now it was her calling from Mitsos's house. She could hear the enthusiasm in her voice, looking forward to the reunion that never took place. Then it was her again, this time from Visby. She pressed the repeat button and listened to the messages again. First Hans, then an unknown person, and herself. She remained sitting by the telephone. The light had stopped flashing. Instead she felt something go off inside herself, a warning light, just like the one on the answering machine. It was as if she'd received an incoming message. She held her breath and tried to isolate her thoughts. It happens all the time that somebody phones, says nothing although the sound of breathing can be heard, then hangs up. She did it herself sometimes, no doubt Henrik did as well. But what troubled her was her own messages. Had Henrik heard them at all?
Suddenly she was certain. He had never heard them. The sound of the telephone ringing had echoed round the flat but no contact had been made.
She felt scared. But she needed all her strength now in order to look for clues. Henrik must have left something for her. She went to the room he used as a study, where he also had a hi-fi system and a television. She stood in the middle of the room and looked slowly round.
Nothing appeared to be missing. It's too tidy, she thought. Henrik was not into tidiness. We sometimes used to quarrel about what was reasonable and what was pedantic. She went round the flat again. Had the police cleared up? She needed to know. She called Göran Wrath. She could hear that he was busy, so only asked him about the state of the flat.
'We don't do that,' said Wrath. 'Obviously, if we've disturbed something we try to put it right again.'
'The sheets have been taken from his bed.'
'That can't have been us. There was no reason to take anything away as there was no sign of a crime having been committed.'
He apologised for having to cut short the conversation and gave her a time when she could phone him the following day. She stood in the middle of the room again and looked round once more. Then she investigated the linen basket in the bathroom. There were no sheets, only a pair of jeans. She searched methodically through the flat, but could find no trace of any dirty sheets. She sat down on his sofa and looked at the room from a different angle. There was something odd about how neat and tidy everything looked. But she couldn't put her finger on anything specific. She went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was almost empty, but that was what she had expected.
Then she turned her attention to his desk. She opened all the drawers. Papers, photographs, old boarding cards. She picked one out at random. On 12 August 1999 Henrik had flown to Singapore with Qantas. His seat number had been 37G. He had made a note on the reverse side: 'N.B. Phone call.' That was all.
She continued cautiously to become better acquainted with her son's life, the parts of it she did not know about. She lifted up the mouse pad with a picture of cacti in a desert: there was a letter underneath. She could see immediately that it was from Aron. She recognised his sprawling handwriting, always scribbled in a great hurry. She hesitated before reading it. Did she really want to know what kind of a relationship the two of them had? She picked up the envelope and turned it over. There was something that could have been an undecipherable address.
She stood by the kitchen window and tried to imagine how he would react. Aron, who never wore his heart on his sleeve, who always tried to keep a stiff upper lip when faced with the realities of life and everything it could throw at him.
You need me, she thought. In the same way that both I and Henrik needed you. But you never came when we appealed to you.