The Postcard Killers

    The lawyer looked as though she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard.

    “What do you mean? A hundred and fifty thousand dollars? That’s quite absurd!”

    Sylvia smiled again.

    “You’re getting five percent.”

    Andrea Friederichs started to get up from her chair. Her blushes had grown into fiery blotches covering her whole neck.

    “Almost a million and a half Swedish kronor for a few days’ work,”

    Sylvia said. “You think that’s absurd? I suppose that it is.”

    “There’s such a thing as legal precedent…,” the lawyer began. Sylvia leaned over and lowered her voice to an almost inaudible whisper.

    “Have you forgotten who we are?” she breathed, and she saw how Andrea Friederichs sank back in her chair, her face drained of color.

Part Three

Chapter 115

Wednesday, June 23

Stockholm, Sweden

    URVЕDERSGRЕND WAS DESERTED AND doing its best to show why it had been named after bad weather.

    Gusts of rain tore and tugged at the street lamps and signs, the shutters and gables.

    The reporters had finally given up and gone the hell home. That was the good news.

    Dessie paid the taxi driver and hurried in through the doorway. Her steps echoed in the empty stairwell. She felt like she’d been away for ages. Her apartment welcomed her with gray light and complete silence and a certain unappealing mustiness.

    She pulled off her clothes, letting them fall in a heap on the hall floor. Then she sank down and sat on the telephone table in the hall, staring at the wall opposite. Suddenly she was far too exhausted to take the shower she had been looking forward to all day.

    For some reason her mother came to her mind.

    They hadn’t been in regular contact during the last years she was alive, but right now Dessie would have liked to call her and tell her what had been written about her, about the terrible murders, about her own loneliness. And about Jacob.

    She would have liked to tell her about the unusual American with the sapphire blue eyes. Her mother would have understood. If there was one thing she had experience in, it was doomed relationships.

    At that moment the phone rang right next to her. It startled her so much that she jumped.

    “Dessie? The phone didn’t even ring on my end. You must have been sitting on it.”

    It was Gabriella.

    “Actually, I was,” Dessie said, standing up.

    She got hold of a towel and grappled with it to pull it around her with one hand, then took the cordless phone out through the kitchen and into the living room.

    “How are things with you? You sounded so down when I last spoke to you.”

    Dessie slumped onto the sofa and looked out at the harbor. It was still gorgeous; at least that never changed.

    “Everything got a bit much in the end,” she muttered.

    “Is it Jacob?”

    Unable to stop herself any longer, Dessie started to cry.

    “Sorry,” she sniffled into the phone. “Sorry, I…”

    “You fell for him hard, didn’t you?”

    Gabriella sounded neither angry nor disappointed, but more like a good friend now.

    Dessie took a deep breath.

    “I suppose so,” she said.

    There was a moment’s silence.

    “Things don’t always work out as you hope,” Gabriella said, so quietly that her words were almost inaudible.

    “I know,” Dessie whispered. “Sorry.”

    Gabriella laughed.

    “That took its time,” she said.

    “I know,” Dessie repeated.

    Silence again.

    “What’s happening today?” Dessie asked, to break the silence more than anything else.

    “The Rudolphs have announced that they’re checking out of the Grand at lunchtime. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.”

    Dessie bit her lip. “Do you really think they’re innocent?” she asked.

    “There’s nothing to link them to the murders,” Gabriella said. “No forensic evidence, no witnesses, no confessions, no murder weapons…”

    “So who did it? Sell me on a new explanation,” Dessie said. “Who are the real Postcard Killers, then?”

    Before Gabriella could answer, the doorbell rang.

    What the -?

    Who could it be now? A reporter who still hadn’t given up?

    She had no peephole and no safety chain.

    “Hang on a moment while I get the door,” Dessie said, going out to the hall and unlocking the door.

    She opened it cautiously, then suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

    “I’ll call you later,” she said into the phone and hung up on Gabriella.

Chapter 116

    JACOB WAS ALMOST AS crumpled-looking and unshaven as he had been the first time he stood outside Dessie’s door.

    She took a great leap into his arms, holding him t ight, tight, tight, as though she never meant to let go, kissing him hard and letting her hands roam inside his checkered flannel shirt.

    “Dessie,” Jacob whispered into her hair. “We’re standing in the stairwell and you’re not wearing any clothes.”