The Black Path Read Online Free PDF

take most of the sessions. A secretary will come up one day a week and deal with applications for summonses, that sort of thing. So it’ll be pretty isolated.”
    Rebecka promises to think it over. But that business about working alone seals the deal. No people around her. That, and the fact that somebody from her insurance company had rung up just a week earlier and talked about training and a gradual return to working life. It had made Rebecka feel sick with fear. Being shoved together with a load of burnt-out no-hopers and being made to take her driving license or join in some positive-thinking course.
    “The respite is over,” she says to Sivving that evening. “I might as well give the prosecution service a go as anything else.”
    Sivving is standing by the stove, turning over slices of blood pudding.
    “Stop giving the dog bread under the table,” he says. “I can see you. What about your lawyer’s job, then?”
    “Never again.”
    She thinks about Måns. She’ll have to resign now. She’s felt like a burden on the firm for a long time. But he’ll disappear forever.
    It’s fine, she says to herself. What would a life with him be like? You’d be going through his pockets while he was asleep, searching for receipts and yellow credit card slips to check that he hasn’t been out drinking. His past would certainly put you off. Is it possible for anybody to be worse at maintaining relationships? Sporadic contact with his grown-up children. Divorced. Nothing but short-term relationships.
    She makes a list of his faults. It doesn’t help in the slightest.
    When she was working for him, he would touch her sometimes. “Well done, Martinsson,” and then the touch. His hand around her upper arm. Once, a brief caress of her hair.
    I’m going to stop thinking about him, she tells herself. It just drives you bloody mad. Your whole head is full of some guy, his hands, his mouth, what he looks like from the back and from the front and all the rest of it. You can go for months without a single sensible thought.

S UNDAY M ARCH 16, 2005
    T he dead woman came sailing through the darkness toward Inspector Anna-Maria Mella. She was floating in the air as she would have done if a magician had waved his wand over her and made her rise, lying on her back with her arms pressed closely by her sides.
    Who are you? thought Anna-Maria.
    Her white skin and those eyes of frosted glass made her look like a statue. Her features were also reminiscent of a marble statue from antiquity. The bridge of her nose was set high up between her eyebrows, her forehead and nose forming an unbroken line in profile.
    Gustav, Anna-Maria’s three-year-old, turned over in his sleep and gave her a series of kicks in the side. She got hold of his small but muscular body and turned him firmly so that he was lying with his bottom and back toward her instead. She drew him close and stroked his tummy with circular movements, nuzzling his night-sweaty hair with her nose and kissing him. He sighed contentedly in his sleep.
    It was just so blissful and so sensual, this time with the children. They grew up so quickly, and that was the end of the stroking and tickling. Anna-Maria dreaded the time when they would no longer have a small child in the house. Hopefully there would be grandchildren. She could always hope that Marcus, her eldest, would start early.
    And there’s always Robert in an emergency, she thought, smiling at her sleeping husband. There are advantages to hanging on to the same guy you’ve had from the start. However wrinkly and saggy I get, he’ll still see the girl he got to know at the dawn of time.
    Or else you have to get a load of dogs, she thought. Who’ll be allowed to sleep on the bed with filthy paws and slavering jaws and all the rest of it.
    She let go of Gustav and groped for her cell phone, looked at the clock, half four.
    One cheek was burning. She’d probably got a touch of frostbite the previous evening when she and