Good Night, My Darling Read online

  Good Night, My Darling

  Inger Frimansson

  Translated from the original Swedish, Good Night My Darling is a mystery / thriller about hatred and revenge. Justine is a wealthy woman in her forties, living alone in a big house full of troubled memories of a tortured childhood. Now the memories come back to haunt Justine, but she is prepared. It is time for Justine to take revenge on everyone that has done her wrong.

  Inger Frimansson

  Good Night, My Darling

  The first book in the Justine Dalvik series

  Translated by Laura A. Wideburg

  God natt min älskade was originally published in Sweden in 1998.

  My thanks to Karl-David, who let me use his blowpipe as much as I needed.

  Prologue

  The plane touched down at Arlanda airport at six fifteen in the evening. The first leg had been late to London, which meant that they missed their connection. All the planes to Stockholm had been fully booked. They would not have gotten a seat until the next morning, if the woman from the Embassy had not gotten angry. Her name was Nancy Fors and she had been calm and a bit melancholy the whole trip. The unexpected explosion surprised Justine.

  They were the first to leave the plane. Two plainclothes policemen came on board and guided them out through a back way.

  “The press has already figured out that you were coming, unfortunately,” one of them said. Justine didn’t quite catch his name.

  “They’re real hyenas with all their chomping and slurping, but we’ll fool them.”

  They took her into their car.

  The light hit her, that pure, cool light and the delicate greenery. She had forgotten that nature could look like that. She mentioned this to Nancy Fors: “Don’t you miss home? How do you manage to live there in that heat?”

  “I know that it’s temporary,” she answered. “And this is still here, here at home.”

  They passed the Sollentuna-Upplands Väsby exit. It was seven-thirty.

  The policeman behind the wheel said, “You know… that girl Martina. Her parents want to meet you.”

  “They do?”

  “It’s important to them.”

  She turned her face toward the window. She saw a little clump of trees with white trunks.

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s fine.”

  part one

  Chapter ONE

  That sharp, pure cold. Grey water like a living thing, silk. No sky, no, just no contrasts, she couldn’t stand that, that hurt her eyes. The gathering clouds, getting ready for snow. And the dry snow would come from the skies, swirl like smoke over the roads, and she would remove her clothes and let herself get completely misted.

  Over there she had tried to imagine exactly this, the sensation of ice crystals. Her whole body tense, she would close her eyes in order to bring forth the sound of a Nordic stream one spring day when the ice had begun to melt.

  She never succeeded. Not even when the fever chills were at their worst and Nathan covered her with clothes, rags, curtains, everything he could find.

  She had been freezing with the wrong kind of chill.

  She ran forward, forward.

  You never saw me like this.

  Forward, forward, force the massive body, feet light in jogging shoes. Justine had tried them out at a sports store in Solna, clinically tried them out, with a young man having bright white teeth and slick wavy hair. He had her run on a treadmill and videoed her foot movements. While she was running, she formed her fists tightly, so tightly, afraid to lose her balance, afraid that he would find her ridiculous. An overweight, forty-five-year-old woman, afraid he would see something desperate in her way of pressing her knees together.

  He watched her sternly.

  “You pronate.”

  She looked at him uncertainly.

  “Yes, that’s right. But don’t worry about it, lots of people do; almost everyone does actually.”

  She got off the treadmill, the hair on her neck somewhat damp. “This means that you run lopsided. You rotate your foot like this, which is why you wear out your soles on one side.” He lifted her old winter boots and showed them to her. “See for yourself.”

  “But I never run. I’ve never done it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You pronate anyway.”

  “Promenade?”

  An attempt at a joke. He laughed politely.

  She bought the shoes, which cost just under a thousand crowns. He gave her a bit of a lecture: better to invest in quality, you could hurt yourself jogging with the wrong kind of shoes, tear something, overstretch something, especially if you were not used to it.

  The shoes had the brand name Avia. She thought of flying when she saw them.

  Of fleeing.

  To reach distant horizons.

  With her dark blue stocking cap pulled down around her face, she began to go up Johanneslundtippen. She ran, bent forward, and small flocks of green birds flew up from their grass nests. They were silent but accusing. She had interrupted them in some important task with her flailing human body and her heavy, whistling breath.

  We’re drifting apart.

  No!

  You should see me now, you’d be proud of me, I could follow you to the end of the world and you would turn and look at me and really see me with your sky-blue eyes, Justine is the one I love, she can climb the walls like a fly.

  Or a louse.

  High at the top, the wind was strong and forced tears from her eyes. Beneath her, rows of houses were spread out. They looked like cardboard boxes placed in the maze of streets and cul-de-sacs, surrounded by rose hedges. The original plaster architect’s model must have looked exactly like this.

  She nearly stumbled into some remains of fireworks, glass and plastic bottles. A group of people had been up here in order for the fireworks and themselves to be seen better on New Year’s Eve, shooting them up higher than anyone else, and then drunkenly stumbling down, finding their way home.

  Sometimes she took the car to the new riding stables in Grimsta. There were plenty of parking spots during weekdays. She seldom saw any horses in the muddy field. Well, once she saw some long-legged animals with their muzzles to the ground like vacuum cleaners, but she could not see a single blade of grass.

  Justine was overcome with the impulse to clap loudly so that one of them, the leader perhaps, would roll his eyes wildly and run off as fast as he could without realizing that he was enclosed on all sides by the fence; panic would make him forget everything but the attempt to flee, and all the others would follow him, out of their minds with fear, and they would thunder back and forth in the mud, completely losing all sense of direction.

  Of course she didn’t do it.

  Left of the ice rink, a path of electric lights began. She followed it just part way. She cut through the waterlogged fields below the apartment houses, passed the parking lot at the Maltesholm baths, and noticed that one of the windows on a trailer still hadn’t been fixed. She kept going toward the water and then ran for a while along the edge.

  Four ducks waddled silently away. Although it was January, the temperatures were above freezing and it had been raining without a break for over a week, but this afternoon, the sky was bleak and white.

  She drew in air through her nostrils.

  Heaps of leaves lay along the slope, and the decay process appeared to have stopped. They were brown and slimy, not at all like leather.

  Just like over there.

  No sound, no birds, no raindrops, just the muffled thudding of her rhythmic steps as she forced her way up the slope, then echoing as she came to the boardwalk, where she almost fell. The water’s dampness had made a treacherous cover that made the Avia soles slip.

  No, do
n’t stop, no weakness now; her lungs burned, a caustic, silent wheeze. She drove herself now, as if she were him. Nathan.

  You were supposed to be proud of me, to love me.

  Safely inside her house, she stopped, leaning against the wall just inside the door to undo her shoelaces. She threw off the rest of her clothes, the red, windbreaker suit, the long johns, the sports bra, the panties. She stood with her legs wide apart, her arms out and let the sweat drip off.

  The bird flew in from somewhere up inside the house. The sound of his rustling wings. He screeched and muttered, going on and on. He settled in her hair, holding tight with his coarse, shiny claws. She turned her head, felt him as a warm heaviness on the top of her head.

  “Have you been waiting for me?” she said. “You know I always show up.”

  She petted his back and took him down. With an angry little chatter, he disappeared into the kitchen.

  She stretched on the thick, dining room rug, as she had learned from an exercise class on TV. She never cared for group activities. Shy, Nathan called her. In the beginning, that was what had attracted him the most.

  She was still tall, but the time over there had sculpted her; she looked thinner, even though the scale still read 171 pounds. She stood for a long time in the shower, rubbing her stomach, limbs, the backs of her knees with a sponge.

  Over there, not a single day went by where she did not long for clean European showers, long for a floor to stand on and tiles on the wall.

  She and Martina had cleaned themselves in the yellow river water, but the smell of decay and mud seeped into their pores and could not be scrubbed away. In the beginning, she had a hard time getting in it, she thought about what may have been swimming about underneath the surface-snakes, piranhas, leeches. One morning they were forced to go through the rapids with all their clothes on since there was no other path. After that day, she was no longer afraid.

  She dried off carefully and smeared on some body lotion. The Roma bottle was almost empty now, the one that looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She cut it open with scissors and scraped out the rest with her finger. She looked at herself for a while in the mirror, flushed from the heat, no longer young. She painted lines around the eyes just as she had done since the sixties. Not a single person could make her stop.

  Not even Flora.

  Dressed in her green housedress, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a bowl of soured milk. The bird had settled on the window sill; he stared with one eye and muttered as if he were displeased. A blackbird strutted on the path outside, fat for winter and ruffled. Its call changed during the winter and became one shrill tone, as if someone were trying to pluck a too tightly wound guitar string. The other song, the one that was both melancholy and jubilant, usually stopped near the end of summer and did not return to life until late February, from the top of a very high tree.

  For her entire life, Justine had lived in this house, by the water next to Hässelby Villastad. It was a narrow, tall little stone house, just right for two or three people. There had never been more than three, except for the short time with the baby.

  Now Justine lived by herself. She could change the furniture just as she liked, but for now, she left everything just as it was. She slept in her childhood room with its faded wallpaper since she could not imagine moving into Flora’s and her pappa’s master bedroom. The bed was made, as if they would return at any time, and a few times a year, Justine would shake out the bedcover and change the sheets.

  Their clothes were still hanging in the closet, Pappa’s suits and shirts on the left side of the bar and all of Flora’s little dresses on the other side. There was a thick layer of dust on the shoes. At times she thought about dusting them, but she never got around to bending down and picking them up.

  She wiped down the dresser when she was in the mood to take care of things. She cleaned the mirror with window cleaner and she moved the hairbrush and the tiny perfume bottles around. Once she picked up Flora’s hair brush and held it to the window, staring at the gray strands of hair. She bit herself hard inside one cheek and quickly ripped away one of the strands. Then she went to the balcony and set it on fire. It burned with a pungent odor, rolled itself up, and disappeared.

  It was already getting dark. She was in the upper hallway now, and she pulled a chair to the window, poured herself a glass of wine. The water of Lake Mälar shimmered out there, waves bobbing up and down, gleaming from the neighbor’s outdoor light, which was on a timer that began at dusk. There was seldom anyone at home, and she did not know the people who lived there now.

  Just as well.

  She was alone. She was free to do anything she decided to do. Everything she had to do to become whole, strong, a living person, just like everyone else.

  She had that right.

  Chapter TWO

  He had spent Christmas with his parents. Quiet, uneventful days. Christmas Eve had been beautiful with all the trees covered in frost. His mother had hung a light in the old birch tree, just as she had done when they were small, and he remembered his and Margareta’s giggling eagerness, which began the minute they woke up on the morning of Christmas Eve.

  His mother usually asked that he return for Christmas. And what else would he be doing? Even so, he played hard to get, let her ask and plead, as if he constantly needed to hear how much he meant to her.

  He had no idea what his father thought. Kjell Bergman was a man who seldom revealed his emotions. Only once had Hans Peter seen him lose his cool, seen shades of pain glide over his large, bulging face. That was the night the police came when Margareta had driven off the road. That was eighteen years ago, and Hans Peter was still living at home.

  His sister’s death meant that he had to postpone his plans to move out. He was the only child now, and his parents needed him.

  He was twenty-five when it happened, and right in the middle of trying to plan his future. He had studied theology and psychology at the university. Something within him longed for something higher; he saw himself in austere black vestments and experienced something resembling peace.

  He stayed with them for three years. Then he packed his things and moved out. His parents had begun to talk with each other again. In the initial period they had been silent, sat like statues in their TV recliners and said not one word, as if they wanted to punish each other, as if they, in some irrational way, considered it the other one’s fault that Margareta had driven off the road.

  She had had her driver’s license just one week and she was using their car that evening, a 1972 Saab. No one ever managed to find out why she had driven off the road close to Bro and right into a cement block.

  The car was totaled.

  Her room stood unused for many years. His mother went in sometimes and shut the door behind her. When she came out, she would usually go to her bedroom, get undressed and creep under the covers.

  Hans Peter suffered from that, so he slowly, cajolingly, tried to convince them to let him go and clear it out. Finally his mother gave in.

  He had cleaned out everything from his sister’s room. He carried her private things up to the attic, and claimed her bed and the neat little desk as his own. His parents did not react. They didn’t make a peep, not even when emptiness gaped from the spotless room. Yes, he had been thorough: he had washed the walls with soda and water, used a wool mop on the ceiling, scrubbed both the windows and the floor.

  His mother had always mentioned having a dining room. “Now you can have it,” he said. “I’ve prepared it for you.” And he threw the IKEA catalog on the coffee table, and finally convinced them to start looking through it. His father gnashed his teeth a bit, pressing his molars together silently. His mother had cried. But finally they accepted it. He had forced them to accept that Margareta was not going to come back, and it would not be a blot on her memory to change her room into something more practical than a museum.

  However, they only ate in that room when he came home, in order to make him happy. Hans
Peter thought that they never had guests. They hardly had them before, so why should they now, just because they had a dining room?

  It seemed they could just barely deal with everyday burdens. His father was tired constantly. Previously he had worked as a sheet-metal worker, but he had been retired for many years, his back ruined.

  His mother had been a high school teacher.

  Hans Peter remembered a time when Margareta had complained to their parents that they isolated themselves too much. She was about thirteen then, had started to rebel a bit. His father had grabbed her by her shoulders and pushed her against the wall.

  “We live our own lives our way, and if Little Missy doesn’t like that, she can move out. We don’t like folks sticking their noses into our business.”

  That was one of the few times he showed anger.

  He began to avoid them. He found an apartment in Hässelby Strand, which was close to the subway, close to nature, and he liked to walk and move around. He kept up his studies, even though it didn’t lead to anything. When he began to worry about his student loans piling up, he started a series of part time jobs such as delivering mail by bicycle and doing surveys for SIFO. They didn’t bring him a lot of money, but he also didn’t have a lot of needs.

  At Åkermyntan’s library, located in Villastaden’s shopping center, he met Liv Santesson, a recently graduated librarian. Eventually, they got married. It wasn’t a question of passion on either side. They just liked each other and that was enough.

  It was a simple wedding, a civil ceremony at City Hall and then lunch at Ulla Winbladh Restaurant with their nearest relatives.

  Her brother ran a hotel in the city. Hans Peter took a job there as the night clerk. This was an unfortunate choice for a newlywed who was not able to take care of his wife in a suitable manner.