Missing

grand?’
    He smiled. She put her hand in her jacket pocket, found the notes and put them down on the keyboard. He pulled a white envelope out of the back pocket of his jeans and handed it to her.
    ‘Your kid, is he?’
    She just looked at him, took the envelope and walked away from him, in the direction of the hall. He followed her.
    ‘Can’t help being curious.’
    She didn’t reply, just went out on the landing and closed his front door behind her. This was the first time that she allowed herself to think about it and give way to her feelings. She was shaking all over. To calm herself, she walked down one floor. Only then could she contemplate even looking at the envelope. She sat down on a step, her heart beating hard.
    The white envelope contained the answer to fourteen years of anxious speculation.
    Who was he? Where did he live? What kind of person was he?
    Now she would know.

    The bus was leaving in two hours’ time. The documents had been signed and exchanged, the cheque was on the table. They had arranged for Gunvor Strömberg to meet her in the bus terminal to hand over the keys.

    Peace and quiet. Rest for a troubled soul.
    In this white envelope was the name of the one who had always been missed.
    She would always miss him. She had lost him fourteen years ago and now, everything she could do was too late – far too late.
    Why was she doing this? For his sake? Or for her own sake?
    She stopped walking downstairs, struck by her own unexpected insight into his rights, as opposed to hers.
    So, by which right would she come marching into his life, fourteen years after his birth? What did he have to gain? She would get the reward of knowing, of her search having come to an end. Did he owe her that?
    He was free from grief. Why should she drag him along to share hers?
    If she still owed him anything, it was to bear her sense of loss on her own.

    She had arrived on a landing. On the wall in front of her was the lid to a rubbish chute. People stopped there to throw their bags of waste into the basement bin. A useful place to shed your past. Her heart pounding in her chest, she opened the lid. She did not feel anxious. Her mind was filled with the liberating knowledge of doing the right thing.

    If the bus service stuck to the timetable, she would be home in time to hear her neighbour’s trumpet play a greeting to the setting sun.

About the Author
    Missing

    KARIN ALVTEGEN was born in Jönköping, Sweden, in 1965 and had a varied career, including work in set design for film and stage, before she started to write. She won Sweden’s most prestigious crime novel award, the Glass Key, in 2000 with her novel, Missing , and further acclaim with her next two novels, Betrayal and Shame . She is the great-niece of Astrid Lindgren (author of the Pippi Longstocking stories), and lives in Stockholm.

    ANNA PATERSON has worked as a literary translator from the Germanic languages for over a decade. She won the prestigious Bernard Shaw Prize for Literary Translation in 2000.

Also by Karin Alvtegen
    Betrayal
Shame

Copyright
    First published in Great Britain in 2003
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
    Originally published in Sweden as Saknad in 2000 by
Natur och Kultur, Stockholm
    This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books
    Copyright © Karin Alvtegen, 2000
English translation copyright © Anna Paterson, 2003
    The right of Karin Alvtegen and Anna Paterson
to be identified as respectively the author and
translator of the work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
    British Library Cataloguing- in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
    ISBN 978 1 84767 688 7
    www.meetatthegate.com