The Double Silence (Andas Knutas 7)

trainers. The wind had tousled her cropped brown hair. Her eyes were fixed on the pavement, and she hadn’t yet noticed Knutas. He wondered what she was thinking about, wondered what he was going to do with her.
    Karin was the colleague he was closest to at work, and she acted as his deputy when necessary. But it was no exaggeration to say that she had really made a mess of things. A little less than a year ago she had confided a secret that Knutas couldn’t possibly ignore. He knew that eventually he would have to do something about it – and sooner rather than later because her confession had placed him in an untenable position ever since.
    Of course he was grateful that Karin had finally unburdened her heart, but he wished the circumstances had been different.
    He, on the other hand, had trusted her right from the start, and she knew almost everything about him. All about his personal life as well as his professional career. Karin was always willing to listen, and Knutas considered her one of his best friends. But she had always found it difficult to talk about her own private life. She was forty-one years old, lived alone with her cockatoo in a lovely attic flat on Mellangatan, played football,and devoted herself to her job. He had never heard her mention a man or a boyfriend in her life. Or a woman, for that matter.
    Then one evening last summer, when they happened to be in Stockholm in connection with a difficult murder case, they had been sitting in a restaurant drinking wine and she had suddenly fallen apart. She told him that as a teenager she had been raped and became pregnant. By the time her pregnancy was discovered, it was too late for an abortion, so she had carried the child to term. It was a girl, and her parents had forced Karin to give the baby up for adoption. Against her will, the child was taken from her immediately after the birth, and she had never seen her again. All her life Karin had kept this sorrow to herself. But now she had decided to search for her grown-up daughter.
    It was as if a dam had burst, and Karin had wept and talked nonstop all night. She had also revealed something so serious that she risked being sacked if it ever came out. To Knutas’s horror, Karin told him that the previous year she had allowed a double murderer named Vera Petrov to escape. Part of her explanation had to do with her own trauma. The police had been hot on the heels of Petrov, but during the chase Jacobsson had discovered the woman in the throes of labour in a cabin aboard the Gotland ferry. Instead of alerting her colleagues, she had helped bring the baby into the world. Since a tragic story had prompted Petrov to commit the two murders, Jacobsson had let her go. She had kept her actions secret until confiding in Knutas on that night in Stockholm.
    Knutas was shocked when the truth came out. Certainly it was a distressing case, and of course he understood feeling empathy for the killer, but what Karin had done was the most grievous dereliction of duty, and his first thought had been to suspend her immediately. But then he had relented. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Vera Petrov was still being sought by international authorities; so far no trace of her had been found. Time had passed, and now Knutas was also implicated. He still didn’t know how to solve the problem, but he realized it was inevitable that sooner or later he would be forced to do something about the matter. It was no exaggeration to say that Karin had placed him in the greatest dilemma of his life.
    Yet he still felt a tenderness for her as she approached. She raised her head and looked straight at him with those eyes, nut-brown and doe-like. Her face broke into a smile, revealing the gap between her front teeth. He found it worrisome that her charm had such a powerful effect on him and that he had become dependent on her. They shared a deep bond. It had grown stronger over all the years they had worked together. Sometimes he almost mistook it for love. Even though he loved his wife, Lina, part of his heart belonged to Karin.
    And no doubt it always would.

THE SHOWER WATER poured over her sweaty body. Goose bumps appeared on her skin as Andrea Dahlberg reached for the soap container. With brisk, light movements she massaged in the expensive shower gel that Sam had brought back for her from his latest trip. He was always so thoughtful, even after twenty years of marriage. He’d been to a film festival in Berlin. Just as a