I pocket my phone and finish my breakfast standing at the kitchen counter. I wash the last two bites of my flatbread and cheese down with a swig of lukewarm coffee, then pour a fresh cup for my wife and leave it on the table.
The cold seizes me the second I step out onto the porch. Sheets of ice line the foreshore like the cheeks of a sea with a beard of snow. My frost-covered kayak is ready and waiting for me on the jetty, but I probably won’t have time before the sun sets at around three to get out there and paddle until the pain erases everything.
My wife and I share this need to be at one with the water every day. Freyja swims daily, and even at night. How many times have I seen her shivering body swallowed up by the black water before returning to me as if risen from a casket?
With a loud yawn, and stepping around the icy puddles, I walk across the garden to the narrow steps that lead to the jetty where our little runabout is tied up, covered with a sprinkling of snow. The boat’s engine sputters to life, and I sound just like it as I clear the burning-cold air from my throat.
A few hundred metres of inshore waters are all that separate Djursholm, where I live, from Rödstuguviken, where I’m expected – a bay in the small community of Sticklinge, at the north end of the island of Lidingö. The crossing only takes a few minutes, and soon I’m tying the boat up by the red wooden cottage that gives the cove its name.
The area has already been cordoned off to keep the rubberneckers at bay. There’s more of them than I’d have thought, given the early hour. Not to mention those scoping out the scene from their balconies or from behind their windows. And it’s quite the scene.
‘Hej.’ Alvid’s there to greet me. He’s the head of the NFC – the crime-scene team. He’s wearing his trademark white coveralls. ‘I figured we had no choice but to call you in for this one,’ he says by way of apology, pursing his lips.
I give him a friendly pat on the shoulder and walk with him down the jetty to the tent the NFC has erected on the small beach, a few metres up from the frozen water’s edge.
‘I’ll be with you in a second. I’m just going to have a word with these ladies first,’ I say, leaving him to go into the tent alone.
I walk over to a trio of seniors who are standing around chatting on the road by the red cottage.
One of them has a stripy beanie on her head. ‘Are you Detective Inspector Rosén?’ she asks me.
I nod.
‘See, Ilse, I told you it was him,’ she says to the woman to her left, who’s wearing a fur hat.
‘They told us we coul
