The question was whether they had reached the desired arrangement, or whether he had simply put off the evil hour in his usual way. Unfortunately, it felt like the latter was the more probable of the two.

54. Jan

54

Jan

SINCE GUNILLA WORKED on Monday evenings, Jan had to eat dinner alone. That meant the menu was a little plainer than usual—instant mashed potato and tinned Pilsner sausages weren’t what his beloved wife usually laid out on the table. Nevertheless, it tasted good and it took less than ten minutes to make. While he was eating, the phone call from Sandra resurfaced in his thoughts.

He couldn’t have cared less about her accusations—they were just something she had reeled off for the sake of it. She had no idea what had happened to the boy, and the question was whether she ever would. According to the papers, the police had nothing to go on, and despite hundreds of volunteers joining the search they hadn’t come even a millimetre closer to a resolution. And now seventy-two hours had elapsed, so it was no bloody surprise she was desperate.

She had been unable to hide her desperation, and even though she had tried to sound cool and businesslike, he could practically hear her heart beating like a piston hammer down the phone line when she withdrew her demands for child support. It must have hurt, given how infernally pigheaded she had been about that money. The fact that she had now given up that battle was yet another confirmation of how scared she was. An observation that he made with a degree of schadenfreude, he had to admit.

When it came to the boy, there had been a small degree of uncertainty at the very beginning. It had been possible that Sandra might lose her head entirely and tell the press and the police and anyone else who would listen how the boy had been conceived through rape, as she chose to describe it. But that kind of behaviour had still seemed unlikely, because—just as she herself had put it on the phone—why would she bring it up now when she had kept quiet for so long? And who the hell wanted to publicise that their firstborn son had been conceived through rape, as she put it? That he was unwanted? It would have been almost the same as saying that it didn’t matter all that much if he didn’t come back, and that would have been blown out of all proportion by the media.