‘What are you thinking about?’ Spencer asked.

She swallowed several times; should she tell him? On the other hand, there was no point in keeping quiet. Every one of Johansson’s clients would soon realise that he was no longer around. She had no idea of the practicalities involved in changing funeral directors, but someone must know.

‘Noah Johansson is dead.’

Spencer froze in mid movement.

‘What?’

‘I found out about an hour ago.’

‘How? I mean why? I . . .’

Fredrika took a deep breath.

‘He was murdered, Spencer.’

‘Fuck.’

He got to his feet, then sat down again.

‘Why?’

‘We’ve no idea.’

‘So what happens now? To people like us?’

‘I don’t know that either, sweetheart.’

She reached out and stroked his arm. ‘Are you okay?’

He shrugged.

‘This is so macabre. I mean, I didn’t really know the guy, and he didn’t know me, and yet he knew a hell of a lot about me. How I want to die, for example.’

He took a couple of gulps of his wine.

‘I suppose I’ll have to find someone else,’ he said.

And then: ‘Let’s eat.’

*

Spencer served new potatoes and Bearnaise sauce with the meat.

‘You must have left work early to get all this done,’ Fredrika said. Neither of them could bear to talk about the funeral director who’d died; it felt as if he’d abandoned them.

Spencer grimaced.

‘I had a pretty useless meeting this morning, and I didn’t stay around for long after lunch.’

‘Good decision. By the way, I need your help with something,’ Fredrika said.

She went and fetched her work bag – a yellow fabric backpack that the children insisted on calling ‘Mummy’s work bag’. Spencer, however, chose to refer to it as ‘Mummy’s teenage bag’.

She took out a piece of paper and handed it to Spencer. ‘There you go.’

‘What’s this?’

‘A colour photocopy of a book cover.’

‘You photocopied a green book cover?’

‘If you look down at the bottom, you’ll see the title.’

Spencer peered closely at the image. ‘Bloody hell.’

Fredrika was astonished. ‘You know this book?’

‘Yes and no. I haven’t read it, but I recognise the title and the author’s name.’

‘What can you tell me?’

Spencer gave a crooked smile. The second smile in one evening.

If this carries on I might not cry.

‘A student I was supervising during the spring term wrote her master’s dissertation on how writers’ views on self-publishing have changed over the last hundred years. Today it’s quite common for authors who can’t get established publishing houses interested in their manuscript to go down another route, but that certainly wasn’t the case a few decades ago. Which is hardly surprising, of course. The advent of the miracle of technology and the internet has made most things possible. However, when Morgan Sander published this book, it was far more unusual.’