The Glass Devil by Helene Tursten Page B

didn’t want to have children with you?” Irene said for clarification.
    Kristina nodded without raising her eyes from her hands.
    Irene felt that it was impossible to come up with the right questions for her. And even if Irene asked the right questions, getting a real answer seemed hopeless. Was she hiding something? Or just terrified? Irene didn’t understand her.

    IRENE WALKED back to the center of town. She followed the signs and used her good sense of direction. The shining sun felt wonderful, even if it had started to set and didn’t add much warmth. It was a few degrees colder in Göteborg than here. She passed over a glittering watercourse. Quacking ducks and honking Canada geese were swimming and walking along the edges. She didn’t know what the stream or river was called. Even though Krister’s family lived in Säffle and her own family usually spent several weeks every year in the parents-in-law’s cottage outside Sunne, she had been in Karlstad three times at the most. Which was really a pity.
    As she strolled and peered into shop windows, she realized how hungry she was. She had an hour and a half before the train left, time enough to eat.
    Once, long ago, on one of her three trips here, she and Krister had taken the kids to a cozy restaurant next to Stora Torget. She remembered that it was on the same side of the square as the magnificent city hall, but that you had to walk down one of the side streets. Her memories were fuzzy, but she managed to find the restaurant, which, she remembered now, was named Källaren Munken.
    When she walked in through the heavy doors and down the worn stone steps, she recognized the basement with its many passages. It had been freshened up since her previous visit, but the cozy atmosphere still prevailed.
    The maitre d’ showed her to a table which was covered with a white linen cloth. He recommended the day’s special, grilled char with almondine potatoes and chive sauce. Irene decided to take his advice, and ordered a Hof as well. After her interview with Kristina Olsson, she deserved a beer. Maybe two. The home-baked bread she was served was still so warm that the butter melted when she spread it. A feeling of pleasure suffused her, and she stopped thinking about the conversation she had just had. There would be plenty of time on the train.

    WAS KRISTINA Olsson mentally ill? The answer would have to be no, but with the reservation that she appeared to be near a nervous breakdown—if she hadn’t already had one, which was difficult for a layman to decide.
    Was she hiding something? Irene was almost convinced that that was the case. But what was she hiding? And why? What was she afraid of?
    Irene realized that she had forgotten to ask Kristina if she had been threatened. How could she forget such an obvious question? Maybe not so entirely obvious, though, since Kristina hadn’t had any contact with either Jacob or his parents in more than nine months.
    Was there something in Kristina’s past that was frightening her? As members of a fundamentalist religious sect, she and her siblings would have had a strict religious upbringing, but it seemed that both Kristina and her sister had freed themselves from the faith of their childhoods. Even so, they might be deeply spiritual. The decor of Kristina’s apartment bore the stamp of Christian faith with ascetic elements. Except, of course, that she had curtains.
    IRENE PROMISED herself that she would look up Laestadianism in an encyclopedia. Personally, she wasn’t very interested in religious questions. The Huss family was about as religious as most of the other people in Sweden. They went to church for baptisms, weddings, and funerals; never otherwise. But she had realized several times, in the course of this investigation, how annoyingly ignorant she was.
    And Satanism had popped up as a counterweight to all this Christian faith with Laestadians, synods, and goodness knows what else. How relevant was this negativity