Unwanted by Kristina Ohlsson Page B

analyst attend their meeting without introducing him properly? In conversations with Fredrika and Peder, Alex had only referred to him as ‘the analyst’. Such an oversight that it almost made Fredrika blush. When she got the chance, she would take matters into her own hands and at least introduce herself.
    Fredrika was unwilling to admit it, but as a woman she was treated differently by the boss she and Peder shared. Particularly as a childless woman, she felt, she was treated differently. Not to mention the sense of exclusion she faced because of her academic background. That was one thing she had in common with the National Crime Squad analyst, at least.
    Fredrika considered making a quick phone call to Spencer before she got out of the car. But she decided against it. Spencer had hinted that they might be able to see each other again at the weekend. Best to leave him to get on with his work in peace, so he would have time to see her.
    ‘But you only ever see each other on his terms,’ Fredrika’s friend Julia had objected, a few times. ‘When have you ever been able to ring and suggest getting together on the spur of the moment, like he does?’
    Fredrika found questions and observations like that quite upsetting. The terms on which they met were given: Spencer was married, and she wasn’t. Either she accepted it, and the consequences – such as Spencer always being less accessible to her than she could be to him – or she didn’t. And if she didn’t, she might as well look for a different lover and friend. The same was true for Spencer. If he had not accepted that Fredrika occasionally had relationships with other men, and then came back to him, they would have split up long ago.
    He doesn’t give me everything, Fredrika would say, but since I don’t happen to have anyone else at the moment, he gives me enough.
    Perhaps the relationship was unconventional, but it was genuine and it was practical. And it neither demeaned nor ridiculed either of them. A mutual exchange, in which neither appeared a clear loser. Fredrika chose not to examine too closely whether either of them emerged a clear winner. As long as her heart carried on signalling desire, she surrendered herself to it.
    An elderly woman, presumably Gabriel’s mother, was already standing on the front steps as she braked and pulled up at the edge of the gravel forecourt. The woman gestured to Fredrika to wind down the window.
    ‘Please park your car over there,’ she said, her long, slim finger graciously indicating a space beside two cars Fredrika assumed to belong to the house.
    Fredrika parked and climbed out onto the gravel. She breathed in the damp air and felt her clothes sticking to her body. As she walked over to Teodora Sebastiansson, she looked around her. The garden was larger than others she had passed on the way there, almost like a park, secluded and at the end of the road. The lawn was strangely green, and reminded her of the grass on a golf course. A wall ran round the entire garden. The gate through which Fredrika had driven was the only opening to be seen. She had a sense of being both unwelcome and shut in. Large trees of some species she didn’t recognize were growing all around and immediately behind the house. But for some reason, Fredrika could not imagine children ever having played in them. On the lawn over near the wall was a little collection of magnificent fruit trees, and further back, beyond where Fredrika had parked the car, was a greenhouse of abnormally large proportions.
    ‘We are pretty much self-sufficient in vegetables here in the summer,’ the woman said, answering the question that Fredrika assumed to be reflected in her face as she caught sight of the glasshouse.
    ‘My husband’s father took a great interest in horticulture,’ the woman added as Fredrika approached.
    There was something in her voice that caught Fredrika’s attention. It had a faint echo to it, with a sort of rasp to some of the