Page 182 of The Sleepwalker
‘How much cash did you have?’
‘Next to none.’
‘What about the gold?’
‘Eight hundred grams.’
‘That’s a lot of money .?.?.’ she mumbles.
‘I’ll have to check if the insurance will cover it. Theydefinitelywon’t pay up for theDN Culture Section.’
‘She’s taken the jar?’ Agneta asks with feigned indignation.
‘Alas.’
‘Well, that’s just not on. What a pig!’ She smiles.
‘Honestly, I could have done with a nice fat joint this evening.’
Bernard sighs as he bends down and picks up a poetry collection with a personal message from Tomas Tranströmer.
‘I found some letters from Claire, by the way,’ Agneta hears herself say, pointing to the desk. ‘I left them over there. One of them had come loose, and I .?.?. I read it. Sorry.’
‘That’s fine. I don’t have any secrets from you.’
‘OK.’
‘Did you read the rest?’
‘No, just that one,’ she lies like a child caught red-handed. ‘It had fallen out of the stack.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, you can read the lot,’ Bernard tells her, putting the poetry collection down on top of a stack of other books on the shelf.
He straightens the shade on the reading lamp, pulls a loose thread from the gold fringing, rolls it into a ball and then looks up and meets Agneta’s eye.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asks.
‘No, it’s just .?.?. You never showed her last letter to Hugo, did you? He told me that Claire does nothing but lie and talk about getting clean, but she never actually gives it a chance. But in that letter .?.?. she sounds like she was really serious.’
‘I should have thrown it away .?.?.’
‘You can’t do that. Hugo would be so happy if—’
‘Hold on a minute.’
‘He has a right to know his mum.’
‘Just hold on a minute, please.’
‘She might be an addict, but she’s still his mum,’ Agneta says, emphasising virtually every word.
Bernard sighs deeply and looks up at her with sad eyes. ‘The problem is that I’m the one who wrote that last letter.’
‘Wait, what?’
‘Claire hadn’t replied to any of his letters in almost two years. I tried to get hold of her, but she blocked me and changed her number,’ he explains with a pained expression. ‘Hugo used to run home from school every day to check the mailbox. He was crushed, so I wrote that stupid letter, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to give it to him. I just couldn’t.’
‘No.’
