Imitation of a Dark Blond

Bjorn Leggo-Saab Freudsen - Standing in for Leye Adenle this Wednesday.

A fragment from my upcoming London Times bestseller: The Laughing Faceless Detective With the Frost Tattoo.

Dedicated

to

Everett Kaser

who, like me, lives in a gloomy place.

I rubbed my eyes, trying to force the image outside the car window to come into focus.

            I wished I had stayed with goop.  But it was illegal. The sticky, black-brown paste my brother cooked up in his lab at the university every Friday afternoon had had its base in hashish.  Hagar had spread it, still warm enough to be soft, onto cigarette papers, which we rolled and smoked.  Hagar had given it its American name�goop.

It lighted me up.

            If I could take a few hits on goop right now, this bleak landscape would assume the aspect of a brilliant minimalist painting. Even in this relentlessly somber light, where the color of the sky exactly matched the wet concrete pavement.

            If I were high on goop, this thin strip of blue water between the endless bands of grey would take on gleaming intensity.  Painful because it was the shade of Sigrid's eyes.  It reminded me of death.  One death I could not stop. And all the deaths I could not stop investigating.  Not even goop, with its silly American name�silly like all Americans�could erase my agony.

            It had, in the end, taken away Hagar's passion�his work at the university. He had been shamed into resigning.  "For using his laboratory to manufacture a banned substance," the letter from the Department Rector had said.  Hagar had taken his own life.

            I did not.  Coward that I am, I had turned to a weaker, but the only legal means of dulling my pain.  Drink.

            And so I never drive.  I look out the window while my partner drives us to the investigation of yet another death.  And I rub my drunken eyes.  And I try to bring into focus that thin stripe of blue between the interminable bands of grey.  And try not to see in it the color of Sigrid's eyes.

            "I think it's the next turning on the left," Nils said.  "Can you see the spinning light of the squad car through the mist?"

            I could not. "Yes," I said.