Read In the Name of Love for Free Online

say this for Freud, he got the sex part right. The strongest drive we’re born with is battened down everywhere by social taboos and look where that’s got us.’
    ‘But you were their superior?’
    ‘No, no. Never from my own staff. And only women with experience. I mean they were married, for God’s sake. Or living with someone. On equal life terms as it were. Even if age separated us.’
    ‘But they must surely have seen you as outranking them at work.’
    ‘What do you mean outranking?’
    ‘The aura of authority. The fast walk along the corridor. Your own parking slot. A bigger room, a bigger desk. With a corner window. Do you have a corner window?’
    Sune gave his laugh, a bellow blast from deep in his chest. ‘Fuck off,’ he said good-naturedly.
    ‘All those innocent girls,’ Dan said, ‘drowning in your wake as you sailed through their lives.’
    ‘No more innocent than the fence beauties at ice-hockey matches. Have you noticed them?’
    ‘I’ve never seen an ice-hockey match.’
    ‘Sexual hand grenades. Let’s not deny them their right to enjoy their bodies, for Christ’s sake. It takes them fifteen years to get to the age of consent.’
    He sipped his whisky, placed the glass on the table, put his hands on either side of it, palms down. His eyes gleamed. But he didn’t look well. Under the ruddy skin Dan sensed a discolouring not unlike the nicotine discolouring smokers used to have.
    ‘Well,’ he said when he saw Dan’s eyes lift to his bald skull. Why the insight came just then Dan did not know though once it did it explained everything – the long absence from work, the sallow unhealthy skin, the sudden pains. On days when Sune Isaksson didn’t shave his skull he used the fisherman’s cap to hide the hair that was beginning to grow back. The chemical therapy was over, abandoned. The approach of death he could deal with. The patchy hair was unbearable. Slowly he sipped his whisky and continued to rest unmoved within himself the way deeply confident people are inclined to do.
    Not long after, while in Norrtälje to replace some of the ruined furniture, Dan ran into Anders Roos again. Anders thanked him for picking up the girl.
    ‘She used to live out there on your island. A farmhouse.’
    ‘I think we saw it. In the dark.’
    ‘I guess it wasn’t dark when she set out. Talking of houses, my wife’s been asking when you’re going to come to ours. Why not come now and you’ll meet her. I have to pick up some papers out there anyway.’
    ‘I should be getting home.’
    ‘No, seriously. Madeleine really wants to meet you. She knows you’re one of my oldest friends. And it intrigues her, your living alone out there on a rocky island. Just a quick coffee, then I have to get back to meet someone in the showroom.’
    Their house, about fifteen minutes outside town, was a graceful yellow building in the gustaviansk style of the late 1700s. His wife was out gardening. Anders went to tell her Dan was there.
    She was smaller, darker than Dan had expected. It took a little time before he realized he had been expecting an older version of Anders’s first wife, Eleonora – a slender woman with a quiet, cosmopolitan air. Her father was an international business lawyer, he had contacts everywhere. After her schooling in Switzerland he had sent her to Paris, New York, London. He held high hopes for her and was, Anders once admitted, disappointed when she told him she was going to marry a shopkeeper who lived in Norrtälje. But he must soon have seen that Anders had flair; he helped him negotiate the Stockholm franchise for an expensive fashion chain.
    ‘Anders tells me you’re so dedicated to your island you almost never leave it,’ Madeleine said when they were introduced. The statement seemed so odd that Dan presumed at first she was confusing him with someone else. She glanced down at the cup of coffee he had left untouched on the table when he rose to greet her, and when she looked up