Was it the fear of death that had struck him like a blow to the back of the knees?
He had heard that a certain amount of stress sharpened the senses and made it easier to concentrate. However, too much stress had the opposite effect: you lost focus and made errors of judgement. Acted without thinking things through. This terrified him: the idea that he might suddenly find he couldn't rely on his own judgement.
He felt the urge to order a beer instead of the coffee that had stopped steaming in front of him, but he fought the craving. It was still morning. He was on duty. He called the station to check on the latest news. Nobody answered on Karlberg's extension, so he tried Beckman instead. She picked up just as he was about to ring off.
'I'm in the middle of something right now, Christian; I'll call you back,' she said, and rang off.
He took a couple of sips of the ghastly coffee. A small pallid square of chocolate lay on the saucer, and he ate it out of sheer restlessness.
A few minutes later his mobile vibrated on the blotchy mock-marble table. The sound reverberated off the walls of the empty cafe.
'Yes?'
'Beckman here. I was interviewing one of the people whose fingerprints were in the Cherokee from Ulricehamn when you called.'
'Have you spoken to all of them?'
'Two of them. I can't get hold of someone called Bengt Falk. A couple of prints came from Berit Johansson, the owner. A Sigrid Magnusson and a Lennart Christiansson have given us prints that match the ones in the car. So we still haven't identified two of the sets.'
'They could belong to Bengt Falk, the false Mark Sjodin, or someone else altogether. So with a bit of luck we've got the killer's fingerprints. All we have to do now is find the killer.'
'Yes…' Beckman sighed. 'If only we could get together everyone who had featured in the victims' lives and take their fingerprints. Then we might find the answer.'
'We'll find it in time,' said Tell, impressing himself with the reassurance he was suddenly able to summon up in the face of Beckman's doubts.
All at once he was overcome by the almost irresistible urge to talk to Beckman about his conversation with Ostergren, but he realised he would be breaking a confidence.
'What about Waltz's sons, then?' he said. 'Is Karlberg there?'
'No. But I think he's got them coming in this afternoon. Apparently Maria Waltz started shouting about lawyers.'
Tell whistled. 'Interesting. Well, we'll see what that's about. I presume she's going to sit in when Karlberg talks to the one who's still a minor then?'
'No idea. I can ask Karlberg to ring you if you're not coming back today.'
'No, no,' Tell said quickly. 'There's no need. I'll be in a bit later, I just… I had a few things to sort out…'
His voice gave way.
'No problem. See you later.'
He made his decision on the spot. It was now or never.
He passed the entrance to the crime scene. It only took ten minutes to drive from there to Seja's house. Once he had finally summoned up the courage to go down into the hollow, over the footbridge and up the slope to the cottage, it was an anticlimax to see there were no lights on. He stood there on the lawn, trying to decide what to do next. Just to be sure, he knocked on the door. It annoyed him that she wasn't there now, now he was finally ready, especially as he could see her car parked up the road. At the same time he was relieved that circumstances had postponed the conversation.
He pulled open the stable door and the silence explained everything: she was out riding. That meant there was still a chance of seeing her.
He was gloomily conscious of the fact that he had ignored her messages and kept her on tenterhooks by making himself unavailable in every way. This was entirely due to his own cowardice and lack of backbone. He was bright enough to realise that she was probably furious, or disappointed. And disappointed was worse, without any doubt.
When he discovered that the cottage door wasn't locked, it settled the matter. He went in and sat down in the kitchen to wait, grateful for the initial warmth but pondering the casual negligence that made a person leave their home without taking even the most basic security measures. Perhaps she was the kind of person who thought nothing unpleasant could ever happen in her neighbourhood. As a police officer he was definitely not prone to that kind of naivety. In fact, he had reached the point where few examples of people's inventiveness when it came to damaging and stealing one another's property could surprise him.
The wall clock ticked away. Once he became aware of it, it became impossible to think of anything else. He tried taking off his coat in order to avoid giving the impression that he was temporarily visiting her life in more than one respect, but as the fire was not lit, the house was unpleasantly cold. It was difficult for him to understand how someone could choose to live like this: far from the comforts of modern life, entertainment and other people.
The waiting soon became unbearable. If he lit a fire, made some coffee, put on a CD to drown out the ticking of the clock, it would look as if he were making himself at home, which might annoy her - as if he were overstepping the mark, as if he thought he had rights but not obligations.
An enormous amount of time seemed to have passed. Looking at the clock wasn't a great deal of help, since he hadn't the faintest idea when he had sat down at the table and fixed his eyes on the path leading into the forest.
He moved into the other room in the hope that the chill from the hallway would be less noticeable there. As he was about to sit down on the sofa something caught his eye, drawing his attention to the desk. A world atlas lay open with a picture on top of it. He stared at the picture. It was printed on shiny photographic paper and was slightly out of focus, but there was no doubting the subject matter: Lars Waltz, his head shot to pieces, lying on the gravel at his farm. Underneath the picture were some hastily scrawled comments which he couldn't make out, and the back was covered with fine, elegant but barely legible script. On closer inspection he thought it was written in Finnish.
A sound made him stiffen. What if Seja was back from her ride? He would be forced to confront her with the incomprehensible object in his hand. His thoughts were spinning far too quickly; he was shocked at seeing his two worlds come together so inexorably without understanding how or why. He discovered that his hand was shaking. Was Seja involved in some other way, apart from having driven Åke Melkersson to the scene of the crime? Had she actually been there at the farm already that morning?
A shadow passed across the windowsill, making him jump. It was only the cat. He still had a little time.
Only now did he recall the hesitation he had felt on the morning of the murder. He had found it difficult to put his finger on what it was, but something about Seja Lundberg and Åke Melkersson's account of what had happened when they found the body had seemed wrong. Tell had found holes in their story, and it had turned out that they were lying. He had intended to question them both again at a later stage, to see if there were any further lies embedded in their statements, to break them down and see what was hiding underneath. But it wasn't unusual for people to lie during questioning; they often withheld information for the most banal and vain of reasons.
He hadn't followed up his plan, and he knew exactly why: bad judgement. Now he would have to suffer for his mistake, and in quite a different way from the one he had imagined.
Tell took two long strides across the floor and gazed out into the garden. The stable door was still closed. He thought fast. Somewhere in the house there had to be something, anything, that would provide further explanation. Wherever it was, he intended to find it, even if he had to turn the entire house upside down. He opened the window so that he would be able to hear her coming.
Tell rummaged among the papers on the bookcase and on the desk and found several articles that she had started writing and in some cases finished, but nothing that explained the picture from the scene of the crime. One drawer in the desk was locked; it took him a couple of minutes to find th
e key in the bottom of a pot on the windowsill. The drawer contained a thin folder. He was so agitated that he had to read the two pages twice before he understood what he was looking at. The document appeared to be a synopsis of a longer text. Even if the brief sentences were more like questions, and even if he couldn't quite work out what it was that Seja Lundberg had withheld from him, there was enough information for a new idea to form in his head. It was obvious that she was involved in a way he didn't yet understand. But he was certainly going to find out.
He found the laptop pushed down between two coffee tables - she clearly had some idea of security after all. An eternity went by as the computer started up, only to deny him access. It was password protected. He glanced at the clock and wondered what time Lise-Lott Edell closed her shop. If he put his foot down he could be in Grabo in fifteen minutes.
* * *
Chapter 47
1997
She allowed herself to take the plastic cover off the bed twice a day, morning and afternoon. Without the cover, the smell of Maya would disappear within just a few months. Even now Solveig could tell that it was growing fainter each time she reverently folded back the shabby rose-patterned quilt which Maya had had since she was a child. Solveig laid her cheek against the sheet and took deep breaths - slowly and carefully, so that she wouldn't start coughing. She had even cut down on the cigarettes, because she wanted to preserve her sense of smell. Losing the ability to experience the smell of things would be like losing another part of Maya.
It would happen one day, inevitably. The particles from a human body did not remain for all eternity, and when that day came she would have to turn to something else. Maya's diary from when she was a little girl. Maya's clothes, which Solveig had hauled down from the attic, where they had been stored in bin bags. She had always had difficulty in throwing things away. She had always saved things, as if she had known all her life that there would come a day when she would be forced to cling to worldly objects in order to survive.
She had crammed her own clothes into the smaller wardrobes in the bedroom so that she could hang up Maya's in the dressing room. One item per coat hanger. The baby clothes were placed carefully in the blue-painted chest of drawers, the ripped punk gear in the middle of the rails and the outdoor clothes at the back next to the wall. She papered the walls with a ridiculously expensive dark purple wallpaper, then hung scarves on ornate gold hooks, along with the hats, berets and other accessories Maya had worn over the years, as if it were an exhibition in which every work of art symbolised an epoch in her daughter's all-too-short life.
Solveig spent most of her time in the dressing room. There was always plenty more to do. She was particularly pleased with the fitted carpet, which had also made a big hole in her savings. However, nothing was too good for Maya. It was important that everything was just right. Maya's colours. Her favourite materials. As long as Solveig was working, she could keep the tinnitus at bay and the panic at arm's length, well aware that the day the memory room was finished, she would be driven into the fire. But that day was far away, because there was still a great deal to do.
She had albums of photos to be sorted, enlarged and framed. She had boxes of Maya's music up in the attic; she would have to listen to it all to see what might be important. Every single lyric might contain those words Maya never had time to say. In her early teens music had been everything to Maya. She lived through her music, wallpapered her room with her idols, dressed like them, quoted them over and over again. those words Maya never had time to say. In her early teens music had been everything to Maya. She lived through her music, wallpapered her room with her idols, dressed like them, quoted them over and over again.
Solveig didn't know anything about music, and she definitely didn't know anything about the kind of music Maya listened to. But she realised that the words were at least as important as the melodies. Maya had written on her mirror with a black kohl pencil, and on the walls she had pinned up quotations written in red ink on rice paper, making the words into works of art. Solveig had never bothered to read them; her English wasn't as good as it had been. Nor had she realised before that it was important for her to understand them, those words, that they were potential routes into her daughter's innermost being. That they could provide answers to the questions she had never managed to ask.
There was no room for the crates of vinyl records in the dressing room so they had to go in the bedroom.
If in the past Solveig had regretted leaving the larger apartment in Rydboholm, she was now almost torturing herself to death. Maya's room was there, the room she grew up in - Maya was in every little detail. The marks on the wallpaper from the toothpaste she had decided to use to put up her posters. Inside the fitted wardrobe, where Maya had painted a landscape in tempera. Solveig had gone mad at the time, afraid she would have to pay the landlord to have the wall repainted when they moved out. The scratch marks at the bottom of the door made by that disgusting cat Maya had dragged home, the one that had caught ringworm and managed to infect them all before they got rid of the wretched animal.
Maya had only ever stayed in the new apartment on a temporary basis, so Solveig was trying to recreate something that had never existed. And there were new tenants living in Rydboholm these days. Maybe some other teenage girl in Maya's old room who played her music so loud that the walls bellied outwards and the neighbours complained. A girl who wasn't dead.
Eventually Solveig received Maya's possessions from the school, in a wooden crate with the address on a sticky label. It felt like receiving a coffin, and just as she was opening the lid she got the idea that it was
Maya she would find inside. Lifeless, of course, but still a body to hold on to. Because she was terrified of forgetting.
She put the record player with the crates of albums. Only when she was so tired that her arms were aching, did she climb up on to her bed and start from the very beginning of the collection.
She tried to allow herself to be rocked into restfulness by the strange discordant music she had always loathed, telling herself that this was Maya's music, that it represented Maya's world and must be appreciated at all costs. Because Maya was irreproachable now. Perfect. Complete. Her death had ensured that this fact would never change.
While Solveig worked on her memorial, Sebastian gave his mother a wide berth. He rarely spoke directly to her, perhaps because he suspected that she only had ears for his sister's voice. Perhaps because his burden of guilt remained a silent agreement between them. Sometimes he would sit a little way off, just watching. Occasionally he would be able to help in some way: holding a shelf while she screwed it into place, making coffee when she needed a break.
It wasn't only the physical things that had changed in the Granith household. For example, Sebastian had never seen his mother with so much energy; normally exhaustion was her signature, along with her infectious apathy and listlessness. He had often felt tired as soon as he walked in through the door. He and Maya had talked about it once: the way their home sucked the strength out of them both. It wasn't the only time they had discussed Solveig, but those were the words he remembered most clearly. Maya had said that Solveig sucked all the strength out of her. From time to time Sebastian was tempted to hurl her words in his mother's face, straight into that pale puffy face, the eyes bloodshot from the dust, the cheeks burning feverishly.
Maya hated you, you old cow. Got it? She hated you. You're remembering things that were never true. You remember that she loved you. That you were close. You think you were alike, you and Maya, but you were nothing like each other. Maya was strong, she was for real. You're nothing but crap, Mum. You're crap, and everybody knows it.
Of course he never said that. He had forfeited his right to have an opinion and he was well aware of that fact. Solveig now had the upper hand.
One morning she woke up as usual with a scream in her throat. The tablets produced such a heavy dreamless sleep that the arm she had been lying on was numb and useless. Dead meat,
she thought as her numbed hand banged into the chest of drawers.
As soon as she hauled herself into a sitting position the scream began to work its way determinedly up her throat to await her decision: out through the mouth or stuck fast in the auditory canals like the cry of an animal in torment? There was nothing to be done about the tinnitus, according to one of the doctors she saw regularly. Avoid noisy environments. Which she did, of course. And he prescribed tranquillisers, either to reduce the noise level or for some other reason. She didn't really know. She took them anyway, but they didn't help much.
Her breathing was jagged, making her gasp for air. Up you get, Solveig. Open the door. Walk through the hallway. Open the door of the dressing room just a little bit. Switch on the light.
At the sight of her work she felt a temporary sense of calm spread through her body. The scream faded away. Her arm was slowly coming back to life, giving her pins and needles. She buried her nose in Maya's shabby white leather jacket. In some places the red lining had split and started to fray, so she decided to mend it. With slow movements she lifted down the hanger and pressed the jacket against her chest. She had no breathing problems now; she had found her project for the day.
Just as she was about to close the door, she saw it. She pushed aside the clothes to expose what she had glimpsed behind them.
The wall was covered in pictures, from the floor almost all the way up to the ceiling. She hadn't seen the collage for many years. It was battered at the edges, and had obviously been rolled up for some time.
Solveig ran her hand over the rough surface. She knew exactly how old the collage was. Maya had been eleven when she found a bag full of monthly magazines that someone had put out with the rubbish. Not the kind Solveig sometimes read, the cheaper ones, but thick glossy women's magazines with names like Clic and Elle, filled with reports on the latest fashions from Paris and interviews with film stars, artists and designers.
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