When Solveig stood up again, Tell decided to put his cards on the table.
'I believe that Olof Bart and Lars Waltz, who was mistakenly assumed to be Thomas Edell, were murdered as a result of the alleged attack on your daughter twelve years ago. That is the explanation your son has given for the murders. At some point during the last twenty- four hours the third attacker, Sven Molin, was also murdered. The problem is that your son was in custody at the time.'
And how is that a problem for me? Or for you?' Solveig Granith was talking to herself. She seemed increasingly distant.
'It's a problem because we don't believe it's a coincidence that Molin has also been murdered. And since your son was under arrest at the time, it means that someone else, somebody who presumably also had strong feelings for Maya, has avenged her in his place. I'm not saying that person is you; I'm simply asking if there is anyone who can confirm that you were at home yesterday evening.'
She tugged at the neck of her sweater as if she couldn't get enough air.
'I can confirm that she was here.'
The woman who appeared in the doorway had bright red lips and a severe bob, dyed black. Possibly a wig, Tell noted after establishing that she didn't constitute a direct threat. She was tall and wore an old- fashioned grubby suit that had once been expensive.
'And who are you?' Bärneflod was openly scrutinising the woman from head to toe. She may have been in her forties.
'I… I help Solveig with the shopping and so on. As a home help,' she explained. 'I can confirm that Solveig was at home yesterday evening.'
Solveig Granith had turned gratefully to her helper, as a distressed child turns to its mother.
'And during the night?' asked Bärneflod suspiciously.
Several things didn't make sense. The fact that the room was in such a mess didn't square with the assertion that Solveig Granith had a home help. Equally, the suit the woman was wearing didn't suggest that cleaning was her job. Perhaps cleaning wasn't included in 'and so on'.
'Oh, so you work evenings and nights too?' growled Bärneflod after glancing at the clock. He made no attempt to hide his suspicion.
'I do work in the evenings sometimes, yes. People don't only need help during the day,' she said unconvincingly. 'But yesterday evening I was here for a different reason: I'd left my watch on the draining board. I take it off when I do the washing up and didn't want to be without it, so I… rang Solveig to ask whether it was too late to-'
'I stay up late,' said Solveig mechanically.
'And what time was this?' said Bärneflod in the same tone as before. He looked at the younger woman.
Her gaze didn't falter. 'Around nine. I stayed until a quarter to ten.'
Bärneflod grunted as he passed over his notebook and asked her to write down her name and where she could be reached. 'Just in case we need to get hold of you.'
After a moment's hesitation she bent her head over the notebook, he caught sight of a tattooed snake emerging from the collar of her shirt. He shuddered.
* * *
Chapter 61
Michael Gonzales had made the same exasperated noises as his colleagues during the crisis meeting, but in reality he was excited about the turn the case had taken.
He was young to be working in CID, and at the beginning he had heard the same things again and again. Some people would praise his enthusiasm and pat him on the back; others would banter about him being leadership material. Sometimes the comments weren't so friendly. Not everyone was impressed by the fact he was climbing the ladder more quickly than usual, whether they believed the reason was unusually high motivation or the need to fill quotas. This was a favourite topic among members of the police service who were not burdened with an overly high IQ.
This ill-concealed hostility made him angry and aggressive at first. He had been brought up not to take any crap by his mother, who, while she was as proud as Punch that her son was in the police service, would never allow him to kowtow to anyone to get on. Initially he had gone into battle for her sake. Not that he would define himself as a foreigner - he had lived in Sweden all his life - but the battle his mother had fought against racism since her arrival in the mid-seventies had to count for something. However, it was possible to choose your battles, and Gonzales had got the hang of this after a while. He was positive by nature. Over the years he had developed the ability to use his charm: it could smooth over misunderstandings, disarm his opponents and thus give him control. And so he never became a victim of his own anger.
And he didn't want to be anywhere else; he had always wanted to be a detective. That was why he always had his nose in a crime novel when he was a teenager, and had watched every detective series on TV. He had no problem identifying with the lonely, obstinate and self- sacrificing detective, whether portrayed by Henning Mankell, Colin Dexter or Michael Connelly. That was also why he had applied to the police training academy twice before he finally got in.
Not that the police work he had been involved in so far bore much resemblance to the investigations in books or on TV. During what felt like an endless period on patrol he had escorted drunks to the cells to sober up, intervened in hundreds of domestic disputes, caught speeding drivers, arrested dozens of petty thieves, worked his way through tons of paperwork and filled in reports on stolen cars. But eventually, one day, he was given the chance to tackle something big.
In his mind's eye he had excitedly seen his name printed on his office door, and on his card: MICHAEL GONZALES - homicide. But he continued to work his way through piles of paper. Carried on writing reports about domestic disputes - the difference being that now they usually ended with one of the drunks being dead.
There was a shortage of car chases, he would say when the little boys in the square asked him about his job. The kids who had not learned to hate the police were still impressed, but those with elder brothers in gangs were not exactly overwhelmed.
'It's smaller than Slavko's,' was the response from one of the younger boys when Gonzales showed them his service pistol. This embarrassingly unprofessional moment had cost Gonzales sleepless nights before he decided not to report the boy's older cousin for the illegal possession of a weapon. Applying a logic that was anything but legal, he concluded that the fact that he had been told about the gun somehow took away his right to judge. Easy come, easy go, sort of. Or maybe he was just scared that his colleagues would find out he'd been using his pistol to impress little boys.
Now he took a call that had been misdirected by the exchange, then sat there, doing nothing. The endorphins that had coursed through his system when he heard that Sven Molin had been murdered were starting to dissipate.
Go through everything was the phrase Tell had used. Get to know the person. Gather information, draw together the loose threads. Think around the situation.
Easy for him to say.
Gonzales was no novice when it came to murder enquiries; he was familiar with the structure and approach, which in many ways were exactly the same irrespective of who had killed or been killed. He had worked on a number of such cases during his time with the team.
In the Jeep enquiry he had been given more of a free rein. Though no one had told him so explicitly, he had been trusted to draw his own conclusions and organise the investigative work as he saw fit. And now he was sitting there without any kind of guidance while people assumed he could think for himself.
He had contacted Borås and asked for the case file from the 1995 investigation, which had been called off due to lack of evidence. Nobody interviewed at the time had been able to come up with names of potential attackers, and there was no proof that Maya Granith hadn't left the track of her own accord and simply tripped.
He found a notepad among the piles of paper on his desk, opened it at a clean page and wrote MAYA in a circle in the centre.
Start with the year of the crime and work backwards, Tell had said. Gonzales closed his eyes and tried to think about what was relevant in a young person's life, what had
been important in his own life. Where you live. What you do. He wrote job/studies in the margin. If you're with anyone - a boyfriend?Boys/mates.
Apparently she had lived at an address in Borås with her mother.
For the last two years of her life she had also had a different address in another part of Sweden - Stensjö. It sounded like the back of beyond. There was some kind of foundation registered there, the Arnold Jansson Foundation for the General Education and Training in Craftsmanship of the Working Class. Since 1999 the foundation had run a training centre for 'the development of local craft', but before that the buildings had housed a folk high school and boarding facilities. On the same web page he discovered that Stensjö lay to the north and inland.
Gonzales raised his eyebrows. If Maya had both lived and studied in some backwater for the last two years of her life, it wasn't impossible that the solution was somehow linked to the school or the surrounding area. Sticking a load of people from different backgrounds with different reasons to run away from home into some kind of barracks in the forest - well, that was worse than Survivor. Anything could happen.
But what could have happened that was relevant to his investigation? Nobody had been murdered in Stensjö, after all. And the three men who might indirectly have cost Maya her life already had names and faces. He was looking for someone who had been close to Maya and was capable of murdering in order to honour her memory, or possibly to protect her brother.
The telephone interrupted his thoughts once more.
'Michael?'
'I haven't got time at the moment, Mum. I'm working.'
He put the phone down gently but firmly. She'd have something to say about that this evening. He got up and started pacing between the door and the desk.
There were only two alternatives, he decided. If three thirty-some- thing men were desperate enough to rob someone, they would hardly choose a teenager, who by definition was likely to be broke - particularly a teenager on her way home from a party. No, it was more likely that it had been their drunken intention to rape Maya, otherwise why would they have chased her into the forest? They had planned to hurt her, even if events had taken a different turn and they had left her to freeze to death, unconscious in the snow.
He tried to weave the strands together.
Someone had reacted on Maya's behalf. Who would do that? The family, of course; Sebastian Granith's confession was in the process of being transcribed. An enraged father was Gonzales' next thought, but the official register informed him that her father was unknown. Although he might have been out there, waiting to take vengeance on his daughter's attackers, and possibly on her mother and those around her who had refused to recognise him as the father of his child. The mother, Solveig Granith. Tell's opinion after meeting her was that she was mentally far too fragile to carry out a murder. That was a contradiction in itself, of course, since a normal person doesn't go and kill someone, irrespective of what they have done to his or her family. Or do they?
He stopped himself. His sisters, full of life and joy, passed before his mind's eye; a fraction of a second later they were lying in the snow - left to die because some randy pissed-up bastards had been too scared, wanting to save their own skins, to call for help.
He clenched his fists and erased the image. It wasn't his sister who had been lying there in the snow. There was no reason to start speculating about what was morally defensible or even human. That wasn't his job. He was there to find a murderer. The law could make judgements. He wrote Boyfriend? on his pad, then picked up his phone and keyed in the number for the principal at Stensjö. To his surprise there was a person on the other end, not an answering machine.
'I'm looking for information about a student who attended the folk high school between 1993 and 1995.1 know it's a long time ago, but…'
The woman on the other end of the phone laughed. She had a pleasant voice.
'It certainly is a long time ago. I've only been principal here for eighteen months, so I definitely can't help you. Berit Hjarpe was the principal before me and was involved in setting up the centre, but this is a completely new venture, even though it's backed by the same foundation. There used to be a more traditional folk high school here.'
Gonzales thought for a moment.
'Would you be able to put me in touch with someone who was around in 1995?'
'I don't know…' She hesitated. 'If I can come back to you next week, that will give me time to contact the board. They must have details of the people who were working here at the same time. But I know that Margareta Folkesson, the chairwoman, is on holiday at the moment and-'
'I'm afraid I can't wait until next week,' Gonzales interrupted her. 'This is a murder enquiry, and it's of paramount importance that the information we're looking for-'
'OK,' she interrupted gently, and Gonzales immediately regretted the formality of his words. She was actually trying to help.
'You can't think of anyone else who might know more?' he asked in a conciliatory tone.
'I can, in fact,' said the woman after a brief silence. 'You could try our secretary, Greta Larsson. She's worked for the foundation for ever, and she had a similar role at the school for many years. She might be able to help you.'
'Could you put me through to her?'
'She's not working today.'
'Then I need her home number.'
There was silence at the other end of the line.
'As I said, this is a murder enquiry, and I do have the right to-'
'Yes, OK. Just a moment.'
A man who sounded at least a hundred years old answered just as Gonzales was about to hang up. He said that Greta Larsson was out walking by the lake and wasn't expected back for at least a couple of hours, but she had her mobile with her. Did he want the number? He himself was in bed most of the time because of heart problems.
Gonzales took down the number, eventually managed to interrupt the old man by thanking him for his help, and called Greta Larsson's mobile. She answered almost immediately with a shrill 'Hello?'
When he had introduced himself she sighed audibly and laughed.
'Oh my goodness, I was so scared. I got this phone because Gunnar, my husband, is so ill, and he has to be able to get hold of me. There's a nurse who comes in every day while I'm at work, but when I'm free I like to go walking.'
She disappeared in a torrent of sounds that forced Gonzales to hold the receiver away from his ear so that his eardrum wouldn't burst.
'Sorry, I just had to take off my rucksack, and I was so worried when the phone rang. Nobody else has the number, you see, so I thought-'
'I know what you thought, fru Larsson.' He was going to have to take the lead if he was going to get a word in edgeways. 'I'm calling because I have a couple of questions about a pupil who attended the folk high school in Stensjö twelve years ago. I will understand perfectly if you can't answer my questions, but I thought I'd give it a try. It would be a great help if you could remember anything at all. Her name was-'
'I have an excellent memory, constable. If you just wait a moment, I'll sit down on this rock…'
She disappeared again in a rush of noise, and Gonzales sighed.
'Maya Granith,' he said before Greta Larsson had time to open her mouth.
'Hmm… it sounds familiar somehow,' she murmured thoughtfully.
This is a waste of time.
'What did she look like? At the time, I mean. I have a good memory for faces. I had all kinds of different roles in those days - study mentor, counsellor. You know what young people are like: their confusion can make them fairly demanding.'
'On the photographs I've seen she had dyed black hair and a ring in her nose. I could send you a couple of photos of-'
'No, I remember!' Greta Larsson exclaimed so loudly that Gonzales actually jumped. 'Granith, you said! I know exactly who you mean! It was a long time ago, but the reason I remember her so well is that I had a lot of trouble with her, to put it mildly.'
'Trouble?' asked Go
nzales. He noticed he was clutching the phone in a vice-like grip.
'Yes. I was also in charge of the administration of the boarding side of the school, you see. And she rented a room, stayed there for a while, moved out, then moved back in. I hardly had time to get the paperwork done before she changed her mind again. That's why I remember her so well.'
'You mean she dropped out of school, then changed her mind, or…'
'Not at all; it was love that caused all her problems. She moved into one of the staff residences, over and over again, to live with our - how can I put it? - caretaker. General factotum. At first it was all sweetness and light. Then there were quarrels and tears and she moved out again. Then it was back to sweetness and light. I have to say that it all took place quite openly, and if you want my opinion, it was rather embarrassing. Stensjö wasn't a big school; everybody knew most things about everybody else. Not that I'm one of those old-fashioned types - even if I am old - who doesn't tolerate tendencies outside the norm, but I mean you don't have to advertise what you do in the bedroom.'
She paused for breath.
'But listen to me going on and on! This will be costing the police a fortune, calling me on my mobile!'
'Don't worry, fru Larsson, that's fine. But I don't understand. What do you mean by "tendencies outside the norm"?'
'She was a lesbian, of course! What did you think I meant? Not that there's anything wrong with that, Constable, but it was just so public! The thing was, the school's old rules and regulations were still in place, which meant that the students who were boarding weren't allowed to have visitors in their rooms, which is why she moved into the caretaker's cottage every time things were going well between them. The school wasn't exactly adopting a modern approach, and in many ways I think we avoided problems by sticking to the old ways. There's nothing that causes as many difficulties as love, Constable. And the students were there to study, after all.'
'So you're saying that Maya Granith had a relationship with the female caretaker at the school.'
'I am, and it went on more or less the whole time she was at the school. I even remember trying to talk to her once, when she came to me wanting her room back yet again, with her eyes all red from crying after they'd fallen out for the umpteenth time. I suggested it might be better if she concentrated on her studies, something along those lines. I did feel a bit sorry for her - she was a bright girl after all. But she certainly wasn't going to take any notice of me; I expect she thought I should keep my nose out of her business. And she was so deeply in love as well, and love is blind, isn't that right, Constable? You must have seen plenty of that sort of thing in your job over the years - all those crimes passionnelles, or whatever they're called.
Frozen Moment Page 41