And then this poker playing. He would never have guessed that John had won such amounts. Why hadn’t he said anything? John wasn’t one to volunteer information but he could have told his only brother when he won a small fortune. Why this silence? Not even Berit had been in on it. The only one who knew how much money was involved was Micke, even if he didn’t want to say.
What had John been cooking up? This was the question Lennart had been asking himself the past few days. He thought the answer would lead to whoever had murdered John. There was something his brother had been working on, something secret, that had led to his death.
Lennart would have been able to protect his brother. If only John had told him, Lennart would have watched his back like a hawk around the clock. That’s what brothers were for. But John had kept Lennart in the dark on this and that was half the heartache.
Micke was already in place on Dragarbrunnsgatan with the company truck pulled up on the sidewalk. He had already unloaded most of the equipment when Lennart arrived.
“It would make more sense to do this on an early Sunday morning,” Micke said and brought out some red cones.
Lennart didn’t say anything, pitching in to help in silence. It was several years now since he had worn his full winter gear and he felt self-conscious. He concentrated on the work, but it wasn’t complicated. The truck had to be fully unloaded, all the warning signs and blockades set up.
Micke was talking to the building manager, who gave them the keys and helped arrange roof access. Lennart looked up. It was high, not worse than he could manage, but Micke would never let him up there.
His fear of heights had come and gone. When his father had taken him up on rooftops he had never been scared. That had come later. On construction sites he had never liked working on high scaffolding but had never said anything.
The first hour went well. The morning traffic grew heavier and Lennart kept an eye out for people who might walk into the restricted area. It was possible to ignore the cold if you walked up and down slapping your arms across your chest for circulation.
The bus drivers nodded at him as they drove past. An older woman complained about the inconvenience. An old acquaintance from Ymergatan walked by but pretended not to recognize him, or else Lennart really was impossible to recognize in his full gear.
Around nine he grew anxious. That was always the time when the usual suspects, a loose-knit group of substance abusers, gathered around the front doors of the state liqour store. Luckily Micke came down from the roof for a snack and Lennart’s thoughts were interrupted. They drank coffee in the truck. Steam rose from their cups and their breath fogged up the windows immediately.
“The job’s going well,” Micke said. “How are the old ladies?”
“It’s okay. Most of them are in a good mood today. It’s a bit boring is all.”
Micke looked at him. Maybe he sensed what was going on in Lennart’s head. He poured him another cup.
“Do you miss being up on the roof?” he asked.
“No, I can’t say I do.”
“Did you ever work together with Albin?”
“No, not really. Occasionally I’d help out. Now no one would let me up there.”
They sat in silence for the rest of the break. Lennart felt his anxiety return. He should be hunting down a killer, not standing on a street trying to look busy.
The rest of the morning they moved the barricades a few times and worked their way down the street. Pieces of ice broke off and smashed into the street with a delicate yet hard sound. People paused on their way past, fascinated with the beauty of the sparkling icicles and the glittering clouds of ice thrown up as they smashed onto the pavement.
Lennart shoveled both ice and snow off the sidewalk, as he also kept an eye up and down the road. He stopped and rested for a moment, leaning on the shovel. A familiar face appeared, a woman pushing a stroller. Lennart took a few steps closer. Their eyes met.
The woman nodded and slowed down.
“Hi, Lennart. So you’re working out here in the cold?”
“Someone’s got to do it.”
“How is it going? I heard about John.”
Lennart looked up at the building. He walked closer to her.
“Do you know anything?”
“I’m on maternity leave, as you can see.”
“But you must have heard something.”
Ann Lindell shook her head.
“Do you know he gambled and won a lot of money?”
“I heard about it, but don’t know any details.”
“I can give you some leads.”
“Give them to Ola Haver, he’s the one in charge of the investigation. Do you know him?”
Lennart shook his head.
“No, Sammy was the one who came to my place. I don’t like him at all.”
“Sammy may have his quirks, but he’s a good police officer.”
“A good police officer,” Lennart repeated.
A load of snow came off the roof. Lennart took a few steps out into the street. No pedestrians were around. He returned to the sidewalk and again drew close to Lindell.
“I want to talk to you.”
“I’m on leave.”
“Can’t we talk anyway? Have a cup of coffee? I can’t do it right now, I have to make sure no little old ladies get killed.”
Lindell smiled. She looked down at Erik bundled up in the stroller. Only the tip of his nose and mouth were visible.
“I’ll come by your place at five thirty. Okay?”
He nodded. More snow fell. Lindell knew what she was doing was wrong, but Lennart might have some valuable information. He clearly had no confidence in Sammy, and it was possible that he would tell her something he wasn’t willing to share with her colleague. Her desire to work made her willing to bend the rules.
“Are you still at the same address?”
He nodded and returned to the street. Micke’s head could be seen high above them. Despite the distance, Lennart could tell he was irritated. Lennart gestured placatingly with his hands and deliberately walked out into the very middle of the street.
Twenty-seven
Ola Haver studied the knife. It was roughly twenty centimeters long with a black shaft and a sharp edge. Who used a knife like this? Haver had checked with a few officers who liked to hunt and they had judged the knife too cumbersome for hunting and fishing. The same verdict had been issued by the riffraff in town: the knife was too big to be easily concealed in clothing. It might be a knife some teenager would use to impress his friends, but it would never become something you carried habitually. Berglund had proposed the idea that it was a weapon someone had bought as a tourist. Maybe the sheath, which they had not recovered, was finely decorated and that was what had tempted the owner to buy it in the first place.
Haver turned it this way and that. He had questioned the young man again, the one who claimed to have stolen it from a pickup truck parked in the hospital garage. Haver was inclined to believe him, because he had seen fear and not lies in his eyes. Mattias was no killer, even if he was a small-time thief and troublemaker. You could only hope he would have second thoughts about the way his life was headed after finding himself dragged into a murder case.
Haver had asked Lundin to check who normally parked in the garage, which turned out to yield a daunting number. Hospital employees parked in a reserved area, and the rest was open to patients, friends, and relatives. Hundreds of people parked in the garage every day. Haver remembered that he himself had parked there one day a few years ago when he had seen the orthopedic surgeon.
They had talked about trying to compile a list of all the people who would have had reason to park there on that day, but finally decided it would take too long. The only thing they had to go on was Mattias’s vague recollection of a pickup, maybe red and white. When they had taken him to the parking garage to point out the place where the car had been parked, he had started wavering about whether or not the truck had had a hard or soft t
onneau cover. In other words, they were talking about a dozen different possible makes and models. The only thing Mattias had been really sure about was the color red.
Had the killer been wounded and had to go to the hospital? They had checked with the ER and surgery, but that had yielded nothing.
Finding the murder weapon often gave way to more leads, but in this case it seemed like a dead end. The knife would become important only if they fixed on a suspect and could tie the person to the weapon.
Haver put the knife back in the plastic bag and leaned back in his chair, letting his thoughts move alternately from the investigation to Ann Lindell. Their kiss had ballooned into a cloud over his head. A gnawing feeling of uncertainty gripped him. For the first time in his marriage with Rebecka there was real doubt. The squabbles and conflicts of the fall, punctuated by equally wearying periods of silence and unasked questions, had escalated to the level of warfare. Rebecka hadn’t said anything else about his visit to Ann Lindell or the flour on his clothes. She had simply given him a cold look, moved quickly and nonchalantly around the house, avoiding him mainly. She had spent most of the morning in the bathroom, showering for an unusually long time, and in the bedroom. They had not had breakfast at the same time, which Haver was grateful for. At least he didn’t have to face the reproachful looks.
Now he was dreading going home. Should he tell her the truth? She would be furious. She was the jealous type, he knew that from before, not least when it came to Ann. Haver tried not to mention her at home since he knew that Rebecka was threatened by the fact that they were so close. Up till now there had been no grounds for her jealousy, but if he told her about the kiss, all hell would break loose. Even if she accepted his explanation and tried to erase the whole thing from her mind, the underlying suspicion would always be there.
He decided not to tell. It would stop at a sprinkling of flour on his chest, an embrace, and a kiss, but he could not deny the curious mixture of pride and shame he felt at betraying Rebecka. A soft voice inside encouraged him to get in touch with Ann again, to continue the foray into explosive, dangerous territory.
It had been a long time since he had felt attractive. And now someone had wanted to touch him. He wasn’t the one who had taken all the initiative. Ann was just as guilty, if one could call it guilt. Even though they had stopped at an embrace and a single kiss, Haver sensed that Ann would have considered going further, and when he thought about this he was suddenly angry at her. She had tempted him, damn it. She knew very well how jealous Rebecka was—she had used him, his vulnerability had been written in his face. No, that wasn’t how it was, he told himself and couldn’t maintain the anger. They were two adults, both in need of human warmth. Ann was the woman, besides Rebecka, whom he felt closest to. They had been brought close through their work, and apart from their mutual respect for each other’s abilities there had always been an undercurrent of sexual attraction.
Now the foundation was trembling. The underground channels were quaking and their hot inner lakes threatened to spill over. Was it love or more a desire for warmth, an expression of friendship where the boundaries had simply become blurred?
So much was broken in his relationship with Rebecka, he could see that now. The passion in Ann’s embrace and in the answer of his body was not only a rush of lust but a yearning for intimacy, evidence of the emotional poverty of his life. Rebecka and he were unhappy together, it was that simple, and Haver had needed only one single kiss to see this clearly.
Could he continue to live with Rebecka? He had to. They had two children together and still loved each other. At least he thought they did.
Twenty-eight
Allan Fredriksson read through Ryde’s report from Vivan Molin’s apartment. There was nothing noteworthy. The place was full of Vincent Hahn’s fingerprints.
The only thing they had found in the apartment that made Fredriksson raise his eyebrows was a pair of handcuffs that the technicians had found stuffed away in a closet, together with two porn films and a vibrator. Battery-operated with two speed settings, Ryde had noted.
They were still establishing her network of friends and relatives. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings. There was a note in her address book about an “Aunt Bettan” and a phone number with a 021 area code. They had called it, with no results yet. Fredriksson had asked a cadet, a Julius Sandemar, to contact Hahn’s brother again. He seemed to be the only one who would be able to give them more information about possible relatives. He would also need to be informed that Vincent was now wanted for suspected assault and murder.
Someone threw out the idea that Hahn might try to leave the country and look up his brother in Israel, but it turned out that Hahn had never applied for a passport. Nonetheless, officials at Arlanda airport were notified to be on their guard.
Fredriksson had no idea where Hahn might have gone. Strange, he thought. A person without any social network. Where does a person without any contacts go? To a bar? He had trouble seeing Hahn nursing a drink in a bar. To the library? More plausible. Sandemar would have to go down to the public library and show the employees there a photo of Hahn. Was there a branch in Sävja? Fredriksson didn’t think so. Many of the smaller branches were being closed down.
They had checked the clinic in Sävja and the Akademiska Hospital, but no patient had ever registered under the name Hahn. He had been treated for depression at Ulleråker mental institution, but that was eight years ago. The doctor who had treated him had moved elsewhere.
The search of his apartment had also yielded almost no clues. Fredriksson suspected that Hahn would eventually turn up somewhere, but sitting around merely waiting for a killer to turn up was not his style. He wanted to track him down, but he was running out of ideas.
A traditional criminal was easier, his hangouts and associates more predictable. A psychically disturbed individual, a loner, was much more difficult to find. On the other hand, in Fredriksson’s experience, once the ball was rolling they were easier to catch because they were more likely to be careless and make mistakes.
Fredriksson was convinced that they were looking for two different murderers at this point. It was really only Sammy Nilsson who insisted that Hahn had had something to do with Little John’s murder. His theory was that Hahn was taking revenge, maybe even for incidents that happened as long ago as his school days. Sammy didn’t think that the connection between John and Hahn was a coincidence and was still searching for a possible explanation. Ottosson let him be for the moment. Sammy had started looking up old classmates of John, Gunilla Karlsson, and Hahn. As it turned out, most of them still lived in Uppsala, and Sammy had already worked through a number of people on the list, but so far nothing had come out that would indicate that Hahn was on a rampage to revenge himself on them. But there could very well be some event in Vincent Hahn’s mind that would not seem like a motive for revenge in other people’s eyes.
After leaving his former sister-in-law’s apartment, Vincent Hahn had walked to Vaksalagatan and taken the bus into town. The hat he had stolen the night before covered his wound. He had found seven hundred kronor in her apartment and that was the extent of his funds. Now there was only one place for him to go.
The smell of people on the bus confused him and made him angry, but thinking about the rattling sound Vivan had made as he pulled the telephone cord tighter around her neck made him feel bigger. He could feel superior to the other people on the bus. They had nothing to do with him, they were small. He was big.
Vivan had assured him she wouldn’t tell on him, but he had seen in her eyes that she was lying. He had felt a rush of excitement while her body was convulsing under his. She had tried to scratch his face but hadn’t been able to reach. His knees had held her arms down. It was all over in a few minutes. He had pulled her along the floor and in under the bed and left her there to rot. They would find her when she started to stink, but not before. And by that time he’d be long gone.
He smiled. The feeling of satisfac
tion at having resolved everything so well filled him with an almost painful joy. Painful because he was unable to share it with anyone. But within a week he would get to read about it in the paper. Then people would know that Vincent Hahn was not to be treated lightly.
The headlines of the Upsala Nya Tidning at the railway station startled him. UPPSALA MURDER STILL UNSOLVED, it said. He stared at the black letters and tried to understand what it meant. Had Gunilla Karlsson died? But that wasn’t possible. Granted, she had collapsed in the yard outside the building, but it was he who had been closer to death. He bought the paper, pushed it down in his pocket, and hurried on. Some event was taking place in the plaza in front of the station. A dozen people or so dressed up as Santa were performing a dance of sorts. The small bells in their hands made tinkling sounds. Suddenly they all threw themselves to the ground and remained there, motionless. Vincent watched them, fascinated. One after another the Santas came back to life and joined hands to form a circle around the thirteenth Santa, who continued to lie on the ground.
“This is the darkness of Christmas,” shouted one of the Santas.
Vincent thought it must be a doomsday sect of some kind. He liked it. The sound of the bells followed him as he walked down Bangårdsgatan.
The bingo hall was unusually empty. He nodded at a few other regulars, but most of them were absorbed in their game. Vincent sat down in his usual spot and unfolded his newspaper. The first thing he saw was a picture of John Jonsson. The reporter summarized what had happened and presented a variety of motives. John’s colorful past was emphasized, the fact that he was a serious gambler alongside his burning passion for tropical fish.
A representative from the tropical-fish society had spoken out and declared John’s death a tragedy and an irreplaceable loss for the society and all cichlid lovers.
The paper, however, was more interested in John’s potential connections with Uppsala’s shady underworld and illegal gambling circuit.
The princess of Burundi Page 20