Black Lies, Red Blood

by Kjell Eriksson

  He was slow but sometimes heated as well, and he sometimes talked about Tantric sex, which she’d never heard of. Always attentive to her mood and desires, he was, in short, a “keeper” as Görel would put it.

  For three weeks they had been seeing each other, but only at her place. It was the most practical, he thought, saying that his place was cramped and that he didn’t like to clean. She thought it was a good arrangement, as she avoided having to get a babysitter. Erik had not taken any great notice of the man who came and went. Anders was always gone before Erik woke up in the morning, and Ann was not sure whether he knew that Anders slept over. One evening they played computer games together, and the next morning Erik asked where the “old man” had gone.

  They had made love three times in the past twelve hours—that was more than she had done the last two years before meeting Anders. She glanced at the clock; it was only an hour since he had slipped out of her.

  She felt her belly contract. He had licked her like no one else, along her spine down toward the tailbone, and further, parted her cheeks and let his warm tongue run. Carefully he had drawn patterns with the tip of his tongue.

  “… that’s what I think.”

  Fredriksson fell silent.

  Lindell reached for the pen that was on the table in front of her.

  “Do you have a fever too?” asked Fredriksson.

  “No,” Lindell assured him.

  “You look a little warm.”

  She laughed. She heard how wrong it sounded, girlish and nervous. Her colleagues around the table observed her: Haver with a look of admiration, Beatrice mildly indulgent, and Ottosson with that unbelievable furrow between his eyes. Fredriksson looked completely uncomprehending while Sammy Nilsson smiled and made the V sign.

  “I’m just a little—”

  “A little what?” said Ola Haver.

  He knows, thought Lindell. Their eyes met before she looked away. With a mental exertion of will she tried to gather her freely floating limbs and thoughts, and return them to her body.

  It only struck her now that she had declined an invitation from Ola Haver and his wife Rebecka the evening before. Every summer they organized a barbecue. She had been there the past few years but this year she stayed away. No doubt they had discussed her absence.

  Ann Lindell looked at Fredriksson.

  “What do we know about his circle of acquaintances?”

  “Have you had a stroke, Ann? Allan was just telling us that we don’t have an identity.”

  Sammy Nilsson’s words made her look down at the table top.

  “I was somewhere else for a while,” she said quietly.

  “Where were you?” asked Beatrice Andersson.

  He licked my armpit, she thought, and smiled and raised her eyes.

  “I was in a place you’ve never been, Beatrice,” she answered after a few seconds, still smiling. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to make an urgent call.”

  She got up and grabbed the notebook and pen. It shows, she thought as she left the room, well aware of their looks.

  “Urgent,” she mumbled quietly to herself outside the door, and grinned.

  * * *

  After her panicky flight from the morning meeting, Ann Lindell barricaded herself in her office, unplugged the phone, and sat down, not at her desk, but in the visitor’s chair that was pushed up against the wall between a pair of gigantic file cabinets. The office was so small that the chair was always in the way when it was in front of the desk. If anyone were to crack open the door and look in, they would think she was out. She also felt like she needed to be somewhere else.

  Little by little the satisfaction of the early morning had turned into a feeling of vague worry.

  She was sore, but above all confused. She had to stick to what had happened. It had been a long time since she needed to handle emotions like passion and hope. Regret and longing she had been able to parry with pretty good success. But this? Should she make a comparison to Rolf or Edvard, two past lives? Can you start from zero, she asked herself, and immediately knew the answer.

  They had met a couple of months ago at Görel’s and sure, she had been interested even then, and she sensed it had also been Görel’s intention to bring them together. She had tried earlier without any results and jokingly complained about Ann’s lack of involvement.

  He had an open face and she liked that, got the idea that it corresponded to what was inside him. She needed a man like that, a man who talked about what he liked and thought, without reservation. She longed for painful honesty. No obstacles, no unspoken reservations, no point-taking.

  Then she had not heard a word from him, even though he had said something about calling, but as the days and weeks passed she had resigned herself.

  A month later he called. They decided to have dinner, the most civilized act two people can do together, as he put it. He suggested an Italian restaurant far up on S:t Olofsgatan and she said yes. She arranged for Erik to sleep over with a playmate from preschool. Anders Brant would pick her up and arrived half an hour early. She was still in her underwear, peeked through the peephole in the door, wrapped a stained bathrobe around herself, and opened the door.

  They never made it to the restaurant. Ten minutes after he had stepped into her apartment they were in her bed.

  This had been going on for three weeks. Violent fucking, there was no other word for it. He was loving. Unaccustomed to all this attention, these hands and this tongue, this cock, made her confused to start with, and sometimes she thought it was too good, too much of a good thing.

  This morning he got out of bed, drew his hand over his sex, which in all likelihood was sore too, and said that he had to go away for a week, maybe two. She asked where he was going but did not get a reasonable answer. That’s how much of an investigator she was! I got caught with my pants down, she thought gloomily, still intoxicated and tired.

  A shiver of fear passed through her. Would he come back? She tried to calm herself by thinking: Why wouldn’t he come back? He seemed happy with her. He came of his own free will, seemingly gladly and often to her home and bed.

  * * *

  After an hour there was a careful knock on the door. She knew it was Ottosson. The door was opened slowly by the unit chief who peeked in, and discovered Lindell between the massive cabinets.

  “How are you? You look a bit tired out,” he began unusually directly, without commenting on her placement in the office.

  She could tell that Ottosson was exerting himself to sound relaxed, despite the furrow between his eyebrows.

  Lindell pulled the chair out into the office, patted him on the arm, and sat down behind the desk. Ottosson took a seat in the visitor’s chair.

  “Warmed up,” he said, and it took a second before Lindell understood that he meant the chair.

  “I’ve been thinking about something,” she said. “Ask around at ‘The Grotto,’ they might have some idea who he is.”

  “Ola and Beatrice are on their way there,” he said with a smile.

  “The Grotto” was the fixed point in existence for many of the homeless. The operation was run as a non-profit by a few activists and got some municipal backing and private sponsorship. There the mournful existences that no one really wanted to take responsibility for or even know about, could get a meal, some clothes, and consideration.

  Lindell nodded and smiled back. Ottosson’s wrinkle smoothed out somewhat.

  “How was the barbecue last night?” she asked.

  “Ola postponed it, so you’ll get another chance.”

  She realized he was wondering what she’d been doing the night before, what was so important that she chose it over the traditional barbecue. Perhaps he thought it was a demonstration on her part, a way of communicating that she was not in sync with the others at the unit.

  “That’s nice,” she said without any great enthusiasm.

  Ottosson was drumming his fingers on the armrest.

  “So, what do you think
?” she asked.

  Ottosson leaned back in the chair. His fingers became quiet.

  “The usual,” he said. “A wino has too much to drink and kills another wino.”

  “But there was no alcohol in his body, was there?”

  Lindell’s face suddenly turned red. What if I misunderstood that too?

  “No, but maybe the murderer had a little under his belt.”

  “And the phone number on the scrap of paper?”

  “No one answers. Berglund is checking on that.”

  “Whose account is it?”

  “His name is Anders Brant, some kind of journalist.”

  Ann Lindell stared at Ottosson. Her mouth opened, but not a word came across her lips. Unconsciously she raised one hand as if to say: Hold up, repeat that!

  “You know him?”

  In the midst of her confusion she marveled at how easily her boss read her.

  “Tell me,” Ottosson continued. “Has he interviewed you?”

  Lindell shook her head.

  “No, we’ve just met casually,” she said.

  “What’s he like?”

  “I don’t really know,” she said.

  Ottosson observed her.

  “What connection do you think there is between the murdered man and Brant?”

  “Not a clue,” said Lindell.

  “But if you know him.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “But something—”

  “Don’t you hear what I’m saying? I don’t know him!”

  She braced her feet in the chair as if to get up but sank back with a sigh.

  Ottosson put his hands up in a defensive gesture. This had happened before, these moments of collapse in their otherwise familiar relationship. No powerful collisions, and their quarrels never dragged on and seriously poisoned their collaboration. It would not happen this time either, Lindell was clear about that.

  Ottosson smiled at her. The wrinkle of worry was gone. It was as if he strove to lure her over a boundary, to get her to expose herself, say something that might explain. He knew her so well. Ottosson was conflict averse but also wise enough to understand that out of anger something might come loose from his otherwise reserved colleague. The iceberg Lindell might calve a piece out into the sea, a frozen clump that would drift away leisurely and slowly melt. She knew his tactics and her own weakness with respect to him.

  This time you won’t get any confidences, she thought gloomily, but she braced herself and let out a short laugh, a gesture and a grimace that might indicate resignation, not due to Ottosson, but rather a kind of excuse, evidence of self-insight: Yes, this is me, Otto, and you’ll have to put up with it.

  “I do have my cold case,” she said, and he took her hint.

  “Okay,” said Ottosson. “You don’t know him, but soon enough we will. Sammy’s going to check up on this Brant. And how’s it going with the girl?”

  “I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  In April a sixteen-year-old girl had disappeared from her home in Berthåga. Lindell had expended considerable effort trying to figure out what happened, but had not found anything, or anyone, who could explain why Klara Lovisa Bolinder was as if swallowed up by the earth.

  Every year a number of Swedes disappeared from their homes; the majority ran away of their own free will from their everyday lives, their jobs, and their families. For understandable reasons, the investigating police occasionally thought.

  Klara Lovisa’s disappearance on the other hand was a mystery. Lindell had stared at photographs of the young girl, the best one taken only a week or so before she disappeared. It depicted a blonde, laughing girl, with long, straight hair parted in the middle, blue eyes, and a classical nose that hinted at Roman blood in her veins. She was smiling into the camera. Her eyes were confident, she trusted the photographer.

  It was a girl you noticed. Lindell sensed that from the first moment, which was also confirmed by her family and friends. Even more peculiar was that absolutely no one had noticed Klara Lovisa after she left home on April 28, 2007, to go into the city and shop for a spring jacket.

  “I want to find her,” said Lindell quietly.

  Ottosson nodded. He leaned forward and placed his hand on Lindell’s. They both knew that in principle the odds of finding Klara Lovisa alive were equal to zero.

  Four

  The visit to “The Grotto” had produced an identity, an ex-wife, and a handful of names that might be characterized as Bo Gränsberg’s friends, or at least acquaintances.

  The manager of the refuge for the homeless, Camilla Olofsson, looked at the photograph of the dead man for a long time.

  “Bosse was a considerate man,” she said at last, but neither Ola Haver or Beatrice Andersson took her words at face value. It was a common reaction; very few people wanted to say anything bad about a dead person. Instead their positive qualities would usually be emphasized.

  “He was considerate,” the manager repeated. “He helped out. He was handy too. Nothing was left undone. I remember when we were going to … it doesn’t matter.”

  Ola Haver stepped aside. Beatrice took a step closer.

  “No one deserves to die like that,” she said.

  Camilla Olofsson nodded resolutely.

  “Can you help us? We need a list of names, persons who maybe can tell us about Bosse, what he did, who he associated with, what plans he had.”

  “Plans,” the manager said flatly, fixing her gaze somewhere far away. “He was happier recently,” she said at last. “It seemed more positive, life, I mean. He came here a couple years ago, when he was really bad off. Then it went up and down.”

  “But now he was happier,” Beatrice observed. “Did he say anything that explained—”

  “No, nothing. Bosse didn’t talk much. He kept most of it inside. He was trying, you could see that, but it was a struggle. He never recovered after the divorce. And then the injury, of course.”

  “What injury?”

  “I don’t really know how it happened, but he fell on the job, he was a construction worker. He broke his one arm and shoulder. Sometimes I could see that he was in pain.”

  “Do you know the name of his ex?”

  “Gunilla Lange. I think she lives in Svartbäcken. I have a brother who lives up there and I’ve seen Gunilla around there a few times. She’s been here a few times, dropped off clothes and that sort of thing. I liked her. I think she cared about Bosse too. She asked how he was doing. Maybe he was too proud to take any help from her, so she donated clothes here instead. Maybe they were his old clothes, what do I know?”

  “He never talked about a job or apartment, or anything like that?”

  Camilla Olofsson looked at the police officer.

  “Job and apartment,” she sniffed. “You don’t know what life is like for these men and women.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Beatrice. “But you do. That’s why I’m talking with you.”

  “Why the hell does he have to die for all of you to get interested?” said Camilla.

  Besides Gunilla Lange’s name, they also got a list of a few names—five men and a woman. According to Camilla Olofsson it was likely that the men on the list would show up at “The Grotto” later in the day.

  Beatrice Andersson phoned Berglund, who promised to spend a few hours of the afternoon at “The Grotto,” to possibly make contact with a few people who could provide information about Bosse’s recent doings.

  * * *

  Am I grieving for him? She had repeated the question silently to herself since the police left her. They must have talked at least a couple of hours, then shook hands and said good-bye. The female police officer was sweet, complimented her on the curtains, asked whether she had sewn them herself. Not everyone noticed such things. The other one’s gaze had wandered, as if he was ashamed or afraid of her.

  Yes, I’m grieving, she decided. I am grieving the life we could have had. For sixteen years they had been married, for two periods, li
ke a soccer match. A long first half, which lasted twelve years, was good. Then came the accident.

  They had no children. She mourned for that. Maybe him too. Of course that’s how it was. He loved kids. During all those years they had barely talked about it. They were both responsible for their childlessness, so why should they gab about it? She knew, purely rationally, that it was idiotic, but after the abortion, when she was nineteen, an intervention that he had supported, she saw childlessness as a punishment. She—they—had a chance, and they blew it.

  Would things have been different with a child? Doubtful. Children were love, but not life, she had heard a girlfriend say once, and that phrase had etched itself into her awareness.

  Their lives, mainly Bosse’s, had developed along a path that no one could have foreseen. He had always been a proud man, and that would become his great torment. Pride was easy to bear as long as he had something to be proud of, but then what?

  She told the police about his work, about the years when he came home sober, full of life, and just proud. He worked hard and made good money. And then: a single nerve in his body that was torn apart and made him useless as a scaffolder. Unable to raise his arm. The pain. Being useless, looking up at the facades and knowing.

  “How did it happen?” the male police officer asked, the first time he had shown any deeper interest in Bosse’s fate.

  She told about the accident and how it had upset Bosse’s life forever, and along with it their life together. He could not blame anyone, it was his own mistake, his eagerness to get it done quickly, that doomed him to idleness. He cursed his own clumsiness, called himself an “amateur.”

  Like so many others he chose liquor. He said “booze,” never alcohol or more specifically vodka, gin, or whiskey. Booze it would be. She thought it sounded crude, but that was probably the point. There was nothing sophisticated, nothing enjoyable in Bosse’s drinking habits. Booze was oblivion. Booze was hate. Booze was separation from life.

  She got up, went over to the window, and looked out over the yard. In the background was a glimpse of the newly constructed police building. They didn’t have far to go to convey their message. How could anyone work as a police officer? A high-rise full of crime, hate, lies, guilt, and sorrow. She should have asked how they put up with it, but suspected there was no good answer.