“If you just give me his name and address, I can mail this to him,” Louise said when Paul returned.
“Please. My nephew Gunnar will take care of it for me. He’s always willing to help out when I need it,” Paul said.
A few days later, Gunnar Bergström phoned Louise and asked her what really was going on. His uncle Paul hadn’t been able to explain it very well.
“I’m afraid I probably can’t explain it either,” Louise said.
“Well, anyway, thanks for sending me those copies,” Gunnar said. “It seemed pretty nasty. We’ve asked the stonecutters to remove the black stone. They’ll pick it up today, and if there’s any more trouble, they will have it out with Carl-Edvard Palm.”
“Good. Nobody will miss it,” Louise said. “Does Paul know that it was Palm who had it set up?”
“No, I just told him there had been some mistake,” Gunnar said. “And I’ve called the tax people and told them that Palm doesn’t live in Paul’s house, or at his address. Now it’s their job to sort it out. I called Palm as well, but I couldn’t get him to say anything sensible. He gave me some kind of tribute to Emma and Paul and their great love. When I asked him to explain in what way the tombstone and his address change were connected to the great affection for Paul he professed, he got abusive. But I don’t want to talk about him. Mostly I wanted to thank you for caring about my uncle.”
“It was no trouble at all. He is a good man. Let’s keep in touch,” Louise said.
Less than a month later, Louise had to prepare a funeral. In her world, life was in constant turmoil, beginning and ending without notice. Paul had passed away, and his nephews had asked her personally to officiate. When Gunnar Bergström called, she was in her vestry. He was cleaning out Paul’s house.
“I know that my uncle came to care for you. If it feels right, you are very welcome to come by and pick out something to remember him by,” Gunnar said.
“I’ll be happy to. And we could talk about the ceremony without being disturbed,” Louise said.
A little later, she sat with Gunnar in the by now familiar kitchen. Habit had made her check the mailbox on her way in, but this time it had been empty. On the other hand, the kitchen table was even more full of papers than usual, serving as storage for all the insurance policies, bills, subscriptions and private documents Gunnar had found in drawers and cupboards.
“It feels strange and a little solemn to be here without Uncle Paul,” Gunnar said. “So today it seems right to use his best china, the set he only used on special occasions. He kept it in that showcase cupboard. Do you think you could get cups?”
“Of course,” Louise said, pulling up a chair to stand on. “It’s a little rickety,” she added, balancing two cups and saucers in one hand and a carefully sealed envelope in the other. “This was wedged in next to the plates. I think you’d better take care of it. It says Deed of gift on the envelope.”
“In that case I’m pretty sure I know what it is,” Gunnar said. “Just put it with the other papers.”
When they had finally sat down, begun sipping their coffee from the flowery, golden-handled cups and picking out the hymns to be sung at the funeral, someone opened the door to the house. Carl-Edvard Palm stepped in, camera in hand. He walked straight to the kitchen but stopped at the threshold.
“How do you do,” he said, obviously surprised. “So you are here?”
“How do you do yourself,” Gunnar said. “Yes, I’m here with the vicar to arrange some practical things after my uncle passed away.”
“Hello. I’m Louise Alm,” Louise said, holding out her hand.
“A pleasure,” Carl-Edvard said, introducing himself. “Well. Yes, I suppose there is a lot of paperwork at times like these. Too bad about your uncle, of course. My sympathies.”
He remained irresolutely in the doorway for a moment. Obviously the others intended to stay put for quite a while, he realized. Oh well, he could always return when they had left. Now he just had to make sure not to make a wrong step. But, of course, he had brought his camera.
“Right. Well, I’ll just go about my business, I suppose,” Carl-Edvard Palm said, and disappeared into the living room.
Louise and Gunnar exchanged a bewildered look. Soon they could hear the sounds of furniture being dragged around, interrupted by groaning and moaning.
“He’s a real estate agent and seems to be taking pictures of the house,” Gunnar said when they saw flashes of light reflected from the living room. “Maybe he intends to put it up for sale.”
“I think it’s a pity that none of you want to stay in this nice house.”
“Oh, but my brother will move in as soon as the estate is divided up. He took care of keeping it up ever since Uncle Paul grew too old to do it himself,” Gunnar said. “I really don’t know what he is doing here.”
Louise went along with him into the living room. Palm was busy trying to find angles where the photos would show the antique charm of the house.
“Would you mind telling me what you are doing?” Gunnar asked.
“Oh. Yes. Well, I assumed that the house will be put up for sale,” Palm said. “And I thought it best to be prepared. I mean, so you can get going at the right time of year, when buyers are eager to find something quickly. Next month prices usually fall, when everyone is away on vacation.”
“Right. But our meeting with the lawyer about the inheritance is set for the week after next, so nothing has been decided yet,” Gunnar said.
“Oh. Well, I was only trying to help you out. After all, we’re almost family. Or were.”
“I think you’d better leave now,” Gunnar said.
“Well, I can always come back. By the way, who is handling the distribution of Paul’s estate? Would that be you, Gunnar?”
“No. It’s a lawyer my uncle picked himself,” Gunnar said.
“Indeed. May I ask you which one?”
Gunnar told him, and asked him again to leave. Palm left, obviously disgruntled. Gunnar and Louise returned to the kitchen.
“Palm has always been high-handed rather than helpful,” Gunnar said. “But taking that kind of liberty is more than I’d expected even from him.” He opened the window, and the slight breeze blew the lace curtains and the scent of apple blossoms into the room. “Obviously he has gotten hold of Emma’s keys to this place,” Gunnar said after a moment. “I ought to get them back from him. Though God knows how many copies there may be.”
“I could ask Him,” Louise said. “But I don’t think He’ll tell me.”
Gunnar laughed.
Louise left, feeling ill at ease despite the little creamer she had picked as a memento. The one she and Paul had used so often during their many talks at the kitchen table.
Gunnar stayed on to clean up and sort through his uncle’s papers. Then he phoned a locksmith and took all the relevant documents along to the lawyer.
From his office, a week after Paul Bergström’s funeral, Carl-Edvard Palm cheerfully phoned the lawyer who was handling the estate.
“Carl-Edvard Palm speaking. This concerns the estate of Paul Bergström. His nephew Gunnar has told me that you will hold a meeting to shift the inheritance in a few days.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” the lawyer told him. “It’s set for next Tuesday.”
“Yes. But the thing is, I don’t seem to have received a notice to attend,” Palm went on.
“No, I’m sure that is also correct,” the lawyer said in a neutral voice. “Since you aren’t entitled to any share, you aren’t notified. But we have notified your two daughters.”
“What? What! There must be some mistake,” Palm exclaimed. “Are you sure your papers are in order? Have you looked through his house? Really looked carefully?”
“Certainly,” the lawyer said. “Everything is being done according to Mr. Bergström’s will.”
“Oh, no, I’m not buying that, I know there’s something fishy going on,” Palm told him angrily. “But you’ll be hearing from me, be sure o
f that!”
“Thanks for calling,” the lawyer said. But Palm had already hung up.
“The shit has hit the fan,” he said aloud. “I’d better check up on it.”
But at the front door of Paul’s house, he discovered that his key no longer fit the lock.
The following week, Paul’s two nephews and Emma’s two granddaughters came to the lawyer’s office to attend the shifting of the estate. After the meeting, Gunnar phoned Louise.
“I just wanted to tell you that I and my brother get the house, and that the girls get fifty thousand crowns each.”
“Well, I suppose that was expected. So I hope everyone is satisfied,” Louise said.
“Not quite everyone,” Gunnar said. “There is a drama behind it. That envelope you happened to find turned out to contain another will none of us had ever heard about. In that one, our uncle left his house to Carl-Edvard Palm, and a hundred thousand to Palm’s daughters. It seemed perfectly legal and was correctly witnessed. It was dated the week after Emma died.”
“I understood that Paul was in a very bad way back then,” Louise said. “He could hardly have been in a state to make any important decisions. Did he really understand what he was signing, that he was disinheriting both you and your brother?”
“No, not likely. But he often said that he wanted to give the girls some money. Though only money.”
“I’m sure he did,” Louise said. “But that thing about the house sounds suspicious.”
“So it was. My brother and I went with Uncle Paul to show him that the black tombstone was really gone,” Gunnar said. “And while we were talking he remembered that Palm had turned up with some papers to sign concerning gifts to Emma’s granddaughters. We searched, but couldn’t find anything. That made Uncle worried that his deed had been lost, so in the end I went with him to the bank where he wrote a new will and put it in his safe-deposit box. He never showed me what he wrote, and only his lawyer was authorized to open that box. I never saw his will until today, and I didn’t know about that other one until you found it, even if I suspected something. But the fact is that Palm’s attempt to swindle my uncle failed only by pure chance. Imagine that. Pure chance.”
Gunnar and Louise fell silent. Neither of them felt like saying anything more.
Later that day, Louise stopped for a moment on the church stairs. In the dusk she saw that someone had put fresh roses on Paul’s grave. It warmed her heart to know that others also remembered him. There was something deeply hopeful in all these small, visible proofs of concern for others. Louise walked down to the grave. There was a small, unsigned card tied to the bouquet. She read it.
From those who thought of Paul,
unlike his greedy relatives who sabotaged his last will.
Louise read the words over and over again. Unbelievable. Did that Realtor imagine that he could abuse the graveyard as his private battlefield? It could hardly be anyone else. She had had enough. She tore the card into pieces, walked away and stopped by the churchyard gates with her hand full of shredded paper. Her heart was pounding in anger. She threw the pieces of paper into the wastebasket at the bus stop before getting on the bus to go home. She was still upset when she reached her house and stood for a while outside her door.
This was far from over, she realized.
A sudden impulse made her go back to the church. She sifted through the wastebasket, retrieving the torn card. When she sat down in her vestry she felt lost. Why had she come back here?
She lit a candle to calm herself. The pieces of paper were spread on the table before her, almost illegible now after being smeared by ice-cream wrappers and the damp remains of some unidentified fruit. She looked at them for a long time. The dirt on them matched the dirty thought behind them.
She thought about the deadly sins, of all the holy scriptures that had warned generation upon generation of what unbridled passion could do to society and to men. That warning was always timely.
She nodded to herself. The flame fluttered in the draft from her hand when she took her pen to start writing her next sermon. She would talk about greed.
Carl-Edvard Palm was sitting on his porch, red both from sunburn and fury. His new wife was equally furious but less red. She used sun lotion. The only ones chirping with joy today had been his daughters.
“Do you know what the girls told me when we had lunch? The old bastard wrote another will just a couple of weeks after I had gone to all the trouble to help him out,” he had told his wife.
“But how could he do something like that?” his wife said incredulously.
“That’s what you get for trying to fix things for a senile old childless fart,” he said.
“And you worked so hard,” she said in an injured tone.
“I stood all the costs, I did all the work, and what did it get me?” Palm said. “Not a damned thing, that’s what.”
“It’s really unfair,” his wife said.
“I won’t even get the fee for selling the house. It seems one of them actually means to live in it. Can you imagine? It’s all come to nothing,” he said bitterly.
But perhaps something could be salvaged, after all. He drove to his office, made a photocopy of the stonecutter’s bill and payment receipt for the black tombstone and wrote out a bill. To the sum and his rate for helping out, he added the highest-allowed market interest. It came to quite a decent amount. On his way home, he mailed the bill to the estate of Paul Bergström.
Born in late 1953 in Lövånger, a town of then only a few hundred (now some 750) inhabitants on the far north coast of Sweden, Eva Gabrielsson studied at Umeå University, where she met her life-long companion, Stieg Larsson, in 1972. She later studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and has worked as an architect, project developer, and government expert on issues concerning sustainable building and maintenance. She lives in Stockholm.
THE RING
ANNA JANSSON
Anna Jansson was born and grew up in the important medieval trading town of Visby, founded in the tenth century, on the island of Gotland, which lies in the Baltic east of both the Swedish mainland and the much smaller island of Öland. She began publishing crime novels in 2000, and in her first book introduced Maria Wern, a young police woman who has remained the protagonist in fourteen novels and a very few short stories, including this one.
In the first few novels, Wern works on the mainland but accepts extra assignments on Gotland during her summer vacations; by the time of the seventh novel, however, she has moved there permanently. In Anna Jansson’s novels, considerable attention is given not only to the crimes committed and the police investigations, but also to Maria Wern’s problems as a committed professional trying to juggle her work, her two children, her romances, and private life into some semblance of functioning order.
In 2010, Anna Jansson also began writing a parallel series of crime novels for young adults, starring the eleven-year-old Emil Wern, Maria Wern’s oldest child who, inspired by his mother and his reading, sets up a private detective agency.
Anna Jansson is one of Sweden’s most popular crime writers. Her bestselling novels have also been filmed for both TV and cinema release, with Maria Wern portrayed by leading actress Eva Röse.
WHEN HE SAW THE BEER CAN TAB GLEAM UNDER THE THIN ICE COVERING the pool of water he understood that it was the Lord of the Rings. In the magical brightness of the streetlight the secret was revealed to him as it had been when Elrond ruled Rivendell and Gandalf was still called the Grey. Deep within his boy’s heart he had anticipated that something like this would happen.
“Today, Tuesday, December the twelfth, Fredrik Bengtsson is chosen to be the Ring-bearer,” he says out loud to himself. At the very edge of his consciousness he can hear the school bell giving its second call to class. The school yard is empty. The ring resting in its coffin of ice looks deviously inconspicuous, but nevertheless it will soon change the world.
Next to the bicycle stand there is a sharp st
ick. Fredrik is still in pain from the previous recess, when Torsten attacked his back with it and yelled “piss your pants” so the girls in his class could hear it. The wooden sword is the tool he needs. Liberator of the Ring. With a single stroke, the invaluable power is his. Fredrik takes the Ring in his hand and puts it on his finger in the name of Gandalf and the elves and the surly dwarves. It doesn’t feel special, not to start with. But then, when he looks at Torsten’s new, cool bike in the stand, with a hand brake, twenty gears and double shock absorbers, something happens within him. His teeth grow sharper and his eyes shrink to small, glowing fires. Rough, black hair slithers out of his hands and his nails grow into claws. The Ring-bearer does something Fredrik Bengtsson in class 1A would never dare. He steals a bike.
Downhill the bike is going much too quickly. The street is all ice. Streetlights pass by dangerously fast. Fredrik tries to brake by pedaling backwards, then in a panic tightens the hand brake and crashes. Thanks to his gloves he doesn’t skin his hands on the asphalt, but he gets a tear on his knee. The bike’s fender is dented and its enamel is scratched. If he hadn’t worn the Ring he would surely have cried from fear and pain, but not now.
The Ring-bearer looks forward. The forest road calls to him. There is a whisper in the frosted crowns of the trees. A whisper of legends. He mounts his steel steed and enters the labyrinth of the black tree trunks. By the frozen flow of the creek is a village of small, gray cottages covered by turf roofs. At the far end, just where the pasture begins, there is a grassy hillock with a small door of decaying wood. That’s how hobbit houses look. Now he has to be watchful. Fredrik crouches down behind the compost bin and pulls the bike down with him. There are black riders. You have to be careful. Just as Fredrik pulls off the Ring and puts it in his pocket he sees the door in the grassy hill open and a dark figure emerges and disappears towards the forest. He glimpses a face. Good or evil? Enemy or friend? He waits for an eternity of shivering seconds. The morning sun quietly filters down through the branches and eats the shadows. Supported by the bike he sneaks closer to look into the earth cellar. The door is slightly ajar. There is no trace of the roundness and friendliness characterizing hobbit homes. The walls are rough and the cold sticks to his body. Fredrik gropes farther in and his foot hits something on the floor. Something looking like a sack of potatoes, yet doesn’t quite. He fumbles in his pocket for the cigarette lighter he took from his big brother’s jacket earlier in the morning. With the slim flame in his hand he bends down, looking through the smoke of his breath straight into a pale, yellow face. Two eyes stare glassily at him. A mouth gapes with a toothless upper jaw. The dentures have fallen to expose much too pink gums. He stands mesmerized for a few immobile seconds, then runs towards the light. Runs through the forest while his thoughts scatter like frightened birds.
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