Stone Coffin

by Kjell Eriksson

  It was clear he enjoyed spending time in the house with her. He had peace here. Laughed. They played, they weeded the beds together. He had never gardened before. Isabella, the dog, lay in the shade and watched them.

  And now he was dead. Disgraced in the memories of those who lived. She was the only one who could still speak of him with love. Not even his parents, whom she had called in order to offer comfort and perhaps to win the confidence of, could see anything to redeem their son. They had rejected her, had been merciless in their judgment.

  It was when she called them for a second time that she received the information that had convinced her of his innocence. It was a relief, but also so sensational and upsetting that she couldn’t quite grasp it. She had not been able to continue the conversation with his sobbing mother and had had to put the phone down.

  It took two days before she resurfaced, before she realized the enormity of what she had been told.

  * * *

  She rested her hand on the handle. The door that was normally so stiff had dried out in the heat and slid open. She had forgotten what she was planning to get, but remembered as she stood there that it was strawberry jam.

  She had called the police and spoken with the woman who was in charge of the investigation. She had read her name in the papers. She had sounded upset and unfocused and, which surprised her the most, angry. Gabriella was extremely attuned to other people’s tone of voice. She could be reduced to tears by a single remark, lose her steam, retreat. She had not been able to continue the conversation, but she knew that she had to call again.

  * * *

  The jar was cool and she held it up to her forehead, following the narrow path back to the house. She glanced at the vegetable garden. She feared the worst. She had not watered it for two days and now she couldn’t bring herself to go there. Much of it would have died, she knew that. Especially the cabbages and perhaps the lettuce. She had to pull herself together in the afternoon.

  Seventeen

  The prosecutor hesitated but finally gave in. If it had been anything else, he would never have approved the warrants for the seven people. There was no clear indication of criminal activity other than the fact that they were vocal animal rights activists, and even that information was rather shaky.

  Media had made a big thing of the attack on TV4. This news dominated the local and national channels. The TV4 morning news had been broadcast direct from the studio and included interviews of its own staff. The morning broadcasts of the daily news program Rapport had fixated on the terrorist angle and run a series of pieces on earlier attacks on researchers, stealth releases of foxes and minks, slaughter trucks set on fire, as well as various interviews with Security Service officers and terrorism experts.

  The station was bombarded with calls and surrounded by reporters. The fact that their media colleagues were targeted had made them particularly insistent. The prosecutor yielded to this pressure.

  The seven were brought in during a coordinated operation at eleven o’clock in the morning. Five were at home and two at work. Everything went calmly. It was as if they had been expecting company. All, however, protested the legality of the warrants.

  They were led into private holding cells and led to understand that there were others. None of them were questioned until late that afternoon. They had to spend the intervening time in the cells in total isolation, checked on two times an hour through a window in the door. Nothing else. No human contact, no offers of food or coffee.

  Sammy Nilsson felt a pang of conscience when the first one was brought in for questioning. She was a young woman, Erika Mattson, nineteen years of age. She had just finished high school and had a summer job at a supermarket.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” Sammy asked.

  Normally he would take it easy, chat a little and try to establish a connection. Now he adopted a purely formal stance, turning on the tape recorder without further comments.

  “May I call my mother?” the girl asked.

  “You can do that later. Do you know that one of the reporters will probably have to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair?”

  Sammy looked at the girl, who gazed wide-eyed back at him.

  “I don’t have anything to do with that,” she said.

  “We think you were there.”

  There was no basis for this claim, but Lindell, Berglund, and Haver had decided to take a tough line. Possibly one of the youngsters would become uncertain and start to talk.

  “You are vegan,” Sammy went on.

  “Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “Your room is covered with posters, magazines, and pamphlets that address the same thing: that animal experimentation is cruel and should be stopped.”

  The girl didn’t answer. Her gaze was fixed on her hands, which were clasped in her lap.

  “Should animal experiments be stopped at any cost, is that it? Even if people end up hurt? You were questioned about an attack on a kennel in Norduppland last year. Now you are sitting here again. That time you were only making threats. Now you are playing at being a terrorist and actually hurting people.”

  “Stop talking about hurting people! I have nothing to do with this. I want to call my mother!”

  Sammy sat quietly for a couple of minutes.

  “What did you do yesterday?”

  “I was home almost all day. I went out for a coffee in the afternoon.”

  “Where?”

  “At Hugo’s.”

  “Alone?”

  “No, with friends.”

  “Do they have names?”

  The girl gave him three names. He recognized one of them. Haver was in the process of questioning him.

  “When did you leave Hugo’s?”

  “At around five maybe. I went home. I had to do laundry.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “Yes, my mom was working. She came home at ten. She’s a nurse.”

  “Home alone. Are you sure you didn’t take a trip to TV4?”

  The girl started to cry. Sammy turned off the tape recorder.

  * * *

  Haver met with steelier resistance. Erik Gustavsson was smirking at him, answering the questions quickly and with nonchalance. He leaned back in his chair, to all appearances completely unconcerned.

  He had been home during the day and gone into town at around three in the afternoon to buy a record and have a coffee.

  “I take it that isn’t a crime?” he said.

  “Go on,” Haver said.

  “I went to Hugo’s, if you know where that is. I hung out there for a couple of hours, and then I biked home again.”

  “I see. What did you do at home?”

  “Went online, talked a bit with a friend on the phone, and in the evening I went to Katalin and had a beer. Great alibi, don’t you think?”

  “I think you knocked down a reporter at TV4 at a quarter past six yesterday. Then maybe you had a beer to celebrate.”

  “Prove it.”

  Haver leaned back and flipped through some papers that lay in front of him on the table and appeared to have lost all interest in the young man. After a while he reached for the phone.

  “Can you come get a guy who’s with me? He should go back now.”

  He turned off the tape recorder, did not look at Erik Gustavsson, and glanced at his watch.

  “Now I’m going to go home and have a steak,” he said and stood up.

  A guard stepped into the room.

  “You know what,” Haver said as Erik stood up, “I talked to your dad on the phone. He’s pissed. Isn’t it a bit of a quandary for a vegan to be the son of a butcher?”

  Erik Gustavsson stared back at Haver with an amused smile.

  * * *

  It was eight o’clock. There was a certain amount of tiredness among the assembled officers. Berglund was making faces, lost in thought. Sammy Nilsson went to get some coffee and returned with a tray.

  “No, not for me,” Lindell said when he o
ffered her a cup.

  Haver looked thoughtful. Wende was almost asleep, his head cradled in his hands.

  “Maybe we took the wrong tactic,” Lindell said as she began the review of the day’s events.

  No one said anything.

  “What we have turned up so far is not particularly significant. Everyone seems to have fairly decent alibis, even if the two Hugo-goers could very well have fit in a brief visit to TV4. The girl’s appearance matches the description of the one who had blood on her face. We’ll test that further tomorrow. We’re going to see if Anna Sundmark, the studio manager, can pick out Erika Mattson. We’re also going to run voice tests on all seven and play them for the TV4 staff. They may be able to identify one of them.”

  Lindell was exhausted after this short review. She was tempted by the smell of the coffee but thought she would throw up if she had any.

  “We’ll have to let them go tomorrow,” Berglund said.

  “Have the searches of their homes given us anything?” Wende asked.

  “Two complaints lodged with the parliamentary ombudsman, a gaggle of crazed parents, and numerous letters to the editor expected for the next few days,” Sammy said. “We’ll probably find that it isn’t to everyone’s taste that we go turn seven people’s homes upside down.”

  “But public opinion should be in our favor,” Wende said.

  Lindell felt even weaker. Since when did they modify what they did to fit public opinion?

  She said this too and was immediately contradicted by Berglund. As always when he talked, she listened carefully. Her older colleague rarely spoke nonsense.

  After hearing his objections, she had to agree at least in part. If people didn’t believe in the validity of their procedures, public trust in police and prosecutors would quickly be whittled away.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ll do the identification and the voice tests tomorrow, and then we’ll let them go.”

  “Yes, since we have nothing to go to the prosecutor with,” Wende shot in.

  “Unless we uncover something of significance,” Lindell went on.

  * * *

  Wende left first, then Berglund and Sammy.

  Still seated, Haver looked up at the clock and said out of the blue: “My father died exactly twenty-five years ago.”

  Lindell looked up. “Exactly?”

  “Yes, exactly. Twenty-eight minutes past eight, on this exact date twenty-five years ago.”

  Lindell waited for more, but Haver pulled himself out of his chair.

  “I’m going home,” he said.

  “How did he die?”

  “A bee sting. Silly, isn’t it? We were sitting out that evening. Dad was having a beer and a bee was swimming around in his glass. It went down his throat and stung him. Dad turned out to be extremely sensitive, because his throat immediately swelled up and he choked in a couple of minutes.”

  “How come you know it was at exactly twenty-eight minutes past eight?”

  “The window was open, and when we stood there around Dad, the clock in the living room rang half past nine. At that point, a couple of minutes had gone by.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Thirteen. It happened so fast. We were sitting there on the patio and talking and then suddenly he was gone. It was a warm evening. I even remember what we were talking about. Mom said once afterward that she felt so helpless.”

  “That’s awful” was the only thing Lindell could think of to say.

  “No one should have to die like that.”

  “Death is never pleasant.”

  “I think about it more and more,” Haver said, standing in the middle of the room. “I’ve tried to reach back into my memories, remember how Dad was, what he said, how his voice sounded, but I can’t. I hardly remember anything. Some people can recite their entire childhoods, I remember almost nothing.”

  “You’re a father yourself now.”

  “That must be why it comes up.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was a construction worker,” said Haver and looked at Lindell, whose eyes teared up when she met his gaze.

  “That’s good,” she said. “That sounds nice. Construction worker. He must have built a lot of wonderful houses.”

  Haver smiled. Lindell thought her last comment sounded ridiculous and regretted it immediately. It was something you said to children. “Built wonderful houses.”

  “I knew you would think that,” he said, and Lindell realized that he had appreciated her words.

  They were silent for moment. Haver looked at her one more time and seemed to be about to say something else, but he didn’t.

  “Give your family my regards,” Lindell said.

  * * *

  As was often the case, she stayed behind as the others went home. She thought about the seven young people who had been brought in and detained on dubious grounds. She realized that both the prosecutor and the police had given way to the pressure. At a public briefing, the chief of police had said that a number of suspects had been apprehended and that he hoped there would soon be a break in the case of the “terror attack against an organ of so vital a public interest as television.” This statement inspired undeniable hope, and the evening newscasters, assuming this optimistic view was based on actual investigative information, had praised the Uppsala police and had also interviewed a high-level member of the Security Forces, who had basked in the attention.

  The hangover would hit them the next day, unless the morning’s attempt to link one of the seven to the station attack led to something. Lindell didn’t know what the final determination of the offenses was likely to be and decided to contact the prosecutor.

  She should have gone to the drugstore and bought a pregnancy test, but had not had time and was no longer sure whether a test was necessary. Yesterday’s certainty had turned to doubt. The likelihood of becoming pregnant while on the pill had to be very small, and why would it happen after only a single night’s adventure?

  She stuck her hand inside her T-shirt and squeezed her breasts gently. Admittedly, they were a little tender. But that could also be the result of her Midsummer’s activities. Edvard could be rough, she had noticed that before.

  She should have called him but had not felt like it. What should she say? During the morning she had toyed with the idea of a quick abortion. Then she would not have to say a word to Edvard. Suddenly she was struck by the thought that this proved that she could have children.

  “If I am pregnant,” she muttered aloud.

  I have no one to ask, she thought. No close friend to share confidences with, to talk to, to get advice from. She could have talked to Beatrice in her unit. She was experienced and smart and would never say anything to anyone. But Ann hesitated to confide in her colleague. It would affect their working relationship. She felt that she would find herself in a position of weakness psychologically if she opened up to Beatrice.

  She hated being distracted. She should be putting all of her might into the investigation of Cederén, MedForsk, and TV4 so that it could be cleared up by the end of the summer. The summer with Edvard. Now everything had been thrown into disarray. She bit her lower lip until it hurt. She was awash with anxiety about having gone to bed with an unknown man.

  She had been enveloped in a diffuse sense of worry for a while. She knew that her social life was a catastrophe. Almost all of her time went to her work. Edvard had not been the most ideal partner, but you don’t really get to choose, she thought. You fall in love and are thrust into situations that are hard to control. Now life was catching up with her. This was nothing unusual. She had seen similar symptoms in some of her colleagues, a kind of unfulfilled longing to work in peace and also to establish connections between the workplace and the private sphere. Everyone found this hard to achieve, not just those involved in police work. It seemed as if the country was becoming more and more splintered, both at the level of the individual and at large. There was never enough time, someone said the other
day as they were complaining to one another in the lunchroom.

  That it should be so damned hard! Some managed to make it work. Like Ola. Two children and a wife that he loved above all else. He was tired but often smiled, and there was a longing in his gaze. He seemed so loyal toward something—what, she didn’t know. I don’t know if I would recognize it if it turned up in front of my nose.

  Edvard could have become this “something” if I am going to hang this on a man, and I guess I will. I can’t manage to live alone. If I am forced to, my life will be an endless series of investigations, stress-filled moments, and red wine in the evenings. Maybe I’ll make commissioner in a couple of years, in a black hole of a society of fried people.

  Edvard had talked about a kind of breakdown. He had his union spiel, which she often found tiresome. Life wasn’t just a struggle. Sometimes when he was calmer, but also sometimes when he started to talk about the cause, he could express some of what he meant. She could sense an inheritance of sorts inside him.

  Like her, Edvard was searching for connection and trust between people, and he had found it in Gräsö among the older folks—Viola, Victor, and the cousins, a dying breed. This lack of sustainability troubled him.

  Lindell realized that the child had set this internal monologue going. A budding life was forcing her to make a decision, placing markers in the ground for a playing field on which she would act out her life. Until now there had been no lines. Life seemed unstructured, and in a couple of years she would be forty.

  She sighed, rose heavily as if she were already in an advanced stage of pregnancy, left the office, and walked down the empty corridor. She remembered the first time she came to the station and walked by all of the offices, reading the name tags and arriving at Ottosson’s door. He had received her with great kindness and care. She had felt welcome and secure from the first day, and she still loved her workplace and respected most of her colleagues.