Blomquist had been silent throughout these exchanges. Now he spoke. “It was certainly busy at the time of the incident. I arrived ten minutes afterwards, and there were big crowds.”
“Remember I was here too,” retorted Oscar. “If Edvin had been hanging around, I would have seen him. He wasn’t. And anyway, there’s a reason why he wasn’t here. A good reason.”
They waited for him to explain. And when he did, he did so with a certain air of triumph. “Because he was in Canada. Some cousin was getting married in Winnipeg, and both Mona and Edvin had been invited. Mona didn’t want to go, but Edvin and his wife did. They left at the beginning of last week and don’t return until next Tuesday. Malte told me about it. He wouldn’t have minded going, but Mona said she couldn’t stand Edvin’s company for a whole wedding. She’s the one who decides what they do, generally.”
* * *
—
Accompanied by Blomquist, they were taken by Oscar to the scene of the incident. This was behind the stall, in a small canvas enclosure, a sort of lean-to tent that seemed to serve as an office. There was a desk, a folding chair of the kind used by campers, and a pile of cardboard boxes.
“I came in here when I heard Malte shout,” said Oscar. “I was dealing with a customer when I heard him yell. I thought he was just calling me to tell me something, but I soon realised that something was wrong. Malte was standing over there, bent over, holding his knee. He was in considerable pain.”
“And was there anybody else in here with him?” asked Ulf.
Oscar shook his head. “Not a soul. And Malte said he didn’t see anyone.”
Ulf frowned. “Could somebody have been in and then left in a hurry?”
Oscar looked perplexed. “I just don’t see how anybody could have done that.”
Ulf asked if there was any way in and out, other than the gap in the canvas through which they had walked. There was not, said Oscar, apart from a small split in the canvas at the back. “A small child could get through that,” he said, pointing to the split. “But not an adult.”
Ulf bent down to examine the split. Parting the canvas, he saw that behind it there was an alleyway of sorts stretching down the back of the stalls. It would have been possible for somebody to walk along that, he thought, although there were many obstructions: a petrol can, an abandoned spare wheel, a few wooden crates upended and rotting.
He turned back to face Oscar. “Which way was Malte looking when you came in?” he asked.
“Towards me,” said Oscar.
“Away from the split in the canvas?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Ulf bent down again to examine the canvas where it split. “There is blood on the canvas here,” he said quietly. “Look.”
Blomquist peered over his shoulder; Anna bent down and looked from the side.
“This is where it happened,” said Ulf. “Somebody reached in from outside—with a knife—and plunged it into the first thing that came to hand. That was the back of your brother’s knee.”
“So that’s why he never saw him,” muttered Oscar.
“I assume so,” said Ulf. “Anna, what do you think?”
“It’s a credible hypothesis,” said Anna. “But it’s a hypothesis that answers no questions. Any hypothesis that uses the word somebody takes us no nearer a solution.”
Ulf disagreed. “It answers the how question, though. It leaves open the why question, and the who question, but to have answered one of three questions is better, surely, than to have answered none at all.”
“Marginally,” said Anna.
She left to buy her broccoli and eggs while Ulf and Blomquist, who seemed to have attached himself to their investigation, searched the narrow space behind the tent for any piece of evidence that might shed light on the case. They found nothing, of course, but the detritus of urban existence: the cellophane wrappings of instant food; an abandoned, exhausted ballpoint pen; a crumpled shopping list, dropped by some passer-by, a memo-to-self that listed purchases: potatoes, vitamin pills, kitchen towels, French chalk; a ticket for a rock concert that had taken place months earlier—a Danish group that everybody had heard of, even Ulf, who did not like rock music.
“Nothing significant,” said Blomquist, at the end of their search, and added, “People are such litterbugs, aren’t they?”
“They are,” agreed Ulf. He pushed at a collapsed cardboard box, left by some trader to disintegrate in the rain. A beetle, disturbed in its sodden home, scurried off in search of shelter.
Chapter Three
THE SINGING TREE
There had not been much to do at the office when Ulf and Anna returned from the market. In their absence, Carl had been hard at work: a routine report, one that they were all due to have contributed to, had been completed, Carl having sacrificed his lunch hour to get it finished. All the report required now was signatures, after which Ulf had at his disposal what he called thinking time, an opportunity to let the mind mull over the details of the investigation so far. Something missed? Something suggested by the circumstances that had yet to dawn on him? The obvious, Ulf once observed, is rarely the obvious until the passage of time has proved it so. This was the wisdom of hindsight, which claims that anyone could have foreseen what eventually happened, and was not something that Ulf had ever supported. “We are usually in the dark,” he once said to Anna. “All of us—you, me, Carl—three people in the dark, fumbling around, trying to find our way out of the woods.”
“And yet we have a reasonable rate of success,” she countered. “Which shows that light can sometimes penetrate this darkness.”
“I think that may just be coincidence,” Ulf said. “Sometimes we stumble over the truth. We think we find it, but it finds us.”
Anna asked, “Does that matter? What counts is the result, not the route by which one reaches the result. It’s often all a matter of luck.”
Ulf pondered this. The role of luck in human affairs had always intrigued him. So much of what we did was influenced by factors that were beyond our control—the vagaries of others, sequences of events that we initiated in ignorance of where they would lead, chance meetings that led to the making of a decision that would change our life. Ulf had met his wife, Letta, that way: he had bumped into an old friend, who had invited him to a party. He met the old friend because he returned to a shop to retrieve a purchase he had left on the counter. Had he not forgotten to pick up the item, he would not have gone back into the shop and would not have met the friend and received the invitation. And then he would not have gone to the party where he met his wife. Their marriage had been a contented, uneventful one, and then she had met a hypnotist, and his world had come tumbling down. Had he not forgotten that item, he would not have known the happiness he knew, nor the sadness. It would all have been different.
But this was no time to think about that. Dr. Svensson had once counselled him to think of the things you’re doing rather than the things you did. It was useful advice—he knew that—even if the therapist liked to claim he was not dispensing advice, but helping him to work out what was the best thing to do. That was the trouble with Dr. Svensson, thought Ulf: he often denied that he was there—an odd thing to do, especially when you charged so much for being present.
So Ulf sat at his desk during this thinking time, and thought about the strange assault on Malte Gustafsson. He felt that there was a missing factor that he should be seeing, but he was uncertain whether that factor was to do with the victim or with the modus. He had yet to meet Malte, but he felt that he had a reasonable idea of who he was. A man’s description of a brother should normally be treated with caution—we never recover from the jealousies, and loves, of childhood, and this may influence the way we see people. Ulf knew of feuds that had started in the nursery and ended in the retirement home. And yet he thought that Oscar’s insistence on Malte’s good nature and populari
ty was probably justified; it certainly felt that way to Ulf.
He was in no doubt about what Oscar had said about Malte’s motorcycling colleagues. In Ulf’s experience, any assault on a biker was almost certainly the act of another biker, and could usually be pinned on a member of a rival gang. Identifying as a biker was an act of machismo, and machismo always provoked animosity. But it was different when bikers reached a certain age: the plumage may say one thing, but the spirit says another. Middle-aged bikers might want to travel at two hundred kilometres an hour, but they usually settled for one hundred. They might have pictures of skulls on the backs of their leather jackets, but in their case these were really pictures of their last X-ray rather than threats. It was probably the case that at least some middle-aged bikers would have started to have prostate problems and as a result liked short trips. And no biker—of whatever age—would ever consider picking a fight with a motorcycle mechanic, even one who could not tolerate soap and had to be careful about exposure to grease.
No, there was no point in pursuing anything in that direction. And nor, it seemed, was there anything to explore on the family front. Malte’s wife, Mona, might be alienated from her brother, and that might seem a good line of inquiry, but the brother had been in Winnipeg at the time of the attack and so that removed him from suspicion. Unless, of course, he had arranged for somebody else to do the stabbing. That was a thought: if one wanted a cast-iron alibi, go to a wedding in Winnipeg, but get somebody to do the deed on your behalf.
Ulf realised he had perhaps been too quick to exclude Edvin from suspicion. Farmers—particularly dairy farmers—might be phlegmatic, but when it came to an argument over land—and milking parlours, presumably—they could become intensely passionate. Rural feuds about who used which field or whose cows had broken out and eaten whose turnips were famous for their intensity. Wasn’t Cavalleria Rusticana all about rural passions and their dramatic consequences? You did not have to be Italian to experience such things, although no Swedish composer could have written Cav and been taken seriously.
But no, it just did not seem right, and Ulf had learned to trust his instincts. No dairy farmer would get somebody to go off and stab his brother-in-law in the back of the knee. It just would not happen.
And that left him with no surmise and nothing to think about, let alone work upon. So Ulf looked at his watch and decided it was time to go home and take Martin, his dog, for his evening walk before giving him his dinner. He could still think about the case while he did this: he might have reached a dead end when it came to the who question, but there was still the why question. Why would anybody stab Malte in the back of the knee? Had that really been sheer chance, as he initially thought, or was there a reason why the assault had been carried out at a low level? At a low level...Ulf decided that in that particular feature lay the key to the whole matter. There was something critical about it that he had yet to figure out. He was now sure of this, and it boosted his confidence about finding a solution. Now he knew where to look: not up there, but down there, down at knee level.
* * *
—
Martin gave him an ecstatic welcome—as he always did. Ulf had read that dogs believed when their owners left them behind in the house they would never see them again. Dog memory, however long it might be when it involved smells, and the remembrance of smells, was not all that strong on events, and a dog might well forget that his owner usually returned after going out. So the poor dog would go through the agony of abandonment—seemingly permanent—every single day, sometimes more than once a day. And when the owner returned, the dog’s joy would be immense, as great, in its way, as the joy of Penelope on the return of Odysseus. Or, for that matter, of the hero’s dog when his master turned up once again in Ithaca, although poor Argos, lying on his dungheap, was too old to do much more than raise his ears and wag his tail, much as he would have liked to turn somersaults, bark with delight, and confer slobbering canine kisses.
It was not easy, keeping a dog in a flat, especially an active one like Martin, who had poodle and Labrador blood in him—both being sociable breeds fond of exercise and human company. It would have been impossible, in fact, were it not for Ulf’s neighbour, Mrs. Högfors, a retired schoolteacher, who was only too happy to take Martin out for walks along the street several times a day and look after him while Ulf was working. Martin loved Mrs. Högfors, and she adored him in return, allowing him to sleep on her sofa, feeding him a constant diet of fattening treats, and refusing to countenance any talk of faults on his part. So when Martin ate a set of stereo headphones belonging to Ulf, and gnawed a hole in Mrs. Högfors’s own hall carpet, these peccadillos, as she called them, were put down to his desire to be helpful.
“And we have to remember,” she said, “Martin suffers from a handicap. We have to make allowances.”
The handicap to which Mrs. Högfors referred was deafness. Martin was hearing-impaired, and had been so since puppyhood. Ulf had first discovered this when taking Martin, as a young dog, for a walk in the park near his flat. Two troublesome youths, who had been setting off firecrackers, tossed one so that it landed immediately behind Martin. The resulting explosion had no effect on Martin, who sauntered on unperturbed. Ulf had been surprised by this, given the sensitivity of most dogs to fireworks, and had arranged for Martin to be examined by the local vet. Ulf’s suspicions were confirmed: Martin was unable to hear anything, even with the temporary assistance of a special canine hearing aid that the vet inserted in his ear.
“There’s not much we can do,” said the vet. “You’re going to have to watch him on the roads. He won’t hear cars, you know.”
That was a danger, of course, but Ulf found it possible to avoid the more serious consequences of Martin’s deafness by remembering that for a dog, smell is more than capable of compensating for lack of hearing. So, rather than call Martin for his dinner—as most dog owners would do—he would open a can of dog food and then blow across the open top, wafting the smell off to Martin’s attentive nose. Similarly, when it was time for Martin to be taken for a walk, Ulf would wave his leash about in the air, allowing Martin to catch a whiff of the leather and to come bounding up for the outing.
These techniques had worked well enough, but then a chance remark by the vet had led Ulf to adopt a whole new approach to Martin’s handicap. “It’s a pity,” said the vet, “that nobody’s ever thought of teaching dogs to lip-read.”
Ulf had quizzed the vet. “Nobody’s done that?”
The vet shook his head. “Not as far as I know. But I can’t see why they shouldn’t. Dogs can read signals—look at sheepdogs; they understand hand movements for left and right. Dogs are no fools, you know.” He paused. “Well, some are. Some dogs are truly stupid, Ulf. But Martin certainly isn’t; his poodle genes prevent that. I’ve never met a stupid poodle in all my twenty years of practice. Not one. Stupid spaniels—plenty of those; stupid terriers—now and then; but stupid poodles—never. They just don’t exist.”
Ulf had said nothing, but the vet’s comment, a casual, throwaway observation, started him thinking. Why shouldn’t dogs lip-read? Dogs understood language—to a limited extent. Dogs knew single words—walkies, biscuits, bad, sit, and so on—although their grasp of grammar was solipsistic. All verbs, in a dog’s mind, are governed by a pronoun, and that pronoun refers to themselves. So the verb sit must always be read as me sit. Adjectives and nouns, too, are similarly qualified: bad is me bad, and biscuits is me biscuits. And if they understood words, even imperfectly, and even in this remarkably self-centred way, then surely they could understand the equivalent sign—a gesture or lip position that accompanied the word?
Ulf decided to put the matter to the test. Starting with a simple command—one that most dogs were capable of understanding and acting upon, sit—he stood in front of Martin, said sit in such a way that the position of his lips was exaggerated, and then pressed firmly on Martin’s hindquar
ters, forcing them down.
Martin looked up at his owner in mute incomprehension. Many dogs spend a large part of their lives in such a state of unknowing: they try to understand the human world, to which they feel—and are, by ancient compact—attached, but can simply make no sense of it. Such were Martin’s feelings now: Why did Ulf, whom he worshipped, whom he regarded as God incarnate, want him to lower his hindquarters when there was clearly no need to do so? But that was a question too advanced in its implications for a dog, and Martin did not even try to understand it, and so he sat. And in the course of time he established a connection between the position of his owner’s lips and the need to sit, thus becoming the first dog in Swedish history to lip-read a command successfully.
Ulf took Martin outside briefly when he arrived home that evening, and then fed him. After that, with Martin asleep in his basket under the kitchen table, Ulf sat down and opened the latest copy of a magazine to which he subscribed, the reading of which he eked out, as one might prolong the pleasure of a box of chocolates. This magazine arrived in the post every third Thursday of the month, and, through the exercise of willpower, could be made to last ten days, with roughly eight pages—or one article—being read each day. Then the magazine would be placed, along with earlier issues, on a living-room shelf specially set aside for it, filed in correct sequence and therefore readily available for further reference.
The magazine was Nordic Art, a popular art history publication specialising in Scandinavian art but occasionally including articles on the art of other northern countries—Canada, Russia, Iceland, and Scotland. Ulf read these other articles, of course, but not with the interest he reserved for those dealing with Scandinavian art of the twentieth century. That was what interested him, and that was his principal intellectual passion, along with philosophy, which he read less frequently, and with rather less engagement.
The Department of Sensitive Crimes Page 3