The phone immediately rang again. This time it was Hansson at the forensic lab with the information that Thomas Karlsson's fingerprints did not match any of those at the murder scenes. She had been able to determine that all the samples belonged to the same person, but this person was not Thomas Karlsson. This hit both policemen and the entire investigation like a cold shower. With the conversation with Lennart Josefsson fresh in his memory, Sjöberg immediately came to the conclusion that the two men who had been observed outside Ingrid Olsson's house on the evening of the murder must have been Thomas Karlsson and an additional person who was in league with him.
During the following hours, while they waited for Thomas Karlsson's attorney to arrive at the police station, further reports came in from the forensics lab. No fingerprints from the persons questioned from Ingrid Olsson's old preschool class matched those at the four murder scenes.
* * *
Katarina had not yet taken off her coat. She was sitting on her suitcase in the hall, playing the scene over again in her mind. How many times she had done that she did not know, but one thing was certain: This was not what she had imagined. This was not the way it should end, alone again, misunderstood.
After wandering back and forth on the street a while, she finally gathered up her courage, went through the gate, and up to the house to ring the doorbell. Her heart was beating like a piston in her chest, but she was optimistic. All her hope was in her old preschool teacher. Miss Ingrid was fond of children, so she was fond of people. She would understand—console and understand. Naturally everything would have been different if Ingrid had been home when she first sought her out, before everything that had happened the past few weeks. Then, perhaps, Ingrid would have been able to stop her, put her on a better path. She could have given her strength to forgive and go on. But she was not home. Katarina kept the house under watch for days, but Ingrid did not show up. So she had been forced to go to work, without Miss Ingrid’s approval. And for that reason there was also a little seed of doubt inside her when the door opened.
“Yes?”
How beautiful she was. She had cut her long hair and had a youthful short hairdo instead. Miss Ingrid looked inquiringly at her with clear eyes, behind a pair of glasses that suited her finely chiseled face. The wrinkles of age were well placed and gave her a distinguished expression.
“My name is Katarina. Katarina Hallenius. You were my preschool teacher many years ago. I would really like to talk with you.”
Ingrid inspected her without saying anything.
“May I come in a moment?” asked Katarina.
“I don’t know. I’ve been ill and--”
“I can help you. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you, Miss Ingrid.”
The gaze she was met by was a trifle skeptical, but that was not strange after so many years. She must get the chance to show who she was, so she took a step closer to the older woman. Ingrid took a step back and Katarina interpreted this as an invitation and entered the hall. Ingrid backed up a few more steps.
“What's happened to you?” asked Katarina.
“I broke my hip. Old people...”
“You’re not old,” Katarina smiled. “But I can take care of you.”
She carefully closed the door behind her and set her suitcase down on the floor. She then took an old photograph out of a compartment on the outside of the suitcase.
“Look here!” she said happily, and placed herself close by her old teacher. “Here I am. Do you remember me now?”
She felt how Ingrid Olsson’s gaze was still directed toward her instead of the picture and gave her yet another smile.
“Look!”
Ingrid did as she was told.
“No, I must confess that I don’t recognize you. But I just can't--”
“Wait, I’ll help you,” Katarina interrupted and fetched the stool, which she placed behind Ingrid. “Sit down.”
Katarina sat down across from her on her suitcase, and with some hesitation, Ingrid sat down too. She said nothing and still did not return her smile, so Katarina decided to start her story.
She told about Hans and Ann-Kristin and all the other children. She told about terror, mistreatment, and loneliness and what life had been like after the difficult time at the preschool. Not for a moment did she blame her old preschool teacher for all the terrible things she had been subjected to. Yet Ingrid made only one brief comment during Katarina’s hour-long monologue.
“What happened outside the preschool was not my responsibility. In my classroom there was no fighting.”
Katarina tried to get her old teacher to understand that it was not just about hitting and kicking, but about the whole game. She had a hard time holding back the tears, and at one point placed her hand on Ingrid’s, but the teacher resolutely lifted it away with a pained expression.
Gradually, Katarina started to worry about getting Miss Ingrid to take an interest in what she had to say. In a final, desperate attempt to get her to react, Katarina talked about what had driven her to kill Hans Vannerberg, and how after that, she had also looked up Ann-Kristin, Lise-Lott, and Carina Ahonen.
Ingrid sat stiff as a poker on the stool and observed her in silence, without changing her facial expression.
“May I sleep here?” asked Katarina, when the words came to an end. “I’m so terribly tired.”
“No,” said Miss Ingrid. “You may not.”
A long time had now passed since it became silent in the hall. The two women sat quietly, observing each other. The suitcase, whose only contents were a toiletry case, a couple of changes of clothes, and a few diaries, started to be uncomfortable to sit on. Slowly, it occurred to Katarina that there was nothing for her here, either. No warmth, no consolation. Her beloved preschool teacher did not remember her, and obviously had no interest in lightening her burden. Her indifference to Katarina’s life story was apparent. And indifference was a deadly sin.
* * *
Ingrid was lying on the sofa in the living room. Her wrists ached from the tightly pulled cord that rubbed against the bare skin, and the blood was pounding in her bruised fingers. Her feet were also tied together, but the pain in them was not as noticeable. It was very wet below her and she shivered quietly, lying there in the cooling urine.
“I don’t intend to harm you,” Katarina had said. “Just like you, I don’t intend to do anything. I do intend to let you lie here until you rot, in your own filth. You will get no food, no water, and no medicine. I’m not going to torment you, the torment will come from yourself. Your hunger, your thirst, your bad conscience, your needs of one kind or another. I’m not going to provide for your needs. You’re your own responsibility, aren’t you? That’s how you see it, true?”
At first Ingrid was too dazed to take in what the woman was saying, but now hours had passed and she’d had plenty of time to think and listen. How long did it take to starve to death? That probably didn't matter, the hunger would gradually disappear and at last, only a great, unendurable thirst would remain. How long could you live without liquids? A week, two weeks? She still felt no hunger, but her mouth was completely dry, so dry that she had a hard time speaking. But right now it was the pain in her wrists and the unpleasant pounding of the pulse in her fingers that she was most aware of. It felt as if her hands were going to burst and she wished they would simply go numb.
At first she did not understand who the unpleasant woman was and what she wanted, but Katarina talked uninterruptedly for an hour and at last the words sank in. She was one of the children in the murdered Hans Vannerberg’s preschool class thirty-seven years earlier. She maintained having been badly treated by the other children and Ingrid’s own guilt in the whole thing consisted of the fact that she, in her capacity as teacher, took no steps to stop the so-called bullying.
The woman was obviously completely out of her mind, but in the midst of her insanity, Ingrid could not help feeling a bit unjustly treated. She had always done her best at her job, been friendly and
nice to the children, and she felt that the children liked her. She worked hard for many years at the preschool, taught the children to sew and make things, sang with them and played games. Of course the children could be a little annoying at times, and bickered with each other, but when Ingrid was present there were never any fights or other mistreatment of the type that Katarina described.
What happened after the children left the preschool she, of course, had no control over. You have to draw the line somewhere, and in this case, it was simple: the line was at the gate at noon, when the children’s day at the preschool was at an end. “You knew what was going on, you could have talked to the children,” Katarina said. Ingrid had no memory of any mistreatment, but answered in any case, “I was a preschool teacher, not a therapist. Or child psychologist, for that matter.” But this did not go over well. After an unexpected outburst of complete madness, Katarina put her on the couch, hands and feet bound.
She had roared that Ingrid was a human being after all, and as such, you don't just stand by and watch other people—children—destroy one another. Ingrid had not made any objections, but inside she knew that this was the only way to go on living. Even as a little girl, Ingrid had learned not to poke her nose in other people's business. When her father resorted to clenched fists against her mother, she realized that it was best for all concerned if she stayed out of the way. It was a wicked and nasty world they lived in, but if everyone minded their own business, existence would be more tolerable. I am the forge of my own happiness, she thought, and you are yours, Katarina. Of course, she did not say this out loud, but she knew this was the way life worked.
The aching in her hands only increased and it was now beginning to feel unbearable.
“Please, Katarina, can’t you loosen the cord a little,” she begged pitifully. “It hurts so terribly.”
“It hurts to live,” Katarina replied with a smile. “You’re the forge of your own happiness, so make the best of the situation.”
The insane woman had read her thoughts and obviously had no intention of doing anything to relieve her torment. Ingrid felt the stealthy onset of hunger. Her interest in food had ceased long ago. Food simply had no taste any more, but even so, she felt hunger pangs like anyone else and would need to eat a little something so as not to become confused and nauseated. Now she was lying here completely helpless, hungry, thirsty, and in severe pain, and it would only get worse. Katarina said she intended to live in her house until her time was up, until Ingrid’s time in the hourglass had run out.
There was no hope that anyone would come to visit, or even miss her. She was completely alone in the entire world, and she felt the tears streaming as she thought about that. She did not know when she had last cried—it must have been many years ago, perhaps when her sister passed away. Now she was alone, no husband, no children, no parents, or siblings still alive. The few friends she had over the years had grown old or disappeared, for one reason or another. She had left many of them behind, of course, in the move to Stockholm. It was hard to get old, hard to be alone. No one to talk with, no one to do things with, no one to come to her rescue in a situation like this.
* * *
Katarina was in the kitchen inspecting the contents of Ingrid Olsson’s freezer. It mostly contained bread, but also apples and plums parboiled in sugar, and sweetened berries. There were also some bags of homemade meatballs and premade casseroles. In the refrigerator there were large quantities of potatoes, and in the pantry she found rice and jars of preserves. She would not go hungry; there was food enough to last for weeks.
When she thought about how long this might take, she felt restless. On the one hand, she had an incentive to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible, and as painfully as possible, but on the other hand, she knew that the longer it went on, the greater the torment would be for Miss Ingrid. The most important element in this case was prolonging it, magnifying the old woman’s certainty that it would end in death and the uncertainty of how long it would take. That had become the purpose of it all, that it would drag on and on, and that she herself would not do anything forcibly.
“Set an example,” she said to herself.
The choice of words was ridiculous because it was hardly worth setting an example for someone who would soon be dead, but even so that was what she would do. She was forced to hold back and not do anything rash that she would regret later.
She peeled some potatoes and put them in a saucepan, which she set on the stove. Then she rummaged around for an old cast-iron frying pan and put in a dollop of margarine. She watched as the margarine slowly melted in the pan, and as she shook the pan a little, it started sizzling. The bag of meatballs was rock hard, but by using a bread knife she was able to hack a few pieces loose, which she rolled down into the cooking fat. From the living room she thought she heard smothered sobs, which made her happy, even as the general self-pity and monotonous sound irritated her. There was a popping sound in the pan as the ice melted and a drop of boiling-hot margarine splashed up and hit her in the eye.
Before she knew what she was doing, she was out in the living room and found herself straddling the old woman. She struck her with clenched fists again and again on the face, after which she took hold of her gray hair with both hands and forcefully banged her head against the armrest. There was a crack somewhere inside the thin body below her and Ingrid screamed in pain.
“Be quiet now, you old hag!” Katarina screamed.
Ingrid winced and was silent.
“This is taking too long, much too long! I don’t know if I can put up with your ugly mug much longer. So die already! Die, so we’re finished!”
It seemed like the old woman was on the verge of fainting. It was probably the broken hip that was so painful.
“Answer me!” Katarina roared, continuing to shake her. “Answer when I talk to you!”
“You told me to be quiet,” Ingrid whimpered, but her words were barely audible.
“But now I’m telling you to answer. Have you broken your leg again, you bitch?”
Ingrid nodded, and Katarina saw that she was trying to articulate the word "hip bone,” but it disappeared somewhere in the darkness into which she was sinking. Katarina continued shaking her, but gave up at last when she noticed that the old teacher was now beyond all contact.
She got down on the floor and picked up the remote control on the table and turned on the TV. She flipped between channels for a while and found to her delight that the old lady had MTV. She used to watch MTV when she needed company, and now she sat a while in front of Christina Aguilera and her well-built dancers, all of whom moved to the same patterns in time with the music. The fury ran out of her as suddenly as it had come. She turned off the TV and went back into the kitchen where she continued her food preparations.
* * *
When Ingrid opened her eyes again, Katarina was sitting in the armchair, eating.
“Do you feel better now, after you’ve had some sleep?” she asked in a calm, cool voice.
It was hard to believe this was the same person who a few minutes earlier had jumped on her in uncontrolled rage and hit and screamed at her. For the first time she felt the terror really take hold of her. The captivity had happened at a leisurely pace and in a controlled way, and she had been more surprised than afraid. But now it turned out there was also a wild, hysterical person, beyond all reason, behind the cold, calculating facade. A person who presumably didn’t know herself what was waiting around the next corner.
“You said you weren’t going to hurt me,” said Ingrid quietly, trying not to rouse the dormant insanity to life again.
“But I lied,” Katarina answered with an ice-cold smile. “Can’t a person indulge in that occasionally? Life is full of surprises, and I guess that’s a good thing. Imagine how predictable existence would be otherwise, and how meaningless, if you already knew how everything would end. You promised that everyone would get to drive the green car, but that didn’t happen. I never go
t to. I pushed and pushed for a whole year, hoping to get to drive it at least once, but I never got to. You lie when it suits you, so maybe we don’t need to turn my statements inside out.”
“What time is it?” asked Ingrid.
Her tongue was sticking to her palate with every syllable. She really needed something to drink.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have a watch. I don’t care about time. This will take whatever time it takes, and that's how it is with everything else, too.”
“Don’t you have a job?” Ingrid asked.
They could just as well kill time by talking. When they talked she could concentrate on the conversation and then she didn’t feel the pain as strongly.
“No,” Katarina answered. “This is my job—doing crazy things. Before, when I was in the hospital, I was in work therapy, but then they closed that down, so now I more or less do what I want.”
“Where do you live?”
“I live here with you, Miss Ingrid.”
“But before? You must have lived somewhere?”
“I live at home with my mom. If it suits me. In Hallonbergen. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I live in a shelter on Lidingö. I do what I want.”
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