The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  Gustav stopped talking when he caught sight of the bodies.

  “Someone’s seeing to it,” said Ove.

  Gustav still said nothing. The first look at the victims had also caused Fredrik to go silent. If the victims’ bodies were pale and mute, the room itself was positively bellowing, screaming out all the violence and hate that must have exploded in the killer.

  “Do we know who they are?” said Gustav finally.

  “The woman is Kristina Traneus, registered as living at this address, as for the man…?”

  Fredrik left his sentence hanging. The mutilated body spoke for itself.

  “The cleaning woman recognized Kristina Traneus, but couldn’t say who the man was,” he continued. “She only got a quick glimpse of him and doesn’t seem to be in the mood to come in for a closer look.”

  “No, well, you can hardly blame her,” said Gustav. “But there is a Mr. Traneus?”

  “Yes, Arvid Traneus. They have two children, according to the cleaner, but neither of them lives at home.”

  “So it’s a fair guess that that’s Arvid lying there?” asked Gustav and wrinkled his nose.

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Ove and ran his hand over his black crew cut, which he had apparently not yet gotten used to.

  Gustav took a step to the side.

  “There are three different routes you can take to get here; two from the north and one from the south, the way we came.”

  Ove looked up at him.

  “An ideal spot for a murder.”

  Gustav nodded and looked down at the bodies again. They stood there silently for a long moment. A fly came buzzing around and landed on the dead woman’s arm. Ove shooed it away.

  “Rage … almost derangement and a fair bit of strength,” said Gustav.

  “Depends a bit on the tool, too,” said Fredrik.

  “The tool?”

  “Well, it’s not very usual for people to run around with swords, so unless the killer is a maniac with a cutlass, it ought to be some kind of a tool.”

  Suddenly there was something that disturbed their concentration: a voice that was speaking far too loudly and footsteps that were moving far too quickly to fit in with the ordinary activities of a crime scene investigation. All three of them reacted, by turning toward the hall and looking at the front door as someone tugged at the handle.

  * * *

  “YOU LET GO of me! Let go!”

  It took two young, strapping police officers to keep the man, who looked like he was a bit over seventy, away from the door. He braced his feet against the ground and pushed his way forward with his shabby-looking suede jacket pulled inside out down over his shoulders.

  “You’ve got to let me inside.”

  His wild eyes were fixed on the farmhouse, seeing nothing but the door that Ove had just shut behind him. His face was white with small red splotches down around his throat, his breathing was labored and gasping.

  Ove, Gustav, and Fredrik hurried over to their uniformed colleagues who were struggling with the man. Fredrik tried to catch the man’s eyes, stood right in his way, but the man stared right through him.

  “Why do you want to go in here?” asked Fredrik, but the hoary old man didn’t respond.

  “You’d better answer the question,” Gustav continued.

  “We’ve tried,” panted one of the officers who was trying to keep the man still.

  The white-haired man started to nod over to his side, toward the two cars parked in the driveway.

  “That’s his car. His car’s standing right there, don’t you understand? If he’s in there I’m going to kill the bastard, I’m gonna kill him!”

  He had a powerful voice and he was shouting at the top of it, but it also sounded like his voice could seize up at any moment in despair.

  Ove made a tired expression.

  “Put him in a car and let him sit there till he’s calmed down.”

  The officers gave a strained nod and struggled to drag the obstreperous, wriggling man toward the patrol car. Using gentle force, they managed to stow him in the backseat. Gustav followed after him and opened the front door on the passenger side. He leaned in through the opening.

  “Who is it you think is in there?” he asked him softly, almost whispering.

  “My son. That’s his car. That’s his car standing there.”

  The man’s voice suddenly sounded pleading, as if he desperately wanted the five policemen gathered around him to contradict him, to convince him that he was mistaken, put him in a car and drive him away.

  Fredrik and Ove stood silently off to the side, didn’t want to disturb right when Gustav seemed to be making some kind of contact.

  “And your son, who is he?” asked Gustav.

  It took a while for the man to answer, as if he hadn’t quite understood that he was expected to provide a name. His voice was dampened by the upholstery. Gustav only caught “Traneus” and leaned in further.

  “Arvid Traneus?” he asked.

  It was like flipping a switch. The man threw himself at the door and tried to get out. When he noticed that the door was locked he tried to scramble out between the front seats, but was stopped by the uniformed officer in the car.

  “Arvid! If that’s my son in there, if that’s Anders lying dead in there, then it’s him. Then Arvid’s the one who did it. If that’s my son, then he’s the one. He’s capable of anything…”

  Gustav looked at Fredrik and Ove, but there was nothing in their expressions to suggest that they had understood anything more of what the man had said than he had himself.

  “So you’re not Arvid Traneus’s father?” he asked.

  “Me?” the man bellowed and spat on the floor.

  Gustav recoiled.

  “This is getting us nowhere,” he muttered.

  “Arvid!” the man hissed. “Arvid! He’s your murderer.”

  Gustav slammed the door shut and turned his back on the patrol car, relieved to not have to sit in the car with that raving old man.

  “How the hell did he find out about this?” asked Fredrik.

  “Don’t ever underestimate the Gotland grapevine,” said Ove.

  Fredrik regarded the man who one could just make out between the reflections in the side windows of the patrol car.

  “Yeah, sure, but I wonder why it is that once the rumor reached him he immediately jumped into his car and drove over here to find out if it was his son that had been murdered?”

  Sunday, October 29

  Karolinska University Hospital, Solna

  Sara Oskarsson stood with her back to Fredrik and saw the door to the hospital ward swing closed, gently and silently. Ever since she was a little girl, she had held the firm belief that hospitals had a particular smell about them, and that it wasn’t an especially pleasant smell. Now she suddenly realized that they didn’t smell at all. They were spotlessly clean, dust free, and odorless.

  She became aware of Fredrik’s breathing and turned around. He looked at her, and as she took a few steps toward the foot of the bed, caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the sink, of her black hair that she’d let grow down over her shoulders. Fredrik followed her with his eyes. That must be a good sign. But then again, the question was of course whether he recognized her, or was just registering movement?

  It was hard for the doctors to provide a meaningful prognosis. They made it sound as if he could just as well make a complete recovery as remain in his present state indefinitely. His brain had suffered a shock and had been under pressure, and it was as yet impossible to say if he had sustained any permanent damage. But he was headed in the right direction.

  Fredrik’s head was shaved on the left side, the still unhealed scar from the operation covered by a compress and a white bandage that had been wrapped around his head like the headband of a sushi chef. Then on top of that, a kind of semitransparent sock reminiscent of some cool rap artist. Except for the fact that Fredrik really didn’t look especially cool. But it helped to think like
that, made it easier to look at him.

  Fredrik was one of her closest colleagues, originally from Stockholm just like her. When she first arrived in Visby she thought that it was nice to have someone she could talk to without having to be afraid of stepping on any local toes, which was all too easy to do, she had noticed. Not so much among her colleagues at work, but in other situations. As an outsider from the mainlander and a figure of authority, she was sometimes met with double hostility.

  She wasn’t so sure anymore. About Gotland. Once the enthusiasm of the first year had faded, things became harder. She liked her job, there was no problem there. In the beginning she had been worried that her work assignments might prove to be too trivial, but in hindsight she could have done with a bit less excitement. Two summers ago she had stood in another hospital room in front of another colleague who lay there with a broken arm and his body all covered in bruises after a bomb had gone off on one of the ferries.

  Her life outside the police station may not have seemed too bad to an outside observer. She had gotten to know some people, had one relationship under her belt, and had recently started seeing a man on a more regular basis.

  But still. It was difficult to really be accepted. There was a fundamental difference between city and countryside, or small town, if you were talking about Visby. In a big city, most everyone was just as rootless and stressed—quick to dismiss you to be sure, but also curious and open to trying out something new. In a big city, life could turn on a dime, here it took at least five years for anything to turn. In that sense it was probably easier for someone from Stockholm to feel at home in Amsterdam, Berlin, or Copenhagen than in Visby. Here there were so many old bonds between people. It was as if everything was written in stone and to make so much as a single scratch on your own was almost impossible. Younger people were a little easier to deal with, but she was thirty-four now and couldn’t run around like some overage groupie among twenty-seven-year-olds forever.

  She couldn’t claim that life in the big city was better than in a small town, but life in Stockholm was different from life in Visby, and it was the kind of different that she was used to. Maybe it was too late to learn new tricks.

  She was woken from her thoughts by Fredrik suddenly mumbling off a long string of words.

  “What?” said Sara without thinking.

  The words were disjointed, didn’t make any sense. Was it even an attempt to say anything coherent?

  She got no answer to her “What?”

  Just a moment ago it had felt so natural to sit down beside the bed and speak to him, but now that it was just the two of them in the room she felt unsure. The situation had become so intimate all of a sudden.

  For a moment she had almost regretted offering to sit alone with Fredrik for a while so Ninni could go down and get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria or a breath of fresh air, or whatever she wanted to do. After Fredrik’s, well, what would you even call it … fling … with Eva Karlén, it wouldn’t be strange if Ninni felt a little uncomfortable with his female colleagues. But apparently Ninni could tell the difference between apples and oranges, because she had just nodded and smiled gratefully.

  Sara had of course been forced to lie to her, but it was the same white lie that she had told everyone else, except for Göran Eide, and wasn’t something that weighed on her conscience.

  10.

  Gustav drove while Fredrik sat in the backseat next to the previously raving man whom they had by now managed to identify as Rune Traneus. They were on their way over to see one of Rune’s grandchildren, Sofia Traneus-Helin. She lived in town, Visby that is, in an apartment in Gråbo.

  Rune Traneus sat silently next to Fredrik in the backseat hanging his head and staring at his hands that lay cupped in each other in his lap. He was as glum and inert now as he had been out of control just a short time ago.

  Fredrik felt a sense of panic rising within him as he thought about what he would say to Sofia Traneus. Almost worse than having to notify someone of the death of a loved one, was having to inform someone that their father might be dead, but that they didn’t know for sure.

  Of course he couldn’t do that. He would have to proceed on the basis of Rune’s reaction. They had found a dead man that her grandfather for some reason suspected was his son, Sofia’s father. No, that was no good, either. And then there was the car, of course. They had run a check on the plates and it was true, it belonged to Anders Traneus.

  “What was it that made you go out there?” Fredrik tried asking him.

  Rune Traneus didn’t respond.

  “I mean, how could you be so sure that you would find your son there?”

  Silence. Had he even heard the question? He seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

  They reached Visby, turned off toward Gråbo between the ICA supermarket and the Sibylla hamburger grill and stopped outside one of the pastel-checkered fifties row houses on Allégatan. Across the street stood a long string of redbrick houses, all identical.

  Fredrik had heard Visby residents say that “once you end up in Gråbo, you never get out” and then complain about how far away it was from the center. It was true that it was a neighborhood you never went to unless you had a reason to go there, but it wasn’t more than a few extra minutes’ walk into town compared to Öster, for example, and as far as Fredrik could tell it looked pretty nice.

  But presumably it wasn’t the charming houses from the fifties, but rather the ones from the seventies in the center of Gråbo that had given rise to the neighborhood’s unfavorable reputation, thought Fredrik when he rang Traneus-Helin’s doorbell.

  The woman who opened the door looked to be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years of age, and could have been a model for the essence of Swedishness, or at least the perception of it. Tall, slender—yet sturdy—flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, steadfast lips that stood guard in front of two even rows of white teeth. She had a two-month-old baby on her arm, naked except for a diaper. A girl of about three peeked out from a doorway a ways inside the apartment.

  “Gramps,” the little girl cried out and came running toward them, but slowed down and faltered about halfway, frightened either by the strange men or by the fact that her great-grandfather didn’t seem to take any notice of her.

  Rune Traneus stared vacantly at his filial granddaughter.

  “Grandpa, what’s wrong?” asked Sofia Traneus and then turned to Fredrik questioningly, when she noticed that she wasn’t getting an answer.

  Fredrik and Gustav already had their badges out and introduced themselves.

  “I can’t help thinking that something terrible must have happened, seeing you show up like this. Something I don’t want to hear,” said Sofia.

  She hoisted her baby a little higher and pulled it closer to her.

  “There has been a very serious incident, but whether it has any connection to you, we don’t yet know. But with a little help we should be able to sort it out,” said Fredrik. “Could we come in for a moment?”

  “Sure, come in,” said Sofia.

  Fredrik saw how her expression changed from an initial look of confusion to one of apprehension of impending calamity. It turned in on itself and became completely exposed all at the same time. He had seen that transformation many times before.

  They all went into the sunny kitchen, the girl with a firm grip at the knee of her mother’s jeans. After having sat Rune Traneus down on one of the chairs at the kitchen table, Fredrik gave Sofia a quick rundown of events, in a manner that was both as sensitive as possible while at the same time being as unintelligible as possible for the three-year-old.

  “Your grandfather seems to think that one of the victims could be your father. We haven’t quite been able to work out why that is, nor have we found anything specific to suggest that to be the case.”

  Rune Traneus shook his head slowly. Apparently he had absorbed something of what they had said. Sofia looked at him with glistening eyes and sank down on the chair opposite him.


  “Grandpa?” she whispered.

  Fredrik hadn’t said anything about Anders Traneus’s car having been parked outside the house. There was absolutely no reason to bring that up just then. Sofia Traneus was worried enough as it was.

  “Do you have any idea why your grandfather might think that?”

  Sofia looked up at Fredrik and it was clear that she didn’t have the slightest idea.

  The girl crawled up into her lap without it occurring to Sofia to help her, and soon she was sitting there burdened with both children. The three-year-old leaned her head against her mother’s chest, hugged her mother’s arm and peered timidly at her great-grandfather.

  “Mommy? Mommy?”

  “Yes, sweetie, it’s all right. Mommy just has to speak to these gentlemen here a little bit.”

  Fredrik looked at the three generations sitting around the table and gave up any ambitions he had of questioning the woman properly. This wasn’t the right moment.

  “Do you have a photograph of your father? A fairly recent one. That would be very helpful,” he said and wondered at the same time if they would have much use of a photograph given the condition of the face.

  Sofia nodded and stood up. The girl slid down from her lap and grabbed hold of her right leg with both arms.

  “I should have something, I guess.”

  She shuffled out of the room with her daughter clinging to her leg like a monkey.

  “Please, Emma,” she said helplessly and shuffled on.

  Fredrik and Gustav looked at each other, and just then came a loud crash from the kitchen table as Rune Traneus slammed his fists down full force onto the table.

  “That bastard. He’s a bastard. Him and that goddamn father of his. Murderers.”

  “Mommy!” Emma cried out in fright from the next room and then started sobbing loudly.

  Rune Traneus had stood up and was glaring at Fredrik and Gustav, while he shouted out his words, only they didn’t quite come out as real shouts. It was as if they had run into some kind of resistance, smothered by a deep and powerful anguish.

  Gustav had already moved next to Rune in order to, if necessary, restrain an outbreak like the one they had witnessed earlier outside the house. But it was already over. Rune Traneus stood there rooted to the spot, his gaze confused, his blue lower lip trembling. An old, frail man. Gustav gently took hold of his extended left arm and helped him sit back down again.