The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  “I’ll go in there,” said Fredrik softly.

  When he entered the living room, Sofia Traneus was squatting on the floor, trying to comfort her clinging, sniveling daughter. The girl’s cheeks were flushed from crying.

  Sofia looked up at him with anxious, wide-open eyes.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said, “for the moment anyway … But Rune was very upset when he came to the house. Do you think you can manage this? Is there anyone who could come here and help you? Or else … maybe we should take him with us. To a doctor, I mean.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said after thinking for a moment. “I’ll call my husband. He can be here in five minutes.”

  “And Rune?”

  “It’s better if he stays here.”

  She fell silent.

  “The photograph,” Fredrik reminded her after a moment. “If it’s not too much trouble?” he said glancing at the child. “We can always get a copy of his passport.”

  “Oh, no, I know where I’ve got one.”

  She managed to free herself from Emma and sat her down on the couch together with the baby. The girl stayed there while Sofia quickly walked over and unlocked the bottom cabinet of the bookcase.

  “Here,” said Sofia and returned with an open photo album in dark-red imitation leather.

  It was a group photo with five people neatly lined up in front of the camera. Fredrik immediately recognized Sofia and Rune. In his eyes the woman next to him was little more than a girl in the picture, eighteen or nineteen maybe.

  “It’s five years old, but it’s still a good likeness. Then there’s my brother and my mother. It was taken at my father’s birthday. Two months later they got divorced.”

  She worked one of her clear-coated nails in underneath the edge of the photograph.

  “The only question is whether I can get it off.”

  Fredrik was about to suggest that they just borrow the whole album, so she didn’t have to ruin it, when the photo ripped free from the black construction paper.

  She handed over the picture. He took it and tried to avoid touching the glossy surface, more out of respect for Sofia than concern for the photograph.

  “Does your father have any distinguishing marks that you know of? By that I mean scars, tattoos, that kind of thing?”

  She let out a laugh.

  “Tattoos?”

  “For example,” said Fredrik.

  She shook her head and looked at him with a slightly dubious expression, as if he had asked her something inappropriate.

  “It’s better if you ask my mother about that.”

  Tuesday, October 31

  Gotland

  Ninni was in the car, on her way from Havdhem to Hablingbo in the dirty gray twilight. The drizzle had made the road wet. The tires spattered loudly and the wipers swept across the windshield at the longest interval setting.

  She was driving fast along the winding road, too fast she felt and lightened the pressure on the gas pedal. She didn’t want anything to happen to her, too. She had to look after herself. Be strong. But where would she get the strength from?

  She had left Simon and Joakim at Anneli’s on Karlbergsvägen and taken the ferry back to Gotland to take care of a few things at work. Maybe also just to get a chance to breathe a little. Not to have to be strong for a moment. Maybe so she could have a breakdown. She wasn’t sure. There was so much to think about, to take responsibility for. How long could they stay in Stockholm? What was best for the kids? How long could they be away from school? How long would it take before Fredrik was well enough to be moved to Visby? Would he even be able to receive the care that he needed there? Should she and the kids be moving up there instead?

  She had climbed into the car at the Högby school parking lot. She had planned on driving home, but continued south and now she was on her way to Hablingbo. On her way? No, she wasn’t on her way anywhere. She was just driving. She was on the road between Havdhem and Hablingbo, but that was all you could say with any certainty.

  She had pinned her hair up behind her neck so that it wouldn’t be so obvious how matted and dirty it was. It had been several days since she last put on any makeup, but there were faint shadows of smeared mascara on her eyelids. She wished that she had a cigarette. She had quit smoking eighteen years ago, but now she wished that she had a full pack of wonderful cigarettes to light up and inhale to put a fog between herself and reality.

  The car rolled the last few feet up to the stop sign next to the electrical goods store in Hablingbo. If it had still been a supermarket she could have stopped and bought cigarettes. But it seemed as if everything closed down on this godforsaken island. Everyone shut up shop, moved away.

  Ninni turned left out onto the coast road without really knowing why, guided by a vague yet persistent feeling.

  And how about that whole thing with Mother?! Ninni had asked her for help. How fucking stupid was that? She should have known better and spared herself the disappointment. Mother was playing a key role at some conference or other, and then she would be flying off to Helsinki for two days, and then her best friend was coming to visit her all the way from Umeå—and that had already been booked a long time ago—for about a week or so, at least over the weekend.

  Ninni shuddered inside and nearly burst into tears, but she pulled herself together, didn’t let it get beyond a short sniveling.

  Mother had made no attempt to hide her disappointment when Ninni told her that she was moving to Gotland. She would have so far to travel to see her and the kids. And Ninni had felt guilty, that she was robbing her mother of something that meant a lot to her. It was only after they had moved that she realized that her mother almost never had time for them. On those rare occasions when she did have time, it was always on her terms, when a little opening had appeared in her chockablock schedule.

  The wiper motor squeaked, the tires spattered. Where was she going? She didn’t know.

  She had a goal, she felt it, but she couldn’t see it in front of her and after nearly an hour of driving around aimlessly, she pulled up in front of her own house. Pitch dark and deserted.

  She unlocked the door, wriggled out of her coat, tossed it onto a chair in the kitchen, and sat down on another one. She stared vacantly at the dirty dishes in the sink.

  The big question was whether the bleeding between his skull and brain had cut off the supply of oxygen before they had managed to reduce the pressure. The CAT scan looked good, but it didn’t show everything the little woman doctor with the peppercorn eyes had explained. The more she had explained, the more Ninni sensed that the brain was unknown territory even for doctors. Wait and see, was the order of the day. There was nothing to suggest that Fredrik couldn’t make a complete recovery, but at the same time they couldn’t promise anything. In any case, she had to prepare herself for a long convalescence, at least six months, maybe even a year or more.

  Maybe she just wanted to step out of her own life.

  Easier said than done.

  She sat in still silence as the minutes ticked by. Alone there in that empty house it was almost as if she was removed from her life. At least she could pretend that she was for a brief moment.

  Then she suddenly understood where she had been on her way to. That vague persistent feeling in the pit of her stomach had been urging her to seek out a place of her own. Now she saw it: the low rocks beyond the pier where her parents had their summerhouse in the Stockholm archipelago. Bedrock that she had sat on every summer from when she was seven years old right up until they moved to Gotland. Or maybe the rocky outcrops at Hellas in Nacka, that she had swum from and set off on skating excursions with Jocke when he was little. She wanted to sit on solid, familiar bedrock and look out across the water, not on some brittle goddamn limestone that fell apart as soon as you looked at it.

  She got up with a jolt and grabbed the first things she could get her hands on, a pepper mill of brushed steel that she had been given as a fortieth birthday present by
distant relatives, and threw it with all her might at the kitchen cupboards.

  “Goddamn you!” she screamed.

  The pepper mill smashed a nasty hole in one of the cupboard doors and the little plastic container that kept the peppercorns in such a viewing-friendly manner, broke into pieces that went skittering across the floor with a rustling sound. Not unlike what you hear when a gust of wind shakes the water from a tree top after it’s rained.

  “Goddamn you!” she shouted again and threw a hot dish holder and the pile of newspapers immediately after it. “Don’t you dare die on me now! And don’t you dare become some fucking vegetable that I have to spoon-feed for the rest of my life! You hear me?”

  She remained standing there with her hands clenched, fixing for a fight, as if she were ready to have it out with life itself.

  It just couldn’t end up that way. She had been dragged to this goddamn island half against her will. She had just started to feel a little bit at home—despite the drawbacks—thanks very much to her job and colleagues at the school. As a teacher you quickly worked your way into a community, made contacts, and gained stature. But it was also because of her job that they had ended up so far out in the countryside, over thirty miles from town.

  What the hell was she doing here?

  Was it her destiny to rot away in a limestone house in the middle of nowhere with a husband who couldn’t wipe his own ass? It just couldn’t end up that way.

  11.

  The October sun had risen up higher into the sky. The day had become mild and clear.

  “Wonderful day,” said Gustav as they sat in the car. “First, two people cut to shreds, then a grandpa with a screw loose.”

  “Let’s see how much fun we have at the ex-wife’s house,” said Fredrik and steered the car toward Södercentrum.

  He was hungry, had eaten too little breakfast as usual.

  “We’ll have enough time to grab a quick lunch after Inger Traneus, right?” he asked and Gustav nodded.

  “So what do you think?” Gustav then asked. “You think Rune Traneus is right?”

  “Unless the guy’s completely nuts, then I guess he must have a good reason for reacting the way he did. But we didn’t get anything useful out of him.

  “His son’s car was parked outside, there’s no escaping that. But it could just as well be Arvid Traneus lying hacked to pieces inside the house.”

  “More likely even,” said Gustav.

  “In which case Anders Traneus’s car points in a different direction altogether.”

  * * *

  INGER TRANEUS LOOKED like her daughter. Tall and slim with the same long hair, more gray than blonde, in a tight ponytail. A beautiful woman just over fifty.

  Once again, Fredrik explained the reason for their visit, the sensitive version, but was spared the trouble of having to try and make it incomprehensible to a three-year-old.

  They were sitting crammed into an office at the Department of Childcare and Education at Söderport. Fredrik had seen that office innumerable times before, both at public agencies as well as in the private sector: about seventy square feet, a desk in birch veneer, a glass wall hung with thin cotton curtains looking out on the corridor. It could have been his own office at the police station.

  “Rune Traneus seems convinced that Anders is the dead man in the house. Do you have any idea why he might think that?”

  Inger Traneus lowered her head and looked down at her lap. Fredrik thought he glimpsed a vague smile. She shook her head, then looked up at them with a gaze that was somewhere else, tired, guarded.

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “We already have,” said Fredrik, “but now we’re asking what you think?”

  His natural impulse was to be more open and forthright, show more empathy, but if things were as Gustav had suggested, that the answers were to be found within the family, it was better not to reveal more than was necessary.

  “I was together with Anders for twenty-two years. We were married and lived under the same roof for twenty of those. But I never got to know him especially well. I thought I knew him, but then I discovered that I didn’t know him at all.”

  There was that smile again, only it wasn’t so much a smile as a strained grimace.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” said Fredrik honestly.

  “Well, what is there to understand?” said Inger Traneus inwardly and stretched her neck. “I don’t understand myself.”

  Fredrik decided to wait her out. The hard drive under the table started whirring. The sound was drowned out a moment later by a loud laugh out in the corridor, Inger’s colleagues on their way out to lunch.

  “If it is Anders lying … If it is him, then it’s only logical that Kristina became the death of him. And he of her. Romantic, huh?” she said and moved her gaze back and forth between Fredrik and Gustav.

  That didn’t make things any clearer for Fredrik, and he was just about to ask what there was between Kristina Traneus and Anders when Inger’s head fell forward again, and she started weeping.

  She held her thumb and forefinger above her eyebrows as if she wanted to press back her tears. The long ponytail slid slowly down the front of her shoulder, strands of hair getting caught in her woolen sweater along the way.

  “We don’t know for certain,” said Fredrik. “It’s very possible that we’ve upset you completely unnecessarily.”

  They could just as well do this later, just concentrate on what was most important: finding out who it was lying sliced to pieces on the living room floor at Kristina and Arvid Traneus’s house.

  “We’re heading back south. If you’d like we can give you a ride home?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s not Anders I’m crying about. It’s all those wasted years. How you can waste your life so single-mindedly on someone who doesn’t want you?”

  They fell silent. What can you say? Fredrik wished that he could say something. Instead it was Gustav who broke through the gloom.

  “It’s better at least than single-mindedly staying together with someone you don’t want.”

  Fredrik glanced at his colleague out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes he could surprise you. Inger Traneus also looked at Gustav and gave a little smile, a real one this time. Then she got up, turned her back to them, and wiped her tears.

  “God how pathetic,” she mumbled. “Me, that is,” she added over her shoulder, in Gustav’s direction.

  “Our main reason for coming here was actually to ask you whether Anders has any distinguishing marks or scars, that could help us to identify him. If it is him.”

  She needed to think about it for a moment.

  “He’s got a brownish-red birthmark just above his right knee, about the size of a fifty-öre piece.”

  12.

  Elin Traneus dropped a Treo Comp effervescent analgesic tablet into a glass of water on the bedside table. She didn’t have a headache, yet, but could feel how it was lurking there ready to pounce. For the moment her entire world was wrapped up in a gray haze, but just the sound of the tablets dissolving made her feel perkier.

  She looked out across the room in the ridiculously small apartment that she had been subletting since New Year’s. The room where she would sleep, study, socialize, and look at TV was about fifty square feet. Beyond that there was a corridor of a kitchen, an intestine-like hallway, and a miniscule bathroom. The apartment was on the third floor of a building on Atterbomsvägen in Fredhäll. And Fredhäll was on the island of Kungsholmen, right in the center of Stockholm, although she had soon learned that it was the part of Kungsholmen that anyone living in the center of the capital didn’t recognize as being part of Kungsholmen.

  “Oh, I see, in Fredhäll,” they had corrected her with polite smiles when she had explained where exactly on Kungsholmen she was living. What inevitably followed was the obligatory, “It’s a really neat area, Atterbomsvägen.” That she had also learned. The inner suburbs were always “really neat.” Totally unhip
, but really neat. The outer suburbs weren’t even really neat; “pretty nice” possibly, and when you got as far out as suburbs like Alby and Tensta they had nothing to say at all.

  Her building was actually wonderfully situated on top of a high cliff with a view out over Riddarfjärden, even if the only thing Elin ever saw from her apartment was the light yellow facade of the building next door.

  She was happy with her apartment, loved it in fact, even though she had grown up with closets that were as big. She couldn’t care less what the inner-city crowd thought. It was her life, not theirs.

  The Treo tablet had finished fizzing. Elin downed the contents of the glass and reached for her cell phone. She dialed her mother’s number, but waited in vain for her to pick up.

  “Damn it,” she said out loud and threw off the blanket that she’d wrapped herself up in.

  She had been trying to get hold of her mother since yesterday afternoon with no luck. It was as if her mother could sense that she was going to wriggle out of it and refused to answer. Elin checked the time on her cell phone. There was no way she was going to make it over there in time by ferry. She considered calling Ricky and letting him deal with it, but then decided to head out to Bromma airport and try to fly standby. That usually worked.

  She slid out of her pajamas and stood naked in front of the hall mirror. Her hair was dyed black, but was actually a dull mousy blonde underneath. Her brother and sister had gotten real blond hair, while she’d ended up with her drab color. Otherwise, she looked pretty okay, she thought, even if her breasts were maybe a bit on the small side, and her stomach wasn’t quite flat. And then she was short, of course. She could feel very unremarkable next to five-eight girls in four-inch fashion heels. But there were a lot of guys who liked small girls. It made them feel more manly.