The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  Redners?! Are you

  out of your mind?

  On my way.

  Thanks for warning me, she thought, it would have been even better if it had come before I’d made it over here. Redners hadn’t exactly been a first-choice hangout even back when Elin left the island over two years ago, but it had still been a potential second choice. Apparently not anymore.

  The wine was rough and a little sour, but it was all right. It hadn’t cost much. She took two quick gulps and tried to catch her own reflection in the window.

  A man of around thirty came walking along outside. He stopped, leaned his forehead against the window and screened the light with one hand so he could see inside. His eyes moved around, peering into every corner of the place, then he disappeared as quickly as he came.

  Elin was sure that it was someone she knew, but she couldn’t come up with a name or a context. And yet he was so familiar.

  She jumped up from the table and hurried toward the door. The waitress looked up from behind the counter when she heard the sound of the bell on the door. Elin stuck her head out through the doorway and looked down the street that ran straight through town. He was gone, must have disappeared down one of the side streets.

  She walked back to her seat. Caught a whiff of rancid fryer grease from the kitchen. He had seemed so familiar. That long thin face and eyes that were somehow completely … wild.

  She pushed her glass slowly back and forth across the laminated table in front of her. For some reason she came to think of Stefania. The last time she had seen her. She was sitting in the car and had raised her hand to wave, and just before the car began to roll, she had flashed a cautious smile.

  Elin raised her glass and took a big gulp, tried to think of something else. She was going to take out one of the horses. Tomorrow she would go out for a ride. That was something to look forward to, at least.

  Oh, what was she doing here? Dinner with Mom and Dad. Jesus Christ, please let it be bearable, she said to herself in feigned prayer, even though she didn’t believe in anything. At least not in any god. She had rejected that possibility ten years ago. She may not have been one of God’s little angels before, either, but after that day ten years ago she knew that for certain. There was no God. There couldn’t be a God.

  Because God doesn’t like the poor. And God doesn’t like blacks. And he sure as hell doesn’t like you … Screw God! she sang silently in her head.

  Where the hell was he? This was getting to be ridiculous.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME Ricky stepped in through the tinkling door, another fifteen minutes had passed and Elin was on her second glass of cheap red wine. In other words, he hadn’t been on his way at all when he sent off that text message. But she was happy to see him, wasn’t going to chew him out. She got up to give him a hug and accidentally bumped the table spilling some wine out. A bluish-red pool appeared at the foot of the glass.

  There was something odd about him. He held her arms for a moment after the hug and looked at her gravely. She laughed and asked if he was okay. Ricky could be a bit sullen sometimes. He had periods like that.

  He didn’t answer and Elin sat down. Ricky slowly slid into the chair across from her.

  “You want something?” she asked and nodded at the glass.

  He shook his head.

  “Have you seen him?” she asked.

  Ricky looked at her that way again. Gravely, almost solemnly.

  “What is it?”

  “Something’s happened,” he said.

  And when he said it she immediately understood that it certainly had. It knocked the breath out of her. All at once she felt terribly weak and all the sounds around her grew louder while Ricky slid away from her and became the size of an ant, far away at the other end of the table, which must have been at least thirty feet long. Please, could she be spared having to hear anymore, she didn’t want this, please, please. And then she prayed again. How silly she was. A stupid little idiot. There was nobody listening.

  And he sure as hell doesn’t like you … Screw God!

  “Something terrible has happened,” he said. “I don’t know how to tell you.”

  Then the earth split open.

  Tuesday, October 31

  Karolinska University Hospital, Solna

  Fredrik had shut his eyes. Sara was uncertain if this meant that he was sleeping, or if it had something to do with his condition. She was uncertain about almost everything, but deep down she had a hard time believing that he would ever be completely restored. She didn’t want to think that, but it was difficult to come to any other conclusion. The pale skin, the dark rings under his eyes, the blood-red abrasions across his left cheek and temple, and the bloodshot eye, hidden for the moment behind the closed lid, did nothing to contradict her pessimistic prognosis.

  She felt that he seemed worse today. He didn’t talk at all. But the doctors had said that you had to be prepared for bad days. One bad day was okay. It didn’t affect the diagnosis. But several bad days in a row wasn’t good. But the doctors were optimistic. They really were. Or was that just an act they put on until all hope was gone? The white coats’ fear of “failure”? It must be tough to see death as a defeat when you’re in a line of work where every customer was ultimately doomed to die. It was a fight against time that sooner or later they always lost.

  When Sara and her colleagues were given a new case to work on, there was seldom any hope left. Death had already been there and they could do nothing to help the deceased or anyone else. Their work was governed by a completely different set of laws. The Law. They did what had to be done and she often wondered if there was any point to it all, but she knew that it made little difference what she felt about the individual cases, or whether the apprehension of a criminal actually changed anything. It had never been about that. What was important was that they did what had to be done, always, because that’s what had been agreed. Otherwise everything would come crashing down. Like a sand castle in the waves of a beach.

  Sara looked at the transparent tube that wound its way down from the IV stand, and without warning a powerful fear dug its claws into her. She wanted to get up and rush out of the room, wanted to run out of the hospital to try and capture something, to start living, because she had become lulled into a prim conviction that such a thing was possible. Only she had no idea what it was she was chasing. Start living … How? What did that even mean? As if there was a life out there waiting for you, a life that you could just climb into like a hot tub full of essential oils.

  “Damn it,” she whispered, and got up and walked the short distance to the window. She leaned her head against the glass and looked out over the trees of Haga Park that were swaying in the wind, before she turned back toward Fredrik.

  Fredrik’s eyes opened very slowly. The movement was so slow that it almost didn’t seem human. And then his gaze, that made no attempt to focus on her, or even look in her direction, but stared in the direction they had been in when the eyelids slid back, straight up at the ceiling.

  She didn’t know what to say any longer. It felt so foreign to her to stand there in front of a partner whom she no longer knew. It made her feel strange.

  She breathed deeply.

  “I better be going. Ninni will probably be here soon.”

  She took her bag.

  “I’ll come back.”

  Just as she said that, she felt that she couldn’t handle it anymore, but that she would come back anyway. She took her bag.

  Now he looked at her.

  16.

  Elin didn’t remember anything more until they were sitting in the car. The engine was on, but they were still sitting in the parking lot outside the library.

  She stared out through the windscreen and the first idiotic thought that went through her head was that you weren’t allowed to park there. Not if you were at Redners drinking wine. Only if you were going to the library or some other municipal institution. Not if you had just found out that your m
other was dead.

  “Aren’t you going to start driving?” she asked.

  “Just calm down,” said Ricky and sounded like he really was trying to calm her down. As if she had been carrying on or had berated him somehow.

  Had she? Had she said things she didn’t remember, words that were just as wiped clean from her memory as the steps out from the restaurant, across the street, and into the car?

  She reached up and lowered the sun visor, the backside of which she knew had a mirror. She leaned forward, stretched her neck. Her face was flushed and her cheeks streaked with mascara. She must have been crying.

  “What are you doing?” asked Ricky and ran his hands down the steering wheel.

  She didn’t answer, heard Ricky’s breathing.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She giggled in a way that sounded strange even to herself.

  “Of course I’m not okay,” she said.

  Her voice failed her and her throat choked up into a painful little knot and she didn’t know for sure if it was the grief or the pain that made her cry again.

  “Can we please get the fuck out of here!” she shouted shrilly and kicked and stamped at the floor and around her.

  “Okay okay, we’re going,” said Ricky and this time he sounded like he was afraid of her and that made her cry even more.

  She wanted him to comfort her, be her big brother and not let his voice waver, but tell her instead that everything was going to be all right, that everything would work out.

  Instead he slowly backed up the car so he could swing out of the parking lot. They were both younger siblings after all.

  “This is so fucked up,” she said looking down at the floor when they turned at the bank.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Normal people don’t get murdered, do they? Huh? Stuff like that doesn’t happen.”

  The sun was hitting her in the eyes, but she couldn’t be bothered to reach for the sun visor again. She squinted at the sun. She had traveled home reluctantly to see her father, mainly so as not to disappoint her mother. An obligatory dinner and hopefully a few nice hours with Ricky, that was what she had expected. Two wasted days of her life, but nothing she couldn’t live with. And all of a sudden she was in hell.

  17.

  Eva Karlén saw them at once when she examined the window above the flower bed. Two strands of hair that had gotten caught between the outdoor thermometer mounting and the window frame. They must have been plucked from the head of the person who had been standing there in the flower bed looking in.

  She removed the strands of hair with a pair of tweezers—two long, black strands of hair—and put them carefully in an evidence bag. She was just writing a note on the outside of the bag when she heard someone approaching and turned around.

  “How’s it going with the shoe prints?”

  Fredrik Broman. Couldn’t he just stay away? Didn’t he understand that it was better that way? She certainly tried to keep her distance as much as possible. He must have noticed that.

  It bothered her, having him that close to her. She lost her concentration. Something was disturbed. It wasn’t that she was still in love with him, not at all. She wasn’t even sure if she had ever even been. Rather than love, it had been a wonderful intoxication that she had needed right there and then. But now it was just a memory. And yet. Her pulse quickened, and, when she had it bad, images could start flipping through her head: naked bodies, tender words. Isolated highlights that were easily cherished, but best forgotten.

  Perhaps she wanted to become intoxicated again? Just for one day.

  “These shoe prints weren’t left by the same person as over there in that flower bed,” she said and pointed over at the trampled red dahlias. “These are a size forty-two and those over there are forty-sevens.”

  “Arvid Traneus trudged right through the flower bed?”

  “Presumably,” said Eva.

  “But someone else was standing over here snooping then?” he asked.

  “Yes, and left behind two long, black strands of hair. Because I guess we can assume, given the shoe size, that it’s a he,” said Eva, “even if we can’t rule out a large woman.”

  Fredrik nodded, stood there silently thinking.

  Okay, you’ve got the forensic details. Now go! thought Eva Karlén.

  * * *

  WHEN ELIN STEPPED out of the car she didn’t quite get a proper grip on the bag with the box wine. It tumbled out of the car and landed in the grass. She reached down for it, but fumbled and dropped it again and, without really understanding why, began stamping furiously on the pathetic little Bag-in-Box that she had schlepped with her all the way from Stockholm.

  “Fuck,” she gasped and jammed her heel into the box several times without anything happening. “Goddamn,” she whimpered and wrenched the box out of the bag and pressed the spigot and spun around slowly as the wine gushed out onto the grass.

  “What the hell are you doing?” asked Ricky and reached out to her with both arms, but she twisted free from his grasp and continued spreading the dark-red liquid across the ground.

  “Stop it Elin, stop it,” he said.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you, are you some kind of wino or what?” she cawed in a voice that was broken and didn’t sound like her at all.

  Ricky took two long steps forward and caught hold of her, forced her arms down to her sides. He put his arms around her, finally he put his arms around her.

  The Bag-in-Box fell to the ground with a dull thud, just a third of the wine left inside.

  “She’s dead. Dead!”

  She screamed out, and then her whole body started to shake as she broke down sobbing and went completely limp in his arms. Ricky had to hold her up to keep her from falling.

  “It’s him. It’s gotta be him,” she wailed through her bawling.

  Ricky shook his head.

  “Try to stand up now,” he said. “Try. It’ll be all right. Somehow things are going to turn out all right.”

  “But he’s the one who did it. You’ve gotta admit it had to have been him.”

  The words bubbled through her sobs and gasps for air.

  “Elin,” whispered Ricky.

  “It’s gotta be him. It’s gotta be Father. Father killed her. How could it be anyone else?”

  “No, no, no. Stop it now, Elin. That’s not true. Come on, try to stand up.”

  “It was him.”

  “No, Elin.”

  But that was the only thing she could think about. He had done it. That fucking son-of-a-bitch bastard had killed her beloved mother. Her beloved mother whom she’d turned her back on and left behind on Gotland.

  “Come on. Stand up!” said Ricky, more firmly this time.

  Her body was still shaking with sobs, but she was really trying.

  “Let’s go now.”

  He helped her step by step to the door. The Bag-in-Box and her black Prada bag would have to lie there for now in the wine-soaked grass.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A low, comforting rumble coming from the shiny, dark green tile stove. Elin sat curled up on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket, with an untouched cup of tea in front of her on the table. Outside the window a cold blue October twilight fell.

  Ricky entered from the kitchen and sank down next to her without saying anything. She was surprised that he could be so thoughtful and caring. It didn’t feel out of place exactly, but it was a side of him that she hadn’t seen very often.

  He actually didn’t have to do all that—the fire, the blanket, the tea—but it felt good anyway. Something to hold onto. She could sit there forever, cocooned in her blanket, silently listening to the hiss and crackle of the fire while her thoughts went spinning around in her head. She didn’t want to move, didn’t want to speak, just wanted to sit there huddled up, sleep, wave, watch the light change.

  “The police want to speak to you later. At some point. They left a phone number.”

  She closed her
eyes.

  If this had been one of her usual trips home, they first would have swung past the farm, she would have dropped off her things in her old room, maybe had coffee with Mother, then they would have gone over to Ricky’s place for a drink or a glass of wine or two, and DWI-ed the short way back when it was time for dinner. If it wasn’t too late she would have gone out and met up with an old friend. But not Ricky. He wasn’t much of a party guy anymore. He’d become a homebody.

  Now none of that would happen. Maybe she wouldn’t even set foot on the farm.

  “Do you know where she is? Is she still at the house or have they…?” she asked.

  He turned his head toward her and she could tell from his expression that he had been wondering the same thing. Mother. Where was she now?

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She reached out for the cup of tea, but didn’t have the energy to rise up far enough from her curled-up position to reach it. Ricky had to lean forward and give it to her. She took a few gulps because her mouth was dry, not because she wanted tea.

  “It’s strange to think of her.”

  “Yes,” he mumbled.

  “Lying somewhere.”

  She wanted to talk about this, but she was forced to do so with long pauses between sentences.

  “On the floor at home inside one of those chalk outlines.”

  “I don’t think they…”

  “Or in a refrigerator in Visby. Or maybe she’s on her way somewhere right now. Riding in an ambulance…”

  “Elin.”

  Soon he would tell her to stop it again, but she wouldn’t have any more outbursts, not right now anyway.

  “Can they move her around as they please without consulting us? Don’t they need to have some kind of permission?”

  As if wanting to give her an immediate answer to her question, the cordless phone quivered with an indistinct ringtone.

  18.

  Wow, it’s Saint Nicholas himself, thought Sara when she caught sight of the slouched figure with the long, white beard. Or Saint Nicotine rather, she corrected herself as the light hit the yellowed patch beneath his mouth.