The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  Emrik Jansson’s house smelled strongly of saturated smoke. Heavy, gloomy, pungent. Possibly you could pick up a slight whiff of fried food through the miasma of smoke. Everything was a yellowish brown: the walls, the ceiling, the woodwork, the hall ceiling lamp’s pilled fabric shade that had been hanging there since at least the sixties.

  “I was watching TV,” said Emrik Jansson, “they’re showing reruns of Hem till byn. You know it?”

  Sara nodded. She knew the series, but she didn’t follow it.

  “I’ve heard about … well, all that up at the Traneus spread,” said Emrik Jansson and pointed with his thumb over his shoulder toward the farm.

  “Then you know why I’m here,” said Sara.

  Emrik Jansson’s house was more a nest than a home. The jaundiced walls had something of a beeswax quality about them she thought, and decided to question him out in the hall. He’d have to come up with something really sensational for her to even consider sitting down anywhere in there. If it looked like a beehive already out there in the entrance, what must it look like in the living room, say, where he probably sat and did his smoking?

  “Who is it?” asked the hunched chain-smoker in front of her. “Is it Kristina and Anders?”

  Sara tried to hide her surprise. It wasn’t all that surprising, in and of itself, for the news to have spread so quickly through the area. It would have been obvious to anyone who saw the steady stream of police cars and other vehicles heading back and forth to the farm that something serious had happened, but how he could be so informed about the details? After all, they had only just managed to establish the identity of the murdered man themselves.

  “Has somebody suggested that?” she asked.

  “No, not exactly. I just sort of assumed it,” he said.

  His voice was calm and pleasant and his gaze alert. He may have been living in a smoke-infused nest, but he was no insect. He wasn’t even much of a freak. Maybe just too old to care.

  “And why do you think that? Which Anders do you mean, by the way?” she hurried to say before Emrik Jansson had a chance to answer.

  “Anders Traneus. The cousin.”

  He ran his fingers along the outer edge of his beard and she saw that the tips of his fingers were just as yellow as everything else in the house.

  “And why?” she repeated.

  He bowed his head forward and released a rattly cough into his clenched right hand. It never seemed to end and the coughs seemed to echo inside the old man. He’s going to keel over any minute, she thought.

  It ended abruptly and he continued as if nothing had happened, probably all too used to the convulsions to reflect upon the possibility that someone else might find them disturbing, if not downright disgusting. Sara was ready to sign up to the latter group.

  “Well, I’ve seen him, haven’t I. Many times. I suppose they’ve tried to be discreet about it, but … well, you know, you see what you see.”

  Emrik Jansson was the closest neighbor. That didn’t mean that he lived close by, it was a long way from the Traneus’s farm to the other houses in the area, but apparently it was close enough.

  “I’ve also got plenty of time to observe my surroundings. I don’t snoop around, definitely not, but I’ve got a lot of spare time and still a pretty good head,” he said and put a finger to his right temple.

  “So Anders Traneus has been a regular visitor to Kristina?” asked Sara.

  “Yeah, I’d say so.”

  Emrik Jansson wobbled suddenly and put a hand up to the wall for support.

  “Gosh, are you all right?” she asked.

  “It’s just the way it is,” said Emrik and kept his hand against the drab brown wallpaper.

  “We can go sit down,” she said.

  “I’m all right,” he said and waved with his free hand.

  “If you say so … Can you explain a little more in detail why you think that it was Anders Traneus who was killed up there?”

  “Well, Arvid came home the other day, didn’t he. Somehow I thought that maybe he caught them and, well…”

  “Killed them?”

  He paused before answering, as if he’d suddenly realized that his quick assumption amounted to a very serious accusation.

  “Well, I can’t possibly know anything about that, of course, but yes, I guess that’s what I thought.”

  He smiled meekly and did a little gesture with his hand.

  “A crime of passion.”

  “Is he the type who’d be able to kill over something like that, Arvid Traneus?”

  “Sure he’s the type. I think I could go so far as to say that.”

  “How would you describe him?”

  “Adventurous, always in a hurry to get things done, hot tempered. I had him in school,” said Emrik.

  “That hot temper of his … did he used to get into fights? Do you remember?”

  “Fights? Well, not fights exactly. I mean, you know what boys are like, some of them anyway. He threw the occasional punch I guess, but he wasn’t the only one.”

  “But there must have been more to it than that to make you think that he killed his cousin out of jealously.”

  Emrik Jansson started to finger the edge of his beard again, a deeply ingrained habit.

  “I’m starting to feel a little silly now,” he said and coughed a dry, social cough this time, “but one reason of course is that there’s a dead man lying up in that house together with Kristina, at least that’s what I heard, and the fact that I’ve seen Anders coming and going. That I made the assumption that they’d had some kind of relationship. But then there are also the rumors about Arvid being abusive. Well, toward Kristina that is.”

  “Is that something that you’ve witnessed yourself at any point?” asked Sara.

  “No, I can’t say that I have. It could, of course, just be idle gossip.”

  “Well, if you haven’t seen or heard anything concrete then…” Sara agreed, but thought at the same time how gossip could sometimes be a criminal investigator’s best friend. If you were lucky.

  She rounded off with a question about whether Emrik Jansson had seen Arvid Traneus since he got home. He had. He had seen him in the car together with Kristina on Monday evening, presumably on their way home from the airport. But not since.

  * * *

  EMRIK JANSSON FELT unsettled when he shut the door behind the young woman from the Visby Police Department. His observations and assumptions about what was going on in the houses around him, conclusions that had seemed logical and sensible, appeared to fall apart when they came under the scrutiny of something as serious as justice. Were they, when it came down to it, nothing more than an old man’s excessive preoccupation with gossip and meaningless details?

  He shuffled back to the TV and sat down slowly in his sunken armchair with threadbare armrests. The show he had been watching was almost over. Normally he would have been peeved at having missed half an episode, but all of a sudden he saw it as just a hollow attempt to make time pass.

  Arvid had been good at school, and yet wild somehow, not one of the ones who sat at the front and raised his hand to each question. He used to throw himself into any task with uncommon drive and energy, as if he wanted to get it over and done with quickly so he could move on. He devoured school assignments as if someone had promised him a big delicious piece of cake if he’d just eat up that disgusting plate of food first.

  The other kids looked up to him, but were a little afraid of him at the same time. And now he was out there somewhere. Maybe a murderer.

  19.

  “I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch father of yours. And do you know why? Well, I’ll tell you, because he’s not a human being. He’s an animal. A sick fucking animal who should be culled.”

  The words spurted out in angry gasps, so loudly that the voice in the receiver was distorted to a grotesque croaking. Ricky felt how the cordless phone became sweaty in his hand. He looked at Elin, but she didn’t meet his gaze. She had sunk back in the
couch and was staring vacantly at the ceiling.

  “Hello?” Was all he managed to say.

  “He won’t get away. If the police don’t get him, then I will. He’s gotta die!”

  The last bit came out as an almost unintelligible howl that caused Ricky to move the receiver two inches away from his ear.

  Strange waves of heat billowed up through his body. He felt weak, paralyzed, and terribly afraid. A feeling he had never experienced before. It was an unpleasant combination that quickly caused his fear to surge into panic.

  “And if you try to protect him, then I’ll fucking kill you, too! You hear me? You don’t stand a chance.”

  A click, and then the receiver was silent.

  Ricky’s heart was pounding so hard that his chest hurt, his tongue was gummed up in his mouth. He felt like he wasn’t getting enough air even though he was actually panting as if he had just run a marathon.

  “Ricky?”

  Elin had sat up in the couch and looked at him, worry flickering in her eyes. Ricky gestured with the receiver. What could he say? How did you go about describing what just happened? What did just happen?

  “He said he was going to kill me,” he gasped between his heavy breaths.

  “Who did? What do you mean?”

  Ricky took a staggering step toward the couch and wobbled. His vision flickered, small colorful circles danced and spun around in a background that moved further and further away. His face had gone gray.

  “Ricky!” shouted Elin, threw off the checkered blanket and leaped from the couch.

  Quickly reaching her brother, she grabbed hold of his arm with both hands.

  “Come and sit down. Sit down and listen to me.”

  She got him to the couch. His knees gave way when she gave him a gentle push and he fell backward with a heavy thud.

  “Now you listen to me Ricky, listen to me.”

  * * *

  FIVE MINUTES LATER she had managed to get him to calm down. His breathing was almost back to normal again.

  “Worse comes to worst, we’ll have to get you a paper bag to breathe into, but I think you’re going to be all right,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Take it easy, you’re in good hands,” she said and patted his leg, “I know all about panic attacks.”

  Her grimace made it abundantly clear that she hadn’t come by this knowledge from studying psychology.

  “But forget about that now,” she said, “I want you to tell me who it was that called.”

  She sat at the very edge of the couch, turned toward him. Her eyes were dark and firm, and her cheeks flushed. A moment ago she had been lying under a blanket staring at the ceiling, but the grief and shock had at least temporarily been swept away by something much more powerful.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  He recounted as best he could the threats that had been yelled at him over the phone.

  She looked at him for a long moment without saying anything, her brow furrowed like a washboard.

  “And that was it?”

  Ricky nodded.

  “He just started out like that, just straight off?”

  “Yes. ‘I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch father of yours.’”

  “You didn’t recognize the voice?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “Jesus Christ, how scary.”

  Elin had to try hard not to show how shaken she was, but she knew that it was impossible to stop a panic attack in someone else, if you weren’t calm yourself. Or at least appeared to be.

  “Must be somebody who thinks Father is involved in…”

  Maybe she ought to talk about something completely different, but she couldn’t. She felt that she had to get to the bottom of this right away, if she wasn’t going to freak out herself.

  “Maybe we ought to call the police,” she said.

  “They gave me a card. Two actually. I was supposed to give one of them to you. Where did I put them now?”

  “A card?”

  “From the police who were here.”

  20.

  The high beams punched a hole in the dense blackness and lit up the reflectors at the side of the road.

  “Do you think we can get anything useful out of that Rune character? He made it sound like this Arvid Traneus was some kind of devil,” said Gustav.

  “Maybe he’s senile,” said Fredrik who was driving.

  “Probably just in shock.”

  “Or senile and in shock.”

  Lena, Ninni, and the children had eaten dinner without them hours ago. Ninni had called and said that they weren’t going to wait.

  “I’m hungry,” said Gustav.

  As soon as Gustav said that, Fredrik felt his stomach growl, too. They had wolfed down a quick lunch after questioning Inger Traneus, but that was two hours ago now.

  They had tried to sum it all up on the way back. There was a lot pointing toward Arvid Traneus being the killer they were looking for. A witness had intimated that he beat his wife. He had been abroad for an extended period, his wife had some hanky-panky going on with his cousin, Arvid caught them at it and couldn’t control his anger, especially not toward the cousin, whom he butchered beyond recognition. Then he ran off. Maybe he was even back in Japan by now. A country of almost 130 million inhabitants, 20 million in Tokyo alone, a city that that Arvid Traneus knew well after spending all those years there. Furthermore, he had virtually inexhaustible financial resources.

  If he had made it that far, it wouldn’t be easy to find him, but of course they had put out a nationwide APB, and alerted Interpol.

  “But if the cousin was having an affair with Kristina Traneus, wouldn’t he have stayed away from there once Arvid was back?” asked Fredrik. “What was he doing in the house?”

  Gustav moved around in his seat and adjusted his shirt beneath his jacket.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “but maybe something happened. Maybe Arvid Traneus started going after his wife, beat her or threatened her, and she called Anders for help.”

  “And he jumps into his car, drives over there, and then things don’t turn out too well?”

  “Yes. Or else Arvid invited his cousin over under some pretext, with the intention of confronting him.”

  “Maybe. But that doesn’t really fit with how the body looked. I mean, would he really be so calculating at first and then totally lose control and make mincemeat out of him?”

  “No, that’s a good point.”

  “Beside which, it seems like they really didn’t have any contact to speak of. Anders would have seen through him.”

  Fredrik turned off Road 142 and drove familiarly the last winding miles through the darkness back to his house. They bounced gently onto the grass in front of the old farm. There was an inviting glow in the windows and a flickering from the TV on the upper floor. They climbed out and slammed the doors shut behind them.

  They felt both hungrier and more tired now that they were so close to their destination.

  But then there were the footprints outside the window and the black strands of hair, thought Fredrik as he walked past the kitchen window with an outdoor glass thermometer that Ninni had recently put up. Neither the shoe prints, nor the hair matched Arvid Traneus. Of course they might not have anything to do with the murder. It could have been anyone, maybe one of the many visitors from the mainland searching for a summer sublet by shamelessly slipping ridiculous offers through people’s letter boxes.

  Fredrik felt the door. It was locked. It was always the same. They usually never locked the door until they went to bed, but with the start of every new murder investigation, Ninni would bolt the door until the killer was caught. Not so strange considering what happened to her their first summer on the island. It was more surprising that she hadn’t had an alarm installed and put bars on the windows.

  “Hello!” he shouted once he’d unlocked the door and stepped into the hall.

  “We’re in here,” Ninni called out from the ki
tchen.

  * * *

  GÖRAN EIDE OPENED a bottle of Ramlösa mineral water and poured it into a Duralex glass he had taken from the cupboard. He felt the soda bubbles spray against his chin as he raised the glass to his mouth. He downed it in a few gulps and refilled it with what was left in the bottle.

  Sonja was already asleep. She had lain there with a book in her hand, glasses on her nose, and a sixty-watt lightbulb shining right onto her face when he had come home five minutes ago.

  He had switched out the light and removed the book and the glasses.

  Quaffing the last of the mineral water but still feeling thirsty, he took out another bottle from the fridge and grabbed two round cheese crackers from the top cupboard that he started munching on.

  He looked out through the window, out into Ekeby’s autumn darkness. He was having a hard time shaking off the image of the two murder victims. He had seen many unpleasant things in his years as a police officer. He had learned how to handle the feelings of discomfort and disgust a long time ago. What still badly affected him were the traces of the murderer’s rage, madness, and sometimes suffering. That this life could deform people to such an extent that they became capable of doing this kind of thing to their fellow human beings. Committing murder was one thing, often it was an accident, or at least wasn’t altogether intentional, but sometimes it was more than that. In some cases the murderers were driven by seething hatred and a desire to cause injury and inflict as much pain and suffering as possible.

  He sat down at the kitchen table, set the glass and bottle down. The dark wood surface was wiped spotlessly clean. Not a single bread crumb or coffee stain. He had never thought that it would happen, but he could miss the crumbs sometimes. It was as if his life with Sonja had been wiped just as spotlessly clean. Two weeks ago their youngest child had turned thirty. She was grown up now. Of course he still thought of her mostly as a teenager, but he had to admit that she wasn’t and hadn’t been for eleven years. A strange feeling. His son had taken a break from studying to become a teacher. Göran understood him. It’s difficult to find the energy when you’re studying for a career you don’t really want.

  He ran his hand over the table. In time your eyesight fades and your hands begin to shake, he thought, then the crumbs will come back. But life won’t.