The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  Lennart Svensson liked to work, quite simply. Fredrik was convinced that he would fall down dead the moment he stepped out of the police station’s front entrance with a gold watch in his hand, or whatever it was they gave you these days.

  “He’s no fool, Arvid Traneus,” said Göran Eide, who looked both perkier and more worried. An emotional negative of Lennart Svensson.

  “That’s for sure; have you seen how much the guy’s worth?” said Lennart. “Unless he won it all on the lottery, I’d say he’s pretty sharp. And if he’s got that much in his registered investment portfolio and in ordinary bank accounts, then you can bet he’s got ten times that stashed away on the Cayman Islands or some place like that. He could buy the entire Gotland Police Department if he wanted to.”

  “Good thing we’re not for sale then,” said Göran.

  They held the briefing in the small conference room as always. The entire team was present. Prosecutor Peter Klint was also sitting in, but not the district police commissioner who was attending a course on the mainland.

  Peter Klint had a deep tan, and sun-bleached hair that was in need of a trim. He had just returned a week ago from a sailing vacation in the Mediterranean and seemed more loose and laid back than his colleagues were used to seeing him. It might have had something to do with the fact that Klint, who was just over fifty, had left his wife that spring and, as rumor had it, moved in with a woman sixteen years his junior.

  “So, the two victims have been identified as Kristina Traneus and Anders Traneus, both forty-seven years old,” Göran continued. “Anders Traneus is the cousin of Kristina’s husband Arvid Traneus, in case anyone missed that. Lennart, you’re the expert on this, right?”

  “Yeah, so, like you just heard, Arvid and Anders are cousins, Arvid is three years older.”

  Lennart got up feeling a little stiff and walked up to the whiteboard.

  “It’s all on the computer, but it might help to have it up on the board in front of you while we’re talking about it,” he said and wrote up the names that had already been mentioned. He ended up printing them in green marker since that was the only pen he could find. He grouped the names according to family and ended by underlining the names Kristina Traneus and Anders Traneus.

  “Arvid and Kristina have two children, Oskar Traneus…”

  “I think his first name is actually Rickard,” said Sara.

  “Okay, Rickard,” said Lennart and changed it before he wrote the next name, “and Elin Victoria Traneus. They also had a third child, Stefania Traneus, who died ten years ago, at the age of nineteen.”

  “Do we know how she died?” asked Gustav fingering his blue Bic pen.

  “Not yet,” said Lennart. “So, starting with the cousin; he’s divorced from Inger Traneus with whom he has two grown-up children, Sofia and Karl-Johan. The daughter lives in Visby and the son on the mainland. Rickard Traneus, by the way, lives here on the island, just a few miles from his parents’ house in Levide. Göran and Sara were there yesterday. Elin, however, lives on the mainland, in Stockholm.”

  “But is currently staying with her brother in Levide,” Göran interjected. “She came here to celebrate her father’s return from his job abroad and only learned what happened when she stepped off the bus in Hemse.”

  “Well, I’ve checked with the property registry and apparently the cousins’ grandfather left the farm to Arvid’s father, who then passed it on to Arvid,” said Lennart picking up the thread. “It’s possible that Anders’s part of the family felt passed over, but then we don’t know anything about the original arrangements, and whether Rune Traneus received any kind of financial compensation for relinquishing any rights to the farm.”

  Lennart continued sorting through the family ties for a few minutes. He finished off by drawing a dotted line between Anders and Kristina Traneus and a question mark above it.

  “Take this with you and keep it in the back of your mind when you’re questioning these people,” said Göran and pointed at the board.

  Lennart returned to the table, but didn’t sit down. It was a peculiar little habit he had developed because of his lumbago. Periodically he couldn’t sit down for very long at all unless it was in the right chair.

  “None of the people I’ve mentioned show up in our files,” he said and rested his hands on the back of the chair. “But I called up an old acquaintance at social services. You sort of expect that big landowners and other muckety-mucks might stick in people’s minds more than ordinary people.”

  “So there was a complaint filed?” said Ove.

  “An anonymous complaint was filed eight years ago. Claiming that Arvid Traneus was abusing his wife. Social services made a few cautious inquiries, but didn’t find anything. Then there are the phone calls. There we’ve uncovered a few items of interest,” Lennart continued and picked up a sheet of paper from the table. “Listen to this; last Monday evening at ten-thirty-nine p.m. someone made a call from Kristina and Arvid Traneus’s home phone to Anders Traneus’s home phone. That is the only registered phone call between the two locations in the seventy-four days that we’ve been granted access to so far.”

  “Kristina contacts Anders, then they’re killed,” said Ove.

  “Let me finish,” said Lennart. “Like I said, there’s only one call registered from Arvid and Kristina Traneus’s phone to Anders Traneus, but there are upward of a hundred calls from Anders Traneus’s home phone to an unregistered prepaid cell phone and essentially the same number of incoming calls to him from an anonymous phone number. Put them altogether and we’re talking an average of two phone calls a day.”

  “So, Kristina had a special prepaid SIM card that she used to call her lover,” suggested Fredrik, “a card that she got rid of before her husband returned. Then something happened where she needed to get hold of him, but then she didn’t have the prepaid card anymore.”

  “Or else she got careless,” Sara objected.

  “It may also have been Arvid who called,” said Fredrik. “If Kristina really did have an extra SIM card, then she was being very, if not extremely careful. Strange that she would suddenly start being careless.”

  “She may have destroyed the extra card, but she may also have been distressed, desperate. Maybe there was no time to fiddle around with different SIM cards.”

  Fredrik sat up in his chair and turned toward Sara.

  “Let’s say Arvid comes home from Japan and finds something that makes him suspicious that there’s something going on. He becomes jealous, aggressive, and goes after Kristina. Kristina calls Anders, who heads over to the farm in Levide, but things don’t quite turn out the way he’d intended.”

  “But there’s a problem there,” said Eva.

  “I’m listening.” said Fredrik and turned toward Eva.

  “There’s no way the bodies had been lying there since Monday. I’ll be getting the preliminary autopsy report tomorrow, but in my opinion they were killed sometime on Wednesday.”

  “So the phone call can’t have been what prompted Anders Traneus to go storming over to the house?” said Ove.

  “No, definitely not storming over,” said Eva.

  She could have come out with that earlier, thought Fredrik, but said nothing.

  Wednesday, November 1

  Karolinska University Hospital, Solna

  Sara walked over to the shiny, spotlessly clean sink and filled a plastic cup with water. She had spoken for a long time and her throat was dry. The cup barely held four ounces, so she drank three of them before she felt satisfied.

  “Blue,” said Fredrik behind her.

  Sara turned toward Fredrik in the hospital bed. She didn’t know what to answer.

  “Blue,” he said again.

  He seemed better, especially compared to yesterday’s relapse. No dramatic changes, but definitely better. His power of speech had improved. The doctors described his power of speech in percentage terms. Sara didn’t really understand how they calculated it, but obviously the higher the
percentage the better, and it had gone up. He was speaking. For the most part, what came out of his mouth was unintelligible, but it was better than him not talking at all. “Blue” might well mean blue, but could just as well mean something else. Maybe it was an attempt to say, telephone. Or maybe: What did the medical examiner’s report say?

  Sara tossed the cup into the wastebasket next to the sink and slowly walked back to the window. Fredrik followed her with his eyes about halfway, but then lost track of her.

  She looked out over the redbrick buildings of the hospital grounds. The sun hung low in the sky and beamed in streams of yellow light between the buildings.

  “So anyway, then Göran told me that Rickard Traneus had been threatened late the previous night. It was somehow connected to the murders.”

  23.

  “It was Elin Traneus who called me, but the threat was directed at her brother. The call went to his home phone and he was the one who answered.”

  “Could it have been Rune Traneus? Considering what happened outside the house yesterday it wouldn’t come as any great surprise,” said Fredrik.

  “Did it seem to be an elderly person, did she say anything about that?” asked Gustav.

  Göran Eide waited out the questions patiently and rubbed his eyes before he answered.

  “According to his sister, Rickard understood it to be someone his own age.”

  “Then we’ve got another crank on our hands,” said Lennart.

  “We’ll have to keep an eye on that,” Peter Klint interrupted, “if it seems serious we’ll have to arrange for protection. It’s reasonable to assume that it could be a relative of one of the victims who made the threats, most likely someone related to Anders Traneus.”

  “Right,” said Göran. “We’ll have to pull Rickard Traneus’s phone records and cross our fingers that this crank doesn’t use a prepaid phone card. I guess that’s it,” he said and got up. “Everybody know what they have to do? Fredrik and Gustav take Anders Traneus’s ex and the father, continue with the children if you don’t hear anything else. Sara, you question Rickard Traneus. Check up on this threat. Ove, you check out the people closest to Kristina. If it’s a case of infidelity, then there’s bound to be at least one friend who knows about it. I’ll question Elin Traneus, and then I’ll see what we can glean from Arvid Traneus’s employers in Japan. The company is at least partially Swedish owned, so it shouldn’t be completely impossible to communicate with them.”

  “One more thing,” said Eva when everyone had already started to get up. “I found Kristina Traneus’s diaries. I don’t know if there’s anything useful in them, but they’re down in my office anyway. They’re twelve books in all, with well-filled pages of difficult-to-read handwriting. I don’t have time to sit down and plow through all of it myself, but maybe we can divide them up.”

  No one showed any spontaneous enthusiasm.

  * * *

  THEY HADN’T EXPECTED Inger Traneus to be at work, but that was where they found her. They let her decide if she wanted to be questioned there or at the police station. She chose the police station. They offered to come pick her up, but she said that she could walk. It wasn’t far from Söderport.

  When Fredrik met Inger down in the reception, he thought that she seemed unchanged from the day before. The same tone of voice, the same expressions and demeanor. The death of her ex-husband didn’t seem to have affected her. Not on the surface.

  The interview rooms on the ground floor were all occupied, so he took her to the video room up at CID.

  “Whenever we have to interview children we usually do it in here,” Gustav said explaining the teddy bears lined up on a little wall shelf.

  Inger Traneus flashed a brief smile and then sat down on the chair Fredrik had pulled out for her. She adjusted her tight ponytail and drew two fingers along her forehead just below the hairline. Fredrik and Gustav sat down, too.

  “What was your relationship with Anders like after the divorce?” Fredrik began.

  “It was good,” she said lingeringly and then added hastily, “lately it’s been good. It been five years since we got divorced.”

  “Was it different then, five years ago?”

  She looked at Fredrik with a pained expression and was about to say something, perhaps a plea not to have to talk about this of all things, but then reconsidered, as if she realized that it wasn’t negotiable. She started again.

  “I was the one who left him,” she pointed out soberly. “We were going through what is euphemistically referred to as a rough patch, but I had never considered leaving him until just before I actually did it. Once I realized that he’d never really loved me, it was easy. Or, rather, it was awful, but it was easy to make the decision to move out. Over twenty years. Half an adult life with someone who doesn’t love you. What a disaster.”

  She shook her head.

  “That was what I was trying to tell you yesterday, but I was probably a little incoherent.”

  She breathed in through her nose and let out a little sigh. Fredrik sat there silently and waited, tried to concentrate on Inger and forget himself. Her words turned his insides upside down, both because he could imagine the abyss that must have opened up beneath her feet, how twenty years of life had suddenly been drained of all meaning, but also because there was something tragic in that absolute need for closeness, fusion almost. Was there anyone who escaped, who didn’t sooner or later stand there at the edge of the abyss and realize that their lives were gone and that there was no time left to give it another go?

  “Anders liked me. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, or treated me badly, but he was busy elsewhere,” said Inger.

  “You mean he was unfaithful?” asked Fredrik and felt clumsy.

  Inger shook her head again.

  “No. I’m sure he wasn’t. As sure as it’s possible to be,” she said and paused, letting her right hand run over her hair. “Some people can’t move on,” she said. “Never. They’re stuck in the past.”

  “Was there anything in particular that made you realize that he was busy, as you called it?” said Fredrik.

  “Sure, you could say that. It was Rune who made me realize it. I don’t think he intended to, it was just something he said. A little thoughtless, of course, but Rune can be like that, more honest than is really healthy, without realizing it himself. It was during the Christmas holidays. We’d been having difficulties for a while. It happened every so often, but this time it had gone on for a long time. I asked Rune straight out what he thought. About Anders, that is. Why he was so distant. We’d just finished dinner at our place. It may have been the day after Christmas, and Rune and I were still sitting at the table. First he nodded, as if it didn’t come as much of a surprise, and then he began to talk about how Anders had always been a bit of a brooder and that…”

  Inger stopped herself and looked at Fredrik stiffly.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you all these details. I’m not feeling very well. Maybe you can understand that? I doubt that this is the sort of thing you want to hear.”

  Strictly speaking that was probably true, thought Fredrik, but then again who was to say what was the best path to what they wanted to hear?

  “Tell us in whatever way feels best for you,” he said.

  “Right, okay,” said Inger and put her hands together again. “‘He’s never quite gotten over Kristina.’ That’s what he said. Rune. ‘He’s never quite gotten over Kristina.’ That’s what he said to me, after I’d been married to his son for twenty years. I don’t get what he was thinking, or I guess that’s just what he wasn’t doing. Thinking. He was a little drunk, too, so he was spinning around there in his own world ruminating over what he saw. It just slipped out of him. The stupid idiot! But Rune has always been clumsy. Not Anders, on the other hand. That he didn’t inherit. An idiot, too, maybe, but not clumsy.”

  “You mean that Anders had a relationship with Kristina Traneus?”

  “Yes, he did,” she said
and took a deep breath. “But that was over thirty years ago.”

  “That’s a long time ago,” said Fredrik.

  “Yes, it’s a very long time ago,” said Inger and judging from her expression she thought it was more like an insanely long time ago.

  “What do you know about their relationship?”

  “Not much,” she answered, calmer now. “Essentially nothing. They were together for a while before she met Arvid.”

  “But Anders never got over her, if I’ve understood you correctly?”

  “You have.”

  “So the cousins were rivals?”

  “I don’t know about rivals. That sounds so serious. Anders wanted her, Arvid got her. I guess that makes them rivals, but whether or not it was an open rivalry … they had no contact with each other, after all.”

  “Was it because of Kristina that they didn’t have any contact?” asked Fredrik.

  “Among other things. Ask Rune.”

  “So there were other things, apart from Kristina?” said Fredrik.

  “Yes, but I don’t know anything about it. Ask Rune. You may have to drag it out of him. There are things in that family that don’t get talked about. But he’s the one who would know.”

  Fredrik decided to drop that line of questioning. They would have to come back to that after they had spoken to Rune, if it proved necessary.

  “So when you decided to leave Anders there was nothing specific that had happened, nothing concrete that is, but rather…”

  “No,” said Inger, “nothing had happened in that sense.”

  Apparently she was in the habit of answering before the person asking the question had finished talking.

  “But rather Rune’s comment?”