The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  Beppo Hallman shifted nervously in his chair, scratched his upper arm.

  “It was … he said it, but he only said it, you know, just like you’re saying.”

  “And what was it that Leo said?” asked Gunilla Borg.

  “That he was gonna go up there.”

  “Where?”

  “He was going to go up to the farm. The Traneus farm in Levide.”

  Beppo Hallman looked dismayed.

  “You can’t say anything to Leo about my telling you this. If you’re gonna tell him, then I’m not gonna say any more.”

  “He doesn’t have to know anything,” Gunilla Borg assured him.

  What a pro, Sara Oskarsson thought as she sat there off to the side and watched her colleague, severe and impressive in that blue uniform shirt, free of any hint of insecurity. She reminded Sara of a teacher she had had in junior high who had possessed the unique ability to push the cockiest and most rowdy troublemakers up against a wall and stare them down, despite being a whole head shorter than most of them. She wished that she could understand the secret.

  “He was going to head up to the farm and stand face-to-face with Arvid Traneus. He was going to stand there and look that bastard in the eye, that’s what he said.”

  “And while he was standing there, what was going to happen?”

  “He didn’t know. He was going to stand there and then he was gonna see.”

  Gunilla Borg tried once again to wait Beppo out, but this time it didn’t work.

  “That was it. I swear. I asked him, even said that I thought he oughta just forget about it because it seemed, well, sort of pointless. Chances were Traneus would just call the cops on him and he’d only make trouble for himself. But Leo never did it. He never went.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Not Leo. I know Leo.”

  “Your friend Leo just got out after three years in prison. He was in there for beating someone up so bad that they’re disabled for life. You know about that right?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Yeah, but?” said Gunilla Borg and for the first time she didn’t sound completely composed.

  Hallman sat there quietly for a moment, absolutely still.

  “I still don’t think he did it.”

  “Well that’s something else,” said Gunilla Borg sounding more understanding.

  Sara looked down at her lap in an effort to hide her smile.

  “So you don’t know, in other words, whether Leo went to see Traneus in Levide or not,” said Gunilla Borg.

  “No,” said Hallman.

  “Would it have been possible for him to have done it? Were you separated from each other for long enough that he could have made it over to Levide and back during that time?”

  “I guess so. Yeah, we were,” said Hallman with a deep sigh.

  “Any particular occasion?” said Gunilla Borg.

  “Well, I mean, he was out for a while every day. I have no idea where he went, other than that he’d been to the liquor store and did some shopping and whatnot.”

  “How about right after the weekend, when he’d just arrived?”

  “Yeah, then, too. I don’t remember the days exactly, but there were several occasions when he could have made it out to Levide if he’d wanted to.”

  “Did he have a car or any kind of vehicle?”

  Beppo Hallman laughed.

  “He’d just spent three years in the can. Where would he have gotten a car from? It’s not like there was someone waiting for him outside the gates.”

  “He could have borrowed a car, stolen one, what do I know? But so he had no access to a car, moped, or even a bicycle maybe?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Hallman.

  * * *

  IT WAS ALMOST evening by the time they left Hemse. The onset of darkness was spurred on by the thickening cloud cover. The drizzle had given way to pouring rain that caused large puddles to form on the road through Hemse. The cars were tightly packed in the supermarket parking lot. People were hurrying out to their cars with their shopping carts filled with bags stuffed with chips, sodas, and Friday steaks, maybe the odd consciously chosen low-GI meal. And shoved down between the cartons of milk and clusters of bananas were latest issues of the tabloid newspapers filled with fresh details about the murders beneath bold black EXTRA headlines, that became wet from the rain and would be difficult to flip through. They sent a smell of wet paper and printer’s ink wafting through the cars that were on their way home to celebrate the weekend.

  Sara, Fredrik, and Gustav didn’t have a free weekend to look forward to, they all understood that. Klint had decided to arrest Hallman on suspicion of receiving stolen goods. That was the safest bet. It was doubtful whether it would ever make it to court, but that was less important. The reason for keeping Hallman locked up, was so that he couldn’t warn Leo Ringvall.

  Gustav was driving, Sara was sitting next to him, and Fredrik was sitting in the back speaking to Ove on his cell phone. Per-Arne Hallman had been sent off to Visby in a patrol car. They were happy not to have to drive him themselves. When Hallman had realized that he was being taken to Visby, he had launched into a relentless whining about having been tricked. As he saw it, they’d had an agreement that he’d be released if he told them what he knew about Ringvall. But nobody had promised him any such thing. Though they may perhaps have hinted at something that could have been misconstrued to that effect.

  Fredrik snapped his cell phone shut.

  “Doesn’t look too good for Ringvall,” he said. “The DNA test isn’t ready, but the strand of hair’s a match. Plus the guy’s got small feet.”

  “Looks like this is going to turn out to be a short stint of freedom for Leo Ringvall,” said Sara.

  They drove through a pool of water at high speed that sent up a great cascade of dirty water against the right side of the car.

  “Let’s hope so, so that we can put all this behind us,” said Gustav.

  PART THREE

  He forgot you long ago

  Screw God!

  —EBBA GRÖN

  Friday, November 3

  Karolinska University Hospital, Solna

  “I’m leaving on the eleven o’clock ferry tomorrow. I’m starting work again on Monday,” she said.

  “Really?” said Ninni and looked up at her.

  Ninni paused before continuing. Sara recognized her hesitation. The hospital room made everything so charged.

  “Thanks for coming here, for spending time with Fredrik. It’s been very helpful,” said Ninni and looked at her husband.

  Sara nodded quietly. She thought about all the visits she had made, the hours and days spent there in the room. She could hear herself speaking. She had revealed things that she would never have considered telling Fredrik if it hadn’t been for the special circumstances. Things that he maybe wouldn’t have wanted to hear, either. She felt how her cheeks heated up.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two in peace now,” she said.

  Ninni didn’t seem to have any objections.

  “See you,” said Ninni when Sara slipped out through the door.

  Fredrik had gotten a little better with every passing day, more words, more intelligible words, more eye contact. Better, but not good. Good still seemed a long way off. Sara didn’t know what it was reasonable to hope for. The doctors still spoke about it being fully possible for him to make a complete recovery or very close to it. That sounded promising, of course, and she tried to stop thinking about what might be included in or very close to it.

  She walked briskly down the corridor, but stopped short when she had passed the nurses’ station. She thought for a moment and then walked back and stuck her head through the open door. A curly gray-haired nurse was busy at a medicine cabinet.

  “Hello, my name is Sara Oskarsson,” said Sara, “I’m a colleague of Fredrik Broman’s.”

  The nurse put on a pair of purple-rimmed glasses that were hanging from a band around her neck.

/>   “Hi,” said the nurse once the glasses were in place. “Yes, I’ve seen you. You’re the one who usually comes in here.”

  Sara smiled at the nurse.

  “Yes, but this will be the last time. I’m going back to Visby tomorrow.”

  “I see,” said the nurse and touched the medicine cabinet.

  “I was wondering about something.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it seems like his memory is slowly coming back, that he’s remembering more and more, or is it just that his speech is returning and that his memory has been there the whole time, but…”

  Sara stopped short, realized that she was just making it more confusing. The nurse adjusted her glasses, waited.

  “What I’m really asking,” said Sara, “is whether you think that he’ll remember anything from his time here at the hospital? I mean, has he even heard what I’ve been talking to him about, and can he remember it in that case?”

  The nurse got a little wrinkle between her eyebrows.

  “It’s impossible to say,” she said, “but it’s possible. You’ll have to ask him once he’s gotten a little better.”

  48.

  He was alone in the dark. He felt the cold and damp against his face and the hard stone against his back where he was sitting curled up against the wall. No light, nothing, just the wind and the rain that buffeted the roof, whipped hard against the brickwork.

  If the sleeping bag he’d crawled into couldn’t keep out the damp and cold, he wouldn’t last very long out here. He leaned his head back against the rough stone and shut his eyes. Might as well shut his eyes. There was nothing to see. He was blind when he opened his eyes. He closed them and tried to turn inward, feel his lungs rise and fall, to block out everything and focus solely on his own breathing.

  Just when he thought that it was working, that he felt a relief of sorts, he suddenly got the distinct impression that someone was standing there leaning over him. He quickly opened his eyes and saw even less. The darkness just became blacker and thicker, but the figure in his head became ever more present. He saw something black within the blackness. A figure without a face, and yet he felt a pair of eyes staring at him, eyes filled with tears; no, eyes that were bleeding, a thick, red liquid that oozed from even redder eyeballs.

  Madness, nonsense, a figment of his imagination, he told himself and quickly swiped his hand out in the empty void in front of him to prove his assertion. Nothing there, of course. And yet the figure remained, like an image etched into his mind following a blinding flash of light. A vague, rustling sound along the floor and suddenly the dark figure was gone, but had made way for something else. Another rustling. This was no figment of his imagination, no haunting apparition, there really was something out there in the darkness, that slithered across the gritty stone floor, rasping softly against it. A snake. He could hear it distinctly. He was alone in the darkness with a viper, a scaly, zigzag-pattered reptile, its flickering tongue sniffing him out just as clearly as he could see in broad daylight. Deadly and real.

  He stamped down hard with both feet, but the effect was dampened by the cushioning effect of the sleeping bag. He threw out his left hand, groping along the wall, he tipped something over that rattled when it hit the floor, found his lighter and managed to get a flame. He got to his feet and held the lighter out at arms length. The flame flickered in the wind that was gusting through the building, but still did a decent job of lighting up the room. He moved it slowly from left to right, saw no snake. He moved slowly around the room with the lighter stretched out in front of him. No snake. No, of course there was no snake. It was just his mind playing tricks on him. When the frightening figure that had loomed over him proved so easy to drive away, his mind immediately came up with something else that was harder to fend off.

  Why was he tormenting himself? Because it all came from inside, the snakes and the strange, bleeding figures. He detected a strong smell, turned around and saw that the camping stove that he had knocked over onto the floor was leaking alcohol onto the ground. A big, black pool was spreading across the floor. He swore under his breath, wriggled out of his sleeping bag, felt at once how the cold bit into him, hurried over and put it back upright, careful to keep his lighter well away. The stove was almost empty.

  He moved his backpack with all his food and clothes, out of the way, the bag of bread rusks and the bottle of vodka that he’d unpacked. There was alcohol on the bag of rusks. He ripped it open and dumped the rusks straight into his backpack and tossed away the empty bag. He swore again. Luckily the backpack had been spared and he moved it even further away from the camping stove. His right hand was cold and dry from the alcohol.

  The lighter was burning the thumb of his left hand. He crawled into his sleeping bag and let the flame on the lighter go out. He didn’t know what to do with it, finally sticking it between his teeth as he drew up the zipper of his sleeping bag. He shuffled over to the wall, sat down, and set aside the lighter.

  As soon as the stillness settled in, the visions returned. The darkness loomed over him, tightened around him, stared at him, grabbed at him. He stared back, steeled himself against the nonsense that was whirling around inside him, but no matter how hard he fought against it, he noticed how his heart pounded faster and harder in his chest, how his blood surged through his swollen, hardened arteries, and how his pulse finally seemed to flutter ceaselessly.

  He grabbed the lighter again, had to flick the flint three times before the gas flame once again cast its dim light across the room. The round floor’s dirty paving stones stared back at him vacantly. He reached for the vodka bottle and wished he’d had something more, something stronger, when he put it to his lips and took two deep gulps in quick succession. He wanted something that would knock him out completely until morning. He wasn’t sure that the alcohol would help, but he drank it anyway.

  He had felt that he was right. When he’d done it, he had felt that he’d been right to do it.

  49.

  Detective Christer Eriksson pulled his thin, wrinkled raincoat more tightly around his grayish-green, one-size-too-big suit. It may have stopped raining, but there was still a cold wind blowing.

  He had driven to Huddinge, south of Stockholm, in order to examine the scene of a shooting that had taken place over a week ago. When Christer Eriksson had started to sift through all the material that had been dumped onto him by a superior who was going on vacation, he hadn’t quite been able to get the witness accounts to tally with the forensic evidence. So he had decided to head down there to see for himself. His personal theory was that someone had screwed up somewhere. Nobody had gotten hurt in the shooting and the intended victim had been an unemployed Chilean, no record, but had been under suspicion of making criminal threats. Low priority, in other words.

  The shooting had taken place in a high-rise area up on a plateau not far from the Vårby Gård subway station. Instead of snaking his way up there by car along the endless winding loop roads, he had parked the car at the bottom of a long stairway that pretty much led straight to the crime scene.

  The stairway was divided into three separate flights that cut up through a park. Christer Eriksson was trudging up the first one when he caught sight of a man walking along the asphalted path that intersected with the bottom and middle flights. Even though Christer saw him from the side, and his face was partially hidden beneath a gray hood, he was immediately sure of what he saw. Four years previously he had spent a few long, cold nights staking out Leo Ringvall. It hadn’t paid off, but he wouldn’t forget that face anytime soon. And he had been reminded of Ringvall this morning by the APB that district CID had issued.

  The wind tossed Christer Eriksson’s short but unruly bangs. He brushed them aside with his right hand and took an extra look while the motion concealed his probing gaze. He was absolutely certain. It was Leo Ringvall, the triple murderer from Gotland.

  Ringvall veered off the park path onto the stairs ahead of Christer and continued up the green slop
e. Christer Eriksson, known to his colleagues as “Che” because of his station signature, had decided to arrest the man. The alternative would be to follow after him and call for backup, but he considered this to be a safe arrest both for himself and the public. If he could arrest Ringvall before he reached the plateau and he still had his hands where he could see them, then he’d do it.

  He quickened his pace, let go of his raincoat and fixed his gaze on Ringvall’s waist. He didn’t like the whole “Che” thing, especially considering he had never voted for anyone left of the Center Party, but he had chosen to ignore it. Reacting against nicknames was a surefire way of getting it to catch on for good. A few of them had even taken to calling him “The Communist,” but he didn’t really care so much about them. They were the bad apples who thought you were an idiot for spending a calm Saturday morning at the station following up on an accidental shooting in the suburbs instead of sitting around scratching your ass in the coffee room. “Regards to the Cubans,” they had hollered after him. It would feel pretty damn good to come back into town with a triple murderer in handcuffs.

  When Leo Ringvall reached the top of the second flight of stairs, Christer Eriksson checked to make sure there was no one behind him, then he pulled out his service weapon, prepared it for firing, and aimed it at Ringvall’s back in a quick, but controlled movement.

  “Stop, police,” he barked. “Put your hands on your head!”

  Ringvall stopped short after the first shout, but remained standing where he was with his hands at his side.

  “Hands on your head,” Christer Eriksson repeated.

  Ringvall glanced behind him, caught sight of the gun that Christer Eriksson had trained on him and slowly started to raise his hands.

  “Don’t move, eyes straight ahead. Hands on your head,” Christer Eriksson ordered as he slowly moved up the stairs.

  “Take it easy,” Ringvall mumbled.

  Christer Eriksson kept his gun aimed squarely at Ringvall’s back the whole time. The suspected multiple killer took his time putting his hands on his head. Christer Eriksson wasn’t about to make any mistakes. If Ringvall tried anything, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot.