Claesson asked him to call the carpet dealer in Kalmar. A visit there before it was time to head off to Turkey. It was a matter of squeezing in as much as they could.
“Maybe even today,” he said with a glance at his watch. He’d just give Veronika a call first. It would mean he’d be late home, but perhaps he could make up for it by staying home a little longer tomorrow. Perhaps just have a little chat with the widow. One call from the police a day would have to do. He’d also have to make time to extract from Ludvigsson and Jönsson what they’d found out before he called on her.
CHAPTER 16
THE PARENTS.
Birgitta would have to tell them herself, she thought, before the news reached them from the radio or papers. They were old enough. And she couldn’t cope with being all on her own in the house, but didn’t even want the kids or a friend, let alone the neighbors, there with her. So she went round the house packing a little overnight bag, while the tears ran and blurred her vision. She wanted to go home. And home, that was her parents’ farmhouse in Bråbo.
Five minutes earlier she’d replaced the receiver after having informed both her children that their father was no longer alive. Johan and Lotta would come over the next day, at some point in the afternoon, probably. She realized that everything would be getting a bit chaotic. They’d then no doubt spend the night down in Oskarshamn so that they could all fly down to Istanbul together by the Wednesday.
The police said they’d be in touch, but the tickets they’d have to book themselves. Magnus, her son-in-law, had immediately hurled himself at the computer and found that there were some seats available.
She’d also called her ward manager. She was due to go on night duty tomorrow, but that was naturally out of the question now. Birgitta could tell by the woman’s voice that she wanted more exact details about when she thought she’d be back, but Birgitta managed to pre-empt this objectionable efficiency by saying that she’d be away for no less than a week. At least.
“Oh, yes, of course. Of course you have to take the time you need! And such a dramatic way to die, too. That must take time to digest!” said her manager. “So get in touch when you feel that you can conquer your grief.”
Conquer her grief? Where had she got that from?
There was so much expert opinionating these days, even in something so fundamentally human as grief. As if the concept had become a term with a built-in action plan. Recipe-mindedness. How to go about things the right way, like how to bake a sponge cake to make it fluffy.
But this had nothing to do with the state she was currently in. Like Bambi on the ice, she could get no purchase. And the darkness would descend on her in time, she knew that.
There were many heavy conversations with the children, there was so much they wanted to know that she had no obvious answer to. Why? was their first question. A bloody death, how is that possible? Their dad? In Istanbul, what’s more. “He wasn’t up to anything dodgy, was he, Mom?” wondered Lotta. “I mean, Dad was mildness itself.”
Both her children cried in turns, and she let them, trying all the while to keep a little distance, mostly for the sake of her own comfort. There would be lonely days and nights when she could weep her heart out in the solace of her own undisturbed solitude. The odd shoulder to lean on she could no doubt find, too, if she wanted and needed one.
And then there were all the practicalities, with details to be coordinated for the funeral. It was Lotta who raised the matter. Typical her! But Birgitta managed to put the brakes on all precision planning. They’d talk to the funeral home once they’d returned from Istanbul. They were sure to know what had to be done. They themselves had no clue how long the Istanbul police would have to keep Carl-Ivar, she said, and Lotta calmed down and started to sob again, like when she was a child. Johan was more restrained, and cried thick and throatily. His Malin was also easy and uncomplicated to deal with, and would undoubtedly support him. They were quite simply two down-to-earth people, Johan and Malin.
She needed to see with her own eyes that it really was Carl-Ivar who was dead and not some other person who’d got hold of his ID papers. She knew what it could be like down there.
Her head was spinning. Her thoughts were in chaos. All the practical things that had to be seen to. She tried to fend off the mental image of all the paperwork: files, insurances, taxes, accounts both private and business. She’d heard friends express their condolences. It’s almost like you have to take a course just to handle all the purely administrative stuff when you become a widow, one of them said. But if she took one thing at a time, she was sure to get things sorted. Annelie would no doubt take care of the carpet shop for the time being if she asked her to. What luck that she already knew the ropes! Magnus, who was used to running a company, had also promised to help out with the paperwork if need be.
But right now, she was to do nothing, the police had said. Other than be available. They’d be in touch when they knew more.
“At the present time” – this phrase that was always heard spoken by police officers – “At the present time we have no idea of what’s behind this,” they said patiently in answer to her recurrent question. Without their saying it out loud, she was made to understand that she’d have to be very grateful if they ever found the guilty party.
It was the job of the Turkish police to handle the investigation and when she heard that she pictured Istanbul. She’d been there several times. Anarchic traffic and noise and bustle penetrated her as if she were there. Finding a killer there must be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Just as she was about to lock up, she turned and went back in, opened the door to her wardrobe, groped around in the dark under Carl-Ivar’s jackets and suits for the bag, took it with her, locked the door, and walked to the car.
As she pulled out onto Holmhälleväg she wondered whether she should call in at the Bromses to tell them what had happened. Mostly to nip things in the bud before the gossip got too wild – after all, they’d be reading the newspapers tomorrow. And possibly to derive a little empathetic cheer from Sven’s friendly eyes.
But she couldn’t be bothered and drove on toward Växjövägen. When she’d turned onto Kristdalavägen her shoulders relaxed. She saw birch, sallow, and alder in their delicate foliage against gray stone walls. Nature was so frail and newborn that she started to cry for real. The road wound on, and by the time she found herself driving up the long, gentle slope toward her parents’ farmhouse, the tears had stopped.
The door of Lars’ little side cottage was shut and the blinds drawn. Had he been drinking? After having been on the wagon for so long…
She picked up the little overnight bag but left the other bag behind in the car. She needed to get her mind straight. Think of a good hiding place until she knew what to do with its contents.
Her father, Albert, emerged from the chicken coop just as she knocked on the front door.
“Well, well, look who’s ’ere!” he said. “Didn’t she ’ear you? I reckon she be havin’ one of ’er naps.”
“Who is it?” she heard her mother call anxiously from inside the house once her father had unlocked the door.
“It’s only our Birgitta,” he called back, letting her into the kitchen.
He realized, of course, that something was up, otherwise she wouldn’t have come rushing to see them like this. Her mother stood there in the doorway, small and thin, hair circling her head like a bushy halo. It was hard to believe that she’d run a hairdresser’s salon, thought Birgitta, as she told them what had happened. “Carl-Ivar’s been found dead in Istanbul.”
It came blubbering out more quickly that she would have imagined. As if she was a little girl again.
“Oh, heaven help us,” her mother said.
They let it sink in, and then they put some coffee on. It was just this kind of thing that coffee drinking was good for. Filling the coffee filter, setting out the cups, cutting the bread – a local Fliseryd loaf, as usual, she noted – arranging the butte
r and cheese and spotted salami. Birgitta found two pewter candlesticks with light blue candles in them in the sitting room, or the lounge as it had always been called. The wicks were white, the candles blotchily sun bleached. They’d stood there as ornaments, but now it felt right to light them and think of Carl-Ivar, even though it was light outside.
CHAPTER 17
CHRISTOFFER DAUN THOUGHT that he heard the Passat further down the hill. He was standing hollow-eyed at the back of the house. He’d been scraping the paint from an old wooden chair with moderately energetic strokes for a long while. He had to have something to occupy himself with. Anyway, it’d look better if he wasn’t standing there with his arms dangling uselessly by his sides when Annelie finally returned. As if he’d been waiting for her.
He’d do anything for her right now. Needed to be accommodating. Had promised to fix up the chairs ages ago.
Was he afraid of her?
She was no monster. She wasn’t the one who’d messed things up… but if she just hadn’t been so… unengaged, or whatever the word was, then this would never have happened. It was like she didn’t see him anymore. Maybe they’d just started to take each other for granted. The excitement was missing. He could also do with a little… extra… .
Baloney, he knew that. But he needed baloney as a defense.
Whatever, he was now making an effort to do his best to pour oil on the waters. Standing here, making a show of things, when things were already screwed up, he was also thinking. He should give up. What the hell was it that was holding him back?
It’s not that he disliked Annelie. He didn’t wish her ill. He’d long been trying to stop what he was getting up to. He wanted, quite frankly, to hang on to Annelie. But in a different way, more like it had been in the beginning.
And here he was, standing with a Windsor chair in his hand.
Those damn chairs were one long, never-ending saga. The division of labor was such that he’d scrape them bare, and Annelie would repaint them. She’d been intending to run a brush over them all in one go. All in all, it was a question of six chairs that they’d picked up for a bargain at an auction that previous summer. And if he knew Annelie, she’d roll her sleeves up when it was her turn to set to work. She’d paint them both quickly and well in just a couple of days. They’d argued about that, too. It was just before Christmas. About how he never got the job done. Never got anything done, she said. Not a thing he ever got started on.
“I might as well do everything myself,” she’d said. “For Christ’s sake, you just never pull your goddamned finger out.”
Then all hell had broken loose, they’d screamed and they’d fought. When they’d calmed down – as they always did after half an hour or so – they decided that the expression “sharing each other’s burdens” said quite a lot. They kissed and cried and made love, too, actually. They’d have to be careful not to make more demands on each other than life was already making, they promised. And she’d understood, once he’d explained, that in spite of everything the scraping of chairs was not one of life’s great priorities. Or so she said. His work was more than enough.
And he realized, as he stood there now with birdsong in his ears, that he found these post-storm lulls worth all the arguing. They were so intimate, so sudden. They came so close, listened so tenderly to each other.
They belonged together then.
“It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to do everything you ask me to do,” he’d said entreatingly back then, before Christmas. “I’m doing my best, Annelie! I just don’t know what to do to really make you happy!”
He’d used his despairing voice. It crept out easily in such situations. He was also deeply ashamed that he didn’t get his act together and do the chairs, it wasn’t such a big deal if he really wanted to. But he was even more ashamed of the fact he was lying. Not just to her, but to himself, too.
And she’d not said a word. They had their given roles. Throughout their argument she hadn’t said a word about his lack of fortitude. That he was what health professionals would call a delicate person. But the words hung in the air all the same. And he felt like a wimp. But it was a comfort that she’d never stoop to humiliating him. She never had. Not yet, anyway.
On the other hand, he was magnanimous and said nothing about who it was who made sure they had food on the table. That they were doing alright, moneywise. After all, she wasn’t getting down to finding a proper job. The carpet shop paid nothing, no matter how much she liked it there. Good teaching jobs weren’t exactly falling from the sky, but without the will, there was no way.
But he didn’t say this. That’s how nice he was.
And neither of them talked about that fact they were childless. They’d stopped all that. A typical dead topic, for these days they hardly even slept with each other, which in a way made things easier, he thought.
The car he’d just heard passed by. It wasn’t Annelie. He relaxed, but it wouldn’t be long – she’d have to come home, sooner or later.
It was cooler than yesterday. The air was crystal clear. That was why he’d decided to stand outside rather than in the barn. His jaw muscles worked in pace with his hands over the seat of the chair. He heard another car, and this one came up onto the driveway and stopped its engine. His heart pounded. A car door opened.
It must be her.
Maybe the little ball of paper had hidden itself under the passenger seat? Could he have been so lucky that she hadn’t seen it?
He put the scraper and brush down, ran his fingers through his hair and tried to set his expression to neutral. Just then, the cordless phone he had in his pocket rang. He fished it out just as he heard Annelie’s footsteps on the gravel. He answered as he entered through the veranda door and passed through the sitting room into the kitchen. He’d meet her with the phone in his hand like a shock absorber. There was no intention behind it, if that’s what she’d think.
“Hi. It’s Ronny. I’m glad I’ve got hold of you.”
“Right, hi,” replied Christoffer, taken aback. Ronny Alexandersson had never called him at home before. Was he going to ask Christoffer to do an extra night?
The tone of his voice said not.
Annelie nodded to him in the kitchen. She looked serious. Angry?
“I was in charge of the ward this morning and discharged that gall bladder patient who’d not been seen to.”
“Really?” said Christoffer curtly. The creeping sense of unease that he had was intensified by Annelie’s clenched, grave air. She’d discovered the little red ball.
“The woman with the post-op stomach pain, if you recall?” said Ronny down the line. “Around fifty. And with a headache, too, so we wanted to keep her in for another 24 hours. It was planned that she’d go home today.”
Christoffer felt how his cheeks started to burn.
“So the taxi came to pick her up around half ten,” continued Ronny in a neutral voice. But it concealed something.
“I see.”
Annelie had started to circle him. She’d placed two shopping bags on the counter and started to fill the fridge. Her movements were leisurely, lethargic even. It was like she was trying to avoid meeting his eye.
“She died exactly one hour after arriving home, according to her husband,” said Ronny.
Time stopped.
Fuck! Christoffer was unable to utter a sound. He even forgot to breathe.
“Can you hear me?” asked Ronny.
“Yeah, sure…”
“Heart attack, we reckon,” said Ronny, strangely enough without sounding accusatory.
Shit, thought Christoffer. Fucking shit!
“She’d suffered chest cramps during the night, as I later found out from a nurse. Or post-operative abdominal pain, they can be hard to tell apart. The night nurse reported it early this morning and entered it into the report, but I didn’t read it, and as you know, it’s total chaos in the mornings. Everyone on their way home. Anyway, no one said anything to me. Not the patient, either. Though a
s far as I recall you didn’t report anything about it this morning, either. But I could be wrong.”
His tongue was paralyzed. And that it was Ronny of all people who’d gotten sucked up in all this didn’t help.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said finally.
“Did you examine her?”
The question was callous but warranted.
“No.”
He could hear Ronny breathing down the line.
“Didn’t Birgitta Olsson get in touch? It says in the notes that she took Hb, temp, and an ECG and called you.”
“There was a hell of a lot to do last night… I don’t really remember all the details. But I guess she did… Yeah, though it didn’t sound as if the ECG was anything to get alarmed about. But we should of course have taken some blood tests for a heart attack. I would have made sure of that,” he corrected himself when he realized who it was that had had medical responsibility for her.
Ronny made no reply.
“OK, Christoffer,” he said then. “We don’t need to talk about it now. I just wanted to let you know. It’s just that it’s bad news when something happens and the one it affects doesn’t get to find out, you know how easily that can happen.”
They were both, of course, familiar with that. That talk that went on behind your back while you yourself never got to hear a thing.
“We’ll have to go through this properly later. Cardiology’s had a look at the ECG now. It’s possible it was normal, but as you know it’s never easy to judge. Women and their hearts, you know. There’ll be repercussions, of course,” continued Ronny Alexandersson, still without sounding acerbic.
Christoffer was no longer listening. His head was spinning. Ronny finished up the call by saying they’d see each other the next day, and Christoffer hung up and remained standing.
“Has something happened?” Annelie had stopped what she was doing and was looking inquiringly at him. “I found out today that…”
Death of a Carpet Dealer Page 12