Sven-Arne nodded again and could not repress a second smile when he had the impulse to pull a couple of notes out of his pocket to hurry along the process.
‘One moment,’ the receptionist said, and picked up the receiver.
Sven-Arne turned and watched the quarrelling pair. It was like a scene out of a play. Now it was the younger one who seemed most upset.
‘Please have a seat,’ he heard the woman say, and without looking at her he walked off toward an armchair, sat down, and prepared for a long wait. But he had only just settled in comfortably when a police officer in civilian clothes appeared by his side.
‘That’s quicker than in Bangalore,’ he said, and rose, not without some difficulty. It struck him that he had not eaten much more than a carrot all day.
‘What was that?’
‘Fast work, I mean.’
‘Sammy Nilsson,’ the police officer said, introducing himself and stretching out his hand.
Sven-Arne answered his gesture, but hesitantly, as if he was suddenly uncertain he had made the right decision. He mumbled something incomprehensible.
The policeman seemed to wait him out, as if he sensed his unease and wanted to give him a moment to pull himself together.
‘Are you ready?’
‘I’m not entirely sure of that,’ Sven-Arne replied truthfully. He knew that if he now followed the inspector into the interior of the building he would change his life more drastically in one blow than even his flight from India had done.
‘But I think we need to talk,’ he said. ‘I don’t see another way.’
Sammy Nilsson nodded and could not conceal his satisfaction. Sven-Arne realised the police officer’s curiosity had been aroused and all at once he felt well disposed toward him. He did not want to disappoint Nilsson, and he decided to make his story a good one.
THIRTY-SIX
It was thirty-two degrees Celsius in the shade. How hot it was in the sun, Sune Stolt did not dare to guess. He walked as close to the building wall as possible in order to maximise his shade. Business was in full swing, the shops had been open for a couple of hours. From time to time he heard people speaking Swedish.
He liked Krabi in spite of the tourists, because the city had not been as ruined as many of the others. Here there was still a somewhat intact Thai atmosphere. He hated Phuket. Phuket City might be all right but the beaches to the north were dreadful. Perhaps it was because Stolt mostly got to see the dark side of the tourist business: prostitution and drugs.
He was on his way to the police station in the centre of town. He had been there several times before and then always met with Mr No, as he was called. Stolt had forgotten his real name. Everyone knew who Mr No was – a legend in the corps – unusually tall for a Thai and known for his hard hands. Perhaps he was corrupt – there were rumours that he was involved in real estate transactions on the islands south of Krabi and that his methods were not always above board – but he had always been friendly to Stolt.
Mr No had called in the morning. Stolt could not help but smile as he thought of how pleased he had sounded as he told him that the missing-person report had gone out in Krabi the same day and that a woman had come to the station the following morning. She had brought her brother. That was all Stolt knew. Now he would find out more.
He had just completed a visit to Bangkok and was standing at the airport preparing to fly to Phuket, where he was stationed, when Mr No called. Stolt had managed to rebook his ticket, and a couple of hours later he had landed in Krabi.
It could be nothing more than a false alarm, but something in Mr No’s voice told him it was a bull’s eye. Mr No liked appearing capable and here was an opportunity to display his Thai efficiency.
Stolt was relieved to enter the station’s air-conditioned and almost arctic climate. Mr No was waiting for him in front of the reception desk. They greeted each other as warmly as usual. Sune Stolt asked him how his wife and children were doing. Mr No was clearly flattered by the fact that Stolt remembered the names of his twins. Stolt had checked the names in his notebook just before walking in.
After a couple of minutes of conversation, Mr No took him by the arm – a gesture he only bestowed upon Westerners – and showed him into a corridor, stopping at a door and opening it.
The room was bare and empty, with the exception of a wooden table and a couple of chairs. A man and a woman were sitting at the table. They immediately rose to their feet. The first thing Stolt noticed was the fear in their eyes. Thereafter he felt astonishment. The woman before him was identical to the woman in the photograph.
Mr No introduced him. Stolt nodded, smiled, and greeted the woman. She immediately began speaking in an intense torrent of words, and Mr No waited for her to finish. When she was done she stared at Sune Stolt as Mr No translated.
The photograph was of herself. It had been taken two years ago outside the restaurant where she still worked. The person who had snapped the picture was her sister, who shortly thereafter travelled to Sweden.
‘Why did she go to Sweden?’
Mr No shot him a look that expressed as much irritation as sorrow. The woman answered with another long explanation. Again Mr No waited patiently for her to finish.
‘She was going to pick berries in the big forests,’ he summarised. ‘She was going to make a lot of money. You have big forests, isn’t that right?’
‘Yes, we do,’ Stolt said. ‘What is her sister’s name?’
He used the present tense as the woman did not know her sister’s fate.
‘Pranee Kaew Patima,’ said Mr No.
It was an hour later, when Sune Stolt had checked in to the hotel, that the grief washed over him. As long as he was at the police station he could retain his composure, but outstretched on the bed in his room, prey to the vertigo no physician could find a reason for, he gave way to the bottomless black void that had recently grown deeper and wider. He felt ashamed, both as a Swede and as a man. Bosse Marksson had given him enough information so that he gathered how it had gone. The same old story, this time with a deadly outcome.
Thailand let its young women go to humiliation and death. Sune Stolt hated the Scandinavians, British, and Germans, the old men, the gangs of rowdy twenty-year-old men, the pudgy pale middle-aged men, and the well-established ones with gold clubs in their luggage. All came for the sake of flesh.
Most of them were content to screw their way around massage parlours and in dim rooms behind bars, others moved down for a few winter months in order to live like kings, and still others imported the reed-thin girls to a cold and loveless life in Europe. Of course there were exceptions, of course there were instances of real love and concern, but most of the time it was purely a matter of commerce with bodies.
Now yet another name could be laid alongside the earlier ones, Pranee Kaew Patima.
How long would he be able to stand looking up close at this misery? He knew this hatred threatened to make him a poor policeman. He glanced at the clock. He knew he ought to get up from the bed, turn on the computer, and email Marksson what he had discovered.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Ann Lindell could not help feeling a smidgeon of triumph as she thought of Beatrice’s haughty face and the rest of her colleagues’ resistance to her suggestion about advertising in Thailand.
‘Fucking brilliant!’ she exclaimed.
Bosse Marksson, who had read Sune Stolt’s entire email, was more restrained.
‘It’s a relief to have a name,’ he said. ‘But how is it pronounced?’
‘Let’s just call her Patima,’ Lindell said. ‘The identification of the woman in the photograph is one hundred per cent? No doubt?’
‘No, Sune is completely convinced that the picture is of the woman he met in Krabi. He even went to the restaurant where she worked. And the police there were going to get a photo of sister Patima and send back that—’
‘—we can test at the campsite,’ Lindell completed.
Marksson grunted.
&n
bsp; ‘The timing fits,’ he said. ‘She left Thailand at the beginning of August last year.’
‘Okay, then we are a step closer.’
But Lindell also realised that the investigation had ground to a halt. They had a name for the woman and a connection to Tobias Frisk, they had a DNA match between the hair they had found in Frisk’s house and the foot, they had the chainsaw, but there it ended. They could conclude that there was a great probability that Frisk had murdered and thereafter dismembered Patima. How, why, and when they would never know. Most likely they would also never recover a body to go with the foot they had found. She had probably been buried or dumped into the sea.
The case was solved but left a bitter taste. The usual sense of satisfaction wasn’t there, something Marksson also commented on.
‘I wish the bastard hadn’t been such a bastard and blown his head off.’
‘Should we keep going?’
‘Can we keep going?’ Marksson countered. ‘We have questioned everyone we can think of, neighbours, his former girlfriend, and co-workers.’
‘And what do their contributions have in common?’
‘That Tobias Frisk was an unusual fellow but no one who would have taken his own life or that of another person.’
‘What do you make of that?’
‘That life is full of surprises,’ Marksson said.
‘Okay,’ Lindell said. ‘We’ll drop the whole thing. I can check with the campsite. It would be good to get a positive ID on the woman, but then we’ll close the file.’
‘What should we do with the foot?’
‘Save it for now,’ Lindell said, after a moment’s reflection. ‘I don’t think we’ll send it to Thailand. That would feel rotten.’
‘A foot may be better than nothing. What do we know, perhaps there may be some kind of religious point to it, I mean in Thailand.’
After having called Sorsele Campsite and agreeing with Gösta Ohlman that she would shortly be emailing a picture of the woman, Lindell left the police building. She needed to walk, to get a little air, even if the weather wasn’t the best. The whole city was wreathed in a damp fog.
She walked west along the Luthagsled. Her goal was the Café Savoy. During the quick walk she came to think of the old man, the county commissioner’s uncle, who lived only a couple of blocks away, and from there her thoughts wandered to Berglund. He would be discharged from the hospital soon and after that there would be some weeks of convalescing. She wondered how it would be. Her image of her colleague was altered in its very foundation and Lindell didn’t like it. She wanted her old, secure colleague back, not some shaky, troubled, and pessimistic old man.
The tables at Savoy were filled. That was more and more the case. Lindell looked over half a dozen mothers who occupied two tables with their offspring in high chairs and on their laps. They looked to have been there quite a while. All of the coffee cups were empty and the tables covered in rubbish. Lindell thought it was out of line to occupy a café for their mum gatherings. Three baby carriages were wedged between tables and chairs. A little one was crawling around on the floor with a bun in his hand, another was screeching in his high chair.
She stood there for a few minutes but none of the customers showed any signs of imminent departure – definitely not the mothers. Lindell sighed and left.
She slowly walked past the flower shop and the kiosk on the corner and then walked east on Ringgatan, with a vague feeling that things were not as they should be. It wasn’t just Berglund who was out of sorts, that much was clear. Beatrice was unusually cranky and Sammy Nilsson was unrecognisable. Even Ottosson was unusually listless. Perhaps it was the approaching Christmas holiday that was making people so down.
She came to a sudden stop outside Konsum. There had been something that hadn’t felt right to her during the whole investigation of the severed foot. She had perceived her uncertainty like an irritating static in the background and Marksson had expressed similar thoughts. The way the whole thing had unfolded appeared obvious, even if a frustrating number of threads hung loose. What was it that rubbed?
She turned around in order to try to understand what it was on Ringgatan that had triggered this sudden impulse of unease and incompleteness. But she saw nothing out of the ordinary. A couple of teenagers who laughingly teased each other. The back of an older woman with a grocery bag. She closed her eyes and tried to grab hold of the fleeting feeling again. She had experienced this before, that creeping feeling of apprehension mixed with excitement, which could sometimes feel nightmarish with panic lurking, when realisation about a missed opportunity that would never come again grew stronger. Perhaps it was something at Savoy that had set this off? She stared back in the direction of the café and replayed the scene: the mothers and children, a couple of older men in the corner whom she had seen countless times at that exact table, and a couple of school kids drinking sodas. The rest of the customers were shadows.
Was it the bun the child had been chewing? Frisk worked at a bakery. Was it a smell? Was it about drinking coffee? At her first visit to Bultudden she had had coffee with Torsten Andersson. Had he made some comment then that had not appeared strange at the time but that now unconsciously had awakened her anxiety? Or perhaps it was Marksson who had said something as they sat in Frisk’s kitchen?
Lindell drew a breath and resumed her walk, now at a considerably calmer tempo. In her thoughts she followed the road to Bultudden and finally arrived at Lisen Morell’s, but there was nothing along the Avenue that spoke to her.
She picked up her phone and called Bosse Marksson.
‘I think there’s something wrong,’ she said at once.
‘What do you mean wrong?’ Marksson sounded tired.
‘Something wrong in the investigation. With our thinking. We’ve missed something.’
Her colleague said nothing. And what should he say, Lindell thought.
‘I mean, you know that feeling you get sometimes.’
Marksson grunted. She recalled his concerns when they were out in Bultudden. He had also questioned the series of events without being able to point to something concrete that strengthened the sense that they were wrong, but eventually they had laid down their weapons before the indisputable facts: the traces of Patima in Frisk’s house, the traces of blood on the chainsaw, and finally the connection in Sorsele.
‘We have to meet,’ Lindell went on. ‘Can I come out tomorrow?’
‘First thing in the morning, in that case. I’m going to spend the afternoon in Öregrund.’
‘I’ll be there at half past eight.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
‘I want to confess to a murder.’
The policeman lifted his gaze from the paper where he had just written the day’s date and Sven-Arne Persson’s name, but said nothing.
‘It happened many years ago.’
‘Go on,’ Sammy Nilsson said after a long pause.
‘I killed a man in the autumn of 1993. He was called Nils Dufva. It happened in Kungsgärdet. Then I travelled to India and remained there. That’s all. How long have you worked in Uppsala?’
‘Almost twenty years,’ Sammy Nilsson said.
‘Then you must remember Dufva.’
Sammy nodded. He remembered it very well, the affair with the wheelchair-bound old man who had been clubbed to death, even though he was on street patrol at the time and did not have any direct involvement in the investigation. It was Berglund’s case, he knew that much. Berglund’s unsolved mystery. It struck him that he should immediately get in touch with him. He would certainly be pleased, if not overjoyed.
‘Can you tell me what happened? You understand of course that I am recording our discussion.’
Persson nodded.
‘Were you already acquainted with Dufva?’
‘No, I can’t say that I was.’
‘You just walked in and struck down an old man completely unknown to you in his own home?’
‘Not exactly unknown to me.’
&n
bsp; ‘Were you intoxicated?’
‘No, completely sober.’
Sammy Nilsson sat without saying anything. The tape deck rolled on.
‘Could I have a sandwich or something? I haven’t eaten in a long time.’
Sammy Nilsson immediately called Allan Fredriksson and asked him to order a thermos of coffee and a couple of sandwiches, and then join him for the session.
He glanced at Persson.
‘It’s regarding the Dufva murder,’ he added.
Persson suddenly stood up and walked over to the window. Nilsson hung up and observed him. He did not look like a killer.
‘Food is on its way,’ he said, ‘but we can start chatting a bit, if you’d like to have a seat.’
‘Of course,’ Persson said, and returned to his chair.
‘How did you get yourself to India?’
‘I flew.’
Sammy Nilsson smiled.
‘I had arranged to get a new passport. Bertil Grönlund, if you remember him, assisted me. I can say that now because I know he’s beyond any punishment now.’
Bertil Grönlund, often called ‘Gävle-Berra’, had been a regular with the Uppsala police for many years, mostly because of his predilection for forging cheques. No violent sort, just a notorious scoundrel, not particularly successful. He was put away for a year now and then, came out and was soon caught again, something he took even-handedly. Sammy Nilsson himself had arrested him once in the early nineties, and recalled a thin, middle-aged man, timid in his manner and never reluctant to admit to what he had been accused of.
‘I didn’t know he was dead,’ Nilsson said distractedly. ‘How did you know him?’
‘I was his parole mentor.’
Sammy Nilsson chuckled and shook his head. Persson sensed that he thought the story was sounding more and more fanciful.
‘Did you have any connection to India?’
‘No, none, but it was as good a place as any. I liked it.’
The Hand that Trembles Page 25