“Did you think it was strange when you didn’t see Petrus last night?”
“No, not really. I saw that his lights were on. Then when I got up this morning I saw that the lights were still on, and that the gate was open. I mean the big gate. At first I thought an ambulance must have been here. Petrus always kept it closed. And then the door to the old barn was open.”
“You were up early.”
“It’s my bladder,” Dorotea said.
“You didn’t see a car here last night?”
“No, I would have noticed something like that,” she said firmly.
Beatrice looked down at her notes, a couple of lines, a few names, not much more. Just as she was about to end the conversation her cell phone rang. She saw that it was Ann and answered immediately.
She listened and then turned off the phone without having said a word. Dorotea looked at her with curiosity.
“I’ve just been informed that Petrus wrote a good-bye letter.”
“A good-bye letter, what do you mean?”
“He was planning to take his own life,” Beatrice said.
Dorotea stared at her.
“That’s impossible,” she said finally. “Petrus would never do anything like that.”
“My colleagues believe he wrote the letter,” Beatrice said. “I’m sorry.”
“So you mean to say—”
“—that Petrus had made up his mind to commit suicide. Yes, that’s how it appears.”
“The poor man. If only I had known.”
“It was nothing that you thought might happen?” “Never! He was a little down sometimes but not in that way.” “I’m very sorry,” Beatrice repeated and Dorotea looked at her as if she took her words to heart.
After a few additional minutes of conversation Beatrice Andersson left the house. At the gate she turned and waved. She couldn’t see her but assumed Dorotea was standing at the window.
It’s strange, she thought, that in Dorotea’s eyes it would have been better if her neighbor had been killed without the complicating factor that he had already decided to commit suicide. On top of the tragic news that Petrus Blomgren was dead she now had to bear this extra burden, the knowledge that he was tired of life and perhaps above all that on his final evening he had not sought her support.
Lindell, Nilsson, Haver, and Andersson were standing in the yard. Lindell took the fact that she could hear the technicians talking as a sign that they were wrapping up their work in the barn. In her experience the forensics team often worked in silence.
“It’s strange,” she said, “how a place changes after something like this happens.”
Perhaps this did not strike anyone as a particularly sensational or original observation and Haver was the only one who took the trouble to grunt in response. The rest were looking around. Beatrice looked back at Dorotea’s house. She was probably bustling around the kitchen or sitting at the kitchen table. Beatrice wished she had been able to spend a little more time with the old woman.
“Yes,” Sammy Nilsson said with unexpected engagement, “now it is the scene of a murder. People will talk about this house as the one where Blomgren was murdered for a long time. They’ll walk past, slow down, maybe stop and point.”
“Not a lot of people walk past,” Beatrice said.
Allan Fredriksson joined the group.
“What a wonderful place,” he said. “Have you noticed what a complex biological habitat the place is? It has everything: spruce forest, deciduous groves, open meadows and fields, dry hills, and even a little wetlands.”
Lindell smiled to herself.
Fredriksson pointed to the other side of the road where a large ditch ran down to a marsh. The green moss glowed in the morning sun. Tufts of sedge grass looked like small rounded buns and a clump of reedy marsh grass swayed in the wind.
“I wonder if Petrus was interested in birds?”
“Petrus didn’t have many friends,” Beatrice said, “and he does not appear to have been a rich man who hoarded cash or valuables.”
“The only thing I found was a letter from the Föreningsspar Bank,” Fredriksson said. “There was not a single account book or any withdrawal slips, but perhaps he kept the papers hidden. We’ll have to go over the place with a fine-toothed comb.”
Neither the forensics team nor the criminal investigators had found the least trace of burglary or disturbance. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the house in Vilsne except for the fact that its owner lay murdered in the barn.
“Will you check the bank, Allan?” Lindell asked.
Lindell looked at their new forensics team member, how he carefully packed away his equipment. Anita’s comment came to mind.
“Nice buns,” she said.
“What?”
“Morgansson’s,” Lindell said and nodded in the direction of the barn.
Haver turned his head. It looked like he was about to say something, but he held back. Everyone was watching the technician.
A door opened and a light reflection from the glass in Dorotea Svahn’s front door swept over the hill where the police officers were assembled, then disappeared into the thicket of alder and willow. The old woman looked out at her neighbor’s house, took a slow step onto her porch, and gently closed the door behind her.
She stood there with a cane in one hand and the other on the wrought-iron railing. She walked down the stairs with an effort and moved toward the police. One of her legs didn’t seem to want to come along.
She was wearing a gray coat and a dark hat. Beatrice had the impression that it was not Dorotea’s everyday outfit.
“Is she on her way over here? Maybe she needs help,” Haver said and took a step toward the gate.
She was not fast but she did seem to have developed a technique to compensate for her bad leg. A car approached. At first there was only a faint rumble behind the forest that surrounded Blomgren’s property. Dorotea must not have noticed the engine sound that increased in volume and when she was halfway across the road the van from the Medical Examiner’s Office rounded the corner. Fridh was driving. Dorotea stopped and lifted the cane over her head as a signal.
Ola Haver took yet another step forward but stopped himself. In his mind he saw the Greek shepherd he and Rebecka had once encountered, on a curvy mountain road in the north. The shepherd was moving his flock across the road. Like a wooly string of pearls they slowly streamed from one side to the other. Still, they brayed nervously, the lambs following the ewes and the flock keeping tightly together.
The shepherd had raised his staff like a weapon, or more likely a sign. He spoke deliberately, even though no one could hear him, with his gaze lifted to a point somewhere above the waiting cars. The stream of sheep seemed never to end, someone in the cue beeped, and the shepherd raised his staff a few centimeters higher. He spoke without ceasing. Haver stepped out of the car—he was at the front of the line—and he observed the timeless scene.
The same feeling now gripped him as he watched the old woman raise her cane at Fridh’s van. Wasn’t she also saying something? He thought he saw her lips forming words that no one could hear.
Fridh had stopped. Dorotea continued over to Blomgren’s large gate, hesitated a moment as if she was unsure of where she was going, then turned into the yard. Beatrice walked over to her.
Dorotea Svahn was out of breath. She covered her mouth with one hand, perhaps wiping some saliva from the corner of her mouth.
“I want to see Petrus,” she said in a strained voice.
Fridh had pulled up and Beatrice took the woman’s arm and guided her to the side so that the van could drive in.
“He’s badly beaten,” Beatrice said.
“I realize that,” Dorotea said.
“I’m sure you’ll be able to see him later, I mean when they’ve had a chance to clean him up.”
“I want to say good-bye. Here.”
There was a faint smell of mothballs around her.
“Of course you can say go
od-bye. I’ll come with you,” Beatrice said.
Fredriksson turned away. Haver kicked the leaves at his feet. Lindell and Sammy Nilsson looked at each other. Lindell shook her head, turned, and walked up to the house.
Beatrice accompanied the woman up to the door of the barn. Charles Morgansson had finished putting away his equipment and he made way for them. He nodded to Beatrice who took it as a green light for them to go in.
“I think the very first blow made him unconscious,” Beatrice said.
She felt Dorotea’s thin body tense up. She freed herself from Beatrice, took the cane as support, and sank down next to Petrus Blomgren, mumbled something, and put her hand on his shoulder. Bea was glad that Dorotea had not walked over alone in the dawn and found Petrus, but that she had just called the police and forced them to come out and take a look.
“He was my best friend,” Dorotea said.
Beatrice crouched down so she could hear better.
“My only friend. We pottered around here like ancient memorials, me and him. Petrus said many times that it wasn’t right, ‘They had no right,’ was how he put it.”
Beatrice didn’t really understand what she meant.
Dorotea’s hand caressed the wool sweater. She appeared oblivious of the blackened blood in the wound on the back of the head.
“Little Petrus, you went first. I could almost . . .”
Her voice was overcome with emotion. The bony hand went still, took hold of the sweater as if she wanted to pull the dead man to his feet.
“He came over with lingonberries this fall. More than usual. ‘Now you have more than enough,’ he said, as if he knew.”
She braced herself on the cane and slowly straightened to standing.
“When you are as old as I am you see things, how it is all connected. Petrus would always say it would be better to turn life around, be old first and then become younger, leave the frailty behind but keep the wisdom.”
“That would be good,” Beatrice said.
The old woman sighed heavily.
“They had ten cows in here, maybe twelve. He sold the land later on.”
“For a good price?”
“It was good enough. He didn’t lack for anything, Petrus.”
“It looks like he lived frugally,” Beatrice said, taking the old woman’s arm and helping her back out into the fresh air.
“That’s how we were raised,” Dorotea said.
“Do you know if Petrus had a special place for his valuable documents?”
Dorotea shook her head. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
The four police officers were still waiting in the yard. Beatrice had the feeling that she and Dorotea were leaving a church, as if after a funeral.
Fridh was sitting in the van and would remain there until after the old woman had left.
“Will you pray with me?” Dorotea asked. “Just a few words. Petrus was not a believer but I don’t think he’ll mind.”
Beatrice interlaced her fingers and Dorotea quietly said a few words, remained motionless for a few seconds before opening her eyes.
“He was a magnificent man,” she said. “With a good heart. May he rest in peace.”
Far off in the distance, a horse neighed.
Three
Had she ever liked him? She often asked herself this question. At times, perhaps. That time when he tripped outside the house and fell on his face she had at least felt sorry for him. That was what he had said, that he tripped, but Laura imagined that something else must have happened since he had scraped both his cheeks and forehead.
She dressed his wounds. She did this with divided feelings: part disdain for his whimpering when the disinfecting solution stung, part tenderness at his helplessness. The skinny legs dangling over the edge of the bed, the thinning hair growing still thinner, and the hands that gripped the soiled blanket.
At other times she could hate him almost beyond reason. If she was in the house and he was nearby she had to escape, out into the garden or even out into the town, in order not to strike him down with the nearest blunt instrument. This hate was indescribable, so dark and so consuming that she believed it deformed her physically.
Even after she managed to calm herself, it could take several days before she was able to address her father in a normal tone of voice.
“I see, you’re that way now,” he would usually comment on her state, unable to grasp what had upset her.
Once upon a time everything had been nicely ordered, then it fell into disarray. Books, manuscripts, and loose papers piled up and formed drifts on the floor. Laura sometimes had the feeling that she was out on the rocking waves of the sea. She had given up trying to keep things in order long ago. There was simply no aspiration for order. It was not part of her father’s worldview and Laura had grown up in an accelerating chaos.
The house smelled a little odd and it was only now, a month after her father’s disappearance, that she realized what it was. She had always thought it came from the discarded clothes that were heaped together on the floor.
She had detested him because of the mess. But while she was cleaning up after him she was forced to go into his bedroom, something she had avoided doing all these years. And there was the reading lamp, the one that had been there ever since she was a little girl. It had been bought in Germany at the end of the fifties, modern at the time and now again a desired object at flea markets and auctions.
When she stood close to the lamp the odor was more pronounced than ever. Against her will she sniffed closer and closer to the hateful thing. The plastic—the lampshade consisted of mottled plastic strips— emitted a stale smell when the sixty-watt lamp was on. He kept it turned on even at night. Laura suspected that some nights he fell asleep in the armchair next to the table, submerged in some problem that had to do with Petrarch or some chess game.
Her first thought was to throw the lamp out, but it still stood in its spot next to the table. She never turned it on and the smell slowly dissipated.
Most of the things in the bedroom were untouched. Even his reading glasses still lay on the nightstand. There was also an essay from the Humboldt University in Berlin. It was about Petrarch’s Laura, about whether or not a newly discovered portrait was a depiction of her.
Laura was named after this woman from the fourteenth century who had become a literary concept and the object of research. Many times she herself felt like a concept. As a teenager she started to doubt whether or not she lived, if she even existed here and now. What did she mean to her father? She pinched herself, experienced pain, cried, and felt her cheek grow wet with tears, but did that prove her existence?
She started to think he only saw her as Petrarch’s Laura, a shadow from the past, without human qualities. No daughter to love, but a reborn literary figure. Even so she continued to live, here and now, getting up in the morning, leaving the house, walking to school, walking home, growing up.
When she had her first period she immediately told her father. Her first feeling was one of shyness, perhaps shame, but suddenly she simply said it: “Father, I have to buy sanitary pads.” It was as if an unknown voice spoke through her mouth.
He put down his knife and fork and looked at her with an expression that was difficult to interpret. Laura imagined he felt offended. She rarely used the word Father. He wanted her to call him by his first name.
After a pause he resumed eating. She understood that his worldview had received a blow. He didn’t like it, she saw that.
Who will carry on after me?” he would sometimes exclaim, with that combination of pride and desperation that became more strongly reinforced in him over the years.
His contribution to research was incontestable. Or perhaps it was closer to the truth to say that those who may have had reason to question his earlier work saw no reason to do so now, thirty-five years after the dissertation. At one time he had been important, but now he was marginalized and excluded from the debate.
He him
self contributed to this in large part. Like a boxer who relies more on raw strength and intensity than technique and calculation, he slugged his way through the academic world. At first he was successful, in part due to his renowned ability to tire out his opponents with masses of data, many times dished out in long, apparently incoherent tirades. But as time went by he became labeled a fossil who had become stuck in outmoded ideas.
But there were still those who allowed themselves to be seduced by his words, above all when he recited some of the more emotional sonnets. He did so with such feeling and in such perfect Italian that the words by their own power appeared to hover in their own rarefied space with no room for questions, objections.
Was he a genius? Or simply an overeducated lunatic? Or both?
He was never promoted to full professor.
“I am consistently overlooked,” he said. “In Florence and Paris they realize my greatness but in this backwater one rewards mediocrity. Here inbred careerists from the land of Lilliput take the high seat, while the giants are forced to jostle just to get inside the door.”
He dug through his stacks of paper, extracted letters from colleagues all over the world, waved them excitedly in the air, and shoved them under her nose.
“Here, here are the witnesses who shoot down the claims of the feebleminded.”
He raised his voice, came up close to her, and forced her to study the letter, struck the signature with his index finger, and told her that the author of the letter was one of the world’s greatest authorities on the poetry of the Italian Renaissance.
“He is a scholar, mark my words. Scholarship, not loose assumptions or flabby opinion.”
His raised his voice a notch. Suddenly he could drop his arms, turn inward, retreat to his room. Once, after an outburst of this kind, she had followed him, had stood in the doorway to his room and watched him from behind. He had dropped the letter and it had fluttered to the floor and slid halfway under the bed.
Laura had also seen other sides of her father, sides that were only rarely revealed in public. His love of the words themselves. He could become intoxicated by a single phrase, a few tentative letters on a page, as if only hesitantly entrusted to the page, a spontaneous expression of the author’s inner life. Sometimes it was quite moving, if a little tiring, when her father called her to him and read something to her, a couple of verses, parts of a sonnet, almost trembling, with his glasses perched on his nose. Often they were about love:
The Cruel Stars of the Night Page 3