The Cruel Stars of the Night

by Kjell Eriksson

  “May I . . . ?”

  “Of course,” Lars-Erik said.

  “I won’t read them now,” she said and put the letters away, carefully re-tying the string and putting everything into her bag.

  “You can get them back later,” she said.

  Her cousin’s expression conveyed that it didn’t matter.

  Both he and Laura had trouble finding the thread again. The carefree conversation, the light talk about what had been, and the gossip about people in common did not want to restart.

  Lars-Erik picked up the cardboard box, got up, and walked up the stairs. Laura looked out the window. Dark rainclouds were piling up on the horizon and gliding together into gigantic formations that threatened the sun.

  So much sky, so much space and life, Laura thought. A movement on the other side of the road caught her attention. It was an old woman who with great effort came out of the woodshed with an old-fashioned wood-bin in her hand. She stopped halfway, put down her burden, and rested.

  “That’s Elsa,” Lars-Erik said, having silently slipped back into the kitchen. “She is my only neighbor. She’s turning eighty-seven this year.”

  “I remember her,” Laura said. “It’s a wonder that she’s still alive. I thought she was ancient twenty-five years ago.”

  “She still keeps chickens. Her grandmother was called Egg-Magda, her mother Egg-Karin, and now it is Egg-Elsa. But it stops there.”

  “Egg-Elsa,” Laura repeated quietly. “A whole life connected to chickens.”

  “There are worse titles,” Lars-Erik said.

  “My closest neighbor is a professor.”

  “A remarkable woman,” Lars-Erik continued. He had walked over to the window. “She’s phenomenal at solving crossword puzzles. I usually see her when she’s sitting at the kitchen window. Sometimes it happens that she comes over and asks about a word, but it’s rare because most of the time she cracks them on her own.”

  The old woman resumed her walk and went into her house. There was smoke rising from the chimney.

  The sun went behind clouds and the kitchen immediately became almost dark.

  “I collect clouds,” Lars-Erik said and leaned forward, looking up at the sky. “It is like an enormous art exhibition. I like to stand out in my yard and watch nature give me fresh exhibitions every day, and to top it off it’s free. Have you ever thought about how the sky can give rise to the most unbelievable formations?”

  Laura was watching her cousin, how his gaze and posture completely changed as he spoke so lovingly about the clouds, unaffected and surprisingly poetic.

  “But the beautiful formations vanish immediately,” she interjected, mostly to get him to keep talking.

  “That’s true, but it doesn’t matter to me. I live in the moment, happy for each second. In town people hurry around, running to galleries and throwing their money away on art. Here everything is free. Sometimes Egg-Elsa comes out into her yard and we stand there on either side of the road looking up at the sky. There are worse forms of entertainment, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I have to go,” Laura said abruptly.

  They stood there facing each other. His shirt was spotted with oil. The dark stubble took on a metallic gleam in the dim light from the window. The brown eyes were Alice and Agnes. He opened his mouth to say something but stopped in the attempt.

  Suddenly he looked taken aback and frail. The face that had earlier seemed so open, his cloud face, now seemed to hold many unspoken questions. She understood that his speech about the free art of the sky and finding joy in the moment were veils of loneliness.

  Laura again felt an urge to hug him but held out her hand instead and he took it with such force and an intensity that bewildered her. She was used to neat, short handshakes.

  “Come back,” he said, “before you go anywhere.”

  Laura nodded, but knew they would never see each other again.

  He didn’t let go of her hand.

  “Whatever has happened, you have to like yourself,” he said. “Everything is not your fault.”

  What is “everything,” she wondered.

  “You saw the tractor out there,” Lars-Erik went on. “For close to two years I have been restoring it. Egg-Elsa sometimes teases me and says I’m married to a fifty-year-old tractor. It’ll be finished soon. I drove it out of the workshop yesterday. But what then?”

  Laura didn’t really understand what he was getting at with his question. She pulled her hand from his.

  “You know that . . .”

  “I know,” Laura said.

  The letters from her mother to Lars-Erik’s father were in her purse. About thirty in all, written over a ten-year period. Three a year. That wasn’t very much but Laura only had only received one letter and two postcards from Alice.

  The letters weighed on her. As if she had a bomb in her bag. She didn’t know if she would be able to bring herself to read them. Not right now. Maybe later, by the sea. Read them out loud to the staff and the other diners who would not understand a word but would listen and smile anyway.

  The visit to Lars-Erik had made her despondent. Not that she wished she hadn’t done it, because if she hadn’t gone back to her mother’s landscape one last time she would have regretted it. Now it was over. The next to last stop behind her.

  She was happy to have come into these greetings from her mother, but a fear of what the letters might contain and her jealousy toward her uncle—who had had such a lengthy and almost intimate contact with Alice—soiled the landscape and Laura’s own memories. The visits, together with Alice, to Mårten and his three sons, now took on a different meaning. Had Mårten and Alice been in love? The letters would perhaps provide an answer.

  Again she stood outside and peeked into Alice’s world. Instead of putting the landscape behind her as she had thought she would be able to accomplish with her visit to Skyttorp, the letters gave rise to new questions.

  She felt Lars-Erik’s gaze on her back as she got into her car. The smoke from Egg-Elsa’s house billowed thickly. In the ditches the ferns were wilting and creating a yellowing edge to the green spruce curtain.

  She pulled out onto the the road behind a lumber truck, whose heavy load made the ground tremble, followed it a kilometer or so before she overtook it but then immediately regretted it since the forceful vehicle had seemed to guide her through the terrain of memories.

  It had felt safe to lie behind it and let the truck set the speed. Now she was driving along much too quickly.

  Thirty-six

  How small he is, Ottosson thought. He stood there looking at Fredriksson from the foot of the bed, feeling somewhat at a loss as he always did with hospital visits.

  Ann Lindell felt guilty. She had not yet shown the picture of the unknown woman to anyone. If she were to pull it out now it would be like adding yet another stone to the burden of her defenseless colleague.

  “The question is what he was doing in Kusenberg,” Ola Haver said.

  “Jan-Elis Andersson in Alsike,” Lindell said.

  “Maybe he had an idea,” Ottosson said. “You know how Allan is.”

  The bouquet of flowers in his hand was drooping.

  “Should I get something to put them in?” Lindell asked.

  Ottosson nodded absently. Lindell was glad to leave the hospital room for a few moments. When she returned Ola Haver was leaning over Fredriksson.

  “At least he’s breathing,” he said and Lindell couldn’t help smiling as she arranged the flowers. They were not beautiful but Ottosson had insisted that they should bring something with them.

  Suddenly Fredriksson opened his eyes. Haver jumped and grabbed Lindell’s arm.

  “He’s awake!”

  “Allan, can you hear me?” Ottosson asked in a loud voice.

  Fredriksson’s eyes glimmered in response but then he appeared to sink back into the fog.

  “The coat,” he said, almost inaudibly

  Opening his mouth appeared to be an incredible effort
. There was a smacking sound as some dried spots of saliva stretched like rubber bands between his cracked lips.

  “What did he say?”

  “ ‘The coat,’ I thought,” Haver said. “Did you say ‘coat,’ Allan?”

  Fredriksson nodded very slightly. He was as white as a sheet and Lindell was afraid he was about to throw up.

  “I’ll check with the staff,” she said and left the room.

  They found Frediksson’s coat in a plastic bag in a nearby room. It had been cut to pieces and stained and Lindell shivered when she realized the dark spots were blood. She put it back in the bag and returned to the room.

  Fredriksson appeared to have sunk back into his dormant state.

  “Here it is,” Lindell said and pulled out the coat.

  “Check the pockets,” Ottosson said.

  “You’ll have to do that,” Lindell said.

  In the left pocket Ottosson found an evidence bag containing a chess piece. A white pawn.

  All three officers stared at the sleeping Fredriksson.

  “Chess,” Lindell said stupidly.

  “The question is where he found it,” Haver said.

  Again they looked at their colleague.

  “Check if he has the keys to Alsike on him,” Lindell said.

  Ottosson shook the coat. There was a rattling sound.

  At that moment a nurse entered the room. Her name was Beatrice and Lindell took this as a good sign.

  “Is he going to make it?” Ottosson asked.

  “Is he going to make it? What did you think, that he was dying?”

  Ottosson became noticeably embarrassed.

  “Allan is a good friend,” he said. “I was just worried.”

  “He has broken his arm, injured his neck and back, and banged his head pretty hard but he’ll be watching birds again in a few weeks.”

  The three police officers looked inquisitively at her.

  “He’s been raving about smews and buzzards the whole time.”

  “And chess?”

  “No, just birds, birds, birds.”

  She adjusted the IV tube that was connected to Fredriksson’s arm, patted his cheek, and swept out as swiftly as she had entered.

  “Ola, you stay here and when he wakes up you’ll ask him how and why.”

  “Ask him what?” Haver said with an uncomprehending look.

  Ottosson stared at him.

  “I was just joking,” Haver said and laughed.

  He liked the idea of sitting at his colleague’s side when he regained consciousness.

  Ottosson’s eyes were moist. Lindell knew that it was in response to the nurse’s friendly chatter and care of her patient. Her boss had a soft spot for TLC.

  Ottosson and Lindell went separate ways in the hospital parking lot. Ottosson had to meet the district attorney and Lindell answered evasively when Ottosson asked what she would do.

  She drove through the hospital area, came out onto Dag Ham-marskjöld’s Way and turned onto the road to Kåbo. She couldn’t get Laura Hindersten out of her thoughts. There was really nothing that indicated that this strange woman had anything to do with the three murders but this morning she had studied a self-drawn map where Jumkil, Alsike, and Skuttunge were marked with crosses. Between these points she drew straight lines and they intersected in Kåbo. Lindell did not put much stock in coincidences, and when the September disappearance of a seventy-year-old man was followed in October by the murders of three men around the same age, she did not believe it to be a coincidence.

  Certainly, Ulrik Hindersten could have disappeared from natural causes, gotten lost, or simply run away of his free will, but in spite of intense searching he remained swallowed up by the earth. The City Forest was not that big. He would have been found, especially since police dogs had been used. The police had received help both from the military and the Uppsala Kennel Club. As far as Lindell could tell every square centimeter had been searched.

  That he had left of his own free will was more implausible. His passport was still in the house, no personal effects were missing, and no withdrawals or purchases had been made with his bank cards since the disappearance.

  Lindell played with the idea that Ulrik Hindersten was the perpetrator and that perhaps his daughter either sensed it or was even party to it.

  Her behavior was odd, to say the least. To burn up all his belongings, especially the valuable books, implied a degree of feeling out of the ordinary. Was it a kind of grieving or was it the expression of hatred and revenge?

  Lindell had to get an answer to these questions before she could let go of Laura Hindersten.

  She turned onto the street and kept her fingers crossed that Laura would be home. The driveway was full of garbage bags but there was no car.

  She parked on the street and got out. A woman peeked out of the window of the neighbor’s house but quickly drew back. Lindell got the impression that she was fearful, maybe a cleaning lady working without a permit. There were rumors about a cleaning service that employed women without work permits from Poland and the Baltic states, who earned thirty-five kronor an hour. Rosén had written a memo after an investigation into the matter but nothing had been done. This female slave trade had a low priority. The clients moreover were well-adjusted Swedes in Sunnersta, Kåbo, and Vårdsätra.

  Lindell walked up the stairs and rang the bell. The signal echoed inside the house but no one opened.

  A strange feeling of foreboding came over her. It reminded her of an event several years ago when she visited a house in order to search for a hidden refugee. That time it had been just as forbiddingly quiet but in the end the door had been opened.

  Lindell walked down the stairs and out into the garden. The place where Laura had burned the books was now a black gash surrounded by flattened grass. A few pages from a book had been blown into a bush. Lindell picked up a singed page and read a few lines. It was a poem, that much she could tell, and she guessed that the language was Italian.

  She let go of the paper and it flew away between the bushes, fluttering nervously, lifting and landing in the fork of a tree about a meter above the ground. Lindell followed its flight and thought she recognized the tree. She didn’t know much about plants but it was not your everyday tree, she could see that. The striped, arrow-straight trunk with the branches at sharp angles gave it an almost aristocratic appearance.

  She walked closer and stroked the bark. Something told her she had seen a similar tree lately. Fredriksson should have been here, she thought, smiling.

  She looked around, pulled on the ladder in the hopes that Laura would turn up. The garden really was run-down but it had a kind of charm that appealed to Lindell. Its wildness, the small rooms that were created in the midst of the overgrown vegetation, and the dark tunnels that led to dead ends reminded her of an unexplored jungle. At any moment you could disturb a strange animal who, as quickly as it had appeared, would disappear again into the wilderness. From the low-hanging tree branches, coldblooded venomous snakes could unexpectedly attack.

  Lindell forced her way through a couple of bushes. A cat came rushing past as if shot from a cannon and made her scream with fright. She shivered. The charm was completely lost and she tried to find her way back to the house. A twig was stuck in her hair, her shoes were damp, and she was cold.

  Heavy clouds made their way across the sky and suddenly a strong wind blew through the trees, leaving the garden mysterious and gloomy.

  Ann Lindell walked back out onto the street. A red Nissan Micra stopped in front of the neighbor’s house and the woman she had spotted in the window stepped through the door, hurried down the stairs, and got into the car. She had a large sports bag in her hand.

  Lindell memorized the license plate, walked back to her car, and called to find out who owned the Micra. It belonged to a bus driver with a Polish-sounding name.

  Ann Lindell drove down Norbyvägen toward the castle and then took a right. Her thought was to drive to Alsike. She had taken the key
s out of Fredriksson’s bloody coat. That he had found a chess piece there didn’t mean anything. Many people had chess sets in their homes. She seemed to recall they even had one in her childhood home in Ödeshög but she couldn’t remember anyone who played chess.

  She suddenly took a right at Artillerigatan. Without putting on her blinker and almost without braking she took the curve much too quickly and came close to crashing into an oncoming car.

  It was a stab in the dark, the flash of the woman in the photograph and another in front of a bonfire, that made her perform the insane maneuver. At the Vivo grocery store, a couple of hundred meters from Laura Hin-dersten’s house, she stopped the car and got out, consumed with an idea. The chance of success was minimal but it was worth testing.

  There was a young woman at the cash register. She smiled when Lindell came in. Lindell introduced herself and asked if there was anyone around who had worked in the store about twenty years ago. The young woman looked perplexed.

  “You mean here?”

  Lindell nodded.

  “Twenty years ago?”

  A new nod. A polite smile doesn’t always mean quick wits, Lindell noted.

  “No, I don’t think so. It’s just mullah Ante and me here.”

  “And Ante?”

  “He’s twenty-five.”

  “Okay, do you know of anyone who might have worked here before, someone older?”

  “Like you, or what?”

  Lindell smiled.

  “Yes, like me, or maybe someone even older.”

  “Sivbritt used to work here but she’s retired.”

  “Then she’s older,” Lindell pointed out.

  “She still comes in sometimes, pretty frequently actually.”

  “Maybe she lives in the area?”

  “Ante!” the cashier yelled suddenly. “Do you know where Sivbritt lives— you know, the one who comes in all the time and tells us how to do our job?”

  Ante emerged from the back of the store. He looked much older than twenty-five, probably because of his considerable beard.

  “Sivbritt Eriksson, she lives on Birkagatan. I’ve delivered groceries to her home. Why?”