Sail of Stone

by Ake Edwardson

Susanne stood at the front door and knocked. Aneta walked over. Susanne knocked again.

  The door opened slowly. It was dark inside. Aneta saw the outline of a face.

  “Go away!” said the face.

  Susanne started to say something, but Aneta was faster and showed her police badge.

  “Could you please open up?” she said.

  The face seemed to retreat. The door was still open a few inches. Perhaps that meant they could step into the cottage.

  Susanne did.

  Aneta followed her.

  There was no light in the hall, which was narrow and long. The light of dusk could be seen outside of a window that was dimly visible where the hall ended and a room began. Someone moved in the room. Aneta saw a face. It belonged to an older woman.

  “Mrs. Lindsten?” she said.

  There was no answer.

  “Signe, hello,” said Susanne.

  Aha, she’s Signe to her. Am I the one she doesn’t want to let in?

  “Anette isn’t here,” they heard from the room.

  Why did you come here alone? thought Aneta.

  Susanne walked down the hall, and Aneta followed her.

  The light in the room came from the sea. On bright days, it must be a very bright room, thought Aneta. Right now I can’t really see this woman’s face.

  “Signe, you have to let Hans talk to Anette,” said Susanne.

  “Can’t you leave her alone?” said Signe Lindsten in a voice that was more powerful than Aneta could have imagined.

  “He just wants to talk,” said Susanne.

  Did he want something else before? wondered Aneta.

  “Do you feel threatened by these people?” asked Aneta. “You can tell me.”

  “Oh, God,” said Susanne.

  “You understand that I’m from the police?” said Aneta.

  She thought she saw Signe Lindsten nod.

  “Where is Anette?” asked Aneta.

  Signe Lindsten didn’t answer. Aneta realized her mistake. A damn stupid question to ask when Forsblad’s loyal sister was standing next to her.

  “I’d like to ask you to step out for a minute,” she said to Susanne.

  Susanne didn’t move. Aneta realized that Susanne realized that she had to leave, and that she was trying to say something but couldn’t quite figure out what.

  Suddenly Susanne turned around, said, “Mistake,” in a loud voice, and left, stomping down the hall in her low-heeled boots, and before Aneta had time to say anything else to Signe Lindsten she heard the car roar to life and drive away. She hadn’t seen the road when she climbed down between the trees, but she hadn’t looked for it.

  Winter walked across Heden. Middle-aged men were playing soccer with contorted faces. That was as it should be. He heard screams that sounded like a cry for help. He looked around for the meat wagon but didn’t see it, nor did he see heart-and-lung machines.

  He lit a Corps, his first of the day. He was cutting back, but he could hardly cut back more than this. He refrained from smoking during work. If he was going to refrain after work, he would have to ask himself what the point of that time of day, or any time of day, was.

  It was the screwed-up viewpoint of a nicotine addict.

  But it made sense. He tried to live a different life after the life that had to do with crime and all its consequences.

  No smoking then, but smoking afterward. It made sense.

  He had tried to explain it to Angela.

  “I might understand,” she had said. “While you transition. But later. Elsa might like to have you around when she is, oh, twenty-five. You were not twenty-five years young when we had Elsa. You were forty.”

  “I was still the youngest chief inspector in the country,” Winter had said, lighting up. Angela had smiled.

  “Have you ever looked that up? Really looked it up?”

  “I trust my mother.”

  “There are two jobs where it’s apparently possible to remain young and promising for any amount of time,” Angela had said. “Detective inspector and author.”

  “I still feel young.”

  “Keep smoking and we’ll see in a few short years.”

  “They’re only cigarillos.”

  “What can I say?” She made a motion to indicate that she was speaking to deaf ears. “What else can I say?”

  “Okay, okay. It’s not good for me, and I’m smoking less and less.”

  “It’s not for my sake, no, first and foremost it isn’t about me, as a matter of fact. We’re talking about your health—about Elsa’s dad.”

  He let the thought go. He saw a soccer ball coming his way and he took the cigarillo out of his mouth and connected perfectly, and the ball flew in a beautiful curve back onto the gravel pitch. That’s how it’s done. First take the cigarillo out of your mouth and then connect with the ball with an extended ankle. That’s how it must have been done when soccer was a game for gentlemen in nineteenth-century England.

  His cell phone rang as he crossed Södra Vägen. The walk light was still on, but a man in a black Mercedes honked at him when he was halfway across the crosswalk. Winter answered the phone with a “Yes?” and stared at the man, who was revving the motor. The city was not a safe place. All the frustrated desperadoes racing around in their Mercedeses. He should throw that bastard in jail.

  He turned onto Vasagatan and listened:

  “You haven’t heard anything else?” asked Johanna Osvald.

  “If I find anything out, you’ll know right away,” he answered.

  “I worry more and more each day,” she said. “Maybe I should go over there?”

  Yet another generation of Osvalds takes off to look for the last one, thought Winter. Three generations drifting around in the Scottish Highlands.

  “What would you do?” she asked.

  I would go, he thought.

  “Wait and see for a few days,” he said. “We have the missing-person bulletin out, after all. And I’ve spoken with my colleague.”

  “What can he do?”

  “He knows people.”

  “You don’t think something serious has happened?” she asked. “A crime?”

  “It’s possible he became ill,” said Winter.

  “Then he would have called,” she said. “Or someone else would have called about him.”

  “We can help you,” said Aneta Djanali.

  “We don’t need any help,” said Signe Lindsten.

  It was the answer that Aneta expected, but she still couldn’t understand it.

  “We want everyone to leave us alone,” said Signe.

  “Is Anette at home?”

  Signe looked out through the window, as though that was where her daughter was, somewhere on the stony sea. Or in it, thought Aneta.

  The sky had grown dark over the water, and everything had become the same color. Aneta could see the dock down there. She could see the boat. A lawn lay like a thin band that soon transformed into sand thirty yards from the edge of the water.

  “Is Anette home, in Gothenburg?” asked Aneta.

  The mother continued to look out at the shore and the sea, and Aneta did the same.

  “Is that your boat?” she asked.

  Signe gave a start.

  She looked at Aneta.

  “Anette is at home.”

  “In Gothenburg? At the house in Fredriksdal?”

  The mother nodded.

  “She didn’t open the door when we were there.”

  “Is that against the rules?”

  Technically, it is, thought Aneta.

  “Is she very scared of Hans Forsblad?”

  Signe gave another start.

  “What can you do about it if she is?”

  “We can do a lot,” said Aneta. “I mean it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Put a restraining order on him,” she said, and she could tell how weak that sounded. “We can make a short-term decision on it and then hand it over to the prosecutor. We can bring him in for
questioning. We’ve actually decided to do that.”

  “Questioning? What does that involve?”

  “That we can take him in and question him about his threats.”

  “And then what? What happens then?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Then you let him go, don’t you? You talk to him and then that’s it.”

  “He might not dare to—”

  “Dare to visit Anette again? If you can call it that. Is that what you think? What the police think? That it’s enough to write up some papers that say he can’t see her, and that somehow you’ll scare him by talking to him? You don’t know him.”

  She was expressing genuine frustration, there was no doubt about that.

  But there was also something else.

  In the background there was something else. It wasn’t just about the man, about Hans Forsblad. Aneta could feel that, see that.

  “That’s exactly why,” she answered. “To see what he’s like.”

  “I can tell you that here and now,” said Signe. “He is dangerous. He doesn’t give up. He is obsessed, or whatever you call it. He doesn’t want to accept that Anette doesn’t want to live with him. Doesn’t want to accept it. Do you understand? He can’t get it into his head!” She turned out toward the sea again, as though to gather her strength; she made a motion. “It’s like he’s completely crazy.”

  “Why haven’t you contacted the police?” asked Aneta.

  Signe didn’t seem to be listening, and Aneta repeated the question.

  “I don’t know.”

  She hasn’t mentioned that her husband called me, thought Aneta. Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe that’s not what this is about.

  “Were you afraid to?”

  “No.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “Yes.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t want … it doesn’t matter … it could …”

  Aneta tried to put together the pieces of what Signe Lindsten said. It was her job, a part of it, these broken sentences that people spoke out of fear, panic, sometimes with ulterior motives, sometimes out of sorrow, out of schadenfreude, in the effort to come up with the most believable lie. Splintered words that were barely coherent, and she had to unite those words, make them coherent so that she understood, so that someone understood.

  Most of the time it was like this. Ragged words spoken by a frightened person.

  22

  It was so good at first,” said Signe Lindsten.

  Something happened to her face when she said it. As though the memory lifted her features, as though happy memories could smooth out faces. First comes the sun and then comes the rain and all that crap. Every cloud has a silver lining. All of that. Aneta couldn’t see any of those clouds outside because everything was clouds over the bay and the cliffs and the sand and the shore; no silver linings anywhere, only a flash of light here and there in the middle of the mass of stone.

  “He seemed so nice,” said Signe.

  I hate that word, thought Aneta. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a false word. Look what happened here.

  “It usually starts like that,” said Aneta.

  “I have a wedding picture,” said Signe. “I don’t have it here.”

  “Does Anette have any siblings?”

  “No.”

  She thought of the man who had claimed to be Anette’s brother. One of the thieves. Who was he? And his “dad”? I haven’t asked Anette’s mom.

  She described what they looked like to Signe, who said, “What on earth?”

  “Didn’t your husband tell you about this?”

  “No …”

  “Doesn’t that surprise you?”

  “It does, yes, but he probably didn’t want to worry me.”

  “Has he told Anette?”

  “How should I know? If he had, I would have known about it too, right?”

  Good. She gets it.

  “Have you seen any injuries on Anette?”

  Signe didn’t answer. This is going to be really difficult, thought Aneta. It’s going to be vague. She can talk about threats in a vague way, but not about the concrete details, not yet. It’s almost always like this. It almost doesn’t surprise me anymore. The woman’s fear is transferred to the family. Suddenly they start to stick together about the fear. Won’t let anyone in.

  The only one who can be let in is the one who causes the fear. It’s a paradox. There’s always hope that it will get better and that all the fear will go away, and the only one who can make it stop is him, the one who was so damn nice at first, if only he has this one last chance one more time, and sometimes he gets it, and after that it might all be over.

  Death might be the only thing left. She had seen it. I’ve seen what that last chance can lead to. Sometimes there doesn’t even need to be a last chance. She saw Signe Lindsten’s tormented face. It told her that this would end but that it would not end well.

  Away with that thought. This case will be solved. I’m standing here, right?

  “You don’t need to be afraid, Mrs. Lindsten.”

  “You can call me Signe.”

  “You don’t need to be afraid to tell me how it is, Signe, or how it was.”

  May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord let his face shine over you. May the Lord have mercy on you. Did she need mercy, the woman before her? What kind of mercy? The Lord’s mercy? Aneta suddenly thought of her father. The man of many gods, at least sometimes. Had she asked him about the concept of mercy in his world? She would call him and try to talk on the hopeless telephone lines to inner Africa. Soon satellite telephones would be the only solution, the only thing that worked in the interior. Swipe one from the storeroom, Fredrik had said.

  Signe Lindsten was just about to say something when they heard a car outside. Aneta saw that the woman recognized the sound. Her face didn’t change much. Her expression was the same when they heard a man’s voice in the hall.

  She didn’t light up. His face doesn’t shine over her, thought Aneta.

  He came into the kitchen.

  “Oh, here you are!”

  Aneta nodded.

  “We must have passed each other,” said Sigge Lindsten.

  “You called, but you weren’t there when I arrived,” said Aneta.

  “No, that’s how it goes,” said Lindsten, perhaps by way of apology.

  “Did Anette come down with you?” asked Aneta.

  “No.”

  “You said earlier that she was here, but she’s not.”

  “Yes, I did say that, yes. In the end she decided to stay home.”

  “Home? Home in the house in Gothenburg?”

  “That’s her home now.”

  “I would like to talk to her,” said Aneta.

  “Let her decide for herself,” said Lindsten.

  “That’s why I would at least like to contact her.”

  “You can try to call,” said Lindsten.

  Aneta saw that his wife was trying to say something again, but she stopped and began to walk away, out toward the hall. Her husband nodded toward her. Neither of them said anything.

  It’s some kind of act.

  “I don’t think we’ll have any more problems now,” said Lindsten.

  “You can file a report,” said Aneta.

  “It’s not necessary.”

  “We can do a crime-scene investigation,” said Aneta.

  “Where?”

  Preferably not in the house in Fredriksdal, she thought. That would mean that another crime had been committed.

  “In the apartment in Kortedala,” she said.

  “There’s not really anything to investigate there. Not anymore.”

  “I got the impression before that you wanted to cooperate on this,” said Aneta.

  “I don’t think we’ll have any more problems now,” repeated Sigge Lindsten.

  Moa Ringmar dropped one boot in the hall, and then one more. Her father got bread and butter and cheese o
ut of the fridge, smoked sausage, cucumber.

  “It’s possible to arrange boots nicely,” he said.

  “Come on, Dad.”

  “When you hear the sound of one boot fall on the floor, there’s no peace until you hear the other one too,” he said.

  “Well then, you got your peace right away just now,” she said.

  “I was thinking more of when you’re sitting in a hotel room and you can hear the people in the room above,” he said.

  “And how often does that happen?”

  “As yet it hasn’t happened,” he said.

  She laughed and asked if he’d been home for long. She cut a slice of cheese and put it in her mouth.

  “I’ve been home long enough to have time to admire our neighbor’s yard art,” he said.

  “You have to let it go, Dad.”

  “He’s alive, isn’t he?”

  She sat down.

  “I may have found an apartment.”

  “Hallelujah.”

  “I knew you’d be sad.”

  “Yes. But I’m thinking of your happiness.”

  “It’s serious when kids live at home when they’re twenty-five,” said Moa.

  “It’s only been temporary,” said Ringmar. “We actually wrote you off four years ago.”

  “Good thing Mom can’t hear this.”

  “You’re not bugged?” said Ringmar.

  “Do you do that at work?”

  “No,” Ringmar lied. “It’s illegal.”

  “Are you telling the truth?”

  “Yes,” Ringmar lied. He spooned the tea leaves into the filter of the teapot and poured in the water and placed the pot on the table. “What apartment?”

  “Two and a half rooms. Really nice but maybe not the best location.”

  “What is the best location?”

  “I would say … Vasastan.”

  “Vasastan? That’s where the worst and loudest crowds are on the weekends. And all summer. Hell, no.”

  “Erik lives there. Has he complained about loud crowds outside?”

  “Only every day.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Erik Winter lives so high up among the clouds that he isn’t bothered by the damage below,” said Ringmar.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” said Moa. “Up in the clouds, the seventh floor.”

  “Where is this apartment, then?”