Black Lies, Red Blood: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  “I saw everything from my window, including how Ivaldo embraced Arlindo and closed his eyes. I realized they were related. Ivaldo told me that the police accused Vincente of the murder of his cousin.”

  “Arlindo was a criminal, a murderer who dealt drugs besides. Maybe you think it’s good that he died?”

  He looked at Ivaldo, as if he expected a protest from him, but he said nothing about the description of his son.

  That man is dangerous, thought Brant, but was able to adopt an expression of surprise, and shake his head, as if he thought the policeman’s question was unreasonable.

  “What do you think about his death?” Brant asked instead.

  The policeman observed him silently. Brant realized that the decision would be made at that moment. He opened the bag and took out mineral water, unscrewed the lid, and greedily took a few gulps.

  “You’ll have to meet with one of our investigators, the one who’s taking care of the case. You’ll have to sign a statement.”

  “And then?”

  The policeman made a movement with his head as if to say: Who knows, or maybe, who cares?

  Thirty-two

  “Magdalena Davidsson,” said Lindell, after recording the mandatory interview information, and then waited in silence for ten seconds—a pause that she used to read from her notes what she already knew—before continuing.

  In the meantime the attorney, Petter Oswaldsson, a forty-something well-coifed sort, as Fredriksson characterized him, and a friend of the Davidsson family, was staring at her, which she noted in the corner of her eye.

  She then raised her eyes and gave the attorney a blank look. She sensed that the struggle would be between the two of them, in any event if he had his way.

  “I have a son, Erik, who’s going to start school this fall. A spirited kid”—she used an expression she had not heard since her father used it a very long time ago—“who, like your son, is just starting out in life.”

  Magdalena Davidsson took a deep breath.

  “We have a great responsibility, as mothers,” Lindell continued.

  “Really!” the attorney exclaimed.

  Lindell turned her head very slowly, as if her neck were hydraulically controlled and the oil very cold and turgid, fixing her eyes on Oswaldsson, before she again turned to Andreas’s mother, and continued.

  “And through your lies you are letting him down. It’s that simple. He’s made himself guilty of a crime, you are protecting him, or you think you’re supporting him, but in reality it’s the exact opposite: You are shoving him away.”

  She waved her hand and realized to her surprise that her strategy was holding up. Oswaldsson was grimacing, but remained silent.

  “He has no one but you. Your lies are transmitted through him. Give up while there is still time.”

  “What constitutes the crime?” the attorney asked.

  “Obstruction of a murder investigation and in the worst case manslaughter, perhaps homicide,” said Lindell calmly, as if she were discussing something very ordinary, without taking her eyes off the woman.

  Magdalena Davidsson flinched as if she had been hit when she heard the word “homicide.”

  “Yes, it’s that bad,” said Lindell. “And you are the only one who can fix that. Andreas will not manage this on his own.”

  “What do you mean ‘fix’?” Andreas’s mother said hoarsely.

  Lindell took a photo of Klara Lovisa from the folder before her, and set it on the table. The attorney stared at the picture of the young, smiling girl.

  “If it is the case, and there is a lot that suggests it, that your son is involved in Klara Lovisa’s death, he must have support to manage. He’s only fifteen. His whole life is waiting. Right now he is suffering terribly, and he will be for a long time, if you don’t help out. He will never really be free from anxiety, because he is not a hardened criminal who lacks empathy, but he must be able to go on.”

  “What should I do?” Magdalena Davidsson whispered.

  “Talk with him! Now, right here, the rescue of your son’s mental health and life begins. Let him understand that he has your support, no matter what happened, and that for his own sake, and for Klara Lovisa’s and her parents’ sake, he must be honest.”

  Lindell let the words sink in. It was not surprising that she was broken down; what was surprising on the other hand was Oswaldsson’s passivity. She gave him a quick look and did not know what to believe. Either he was unusually dense or he agreed with her, whatever he thought about her emotional overacting.

  “You lied about his alibi the day Klara Lovisa disappeared,” Lindell resumed. “I think he’s lying when he says he didn’t see her that day. It was her birthday, and he gave her a present, a necklace.”

  Lindell recounted her theory of how Klara Lovisa phoned Andreas and how he went to Skärfälten on his moped, and how they quarreled, a dispute that ended in violence.

  The woman listened with bowed head, and when Lindell stopped talking she had nothing to say. Nor did attorney Oswaldsson, who put his notes in his briefcase and thanked her for an interesting lecture.

  Lindell felt a twinge of desperation. She had hoped that Magdalena Davidsson would break down and that a story would gush out of her that would be the beginning of the end of the drawn-out investigation.

  None of this happened. The woman’s silence and Oswaldsson’s only slightly camouflaged scorn made her depressed, and she concluded by saying that Magdalena Davidsson could either stay there, sit in, and listen during the questioning of Andreas, or go home.

  Both of them knew that Andreas would not want his mother to be there, he had made that clear, but Lindell could not refrain from mentioning that alternative, with the dim thought that in some way she wanted to get back for the woman’s compact silence, by pointing out how Andreas distanced himself in this way from his own mother. Cheap revenge, and it bothered Lindell that she treated the poor woman so basely.

  “I think Magdalena can wait here in the building,” said the attorney. “Then I’ll drive her home later.”

  Lindell wondered whether it was Oswaldsson who had encouraged the mother to keep quiet, which obviously was her right, and whether he had advised the boy to do the same. That would soon be seen.

  It was a given that Oswaldsson would sit in and assist Andreas. If the outcome of that interview was the same, they would be forced to release Andreas, which the attorney very nicely pointed out.

  Thirty-three

  The afternoon meeting, called by Ottosson and the prosecutors Fritzén and Hällström to summarize the investigation of the murder of Bo Gränsberg and subsequent events, Ingegerd Melander’s death, and the murder of Jeremias Kumlin, was a long, trying sitting. It was Friday and everyone had been working intensively the whole week, the majority with hours of overtime. The force was decimated by illness and vacation, and the investigation had swelled out to almost unsurveyable proportions. So despite the widespread fatigue, a summary was needed.

  Ottosson had Sammy Nilsson make a chart on the whiteboard, with photos of those involved and brief information below each. Arrows ran across the board in an intricate system, not entirely clear to everyone, pointing to connections between those involved, established links indicated with solid lines, and others with dotted lines. Question marks, written in red, were abundant.

  The given question was: Were they dealing with the same murderer where Gränsberg and Kumlin were concerned?

  It was not obvious. The only known link that existed between them was a twenty-year-old photo. Henrietta Kumlin had never heard the name Bo Gränsberg. When she and Jeremias met, he had just finished his bandy career. She said that later they went to a few Sirius parties, including an anniversary dinner, but could not recall more than a handful of names, and Gränsberg was not one of them.

  She could not identify him on a photo either, either in the group photo or pictures taken later.

  “So did she recognize the journalist, that Brant?” Riis asked.

/>   Sammy Nilsson shook his head.

  “Where the hell is he?”

  Sammy Nilsson looked at Riis, who had a talent for letting every question sound like an insult or an accusation.

  “In Brazil,” he said, smiling.

  “A fucking Nazi,” Riis exclaimed, whose line of thought was not always easy to follow, but Sammy Nilsson and most of the others understood that he was thinking of the many Nazis who fled to South America in the final stages of or after the Second World War. “What the hell is he doing there?“

  “That’s less interesting,” said Sammy. “I think we can remove him from the investigation. He met Bo Gränsberg in his work. Brant is writing a book about homeless people in different countries, and it was in that connection he visited Gränsberg. They knew each other from before. The notebook we found in Gränsberg’s shed that he got from Brant was to write down some of his experiences.”

  “How the hell do you know that? Have you talked with Brant?”

  “No,” said Sammy Nilsson.

  “You, Haver?” Riis continued, turning around.

  Ola Haver, whose task had been to trace Anders Brant and who to the surprise of everyone except Ottosson had returned to work that morning, shook his head.

  He looked so miserable that even Riis thought it a good idea to leave him alone.

  Sammy Nilsson seized the opportunity, giving Ottosson a quick glance before continuing, hoping that Riis would let go of Brant.

  “Then we have the question of Henrietta’s absolutely certain assertion that the ‘fence man’ was Russian.”

  “Do we know what her husband was working on right now?” asked the prosecutor, Fritzén.

  “Not entirely, and perhaps we’ll never know,” Fredriksson interjected.

  He was the one, along with Olof Myhre at the financial crimes unit, who had taken on Kumlin’s business activities.

  “Jeremias Kumlin owned several companies, some on his own, some with Russian partners, among them this Oleg Fedotov, and almost all of them concerned gas and oil. There are a few exceptions and those involve surveillance systems and alarms. It’s impossible to speculate about what was worrying Kumlin. It’s a tangle of companies, and for that reason there are any number of conceivable explanations,” Fredriksson summarized his and Myhre’s impressions.

  “Are there any relevant documents?”

  “Yes,” said Fredriksson. “A whole room full. He used a room on the top floor as an office. Myhre thought it would take at least a month to go through all the papers, and what might be considered relevant is impossible to say.”

  “A hitman from the East,” the trainee Nyman said for no reason, seeming to find the thought of the Russian mafia appealing.

  “But Kumlin was just about to go to Moscow,” the prosecutor resumed. “He must have prepared for the trip, wouldn’t there be documents packed in his bag?”

  “No, his packing consisted solely of a computer, clothes, and a toiletries case,” said Fredriksson. “We found a locked bag on the garage floor. It’s clear that Kumlin was on his way out and was surprised by the murderer in the garage.”

  “The murderer may have brought the bag with him,” the prosecutor objected.

  “Maybe,” said Fredriksson calmly. “But Henrietta doesn’t think so. Her husband had the habit of getting his bag ready the night before and putting everything by the door to their garage, or by the outside door if he was going to take a taxi. That particular evening, according to his wife, there was only the suitcase with clothing, nothing else, by the door. Kumlin fell asleep early in the evening in front of the TV, was awakened by Henrietta at eleven thirty and then went straight to bed.”

  “But going to see a business partner in Moscow without any documents seems improbable to say the least. He may have had them in his office and brought the papers down in the morning,” Fritzén countered.

  Fredriksson shrugged.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “My theory is that when Kumlin came into the garage the ‘fence man’ was there, ready with the pipe wrench. Then if there were papers or not—”

  “But maybe it was those very papers that were the target of the attack,” the prosecutor persisted.

  “We may never know that,” said Fredriksson.

  “How did he get in?” Fritzén asked.

  “The garage door to the street was unlocked.”

  Fritzén pushed his glasses up onto his head and rubbed his face.

  “What a mess,” he said, and that probably expressed what they were all feeling that Friday afternoon. “An unknown man who disappears. The only thing we have is a pretty good facial description, which fits a few million Russians, and Swedes too for that matter. And Henrietta Kumlin maintains that her husband did not recognize him.”

  Fredriksson had slid far down in his chair—the others were convinced he was dreaming about walks in the forest—so it was Sammy Nilsson who continued the brainstorming.

  “It was probably Jeremias who said that, and we can imagine he did not want to admit it to his wife. He was also against calling the police. He did not even want to go out and ask what the man was doing. Completely passive, in other words, and that’s a little peculiar.”

  “It doesn’t indicate great fear exactly,” said Fritzén. “I don’t think he recognized him or felt any real threat. Then surely he would have acted differently.”

  Submerged in his own musings, Sammy Nilsson thought, where does Brant fit in? Was it too hasty to remove him from the list of interesting persons? He remembered again the material he had found on the journalist’s desk that prompted him to call Ann, but that had been forgotten in her agitated state.

  Russia. Putin. Was there something in that? Anders Brant was an investigative journalist, perhaps he had dug up something that had to do with Kumlin’s business deals, even something about Oleg?

  Sammy Nilsson kept this to himself, and decided to plod ahead on his own on that line of inquiry. This would mean having to get into Brant’s apartment one more time. Nilsson, the building manager, would surely no longer be as accommodating.

  * * *

  After two hours of discussion and arguing, the gathering broke up. Their collective fatigue was monumental, and nothing new had actually emerged, but it had been a necessary session, everyone realized that. Seemingly meaningless talk might waken slumbering insights to life, perhaps not during the meeting, but over the weekend or next week or in a month. That was how police work functioned. It was only Riis who complained loudly of wasted time.

  Sammy Nilsson went past Ann Lindell’s office, but it was empty. He had heard about the disappointing result of the questioning of Magdalena and Andreas Davidsson. Both had been able to leave the building, without Lindell having become any wiser.

  Fredrik Johansson had also been released, after Prosecutor Molin and Lindell had conferred. It could not be proven that Fredrik was the perpetrator. The timing was the reason, and as long as they could not present evidence that Fredrik had returned to the shed in Skärfälten, or that his father’s car had been driven to the garage, they had no case.

  Sammy could imagine Lindell’s disappointment. Twice convinced that the murder was about to be solved, twice forced to see it would not hold. Would there be a third time?

  He sauntered back to his office. It was already three thirty and he should go home. The weekend was earmarked for a visit to Tärnsjö in northwest Uppland, the promised land of mosquitoes, where the livestock went crazy and the camping sites were going out of business due to bloodsucking insects, who propagated at a magnificent rate in all the windings of the nearby Dala River, and then visited the area in dense clouds to attack every living thing.

  It was not an enticing visit, but Angelika’s coworker and close friend was turning forty and having a party. There was no avoiding it. Sammy Nilsson had a feeling he would get drunk, and perhaps that was the only way to put up with the mosquitoes. The Tärnsjö mosquitoes ate insect repellent for breakfast, and mosquito candles and other typ
es of incense only got them excited. But on the other hand, in that part of the landscape they were surely accustomed to alcohol too.

  Just when he had decided to leave the building, the phone rang. He hesitated before answering, but picked up the receiver after the fifth ring. It was Morgansson.

  Sammy Nilsson immediately noticed in the northerner’s serious voice that he had something unusual to tell. The technician said that Lindell had just stopped by and asked to look at the protocol from the investigation of Anders Brant’s apartment. When she left the tech squad she looked completely destroyed, did not say a word to Morgansson or anyone else, simply closed the folder, sat awhile staring blankly, and then more or less staggered away like a sleepwalker.

  Sammy Nilsson realized immediately what had turned her into a zombie, but had no time for a follow-up question before Morgansson barreled ahead with an intensity that Sammy had never experienced before.

  “I’ve also secured a print in Ingegerd Melander’s apartment.” Sammy Nilsson could not avoid noticing how the excitement was mixed with pride. “You know how Bea is, she’s extremely nitpicky. I’ve been trying to get hold of her but haven’t been able to.”

  Sammy Nilsson was not surprised. Beatrice had an unfailing capacity to disappear and cover her tracks when the weekend was approaching.

  “And?”

  “Hold on now,” said Morgansson. “It’s Anders Brant’s fingerprints, a clear index finger on the toilet paper holder.”

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “Yes,” said Morgansson contentedly. “Crystal clear. He used the john at Ingegerd’s.”

  Sammy encouraged the technician to immediately call Ottosson so that he could inform the prosecutors.

  “What are you going to do?” Morgansson asked.

  “Go to Tärnsjö and fight mosquitoes,” Sammy replied. “Well done, Charles! But call now, so you don’t miss Ottosson!”

  Sammy Nilsson hung up and immediately called Lindell’s cell phone. No answer. He went back to her office. Empty. Irresolute, he stood awhile going back and forth before he took the elevator down to the garage.