Love was hard, lots of things were hard, but work was a success. The 528 steps were easy to take. When after 300 steps she passed the burned-down school, she was returned for a moment to her old profession, as a police investigator. Like all the villagers, she had wondered about what happened, if it was an accident or arson. At the scene she had met some of her old colleagues, including from Forensics. They were convinced that a crime had been committed, not least because camps and refugee housing had a tendency to catch fire—two out of three fires are set, Olle Wikman maintained—but they could not speak with certainty based on the technical investigation.
They stood there and discussed the case like they used to. Suddenly Wikman started laughing. “Are you on duty again now, Ann?” He was one of the few who called her by her first name. The next day she’d brought him a couple of cheeses. She knew that he would never gossip at work, about what she’d said, what she looked like nowadays. There were colleagues she missed. And now perhaps her closest ally of all was coming for a visit, Sammy Nilsson.
Should she tell him about the birds? Sometimes he could overreact, and actually there was not much to talk about. First a dead bird in the mailbox, and to be on the safe side one more the following day, if she had the idea that the first one had squeezed down into the mailbox on its own and died there. She had photographed the second one, a dove, but it was definitely not a dove of peace. The neck was broken.
There was someone or more than one who did not wish her well. She was a stranger. A cop, admittedly a former one, but someone who asked around, didn’t sidestep old obstructions and considerations.
Matilda at the creamery had warned her about being too inquisitive, but there was actually nothing that linked the dead birds to her interest in arson. Maybe it was kids who wanted to play a joke and chose an outsider for their tasteless prank?
* * *
“Of course I’m curious,” she said.
“Shall we listen to how he sounds?”
They listened together. Three times. “No,” she said every time after the final words “someone may die.”
“Nothing? You have no idea?” Sammy Nilsson’s voice sounded doubtful. Maybe he’d seen hesitation in her face. She was bad at lying and Sammy was skilled at seeing through liars.
They sat in the kitchen. Sammy had praised the cottage, which he had only visited a few times previously, how nicely she had furnished everything. And it was nice, both inside and out. Against the south wall the first lilacs had started to bud, the summer flowers were planted even though the risk of frost was not over. But every time she got praise the thoughts of loneliness came, also when Sammy made a quick house inspection.
She thought she was doomed to live alone in the nice cottage with its fireplace and its lovely ceramic stoves, scrubbed wood floor and frosted windows in a neat porch, and a garden with flowers, fruit trees, and a potato patch and everything else that was simply there or that she had constructed and planted. A villager, Gösta Friberg, had helped her a lot. He was a retired carpenter and also handy when it came to cultivation.
Erik lived in town, and that was probably the right thing. He was in his first year of high school and had protested about having to change schools, and friends along with it. Now he was living at the home of an old colleague of Lindell’s, with a five-minute walk to school. On weekends he could be convinced to come out to the cottage. Gösta had helped her to renovate and furnish an old shed as a guesthouse. He stayed there, and seemed content. Sometimes he brought friends along from Uppsala. They looked at her and treated her with respect, which she liked.
* * *
“I’ll put coffee on!” She stood up and started filling the coffee maker. She felt his eyes on her back. Her cheeks got warm.
“Have you heard anything about the fire?”
“No,” said Sammy. “You’re the one who’s more likely to hear anything exciting, I mean, since you live in the village.”
“Do you think it’s a local arsonist?”
“We got that feeling early on. We did bring in a gang from the unemployed, young guys, and none of them seemed squeaky clean. It was New Year’s Eve and many of them had been drinking.”
She was grateful that Sammy accepted that she changed tack just like that.
“Things can easily start burning, you mean?”
She turned around.
“It’s an acquaintance, isn’t it?” he said, mercilessly.
“What do you mean?”
“The caller.”
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“Can this have something to do with the fire? Was it someone from the village who called?”
“How should I know that?”
“I think I’ll skip the coffee.”
He stood up and Ann knew that there was no possibility to get him to stay if she didn’t get involved in a discussion, one of those that once upon a time they used to have with complicated occurrences where the questions were piling up.
“Okay,” she said, turning around and turning off the coffee maker.
“Maybe it was someone from that mold factory where you work.”
“If that were so, why would he call?”
“Yes, that’s true, but maybe he’s not at work, maybe on sick leave.”
“Jesus,” said Ann.
“Yes, that was a long shot.” Sammy reached over and pressed the button and the coffee maker responded by immediately coughing to life again.
“Go out and sit on the porch, I’ll be right there,” she said. He obeyed, naturally.
* * *
“No, I don’t know who it is, not sure at all, but the voice reminds me of someone, something.” She made that admission solely for tactical reasons. The question was whether he would let himself be fooled.
“Many years ago?” Sammy Nilsson asked.
Lindell nodded and raised the coffee cup in a toast. She had to watch out, she understood that, they knew each other well and he was an experienced investigator.
“Far too many years ago,” she said.
“An investigation, but which one? A witness? A crime victim? But that…”
“You thought it had something to do with the fire. Is that just because I live here? It may very possibly be so, everyone knows of course that I’m a police officer, was one. You saw that Upsala Nya even published a picture when I was standing by the school making small talk with Wikman, only to get attention and speculate that I was on my way back.”
Despite everything she was glad that they hadn’t mentioned that she lived in the village.
He observed her thoughtfully. “Think about it, listen to the voice. You can keep the USB stick with the call.”
“I’ll listen,” she said and knew that it was both true and false. The conversation was very brief, and there was not really much to brood about, but perhaps there was something hidden to pick up on. Something that wasn’t obvious at first.
“But what old investigation would it be? If the voice belongs to a relatively young man, thirty at most.”
“I don’t know,” said Lindell, cursing her passive tone of voice.
“Someone who trusted you.”
“There are probably a few,” said Lindell.
“A young person.”
“I’ll listen, I promise. If I think of anything, I’ll call you right away. Okay?”
“How’s Edvard doing? Does he still live out there on the island?”
“It wasn’t one of his boys who called, if that’s what you’re thinking!”
“Which one of his boys? One of them has had a few interactions with us, perhaps you know that?”
She did not reply. What was there to say?
“He’s involved in one of those acronyms, NRM, or was it the Swedes Party? They change names all the time. He was involved in beating up a guy in the middle of town.”
“An investigation that wasn’t one.”
Sammy Nilsson smiled. “Fortunately the local press got involved, so we had to pick i
t up again.”
She knew that they shared an understanding here, that the whole thing had been mishandled from the first moment. It was an obvious case, there were willing witnesses, it happened in public and even cops were filmed. It was only after Upsala Nya wrote about it all that things started happening and the investigation was opened.
“He wasn’t one of those who were convicted, but he was involved in the group, you can say.”
“Bad enough,” said Ann. She knew that Edvard was ashamed as a dog at his son’s involvement in various racist and Nazi groups. He himself was raised in a Social Democratic farmworker home, and like his father and grandfather was active in the union. His sons’ mother blamed their political wandering in the desert on Edvard, that he abandoned the marriage and home and thereby left Jens and Jerker adrift. There was a grain of truth in the criticism, he hadn’t been a good father, or rather: He had been a fairly good father, until Ann Lindell showed up and unraveled his life.
He’d been seduced, they had been seduced, and it was probably not so strange, but the force with which the collision happened was baffling to those around them. He broke off from everything, left the work that he’d inherited, his family and house, and rented a room on the top floor of an old estate on Gräsö outside Öregrund. Viola lived on the ground floor, an old archipelago woman of a rare caliber. When she died he inherited the property and a little land, mostly stony hills, meadows, and overgrown ditches, a number of small islands and rocks and fishing rights.
Slowly but surely he became an islander and during that journey he lost his sons. Lindell had seen that early on, but there was not much she could do.
Sammy’s theory that it was Jens or Jerker who called was unlikely. They had never liked her.
* * *
Ann played the call again and felt that she had to struggle against the tears, looked at the hand resting on the table, the cheese hand, as her son Erik called it. Everything had turned out so different, but now the old days came rushing toward her and from all directions. She turned the hand, studied the lines, the police hand. Her colleagues stepped forward, first the old ones, but also the others, Haver and Fredriksson, even the sly Evert Lundkvist with a past in the secret police, with whom she worked in the investigation where Edvard tramped into her life. He had found a young man in the forest, murdered and barely concealed under a spruce tree, and the macabre find started a process that he was never really able to explain to her. Ann had come to the insight that Edvard lacked the tools for analyzing that journey. There was nothing like that in his family, in his culture. There you worked, suppressing everything that could obstruct your livelihood. For that reason many times he was incapable of stepping right. That he nonetheless didn’t stumble all too many times was due to a kind of morality and pride that also was part of the Risberg inheritance.
“That’s how you travel,” he’d said once, when he had been lured out into deep water by Ann, “without knowing where to. Some are built for outings, carefree in a way that I can admire. I’m not. I was happy as a worker on a farm, proud of my father and grandfather, but suddenly it was as if we weren’t worth anything. Our efforts, I mean. It was enough to read the headlines, or look at all the damned game shows on TV, to get that. I was active in the union, but then the local division was suddenly shut down. I was happy with Marita, but we went our separate ways. Can you understand?”
Then he fell silent. Go on, continue! Ann wanted to shout. Talk with me! But he fell silent.
“You still loved her when you moved to Gräsö, is that it?” she asked, but got no answer. She wanted to hear it, wanted to get him to take on part of the guilt that things went the way they did between them.
* * *
She listened to the audio recording one more time, like someone who can’t stop picking at a scab. Should she tell Sammy? No, she decided for the umpteenth time, that would be betraying a confidence. She had to search for the boy herself. Well, not “boy.” Now he was a young man.
* * *
Her free afternoon was ruined. She had looked forward to cleaning up in the flower beds, perhaps plant the perennials she had bought. The bags had been standing for several days outside the porch, with the blossoming bleeding heart that waved seductively, but she stayed sitting in the garden, rocking back and forth. Edvard had a good laugh when he saw that she’d bought a hammock, and she felt a little ridiculous, but mostly wounded by his merriment. She could not say why she’d bought it. In a hammock you rock, and in motion it’s harder to drink wine. And it’s impossible to place a table in front of a hammock, in other words there’s no place for a glass.
In the trees and the thicket the finches were talking away. Ann went in and poured a glass of wine, took a sip, but left glass and bottle behind in the pantry. She brought the phone with her to hopefully find the desperado, as Sammy had called the man who was looking for her.
Seven
“Stay with me, linger here, while I still have hands, skin, and body.” With one hand she stroked her belly, the other was raised in front of the window. Her whisper was inaudible to Edvard, but even so he turned around where he was crouching by the potato patch. His one hand rested flat on the ground, his eyes were closed. Was he gauging the temperature, or what was he doing? Was it a kind of primitive ritual, where contact would be established? She knocked on the windowpane.
“It’s time,” he said when he came into the kitchen. “I can help you trench. It won’t take long.”
Let it happen slowly, she almost blurted out. He smiled; maybe he was thinking about potatoes, maybe he was thinking about her. Did he see something in her eyes and movements? Perhaps she emitted an aroma, which she’d read that butterflies do when they want to attract a partner.
“It’s a good variety,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Maris Bard,” he said, taking one of the sandwiches she had made. He had dirt on the back of his hand. “But you should have pre-sprouted.”
“I did,” she said. “The pantry is full of egg cartons with potatoes.”
That was Gösta the carpenter’s idea.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, taking a bite. She took it as a compliment and felt how she blushed, and got irritated at herself, but not really. She wanted to be there, in the borderland, like a half-grown young girl, on her way to conquering something. Something big, significant, even essential.
“There’s room for a late variety too. Asterix is good. Red-skinned. I plant it every year. It likes the soil you have.”
“What kind of soil do I have?”
“Light.”
He smiled at her. “And you should be happy about that,” he added.
“I am.”
Something in her voice betrayed her, because he looked up. He was often insensitive to moods, but sometimes he was like a finely calibrated seismograph, whose needle shook a little at the slightest tremor.
“Asterix,” she repeated, to hide her embarrassment.
He finished the last of the sandwich and licked his fingers. “Egg and caviar,” he said contentedly.
* * *
While they planted potatoes she told him about Sammy Nilsson’s visit and the audio file he brought with him. Edvard had met him on several occasions and Sammy was the colleague of hers he liked best.
He made the final furrow straight as an arrow before he commented.
“Do you know whose voice it is?”
“Maybe,” said Ann.
“What will you do?”
“I don’t really know. That’s a life I’ve left behind.”
“Didn’t you play private detective a little when the school burned down?”
“I just asked around a little.”
“And what did you come up with?”
“That the arsonist is in the village.”
“Maybe the call was about that?”
“Sammy was thinking that way too.”
She placed the last potatoes in the final furrow. She did it with care and
strove to keep an exact distance between the tubers.
“There now,” Edvard said, picking up the rake.
She remained crouching a moment before she straightened her back. She studied the grip of his hands around the shaft and was struck by how easy, almost unresisting, everything seemed to be for Edvard, in any event as long as it was about tools and gear. And he did it nicely, stroking the rake with precise movements over the hills of earth, sometimes tapping a little clod that willingly fell apart, covered the seed potatoes with careful pulls so as not to injure the sprouts, evened out and left a completely flat surface behind him.
“Water in two days,” he said.
He picked up the egg cartons that had held the seed potatoes and carried them over to the trash barrel by the road, while Ann let her thoughts wander to the man who had called. If it really was who she thought it was, he had nothing to do with the village. She had a hard time seeing him in the country at all. How many years ago was it, maybe fifteen? They had met a few times since then, most recently four years ago. That was before she resigned from the force. He had looked a bit scruffy, resembling his uncle in that respect, but said he’d gotten a job after a period of unemployment. They’re building, he had commented. He lived in the same neighborhood where he grew up. Safest that way, he’d said with a laugh. Safety wasn’t exactly something you associated with him.
A light soil, she repeated silently to herself. A light life with a light soil. She knew that the season was far advanced. Gösta had got his Early Puritans in two or three weeks ago, but that didn’t matter. It really didn’t matter if any tops came up, or if there was any harvest to brag about. Wrong! She changed her mind immediately. It would be great if their joint exertions could produce an amazing outcome. Something to talk about, even remember.
It felt strange to work together with Edvard. As if they were a couple, like many years ago. They had collaborated nicely, but she couldn’t say anything about that, so as not to appear childish, or rather, because she and no one else had seen to it that the collaboration was broken.
The Night of the Fire Page 3