“Why don’t you ask him?”
“He seems to be important in the village.”
Gösta did not reply. He set aside the saw and started cleaning the bench with a minimal brush, which had been around for a few years.
“What did your father do?” Ann asked, making use of her old slugger tactic, to unexpectedly change the subject in order to create a vague feeling of uncertainty.
“He was a country mail carrier, not here, but over toward Österby. He didn’t want to deliver mail to neighbors and people he knew. Over the years a mail carrier learns quite a bit about the customers, especially here in the country. A person should think about that.”
Gösta continued talking about the conditions of the country mail carrier, while he made his way out of the workshop, forcing Ann to follow. Ann was convinced that out there he would surely find new threads to spin further on.
He’s skillful, she thought, listening with half an ear, while she wondered about his discomfort when there was talk of Waldemar Mattsson.
“It’ll go fast now,” said Gösta, pointing toward the apple trees, whose rose-white petals created an insubstantial veil on the ground.
“I’m thinking about the village,” said Ann. “And…”
“Don’t do that,” he interrupted. “Live here, work and live here, but don’t think! And stop asking everyone about everything.”
“You mean the fire?”
“This village is doomed to go under, it has gone under!”
She did not say anything, waiting for a continuation that didn’t come, before he returned to the workshop, bolted the door, and closed the padlock.
“They won’t leave anything alone these days. Edlund never closed his door and didn’t lose a single tool. Now they steal everything! Bicycles, copper gutters, lawnmowers, mailboxes, and even the flowers on the grave.”
“Your wife’s grave?”
He nodded. “Ice begonias. I had planted white and red ones. They’re simple, but she liked begonias. And then they stand up well against rain.”
He was truly skillful, if the talk about the grave was an evasive maneuver. How could she bring up Mattsson again?
“Who stole them?”
He gave her an angry look in response.
“Would you like some fresh herring?”
She held out the bucket.
“I’ll bring the bucket back later,” he said while he viewed the contents. “Thanks,” he added, but did not look the least bit grateful.
* * *
All the herring was doled out, and that felt good. If she got hungry there was filet. She plopped down in the hammock with a notepad of the type she’d used as a police officer. Blank pages. A sudden gust of wind passed through the garden and brought with it a scent of the sweetness of spring. “It’ll go fast now,” she said, repeating Gösta’s words.
“I want someone,” she mumbled, but expertly suppressed the thought. “Two witnesses,” she wrote. She tried to remember how Bertil had put it. Didn’t he say that the two didn’t know each other, or else that they didn’t even know about each other? What did that mean? Two who didn’t know each other and who were in the school, or outside the school, on New Year’s Eve. An outsider, in other words. There were actually only two alternatives. Either it was one of the refugees, or else it was a temporary visitor, maybe one of the young people who’d been at the party on the other side of the road. How many were there? Ann had no idea, but she’d heard that the party started early and went on until the school was in flames. She got the impulse to give Sammy a call, but decided to wait. It was still Saturday. He ought to be able to produce a list of the partygoers. But how could Bertil know about the person and what he had possibly seen? There was only one answer: They had run into each other in the crowd of people that gathered on the road outside the school, and perhaps intoxicated, perhaps confused and in shock, he had told Bertil what he’d seen. Was it a “he”? Probably. A young guy who then, when he sobered up and realized the consequences if he snitched, did not want to tell the police anything.
Okay, I’ll call Sammy on Monday, she continued her inner dialogue. The other one then? Was it Bertil himself? No, she decided. Was it Gösta? He lived next door to the school and was the person with the best view of the back of the schoolyard. But the carpenter had maintained that he was asleep and that as usual he woke up at five o’clock in the morning, and by then the whole thing was over. His bedroom faced south, the school north, so it wasn’t impossible, but how likely? There must have been a lot of commotion. She herself had been at a party in Uppsala, but thought that she would have woken up when the fire department showed up much later, if not before. They had driven with their sirens on, Astrid had told her that, how she sat up terrified in bed, thought she’d woken up from a bad dream, but then realized that the bellowing of the sirens was reality. Shouldn’t Gösta have woken up too? In principle it was then too late to witness how the fire started, but this stubborn assertion that he slept heavily the whole night, which Sammy had revealed that Gösta had testified, did not give a good impression.
But if he really was telling the truth and slept through the night, who was the witness that Bertil talked about? Yet another question mark. There wasn’t much to write down on the notepad. “Sammy Monday,” she wrote a bit superfluously.
* * *
Now it was time to confirm what she believed. She looked for his name on the internet. There were two of them, one of whom was on Molngatan in the Gränby area, where she seemed to recall that he lived. Could she call on a Saturday? She realized how silly the thought was, but perhaps it was a way to try to postpone the whole thing.
She entered the number. He answered on the third ring.
“Hi, this is Ann Lindell.”
There was a rattling sound as if he’d stumbled on something, and a swear word was heard.
“Have you been looking for me?”
It took a few seconds before he answered. “It may be too late.” It was obvious that he was drunk.
“What’s too late?” That old tiredness, the police tiredness, suddenly came over her. Why must it always be so tough? she thought.
A drawn-out sigh came in response, and then nothing. She waited.
“Ann, it’s been a long time.”
“How are you doing?”
“I think about Dad sometimes. You know Dad.”
“Me too,” said Ann, and let the whole thing go as it would. She was no longer a police officer, nothing was documented, she couldn’t be criticized after the fact for anything, and she was aware that sometimes it was good to lure the other one out onto thin ice. Sometimes then everything could burst. Berglund had worked that way, borderline sensitive, but with a different form of address. But then he also had a different weight. Maybe he was the one who inspired her, not hesitating for what was low or elevated, where moods were allowed free play.
“And about you too,” she added.
That boy, she thought, Justus, that little guy. She remembered his despair, his incredible sorrow and longing for his murdered father, Little John. The two of them had nurtured a dream about opening a store for aquarium fish, his father’s great interest. He was an expert on cichlids, one of the foremost she’d understood later, but he had supported himself as a welder.
It had been a difficult investigation, where she learned an incredible amount about Uppsala. The tragedy seemed fated. Berglund thought that there were doomed families, who slowly but mercilessly were broken, ground down by the state of things. Justus’s family had been like that.
“How is Berit doing?”
He sobbed and let out a hiccoughing sound. Was he too drunk to talk? Maybe it wasn’t a good idea after all to call on a Saturday.
“Mom’s not doing good,” he said in a sharp voice, as if he wanted to accuse someone of having inflicted illness on her. Ann didn’t want to hear. Not now.
“You called,” she reminded him. “It was Sammy Nilsson you spoke with. You don’t remember him.�
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“No.”
“He’s good, you could have talked with him.”
“Listen! What do you think about all this?”
He moaned as if he was stuck in a vise.
“What do you mean?”
He did not reply.
“Shall we meet on Monday? I’m going into town.”
“Where the hell do you live?” Ann was not in any publicly accessible register, could not be searched for on the internet with information about date of birth, telephone number, or address.
“In the country. Shall we meet at five o’clock?”
“But, I can’t … we can’t…”
“You don’t want to be seen with a cop, even if it’s a former one, is that what you mean?”
“Something like that.”
“Come to the Linnaeus Garden at five o’clock, I’ll be sitting there on a bench. I don’t think any of your buddies go there.”
“A garden? Where the hell is it?”
“Svartbäcksgatan. You’ll have to look it up. Shall we do that?”
She got him to repeat the time and place, clicked off the call, and got up from the hammock.
* * *
It was an at once familiar and strange smell that struck Ann when she went back into the house. The herring trimmings, it struck her first, but hadn’t she wrapped those in newspaper and then put them in a garbage bag? It was still in the kitchen, but the strange thing was that in the kitchen the odor was considerably fainter than in the hall. She took the bag, looked around, went into the living room, returned to the kitchen, sniffed, looked around again. An indefinable feeling of discomfort came over her. If there was anything she disliked it was unpleasant odors. That was one of the things she had a hard time with in police work, the smell of unaired, stinking apartments and houses, with ashtrays filled to the brim, rotting food scraps, even a corpse in more or less decomposed condition. In that respect Sammy, but Berglund too, had been better, and many times they’d taken over and sent her out in the fresh air.
There was no cat in the house, so she went to the trash barrel. Back in the hall she noticed the smell again. A mouse, she decided. After finding droppings in the kitchen a week earlier she had set out rat poison, which now had evidently produced an effect.
Nine
Ann had extremely diffuse memories of the man who became her son’s father. It was a one-night stand. She remembered his first name, and that he was an accountant, or claimed to be. Was he good in bed? No, not particularly. Was he handsome? She didn’t remember, thin-haired maybe, fairly tall, light trousers that he had problems getting down and off. They were drunk. She was horny, or something like that. That was all.
She hated him. Maybe a bit unjustified, but she couldn’t escape that feeling. She didn’t want to hate, not even loathe, simply forget. She was convinced that he didn’t know that he was a father.
Now she was waiting at the bus stop for their offspring. Erik. He was strong, that was the word that came to her when friends asked. Because they knew, but thank God not all of it, about what he had to experience when she was down on her knees, burdened by guilt, work, and out-of-control alcohol intake. It was a miracle that he still wanted to have contact with her, but he’d always been loyal. On the other hand, what alternative was there? He had obviously wondered about his father, but it had never been particularly dramatic. “Everyone has a dad,” he’d say, “even if they don’t show up.” Ann waited for him to confront her in earnest. She was convinced that moment would come.
When he was fifteen she had presented the proposal about moving. He put his foot down at once, quite vocally too, and explained that he never wanted to move to “the sticks.” She understood that very well, but he couldn’t live alone in Uppsala. “I’ll drive you,” she said. He was in ninth grade, he had lots of friends, and played junior hockey in Sirius with some success.
“Every day?”
“Every day. So you won’t have to change schools. And you can keep playing hockey. Then, when you start high school, we’ll figure something out.”
“There are practices too, not just matches,” he said.
“As if I didn’t know that, I drive you quite a bit already.”
“Okay,” said Erik.
So that’s how it was. It was tough, but it worked. A win on points. She drank less too, when she had to get there on time or pick him up in the evening. She was often completely beat, the new job was also physical in a way that she wasn’t used to, but she gained his confidence that year, it felt that way. They were doing well together, and Ann could feel a bit of happiness and peace for the first time in a very long while. The fact was that Erik’s grades improved considerably. The “sticks” were so boring that for lack of anything else he studied a bit more.
She thought that he liked the arrangement. That slightly meditative feature that he’d always had was reinforced. On the other hand he was happier, he dared to trust his mother, avoided anxiously watching and adapting to her moods.
Now he was living in the city, and came out when he wanted to and stayed in his own cabin. Sometimes he showed up unannounced, and then he walked from the bus stop. It struck her that he did that solely to please her, as if to say: I like you after all.
All young people should have that independence, she thought, when she saw the bus appear on the highway. She understood that it was also a kind of freedom from her, but she told herself that it didn’t hurt anymore. Sometimes she felt that she gave him too much freedom, but she dismissed that thought.
He was the one who had called unexpectedly and said he was coming out. “Is there anything in particular?” she had asked, but he simply said that he wanted to get a little fresh air. Then he’d laughed, as if to play down his statement, which could be interpreted as that he wanted to see her.
* * *
“What’s that smell?” was the first thing he asked. The stench in the house had increased.
“Maybe a mouse that died,” said Ann.
“A mouse? More like a dead hippo that’s rotting,” Erik said. He walked around in the house, simply to decide that it was worst in the hall.
“Have you checked upstairs?”
Ann shook her head. It didn’t feel good. Something was wrong. She realized that it couldn’t possibly be a mouse.
“Mice that eat poison dry up,” said Erik.
Ann peeked up the stairs to the top floor, where her bedroom was.
“Yuck,” she said. “Stow away your things now, and I’ll make something to eat.” That was a signal that made him respond. He was always hungry. He took down the key to the cabin.
She unwrapped the veal entrecôte, which she had taken out earlier, and set it on the cutting board. A neat little 450-gram piece. Erik stood outside his cabin with his hand on the doorknob. It struck her that he was a handsome boy. She pulled open the kitchen drawer and saw immediately that the knife was missing. The best one, which she’d bought in a specialty shop in Lisbon, the one she always used for meat. Now it wasn’t in its place. She looked up and out the window. Erik had gone in and shut the door. Now he was no doubt sitting in front of the computer. She searched through the drawer again, took out the few kitchen utensils, eyeballed the counter and the sink. The knife was gone. She was always careful with that knife, she washed it by hand, dried it off, and stored it in a cork case, advised by the salesperson not to let it bump against other utensils unprotected. “This knife is the most important tool in your home,” he’d said. It had been priced accordingly, 105 euros.
She turned around. Someone had moved the knife, maybe stolen it. The front door had been unlocked while she went around doling out herring. An hour’s absence and that was more than enough for an intrusion. Someone had seen her leave the house and taken the opportunity, was that it?
A freezing cold spread in her body, as if a contrast fluid was being pumped into her veins. Her muscles tensed. The anger would come, she knew that, but now it was only a budding terror that was growing ever stron
ger. A knife, why would you steal a knife? The computer was on the table, the thief hadn’t bothered about that. A knife.
Was the intruder still in the house? She took the vegetable knife down from the knife holder on the wall. It was far from as imposing as the Portuguese meat knife, but the blade was about ten centimeters long in any event and well sharpened. She had been a lone wolf in her work with the police, going her own way many times, and she had nearly paid with her life. Now she was in her own home, surrounded by an increasing odor of decomposition and obliteration, because of course it was death that stank. I’m calm, she told herself. I’m calm, nothing can make me paralyzed.
The stairs creaked as usual. The smell increased with every step she took. The bedroom door was wide open. The door to the other room, which was mainly used for storage, was closed. Centuries ago she had taken part in an exercise at school, how you go in and search a house. Twenty-five years later none of this actually had any significance. Now it was just her, alone with a vegetable knife. She breathed deeply, tested the blade against her left index finger, squeezed the handle, feeling the sweat beading on her hairline.
It was on its back, and strangely enough gave a human impression. The four legs stuck straight up, as if it were participating in an exercise session. The belly was cut open and in the middle the knife was thrust in. This was perhaps what made her the most upset; how would she ever be able to use it again? How would she be able to cut up a piece of meat without thinking about the dead badger in her bed, without associating it with the stench? The hell she could!
She took out her phone and photographed it from all angles. It struck her that perhaps she had seen the badger earlier; could it be the one that was lying a bit down the road the other day, right at the edge of the ditch, swollen up with its paws in the air? Someone had picked up the badger, dragged it into her house, set it on her bed, and stuck the knife in it, releasing a loathsome stench.
After a minute or so, while her disgust and agitation had free rein, she wondered whether it was worth the trouble to call Wikman at Forensics. But she abandoned the thought; they had other, more important things to do.
The Night of the Fire Page 5