“Would you like milk?”
He nodded. Even though his wife had run away and the night had been terrible, he felt content. After that they talked about everyday things and each had a cookie. Sammy asked if she and Andreas had a steady relationship. “Sort of,” she answered, taking a tissue from a holder and quietly blowing her nose.
“How long have you been together?”
“We met at a party, it was Christmas lunch, last year. It was mostly men, some kind of gathering within the construction industry. His brother drives a truck too, and he thought I should come along so it wouldn’t be so heavily male.”
“Tell me about last Saturday. I know that my colleague Brundin has asked, but we have to be absolutely certain about everything, about all the details. This concerns arson and murder.”
“Andreas came here, we’d decided to talk a little. He helped me carry in a few packages that I bought at IKEA, and then we drove to Öregrund. There’s a fairly new restaurant there that I wanted to check out. It’s called Bojabäs.”
“Why did you want to check it out?”
“I work at a company called Windwave, it has to do with energy supply and control systems for wind and hydropower, and we have some customers who come for visits. Customers who perhaps like to eat. My job in part is to take care of the logistics, arrange the details, make sure they’re comfortable.”
“I’m sure you do that well,” said Sammy but immediately regretted his flattering comment and hurried to ask another question. “You got there around six, six thirty?” Therese nodded.
“What did you have to eat?”
“Fish stew,” she said with a smile.
“When did you come back here?”
“Eight o’clock maybe.”
“Who drove?”
“Andreas.”
“And then you were here for the rest of the evening and night?”
She took out another tissue.
“I don’t know,” said Therese, blowing her nose.
“How is it that you don’t know?”
“I was asleep, I was really tired, I was taking medicine. For allergy, that is.”
Sammy waited with a new question. The silence in the kitchen chafed. He tried to imagine the two together in bed.
“You think that Andreas took off during the night,” he said at last.
“I don’t know,” she repeated.
“Is there anything that suggests that he didn’t stay here the whole night?”
“He…”
“I mean, why are you unsure?”
“It’s more a feeling. I thought … maybe I was dreaming. He was cold.”
“What do you mean?”
“At night when he crawled in next to me, his body was cold.”
“As if he’d been outside, you mean?”
She nodded.
“He wanted … but I think I pushed him away from me … maybe it was a dream.”
“Had you been drinking?”
“Wine.”
“How much?” he asked, even though he knew. Brundin had checked with the serving personnel at Bojabäs.
“Quite a bit.”
A whole bottle of white wine, Brundin had said.
“What was he like in the morning?”
“Normal, I think. He left early, so I don’t really know. He’d parked the truck in Österbybruk, a friend of his was going to do some work on it, if I understood right.”
So many threads to pull on, so many people who are dragged along, thought Sammy, feeling for the first time the effects of the restless night and early wakening.
“Would you like more coffee?”
“No, thanks. One thing, it pains me to ask, but I’m compelled: Have you seen any violent tendencies in Andreas?”
Therese squeezed the tissue in her hand, giving him a quick glance before she looked down at the table. Sammy immediately sensed that the question was troubling to answer.
“I’ve met him and he seems to be a good guy, but you know him better, of course. People do have many sides.”
“When he gets stressed … not that he’s ever hit me, but I get scared anyway. He moves aggressively, raises his voice, shouts out things.”
“Has he been stressed lately?”
“A little. I think it has to do with the farm. He doesn’t get along that well with his father.”
“How is that? Tell me.”
“I don’t really know that much, Andreas is quiet about that sort of thing, but it’s about what will happen with the farm, the agriculture that is. Now it will probably get even worse, with Daniel gone.”
“Is Andreas not that interested? Maybe he would rather be diving in tropical waters.”
“You know about that?” said Therese.
“Did he ever argue with Daniel?”
“They were different, as different as brothers can be. I think their father wants too much.”
“Does he ever discuss politics?”
“No, never. He turns off the TV whenever that comes up. The other day he said how boring Sweden is going to be now that there’ll be an election.”
“Are you interested in politics?”
She shook her head. “Should I be?”
“Thanks, Therese, for … Now I have to get going.”
She looked up in surprise. “You don’t want to ask any more questions?”
He shook his head. “Do you have anything to add?”
“No.”
“You can always be in touch. You have my number on the card. Whenever you want.”
She smiled and inspected the card.
“Can I email you?”
“Whenever you want.”
Knock it off! thought Sammy. She’s a lot younger, and you’re married. Or was he, hadn’t Angelika run away? With a few quick steps he left Therese on the stairs, as if to show that he really was in a hurry, but then stopped by the gate and turned around. She was still standing in the doorway, with a cautious smile, as if she didn’t know who she was saying goodbye to: a police detective who might arrest her boyfriend or a middle-aged man who clearly was interested in her.
In the car came the anger. What a fool you are! He struck the steering wheel and momentarily inspected himself in the rearview mirror. You miss the most obvious questions, the ones that have to be asked, and why? Did she fake you out? No, you missed because you’re afraid, afraid to no longer have anyone to curl up next to. You’re a bad policeman, you’re a pathetic man who’s been abandoned by his woman, by his child’s mother. He kept intoning his self-pitying litany. He drove off but could not keep from placing his hand on his crotch.
“You’re thinking with your dick,” he said, but knew that wasn’t the whole truth.
Twenty-Six
“I knew it would turn out bad, but not that Lovisa would have to die.”
Kalle Friman looked unusually healthy and tanned, his body sinewy and flexible in a way that Sammy could envy. But that was on the outside.
“She was supposed to go with you to the Caribbean?”
“That was the idea, or Malin and I thought that.…”
Friman continued his restless promenade around the yard, and Sammy simply had to keep up, even though he would have preferred sitting down somewhere to talk.
“When she was little she wanted to be an archaeologist. She made her own artifacts, which she dug up and displayed.” He threw out a hand toward the remnants of a vegetable patch, and Sammy guessed that was where the excavations had taken place.
“What made her join up with the right-wing radicals? She associated with people from the Nordic Resistance Movement, is that right?”
Friman stopped, appeared to consider a response, but shook his head.
“Deep down she was a nice girl.”
“When did it start?”
“In high school. She met a guy she worshipped, but he was probably moderately interested, so to get closer to him she read his lips and then repeated his racist nonsense. Today he’s some kind of Sturmfü
hrer in Dalarna, Ludvika I think. I saw his name and photo in a report that Expressen did. He already had a lengthy record with you all.”
Kalle Friman mentioned his name, and Sammy took out a notepad and wrote it down, even though it probably had no significance for the events in Tilltorp.
“She talked about the threats against Sweden, but she had everything a young woman could … I mean, what was threatening her? Is it the immigrants who shut down everything reasonable, the post office and the railways and all that sort of thing, you know, healthcare, not to mention the retirees?”
Sammy had heard that argument previously, but it was as if it didn’t take with Sweden Democrats and others. Common sense didn’t always get across.
“She was deceived.”
“But every person must make their own choices, right?”
“She was kind. It was that goddamned Nazi who stuffed her full of shit.”
“When you’re not out sailing in the Caribbean, what do you do?”
“I was a survey manager at Svevia, site measurements and precision leveling. Now I don’t know anymore. I thought when I was on the plane here: Sell the shit in Sweden, stay over there.”
“Your son then, Sam?”
“What about him?”
“Will he stay here, in Sweden?”
“He doesn’t fit in the Caribbean.”
“He’s not your son, if I understood the matter right?”
“A so-called bonus child,” said Friman, making no effort to conceal the sarcasm.
Sammy told him that someone had been staying in the cellar during the winter. Kalle Friman looked perplexed, but didn’t seem particularly upset.
“Did you hear anything from your bonus child while you were sailing?”
“No, nothing, and we didn’t expect to. Maybe Malin had some email contact, but she didn’t say anything about it. Sam is special, but you’ve probably understood that.”
“I got the impression that he was afraid of you, that he would get yelled at if he was in the house too much. Was that the case, do you think?”
Kalle Friman did not reply, instead directed his attention to a rusty hedge trimmer he found in the grass, no doubt left behind since last fall. He threw it aside, indifferent where it landed, and it reinforced Sammy’s impression that Friman had mentally already left the house in Tilltorp. Now that his daughter was dead there was nothing that connected him to the village, or Sweden, he had hinted several times.
“They’re beautiful when they blossom,” he said, pointing toward a carpet of sturdy leaves growing in the shade from a hedge on the north side of the house. “But they spread like crazy. Comfrey.”
Sammy had to walk faster to keep up when Friman set off again. “Have you questioned Sam?”
“About what?”
“Whether he set fire to Mattsson’s house.”
“You think that?”
“He hated Lovisa and he’s crazy enough to do such a thing.”
“What does your wife say about … such a scenario?”
“She doesn’t say anything. She just grieves.”
“How long will you be in Sweden?”
“No one knows.”
“Why did he hate his half sister?”
“Because she was smarter.”
Was she? Sammy had that comment on the tip of his tongue, but kept it to himself.
“Sam thinks shallow. He has his little den and his bloody zoo that he builds up, he’s on that level. He’s never had a further thought about what happens in the area, or even a few kilometers away, never expressed a single dream beyond getting more rabbits and all that other stuff, peacocks and donkeys, as if he doesn’t understand that Route 288 leads farther out into the world. Maybe he’s happy there, in his little world, what do I know? Sometimes he takes the moped and drives to Gimo to have pizza! Then he feels adventurous.”
“He mostly seemed scared, if I’m going to be honest,” said Sammy, who was starting to get tired of the self-important sailor.
“Yes, it’s clear, he thinks that you’re going to blame him.”
“Did you usually blame him?”
Kalle Friman gave him a look.
“What do you mean?”
When Sammy did not answer immediately, which was perhaps his all-too-common tactic, Friman laughed. But it was a dry laugh, free of all affection, and for a moment Sammy could glimpse something in his facial features that Bertil Efraimsson had talked about, which made Friman not treat Sam Rothe well, but sadistically instead.
“Sam knows he’s not very bright, he knows that he constantly messes up, makes mistakes, says wrong things, misunderstands. Of course he’s scared. It’s only the rabbits he’s not afraid of.”
“Did you hit him?”
“You can go to hell!”
“I will, but I really don’t like your way of describing your stepson. Perhaps he’s not the smartest but he is a person. You look down on the weak.”
Friman looked at him with indifference.
“Just like Lovisa did,” Sammy added, and left Kalle Friman. In the future Bodin could handle any talk with the Caribbean.
“Are you some kind of bloody thought police?” Friman screamed after him.
* * *
At Lindell’s things looked calm. Maybe she’s working with her cheese, thought Sammy, but he drove into her driveway anyway. There he stayed in the car. He wanted to think, wanted to be logical, but he was too tired. What he did understand, however, was that a breakthrough would be needed soon. The fire in the smithy was the key, he was sure of it. The motive was obvious: Daniel Mattsson, considered by most to be one of the perpetrators behind the school fire, would be punished, his house would be burned down. Whether the arsonist knew that Daniel, and Lovisa, were actually in the smithy was unknown. The house would be burned down as a warning, or as an outburst of desperate, misdirected lust for revenge. It pointed in a single direction. One of the refugees had returned to the village to take vengeance.
Or! He struck his hand on the steering wheel to underscore his opposition to overly quick and simple analysis. Or else the target was Daniel, and for quite different reasons, and Lovisa became an unexpected victim, or else maybe she was the target, for unknown reasons, and Daniel was simply finished off in the process.
Sammy closed his eyes and leaned his head against the neck rest. A buzzing fly was his company in the car. He was aware that his trains of thought were miserably primitive and one-track, that he was only repeating what he and Bodin had already thrashed over. Sometimes repetition was required, but shouldn’t he be able to add some new idea or angle?
“Angelika,” he said out loud. “What are you doing?” Mölle, who the hell wants to live in that hole? Her sister and brother-in-law evidently. Sammy loathed people from Skåne, and the only reason was the bona fide couple on the Bjäre peninsula. Now he could add additional demerits as far as Sweden’s southernmost province was concerned.
The night before he had spoken with his daughter. As usual she was calm and collected. It was impossible to understand where she got that characteristic from, and she thought that Sammy just had to wait. Angelika would come back, or not, was her laconic comment. “And what do you yourself want, you haven’t seemed that engaged?” she’d added. Where did she get all these words from?
So wrong and tiresome, he thought, that the two of us are on the brink of divorce like so many others our age, as if it were built in. Some of their acquaintances still stayed together and would probably do so for the rest of their lives, the way it’s said when the promises are made.
What do you yourself want? If he only knew. The fly buzzed, moving restlessly around. Sammy opened his eyes and found himself being observed by Ann. She looked worried. He opened the car door.
“Are you just tired or are you not feeling well?”
“Both,” he said, laboriously getting out of the car.
“Has she left you?”
“Skåne.”
“Come,” she said, almost
lovingly, and took his arm. For a moment he wanted to put his arms around her. “Let’s sit down, I’ll fix something.”
He trudged after her; she definitely smelled of cheese. “Sit down in the hammock,” she said, pointing, as if he’d forgotten where it was. He obeyed. It already felt better. Solitude was not good. Even so he was a lone wolf, he had realized that more and more, but now he wanted someone to listen to his lamentation, because he wanted to complain. It wasn’t his fault that frost had crept into their marriage. Hadn’t he always been there, been her confidant all those years?
Ann returned with two mugs. The policemen’s cure, coffee. The stomach’s curse. Coffee.
“Tell me about it,” she said, and he talked, and talked.
“Get a divorce,” said Ann mercilessly when he had come to the end of their story of suffering. “It’s been going that way so long.”
“You’ve never liked her.”
“It’s mutual. She was, and I’m sure she still is, too smart, too cool. I’m a country girl, from Ödeshög besides, which won a competition on which town was the most boring in the land. She comes from a fine neighborhood in Copenhagen.”
“Outside Copenhagen, Hørsholm is the name of the town,” he corrected her.
“She’s a fine lady, a lady with roots in upper-class Denmark, and you know that. And you liked that. You liked her manner, her well-groomed exterior, as it’s called, always fresh, a decoration. You were enticed, weren’t you? She’s a Krabbe, and let the rest of us understand that the name had a considerably better ring to it than many others. Lindell, for example.”
The Night of the Fire Page 17