The Bucket List

by Peter Mohlin

  He pressed the home button on the phone to light up the screen again.

  9:15 A.M.

  More than two hours had elapsed and he still hadn’t heard a peep out of Mona.

  John looked at the painting in front of him. It was the first time since he had moved into the apartment that he brought himself to put one of the blank canvases onto an easel. It had been more than a decade since he had painted using oils and he was either rusty or it just didn’t work when his thoughts were somewhere else entirely. The view from the apartment didn’t come to life on the canvas. The sky became one-dimensional. The movements of the water were too heavy-handed and lacked the soft fluidity of real waves.

  John’s interest in painting had lain dormant after his separation from his mother and the move to New York. A committed art teacher in high school had discovered his talents and tried to encourage him to apply to art school. But John had never even considered it. His dad would never let him choose such an uncertain future and being a police officer appealed to John more.

  He put down his brushes and went to the bathroom to wash the paint from his hands. Why hadn’t Mona been in touch? Did his brother actually know something about Emelie Bjurwall’s disappearance after all? He imagined the visit to Billy having precipitated a breakthrough in the investigation. Maybe Primer was confessing to everything at the police station right now, while John was off the case due to his relationship with the source.

  He dried his hands on the towel, went back into the studio, and called Mona’s phone again—but just like before, he got her voicemail. It would be pointless to leave another message.

  He thought about Billy’s aggression. The night he’d told him that Emelie’s body had been found in the woods, his brother had raised a wrench against him. He would never know how close Billy had been to using the heavy tool as a weapon. But there was no doubt that he lacked boundaries. John had noticed that side to his brother even when they were children. It had always been Billy who’d been responsible for the most serious pranks. He was the one who had dished out—and received—the most beatings on the school playground.

  John was restless with vague fears. If Mona pushed too hard, there was a risk it might backfire. John couldn’t rule out the possibility that Billy might wield that wrench against Mona.

  He looked at his phone again.

  9:31 A.M.

  It was too much. He couldn’t just sit here on his ass while Mona was in the home of a potentially aggressive individual. John took the elevator to the ground floor and was soon heading for Skoghall in the Chrysler.

  On the way, he felt the disappointment growing. Regardless of what Billy knew or didn’t know about what had happened to Emelie Bjurwall, it was a low-water mark to try to blackmail her parents for money. They had lost their only child and they deserved to be left in peace. Billy had his own daughter. Surely he understood what the loss of a child must be like?

  John drove so fast that he almost missed the turn for Nerman’s Autos. This time, he was going to park outside the workshop. If any nosy neighbors wondered who the car belonged to, there was a reasonable explanation. Fredrik Adamsson was there on official police business.

  He stopped when he saw the patrol car in the yard next to Mona’s black rental. Something was wrong with this picture. She would never bring uniformed officers to this kind of sensitive conversation.

  John parked and switched off the engine. He opened the driver’s door just as Mona came out of the workshop. Her appearance reinforced his conviction that something was wrong. She didn’t seem annoyed to see him there. Instead she walked slowly across the yard to meet him. Her steps were heavy, as if crossing the gravel expanse was challenging.

  John jumped out of the car and began to run toward the workshop. Mona took two steps to the side to try to stop him, but he slipped out of her grasp and continued to the open garage door.

  The first things he saw inside the workshop were two uniformed police officers. One of them was pointing a camera at the ceiling. John followed its angle and saw the lifeless body hanging from a rope suspended from one of the steel beams.

  Billy was wearing the same clothes he had had on last John saw him, but his face was discolored. The rope ended in a noose that had cut deeply into his skin as a result of the weight of the hanging body. Blue stripes had spread out from his throat and into his gray cheeks. A few meters away was the rickety chair that his brother had presumably stood on while attaching the rope around his neck, before kicking it away.

  John felt overcome by nausea. He leaned forward and put his hands on his knees to avoid falling over.

  “You okay?” said the police officer not taking photographs.

  John recognized him. He had been eating snacks in the kitchen during Fredrik Adamsson’s week on the kitchen schedule. The round, apple-cheeked face seemed friendly and considerate. But John wasn’t fooled that easily. If there was one thing that uniformed officers liked gossiping about, it was detectives who couldn’t handle the pressure.

  He reminded himself that the police officer didn’t know that the dead man hanging from the ceiling was his brother. It was important it stayed that way. John couldn’t behave in any way that would raise questions.

  “Two cups of coffee for breakfast and a run after that. Not the best combination, sorry,” he said breathlessly.

  The police officer patted him on the shoulder.

  “No need to apologize to me. But if you hurl in here, Forensics will be pissed.”

  “Are they on the way?” said John, straightening up.

  Shop talk was good. It helped him to distance himself from his emotions.

  “Yes, they should’ve been here ages ago. But apparently they’ve got a lot going on today.”

  “You’re not touching anything, I hope?”

  John turned around when he heard Mona’s assertive voice. She had come into the workshop and was looking at them with a serious expression. She understood the situation just as well as he did. No kid gloves, no sympathy. Nothing could be allowed to give away John’s relationship to the corpse hanging from the ceiling.

  “Of course not,” said apple cheeks.

  He didn’t seem to appreciate being patronized by a woman, and one from Stockholm at that.

  John avoided looking at Billy’s lifeless face. He was afraid his own mask might crack.

  The officer with the camera lowered it and muttered something about Forensics doing the rest. He crouched and began to stow the equipment in the black bag on the floor. Suddenly, his hands stopped moving. He was facing the door and could clearly see something the others hadn’t spotted.

  John turned his head.

  There was Nicole.

  She was wearing dark blue pajamas with white stars and her bare feet were inside a pair of rain boots. Her face was turned up and she was staring at the ceiling. The image being burned into her retinas was one she would never be able to erase. She would carry it with her for the rest of her life.

  Then came the scream. The high-pitched, piercing cry of an eight-year-old. John saw her look around and spot him, the only face she recognized among the strangers in the workshop. The girl rushed to him and clamped herself to his leg, like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to the final piece of driftwood.

  Mona carefully tore the girl away from him. Even though it felt wrong, John helped to pry away the small fingers from his trousers so that Mona could pick her up. Nicole must have been asleep in the house and not been woken by the knocking on the door earlier that morning. The fact that no one had thought to look for her was an unforgivable mistake.

  “I’ll drive her to the children’s shrink,” said Mona once she had put the girl in the back seat of her rental car.

  John nodded. It was the right decision. Nicole needed professional help—people who knew how to handle that kind of trauma.

  John needed to get away and process his thoughts. With the workshop filled with people in white masks, he was unnecessary at this point. Fredrik A
damsson could leave without anyone asking questions.

  He got into the Chrysler and with a heavy heart he drove away from his childhood home. When he reached the road, he stopped and considered where to go. He decided to head for the old scout hut where he and Billy had played as children. It was nearby. Before long he was sitting on one of the wooden benches by the fireplace. The cabin had been repainted—it was now a brownish shade rather than the traditional Swedish red. But otherwise it looked just the same. The swings were in the same place and kids were still building dens in the grove of trees by the old outhouse.

  Thinking about Billy physically hurt. John could barely breathe, though the air down here by the lake was fresh and rich in oxygen. He wallowed in guilt like a pig in mud, until he stank of self-contempt. It didn’t matter that he had absolved Billy for the murder of Emelie Bjurwall. It was too late. Something inside his brother must have broken over all those years—something that not even being cleared could heal. His mother had said he had tried to end things once before.

  All the same, the timing didn’t make sense. His brother had finally gotten his life in order and had been looking forward to an existence in which the locals no longer thought he was guilty. Why put a noose around his neck now? It didn’t feel right.

  John thought about the letters. He couldn’t see it as anything other than an attempt to con money out of Heimer Bjurwall. Maybe that was the motive for suicide? Maybe his brother had had bigger financial problems than he’d let on and had been in a pit of debt that was unbearable. John cursed himself for not simply ignoring Billy’s ego and giving him a meaningful amount of money. If he had, Nicole might still have had a father.

  It seemed a good idea to speak to Heimer Bjurwall. If he had paid for the information that Billy claimed to have, there was a possibility they had met. Maybe Emelie’s father knew something that might explain why Billy had taken his own life.

  John got up and stretched. He had been sitting in the same position for too long and needed to get both his circulation and his thoughts moving.

  He went down to the water’s edge and decided to reboot his reasoning from a new starting point. What if Billy really had known something about the murder—what would that mean? He tried to follow this train of thought, but he didn’t get past the first obstacle. If his brother had known that Bernt Primer had murdered Emelie Bjurwall, why hadn’t he said so when he was otherwise risking prison? It just didn’t add up.

  John tried again to break away from his habitual thought patterns. Something occurred to him. If Billy had only realized who the murderer was after being cleared the second time, that changed everything. It meant there was a logic to sending the letters to Heimer Bjurwall that John hadn’t previously seen. At that time, Primer hadn’t been under suspicion. Instead of going straight to the police—who would most probably have dismissed the accusation if it came from Billy Nerman—his brother had tried to kill two birds with one stone. By selling the information to Heimer Bjurwall, Billy would have earned some cash and made sure Primer didn’t get away with it. Emelie’s father was a powerful man thanks to his last name. He, of all people, would surely be able to get the police to launch an investigation into one of their own.

  John began to walk along the path toward the observation point on the knoll beside the scout hut. The path climbed steeply and John had to stop for a moment to catch his breath. He wished he had his investigation piece and some pencils with him, but for now he would have to keep on reasoning in his head.

  He continued to climb and soon he reached the observation point. The old bench was still there. He had kissed a girl for the very first time here. Susanne, that was her name. He remembered it because Billy had teased him all summer when she had left him for a boy on the ice hockey team.

  It was a beautiful view, stretching away to the open horizon. As a child, he had gazed across the lake and imagined it was the sea; he had told himself that there was something much more exciting than the town of Lidköping on the other side. He bent down to find a stone to throw. A younger version of himself would have tried over and over to reach the water—it didn’t look far from up here—never getting more than halfway. He was searching for a suitable projectile when he noticed several cigarette butts lying by one of the bench legs, which were embedded in concrete in the ground.

  He started and had to sit down again.

  His mother.

  Some scouts sneaking ciggies had reminded him of the visit to his childhood home two days ago. The butt lying in the yard and Nicole having given away that she had just been there. His brother had always been a real mama’s boy and it didn’t look as though anything had changed while John had been in the States.

  It could very well be their mother who had made Billy write the letters to the Bjurwalls. Her fingerprints were all over this, making the scenario much more credible. Unlike Billy, she had both the drive and the brains to do something like this.

  He remembered Billy’s phone call to the police station and the sound of desperation in his voice. Presumably, his brother had wanted to tell him what he and his mother were up to. But John had been too busy to listen, and that time she had gotten there in time to stop him. Maybe that was the fight that Nicole had heard when she was sent to her room.

  John needed to go to Gunnarskärsgården to talk to his mother. The nursing home was only a few minutes’ drive away.

  John recognized the woman in the corridor as soon as he came through the doors of Gunnarskärsgården. It was Ruben Jonsson’s wife—the one who had told her husband everything and revealed his identity.

  “Come with me into the office so that we can talk,” she said gravely, opening the door to the small space just inside the main doors.

  John sat down on a visitor’s chair and she rolled her own chair forward so that they were closer to each other.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said, tilting her head slightly in the way health-care personnel usually did when they had bad news to impart.

  “So, the police have been to tell her about Billy?”

  “Yes, about an hour ago. She didn’t take it very well. It was after that we had to call the ambulance.”

  John looked at her suspiciously. Ambulance? What was the woman saying?

  “Sorry, you’ve lost me.”

  “Your mother is in the hospital,” she said. “Heart issues.”

  John was shaken. There seemed to be no limit to how much shit this day was going to throw at him.

  “How is she?” he managed to say.

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to check with the hospital.”

  Fifteen minutes later, John parked illegally outside the emergency room, leaving the left-hand wheels of the Chrysler on the pavement. Thoughts were whirling around in his head as he attempted to find a member of staff. He hoped his mother was still conscious and also felt a little ashamed for feeling like that. Was he there because he needed to know more about the letters to Heimer Bjurwall? Or because he was concerned about his mother? He put the question out of his mind and stopped a nurse walking down the corridor with a cart.

  “I need to speak to a woman who was recently admitted here from Gunnarskärsgården,” he said, flashing his police badge.

  “Ask someone over there,” she said, pointing at a counter at the end of the corridor.

  He followed her instruction and repeated his question to a gray-haired woman. She answered right away without consulting her computer. Old school, John thought to himself. A relic of the days when people actually had to keep things in their heads.

  “She’s in the cardiac cath lab. Balloon angioplasty. She came in with chest pain.”

  “Is it serious?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’d say so. But she got treatment quickly, so the prognosis is good.”

  John thought about his mother surrounded by doctors and nurses. In his mind, he could hear the beeping sound from the equipment monitoring her vital signs, while the staff did its best to keep her alive.

  “Can
I ask what it’s about?”

  The gray-haired woman’s voice was gruff, but friendly.

  “Police business; I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more than that. But please ask her to call this number as soon as she can.”

  He wrote down his number on a piece of paper on the counter and gave it to the woman, who pocketed it.

  “It’s important,” he added.

  She nodded and looked at him gravely.

  “I’ll pass on the message—I promise.”

  John thanked her and hurried back to the car outside. As soon as he shut the door, he began to cry without understanding where the tears running down his cheeks came from. They originated from a strange mixture of emotions he actually felt and others that he supposed he ought to feel. His mother was fighting for her life inside the hospital and his brother had chosen to end his—all within the course of twenty-four hours. It was chaotic and overwhelming.

  At the same time, he couldn’t help partly feeling like an outside observer. As if it were someone else’s mother and brother this had happened to. They’d been absent from his life for so long. Maybe it was symptomatic of this feeling that his tears stopped the moment Mona called. It was as if they came out of a tap that he could turn on and off as he pleased.

  “How are you?” she said.

  John closed his eyes and once again saw his brother’s discolored face hanging from the workshop ceiling. The image was projected in widescreen onto the inside of his eyelids and was unpleasantly detailed.

  “I don’t really know—I suppose not that great.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a car outside the hospital.”

  “The hospital?” she repeated in surprise.

  John explained that his mother was a patient. That he suspected she had been the driving force behind the letters to Heimer Bjurwall, but that she had taken Billy’s death so badly that it triggered heart issues. He went over his idea that his brother had figured out that Primer was the murderer after his own release, and that together with his mother they had sold the information to Heimer Bjurwall. The plan was to put Primer away while cashing in.