The Cruel Stars of the Night E-Book

Kjell Eriksson

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Inspector Ann Lindell
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 556

Beschreibung

When retired scholar Ulrik Hindersten disappears without a trace and the bludgeoned corpses of two local farmers are unearthed within days of each other, tremors begin to reverberate through the local community. Inspector Ann Lindell suspects that it is the work of a serial killer, but the deranged killer may be closer than she thinks.

Leseprobe

THE CRUEL STARS OF THE NIGHT

KJELL ERIKSSON

Translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg

Contents

Title PagePOLICE HEADQUARTERS, UPPSALA, SEPTEMBER 2003ONETWOTHREEFOURFIVESIXSEVENEIGHTNINETENELEVENTWELVETHIRTEENFOURTEENFIFTEENSIXTEENSEVENTEENEIGHTEENNINETEENTWENTYTWENTY-ONETWENTY-TWOTWENTY-THREETWENTY-FOURTWENTY-FIVETWENTY-SIXTWENTY-SEVENTWENTY-EIGHTTWENTY-NINETHIRTYTHIRTY-ONETHIRTY-TWOTHIRTY-THREETHIRTY-FOURTHIRTY-FIVETHIRTY-SIXTHIRTY-SEVENTHIRTY-EIGHTTHIRTY-NINEFORTYFORTY-ONEFORTY-TWOFORTY-THREEFORTY-FOURFORTY-FIVEFORTY-SIXFORTY-SEVENFORTY-EIGHTFORTY-NINEFIFTYFIFTY-ONEAbout the AuthorBy Kjell ErikssonCopyrightAdvertisement

THE CRUEL STARS OF THE NIGHT

POLICE HEADQUARTERS, UPPSALA, SEPTEMBER 2003

‘Has your father shown any signs of depression lately?’

Detective Sergeant Åsa Lantz-Andersson dropped her gaze as soon as she uttered the question. The woman sitting across from her had such a fierce expression on her face that it was hard to look at her. It was as if Laura Hindersten’s eyes nailed her to the wall, saying, I don’t think you will find my father and for this reason: you are a bunch of incompetent bunglers dressed up in uniform.

‘No,’ she said with determination.

Åsa Lantz-Andersson unconsciously let out a deep sigh. The desk in front of her was overrun with folders and files.

‘No signs of anxiety?’

‘No, as I said, he was like he always was.’

‘And how is that?’

Laura Hindersten gave a short laugh. It was a quick, dry salvo that reminded the officer of a teacher she had had in elementary school, someone who had poisoned the children’s existence. She had emanated pride mixed with embittered exasperation at having to put up with such thick-headed pupils.

‘My father is a professor and researcher and devotes all his time to his life’s work.’

‘Which is?’

‘It would take us too far off track to explain it in detail, but I can summarise it by saying that he is one of the nation’s leading experts on Petrarch.’

Åsa Lantz-Andersson nodded.

‘I see,’ she said.

Another dry cackle.

‘So he left the house on Friday. Had he said anything about his plans for the day?’

‘Nothing. As I said, when I came home from work he was gone. No note on the kitchen table, nothing in his calendar. I’ve checked.’

‘Are there signs that he has packed, brought things with him?’

‘No, not that I can see.’

‘His passport?’

‘Still there in his desk drawer.’

‘Your father is seventy years old. Is he showing any signs of confusion, that he …?’

‘If you’re asking if he is senile or crazy, you’re wrong. His intellect is completely intact.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Åsa Lantz-Andersson said. ‘Is he in the habit of taking walks, and if so, where? The City Forest isn’t so far from your house.’

‘He never takes walks.’

‘Was there any conflict in the family? Had you had a fight?’

Laura Hindersten sat completely silent, lowered her gaze for a moment, and Åsa Lantz-Andersson thought she muttered something before looking up again. Her voice was ice-cold, free of any attempt to sound agreeable.

‘We had a very good relationship, if you can imagine such a thing.’

‘And why wouldn’t I be able to do that?’

‘Your work can hardly be very inspiring.’

‘No, you’re right about that,’ Åsa Lantz-Andersson said with a smile. ‘It’s depressing, banal work, but of course we will do everything we can to locate your father.’

She gathered up her notes, but paused for a moment before getting to her feet.

‘Thank you,’ she said and held out her hand.

Laura Hindersten remained seated. ‘Aren’t you going to …’

‘Thank you,’ Lantz-Andersson repeated. ‘As I said, we’ll do everything we can.’

‘He may be dead, murdered.’

‘What makes you think that?’

Laura Hindersten stood up. Her thin body didn’t appear to want to hold her up. She teetered momentarily and Lantz-Andersson put out a hand to steady her.

It’s a front, that haughtiness, she thought, and was suddenly gripped by a pang of conscience and pity.

Laura Hindersten was thirty-five, only a couple of years older than Lantz-Andersson, but she looked older. Maybe it was the clothes she wore, a grey skirt and an old-fashioned hip-length beige coat that gave that impression, for her face was the face of a young woman.

There was no grey in the full, dark hair gathered into a ponytail – quite the opposite, in fact. Lantz-Andersson noted with a twinge of envy how shiny her hair was.

Her thin face was pale. The somewhat too-large front teeth led to thoughts of a rabbit, especially when she laughed, but many would probably have said that Laura, with her mixture of forceful dark and delicate light, was an attractive woman. The eyes under the strong, dark eyebrows were light blue, and the small ears set close against her head had a classically rounded shape, like little shells.

On the desk, the photograph of her father taken a few years ago showed that Laura had inherited several of her features from him.

‘One last question: was there any woman in your father’s life?’

Laura shook her head and left the room without a word. Lantz-Andersson did not think they would find her father alive. Three days had gone by. After the first twenty-four hours you could still be optimistic, after two days the chances were fifty-fifty, but after three days at the end of September, experience told her that all hope was lost.

Lantz-Andersson tried to think past conventional explanations, but gave up. All rational explanations had been tested. Already on Saturday they had gone door-to-door in the neighbourhood. A search party had combed the nearby City Forest, without results. The only thing they found, hidden under a spruce, were the stolen goods from a theft on Svea Street.

It was as if Professor Ulrik Hindersten had been swallowed up by the earth. No one had seen him, not his neighbours nor anyone in the few kiosks and shops in the area.

At the literature department, where Hindersten had earlier been an active member but of late had only visited once or twice a month, no one showed any concern over the disappearance. Lantz-Andersson had talked to a former colleague who made no bones about his intense dislike of the retired professor.

‘He was a pain,’ was how the man summarised his opinion.

The impression from the door-to-door questioning in the area yielded the same weak results. No one actually expressed any regret at the old man’s disappearance.

‘The old man must have got lost in his own garden,’ the nearest neighbour said flippantly.

The latter was a professor of some subject Lantz-Andersson had never heard of, but she gathered it was something to do with physics.

She read through her notes. Ulrik Hindersten had been a widower for about twenty years and had lived alone with his only child during that time. Neither Ulrik nor Laura appeared in the police register nor did they appear to have any debts.

As far as she could tell the household was in good shape financially. Ulrik had a fairly generous pension and Laura’s work yielded a monthly income of more than thirty thousand kronor. The mortgage had been paid off long ago.

There were three possibilities, according to Lantz-Andersson. Either Ulrik Hindersten had committed suicide, had lost his way and collapsed due to exhaustion or illness, or he had been murdered, perhaps during an attempted mugging.

If she were going to put money on one of these alternatives she would have to go with the second as the most probable. She shut the folder with the feeling that she would have to wait before finding out whether she had guessed correctly.

ONE

‘Manfred Olsson.’

‘Good morning, my name is Ann Lindell, I’m with the Violent Crimes Division at the Uppsala Police. I’m sorry for disturbing you so early.’

She put the phone in her right hand and slipped the cold left hand in her pocket.

‘I see, and what is this about?’

Manfred Olsson’s voice was guarded.

‘Routine enquiries,’ she started, in an unusually passive way.

‘Is it about the car?’

‘No, why, have you …’

‘My car was stolen fourteen days ago. Have you found it?’

‘It’s not about the car.’

Ann Lindell leant against the wall. The rising sun warmed her frozen body. She had felt groggy when she woke up and it had not helped to be called out to a blustery front garden on a cold morning at the end of October.

The maple leaves glowed in shades of yellow-red, marred by tiny, black fungal spores, which, woven together, presented an impression both of the unending richness of the plant kingdom, but also of sadness and transience. Scoops of snow were evidence of winter having arrived early this year.

Ola Haver came out of the house, spotted her leaning against the wall, and nodded. He looked tired. He had mentioned something about both kids and his wife, Rebecka, having colds.

Or else it was because he had a hard time enduring the sight of a dead body. Lindell sensed it had to do with the fact that as a teenager Haver had seen his own father collapse at the dinner table – stung in the throat by a bee – and he had died within a few minutes.

‘Do you know a Petrus Blomgren?’ Lindell continued.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Manfred Olsson said. ‘Should I?’

She heard voices in the background. It sounded as if a TV was on.

‘What kind of work do you do?’

‘Burglar alarms,’ Olsson said curtly. ‘Why?’

‘We found a note with your number on it at the residence of Petrus Blomgren. He must have got it somehow.’

Manfred Olsson did not reply.

‘You have no explanation?’

‘No, as I’ve already said.’

‘Are you acquainted with the Jumkil area?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that. I know roughly where it is. What is this all about? I have to get going soon.’

‘Where do you work?’

‘I work for myself. I’m going to … I guess it doesn’t matter.’

No, Lindell thought and smiled in the midst of the misery, it doesn’t matter. Not now and maybe not later.

‘Have you been to Jumkil recently?’

‘I was there for a wedding once. That was maybe ten years ago.’

‘You install alarms, isn’t that right? Have you had any requests for alarms in Jumkil in the last while?’

‘No, not that I can remember.’

‘Thank you,’ Lindell said. ‘We may be in touch later and have you look at a photograph.’

‘He’s dead, isn’t he? That Blomgren man.’

‘Yes.’

The conversation came to an end. A sudden gust of wind made the leaves dance at her feet.

‘Nothing,’ Lindell said to Haver, who had come up to her. ‘He didn’t know a thing, not about Jumkil and not about Blomgren.’

‘We’ve found a letter,’ Haver said. ‘A farewell letter.’

‘What? That Blomgren wrote?’

‘It appears so.’

Lindell sighed heavily.

‘Do you mean he was planning to kill himself and someone beat him to it?’

Haver suddenly started to laugh. Lindell looked at him. One of their colleagues from Patrol looked up. Haver stopped just as quickly.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but sometimes it’s just too much. You’ve got red on your back. You shouldn’t lean up against walls.’

He started to brush off her light-coloured jacket.

‘It’s new, isn’t it?’

Lindell nodded. She felt his forceful strokes across her shoulders and back. It was not unpleasant. It warmed her. She had an impulse to punch him playfully but restrained herself.

‘There we go,’ he said, ‘that’s a little better.’

Lindell looked out at the surroundings. Here they were out in the field again. Gardens, stairwells, basements, flats, houses. Police tape, spotlights, screens, measuring tape, camera flashes, chalk marks on wooden floors, parquet floors, concrete floors, and asphalt. Voices from colleagues and crackling radio receivers. Footsteps in the darkness, in sunlight, in autumn gloom and spring warmth. Objects that had been brought out, hung up, for decoration and joy, memories. Letters, diaries, calendars, notes, and grocery lists. Voices from the past, on videotape and answering machines.

Haver was talking about the letter but he stopped when he noticed her expression.

‘Are you listening?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Lindell said, ‘my thoughts were elsewhere.’

‘The view?’

‘Yes, among other things, the view.’

That was the first thing that had struck her. The view.

‘He lived in a beautiful place,’ she said. ‘But tell me about the letter.’

‘It’s short. A few lines. Somewhat oddly phrased.’

‘And Blomgren is the one who wrote it?’

‘That remains to be seen,’ Haver said, ‘but I think so.’

‘If the murder was supposed to look like suicide it was an extremely sloppy job.’

‘Not with blunt trauma to the back of the head,’ Haver said and looked in the direction of the shed where Petrus Blomgren had been struck down.

‘Fury,’ he said. ‘He is in very bad shape.’

‘Maybe it’s Ottosson? Doesn’t he have a summer cabin in this area?’

‘Should we take a look?’ Haver said and walked towards the hall. They glanced at the building where the forensic team was working. One of Petrus Blomgren’s legs could be seen through the door opening. Lindell had already been in the house but had gone outside again to call the number they had found on a piece of paper. Petrus Blomgren had been a man of order, that much was clear. Maybe it’s the number of Eldercare Assistance, Lindell thought, as she and Haver again went into the kitchen. Everything was in its place. No dirty dishes. A coffee cup and saucer, a serrated knife, a bowl, and several serving dishes neatly placed in the drying rack.

There was a salt cellar and a newspaper on the table. The waxed tablecloth was wiped down. A couple of potted plants in the window and a vase with the last flowers of the season, several twigs of goldenrod and orpine.

‘Was he signed up to receive Eldercare?’ Lindell asked.

‘Maybe. It’s nice and tidy, you mean.’

‘Yes, for an old man on his own. It normally looks a little different than this.’

‘Here’s the letter,’ Haver said and pointed to an area of the counter next to the stove.

Lindell was surprised that she hadn’t spotted the white envelope earlier. It was placed next to the coffee maker, but partly blocked by the bread box.

She leant forward and read: ‘It’s autumn again. The first snow. The decision is mine. That’s how it’s always been. I have had to make all of my decisions alone. You arrive at a certain point. I am sorry that perhaps I haven’t always handled things as I should have. A final request: I beg you not to chop down the old maple tree. Not yet. Let it stand there until it falls. My grandfather was the one who planted it. It’s not a pretty sight to hang oneself but I don’t see any other choice. It’s over.’

The letter was signed ‘Petrus Blomgren’.

‘Why did he put the letter here and not on the table?’ Haver wondered.

‘Have you seen the leaf caught in the window?’ Lindell asked and pointed. ‘It’s like a greeting from the maple.’

A yellow leaf had wedged itself into the woodwork of the window. The dark nerves were shaped like an outstretched hand. It wiggled a little in the wind, silently dashed a couple of times against the glass only to peel off and join the thousands of autumn tokens whirling around the garden.

Haver looked at her.

‘He wanted to die, but for the tree to live,’ she said. ‘That’s strange.’

‘Could he have sensed that the killer was waiting for him?’

Lindell shook her head.

‘But then he wouldn’t have written like this.’

‘The neighbour who called said that Blomgren lived alone, had always done so.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘At home,’ Haver said and indicated a house that could be seen some hundred metres up the road. ‘Bea is talking to her again.’

‘Did she see anything?’

‘No, she reacted to the fact that the gate to the road was open. He was apparently very careful to keep it closed. She realised at once that something wasn’t right.’

‘A creature of habit.’

‘A man of order,’ Haver said.

‘Who couldn’t get his life in order,’ Lindell said and walked over to the window. ‘How old is the tree?’

‘At least a hundred years,’ Haver said, a bit impatient with Lindell’s reflective mood, but well aware of the fact that there was no sense in hurrying her. It wouldn’t make any difference to Blomgren anyway.

‘Do you think it’s a robbery-homicide?’ Lindell asked suddenly. ‘Was he one of those old men with his dresser drawer full of cash?’

‘In that case the thief knew where to look,’ Haver said. ‘The technicians say that nothing appears to be disturbed.’

‘Did he know that Blomgren was on his way to the barn? That’s a barn, isn’t it?’

Haver nodded.

‘Or was he hiding in there and taken by surprise when the old man walked in with a rope in his hand?’

‘We’ll have to check with the neighbour,’ Haver said. ‘She seems to be the kind who keeps tabs.’

They both knew that Beatrice Andersson was the most suited to handle the questioning of the neighbour. If there was anything Bea excelled at, it was talking to older women.

‘Who stands to inherit?’

Sammy Nilsson’s question broke the silence that had settled in the kitchen. He had come creeping in without either Haver or Lindell noticing. Haver didn’t say anything but gave him a look that was difficult to interpret.

‘Am I interrupting?’ Sammy asked.

‘Not at all,’ Lindell said.

‘Let’s hope for a dead broke, desperate nephew,’ Sammy continued. Lindell tried to smile.

‘Look over by the bread box,’ she said.

Sammy walked over to the kitchen counter and read the goodbye letter in a low mumble.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he said.

A gust of wind underscored his words. Their gazes turned to the window. Outside a rain of leaves whirled from the tree to the ground. Lindell had the impression that the maple tree had decided to shake off all its leaves on this day.

‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ Sammy Nilsson said.

‘I wonder how his thought process went last night,’ Haver said.

‘We’ll never know,’ Sammy said and read the letter one more time.

Lindell slipped away, entering the small room off the kitchen. If she had been forced to guess what it would look like she would have scored a nine out of ten. There was an old sleeper couch with dingy red upholstery, most likely from the thirties, and an armchair of the same colour, a TV on a table with a marble top, a couple of chairs surrounding a small pillar table, and a bookcase. On the small sofa in front of the TV there was nothing except the remote control.

It was a very personal room in spite of its predictability. It gave Lindell the feeling of intimacy, perhaps because she sensed that Petrus Blomgren spent his evenings here alone. He must have favoured the armchair; it was extremely worn and had threads coming out of the armrests.

She walked over to the bookcase, which was filled mainly with older books. She recognised a few of the titles from her parents’ house. They had a coating of dust. No one had touched these books in a long time.

The left part of the bookshelf had a small cabinet. The key was in the keyhole. She pulled the door open with a pen and on the two shelves inside she saw what she thought was a photo album and a book entitled The Uppland Horse Breeder’s Association.

Everything looked untouched. If this was a burglary-assault the perpetrator had been exceedingly careful.

‘Allan will have to take a look at this,’ she said, and turned in the direction of the kitchen. She got up and looked around but could not spot anything out of the ordinary.

‘He’ll be here soon,’ Sammy Nilsson said.

Haver had left the kitchen. Nilsson was staring out of the window. Lindell looked at him from her position diagonally behind him and discovered that he was starting to go bald on the back of the head. He looked unusually thoughtful. Half of his face was illuminated by the soft morning light and Lindell wished she had a camera. She was gripped by a sudden feeling of tenderness for her colleague.

‘What do you think about the new guy, Morgansson?’

‘He seems all right,’ Lindell said.

Charles Morgansson had been working in Forensics for a couple of weeks. He had joined them from Umeå, where he had been for the past few years. Eskil Ryde, the head of the Forensics Department, had installed Morgansson in the empty cubicle in their division and the northerner had made a comment about it being like a row of boxes in the stables and had said little else since then. His reticence had irritated some, aroused the curiosity of others, but all in all the new recruit had acclimatised well. This was his first homicide case in Uppsala.

‘Have you heard anything of Ryde’s plans?’

‘No,’ Lindell said, who as recently as the other day had talked to Ryde about his plans of quitting the force and taking early retirement, but this was nothing she wanted to discuss with Sammy Nilsson.

‘Anita thought his buns were cute,’ Nilsson said.

‘Whose buns?’

‘Morgansson’s.’

‘Forget about his buns a while,’ Lindell said flatly, ‘we have an investigation under way.’

‘I was just trying to …’

‘Forget it. Can you take the upstairs? I want to take a look around out there. Tell Allan to go over the TV room.’

The technicians Jönsson and Mårtensson had spent almost two hours going through the home. Now it was the detectives’ turn, but Lindell was finding it hard to remain in Petrus Blomgren’s house. She couldn’t exactly put her finger on it, but it was something more than the usual oppressiveness she felt in the homes of those who had fallen victim to deadly violence. Perhaps a little fresh air will help, she thought and walked out into the garden again.

The mercury strip had indicated negative five degrees Celsius this morning but now there was milder weather approaching. The period of unusual cold would be followed by a warm front and the end of October would be marked by more normal temperatures.

She turned the corner and came out of the wind. A couple of blackcurrant bushes, with withered leaves and the occasional dangling dried berry, reminded her of a time gone by. It was always this way when she came out to the countryside. All the little cabins, woodsheds, and woodpiles with bunched-up twigs and grass took her thoughts back to Gräsö Island. This was her punishment, or so she felt. She had to live with it; she knew that. Everyone carried some painful memories. This was hers.

She sighed heavily, plucked a berry that she popped in her mouth, and looked around. There was nothing of note to see: a handful of old apple trees, a bed of wilted flowers, and a rusty ladder hanging on the wall. She took a closer look at it and the mounting hardware. The ladder did not look as if it had been moved in years.

Behind the house there was a pile of rocks that stirred the imagination. Large stone blocks pushed up against each other as if engaged in a wrestling match. From having been enemies once upon a time they had now made their peace and – weighed down with age, covered with moss and lichen – had stiffened, exhausted in their struggle, leaning heavily against each other.

Petrus Blomgren had planted a tree near this rock pile. Lindell rubbed its smooth, striated trunk. A single chair had been left out under its thin crown. Lindell pictured him sitting there in the coolness of the rocks, pondering the decisions he had to make on his own. Wasn’t that what he had written, that he had to make all his decisions alone?

Where was the motive for killing an old man? Lindell stopped, took a deep breath, and drew out her newly acquired notebook. She was a little embarrassed about it. She had read a mystery novel over the summer, the first she had read in a number of years, and in it the protagonist had a notebook where he wrote down everything of interest. At first Lindell had thought it seemed silly, but after she finished reading she kept thinking about that notebook and so when it happened that she passed by a bookstore she had slunk in and bought a pad for thirty-two kronor. She always carried it with her now and she thought it had sharpened her thought processes, ennobled her as a police officer. Perhaps she was simply going with her gut here, but then, wasn’t that a part of police work? At any rate, the notebook had not made things go any worse.

She had mentioned her new routine to Ottosson. He had laughed heartily, perhaps mostly because of the expression on her face, but had said something about how if she turned in the receipt for her expenditure he would gladly accept it.

Now she wrote down ‘motive’ and smiled to herself. Thereafter she listed the various financial motives she could think of, skipped jealousy but wrote ‘conflict with neighbours’, ‘a failed robbery’, and finally ‘accident’.

What the latter would be Lindell could not imagine, but she had enough experience to know that many crimes – even if they involved violence – were the result of unplanned circumstances.

She heard a car pull over on the main road and sensed that Allan Fredriksson had just arrived. This investigation is probably to his taste, she thought; he likes the country air. The Violent Crimes Division’s own country boy.

Who was Petrus Blomgren? How did he live? She rounded the next corner of the house. The place suggested peacefulness, but loneliness even more, especially like this in the final days of October. May probably looked different, more optimistic. Now nature was switching off, dropping leaves, closing in around piles of rock and underbrush. She stopped and looked right into the vegetation surrounding the house. Static. The wind had died down. She imagined funeral wreaths. Fir branches. Bells that rang out in a doomsdayish way on a bare autumn day over a cowering congregation that tried to minimise its movements.

Don’t let it get to you, she thought. There’s no time to be depressed.

She had to create an idea of Petrus Blomgren’s life in order to understand how he died. The goodbye letter was an autumn greeting from a person who had given up hope. The irony of fate meant he had not been granted the time to take his own life.

Lindell crossed the yard at the same time as Fredriksson walked in through the gate.

‘Male, around seventy, not in our database, lived alone, killed in the barn, no signs of robbery.’ Lindell summed up the situation for her colleague.

‘Nice hill,’ Fredriksson said. ‘Have you seen the maple?’

‘No, I must have missed that,’ Lindell said, and smiled.

‘A lot of leaves. When I was a boy we weren’t supposed to jump in the leaf piles because you could get polio.’

TWO

Dorotea Svahn suddenly got to her feet, walked over to the window, and looked out for a second before once again sinking down at the table.

‘I thought …’ she said, but did not complete her sentence.

‘Yes?’

‘I thought I saw someone I know.’

The woman spoke in short sentences, forcing the words out, audibly gasping for breath and it looked like such an effort that Beatrice Andersson inadvertently leant forward across the table as if to help when Dorotea got ready for another attempt.

‘Petrus and I, we got along. I’m a widow.’

She looked down at her folded hands. Behind her, on the wall, a clock was ticking.

‘Have been for many years now,’ she added and looked at Beatrice. ‘Are you married?’

Beatrice nodded.

‘That’s good.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘I was born in this house.’

Beatrice could discern a streak of defiance, as if it were a strike against her to have been born in Vilsne village, in Jumkil county, and not ever to have got around to leaving.

‘This is a beautiful area,’ Beatrice said.

‘I’m the only one left.’ Dorotea sighed.

‘Could you tell me a little more about Petrus?’

‘He was’ – Dorotea Svahn searched for the right word – ‘strict with himself. He didn’t indulge himself in very much. He kept going as usual. For a while he worked in carpentry, in town as well. He got a lot of work. And that helped. But all that was long ago. The last couple of years he didn’t come over as often. But I could see him sitting in that chair by the corner of the house. He sat there, philosophising.’

‘About what?’

Dorotea smiled for the first time.

‘It was mainly small things,’ she said, ‘things like, well, you know … small things. No big thoughts. It could be about that squirrel that disappeared or the firewood he had to get to. He picked mushrooms too. And berries. Could come back with buckets of it. I had to make jam and juice. My legs aren’t so good any more. For going in the forest, I mean.’

Beatrice nodded. The clock struck a few peals.

‘Was he worried about anything?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Did he mention anything? Did he have any conflicts? People he didn’t get along with?’

‘Then he would have … He didn’t say anything like that.’

‘Did he have any children?’

Dorotea shook her head. ‘No,’ she said flatly.

‘Did he have many acquaintances?’ Beatrice Andersson asked, although she knew the answer.

‘No, maybe in the past. He belonged to the road committee and sometimes he might have gone hunting. But not very often.’

Dorotea paused, glanced out the window. The begonias on the windowsill were still in full bloom.

‘A long time ago the library bus used to come by,’ she continued. ‘He borrowed a lot. I did, too, for that matter. As long as the Kindblom’s children were still at home it was more lively.’

She made a movement inside her mouth, produced a smacking sound. She must have repositioned her false teeth.

‘Do you remember him receiving any visitors out of the ordinary the past while?’

‘Like in the ads, you mean, a tanker running aground in his garden?’

Beatrice laughed at the unexpected comment and could sense a younger woman’s mischievous presence in Dorotea’s eyes.

‘No, he didn’t get many visitors. The postman sometimes stops by. And then Arne, but that got less often.’

‘Who is Arne?’

‘Arne Wiikman. He’s an old friend. Their fathers worked at the mill together. One day Arne simply disappeared.’

‘Really? When was this?’

‘Well that’s a story in itself. He had inherited his father’s temper. A real troublemaker who picked fights with everyone.’

Dorotea smiled at some recollection and seemed to have collected herself somewhat. Her breathing was calmer.

‘He was a communist. Everyone knew that, of course. But he was good anyway. A hard worker.’

‘Are you talking about Arne’s father?’

‘His name was Nils. Petrus’s father’s name was Karl-Erik, but they called him Blackie. They were always together. He was an edger working the saw. Nils was a lumber hauler. Of course, Petrus also worked at the mill when he was young. And so did Arne. Then he disappeared.’

‘When was this?’

‘I guess it was the mid-fifties.’

‘But he came back?’

‘Yes, that was about ten years ago. He bought Lindvall’s old house and renovated it.’

‘And Arne and Petrus spent time together?’

‘Yes, that’s how it went. But so different. Petrus was calm, Arne fiery.’

‘Does he still live here?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Can you think of anyone who would want to take Petrus’s life?’

‘No, no one. He didn’t harm a fly. He had no trouble with anyone.’

‘What was his financial situation?’

‘He managed. He had a pension, of course. He lived frugally.’

‘Did he have any cash in the house?’

‘You mean that someone would have wanted? I don’t think so.’

‘Are you afraid now?’

Dorotea Svahn sighed.

‘I’m afraid of getting old,’ she said. ‘What will happen if my legs don’t carry me? I’m afraid of the silence. It will be …’

She looked down at the table.

‘What a pity for such a fine man, to end like this.’

Dorotea wept silently. Beatrice held out her hand and placed it on top of the older woman’s. She looked up.

‘It’s strange that something so terrible is needed to stir things up,’ she said.

‘Your son, where is he?’

‘In town, but he travels a lot. Sometimes internationally.’

‘When was he here last?’

‘It was a while ago.’

‘What kind of work does he do?’

‘To be quite honest I don’t really know what it is. Something with medical technology. Or that’s what it was before.’

‘Is he married?’

‘Divorced. Mona-Lisa, his wife, was … well, she got tired of him.’

‘Grandchildren?’

Dorotea shook her head.

‘She had a child later. Afterwards, I mean, long after. I think she is doing well.’

‘Do you like her?’

‘I have nothing against Mona-Lisa,’ Dorotea said.

‘If we might return to Petrus. When did he usually go to bed?’

‘After the nine o’clock news, sometimes he sat up later if there was a good movie on. He liked movies.’

‘Did you see him yesterday?’

‘We didn’t chat or anything, but I saw him as usual. He usually brought in wood in the evenings. Before, when he had a cat then … well, you know. He really loved the cat. A little black one with white paws. She disappeared.’

‘So you saw him fetch firewood last night?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I must have sat here,’ Dorotea said thoughtfully, ‘with the crossword puzzle. And then I wrote the grocery list. Petrus was going to look in on me today. He did some shopping for me. There’s always something you need.’

Beatrice nodded and scrutinised Dorotea.

‘You are the first Dorotea I’ve met.’

‘Is that so? Beautiful it’s not, but you get used to it. The worst was when they called me Dorran, but that was a long time ago.’

‘Did you think it was strange when you didn’t see Petrus last night?’

‘No, not really. I saw that his lights were on. Then when I got up this morning I saw that the lights were still on, and that the gate was open. I mean the big gate. At first I thought an ambulance must have been here. Petrus always kept it closed. And then the door to the old barn was open.’

‘You were up early.’

‘It’s my bladder,’ Dorotea said.

‘You didn’t see a car here last night?’

‘No, I would have noticed something like that,’ she said firmly.

Beatrice looked down at her notes, a couple of lines, a few names, not much more. Just as she was about to end the conversation her mobile phone rang. She saw that it was Ann and answered immediately.

She listened and then turned off the phone without having said a word. Dorotea looked at her with curiosity.

‘I’ve just been informed that Petrus wrote a goodbye letter.’

‘A goodbye letter, what do you mean?’

‘He was planning to take his own life,’ Beatrice said.

Dorotea stared at her.

‘That’s impossible,’ she said finally. ‘Petrus would never do anything like that.’

‘My colleagues believe he wrote the letter,’ Beatrice said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘So you mean to say—’

‘—that Petrus had made up his mind to commit suicide. Yes, that’s how it appears.’

‘The poor man. If only I had known.’

‘It was nothing that you thought might happen?’

‘Never! He was a little down sometimes but not in that way.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ Beatrice repeated and Dorotea looked at her as if she took her words to heart.

After a few additional minutes of conversation Beatrice Andersson left the house. At the gate she turned and waved. She couldn’t see her but assumed Dorotea was standing at the window.

It’s strange, she thought, that in Dorotea’s eyes it would have been better if her neighbour had been killed without the complicating factor that he had already decided to commit suicide. On top of the tragic news that Petrus Blomgren was dead she now had to bear this extra burden, the knowledge that he was tired of life and perhaps above all that on his final evening he had not sought her support.

Lindell, Nilsson, Haver, and Andersson were standing in the yard.

Lindell took the fact that she could hear the technicians talking as a sign that they were wrapping up their work in the barn. In her experience the forensics team often worked in silence.

‘It’s strange,’ she said, ‘how a place changes after something like this happens.’

Perhaps this did not strike anyone as a particularly sensational or original observation, and Haver was the only one who took the trouble to grunt in response. The rest were looking around. Beatrice looked back at Dorotea’s house. She was probably bustling around the kitchen or sitting at the kitchen table. Beatrice wished she had been able to spend a little more time with the old woman.

‘Yes,’ Sammy Nilsson said with unexpected engagement, ‘now it is the scene of a murder. People will talk about this house as the one where Blomgren was murdered for a long time. They’ll walk past, slow down, maybe stop and point.’

‘Not a lot of people walk past,’ Beatrice said.

Allan Fredriksson joined the group.

‘What a wonderful place,’ he said. ‘Have you noticed what a complex biological habitat the place is? It has everything: spruce forest, deciduous groves, open meadows and fields, dry hills, and even a little wetlands.’

Lindell smiled to herself.

Fredriksson pointed to the other side of the road where a large ditch ran down to a marsh. The green moss glowed in the morning sun. Tufts of sedge grass looked like small rounded buns and a clump of reedy marsh grass swayed in the wind.

‘I wonder if Petrus was interested in birds?’

‘Petrus didn’t have many friends,’ Beatrice said, ‘and he does not appear to have been a rich man who hoarded cash or valuables.’

‘The only thing I found was a letter from the Föreningsspar Bank,’ Fredriksson said. ‘There was not a single account book or any withdrawal slips, but perhaps he kept the papers hidden. We’ll have to go over the place with a fine-toothed comb.’

Neither the forensics team nor the criminal investigators had found the least trace of burglary or disturbance. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the house in Vilsne except for the fact that its owner lay murdered in the barn.

‘Will you check the bank, Allan?’ Lindell asked.

Lindell looked at their new forensics team member, how he carefully packed away his equipment. Anita’s comment came to mind.

‘Nice buns,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Morgansson’s,’ Lindell said and nodded in the direction of the barn.

Haver turned his head. It looked like he was about to say something, but he held back. Everyone was watching the technician.

A door opened and a light reflection from the glass in Dorotea Svahn’s front door swept over the hill where the police officers were assembled, then disappeared into the thicket of alder and willow. The old woman looked out at her neighbour’s house, took a slow step onto her porch, and gently closed the door behind her.

She stood there with a cane in one hand and the other on the wrought-iron railing. She walked down the stairs with an effort and moved towards the police. One of her legs didn’t seem to want to come along.

She was wearing a grey coat and a dark hat. Beatrice had the impression that it was not Dorotea’s everyday outfit.

‘Is she on her way over here? Maybe she needs help,’ Haver said and took a step towards the gate.

She was not fast but she did seem to have developed a technique to compensate for her bad leg. A car approached. At first there was only a faint rumble behind the forest that surrounded Blomgren’s property. Dorotea must not have noticed the engine sound that increased in volume and when she was halfway across the road the van from the Medical Examiner’s Office rounded the corner. Fridh was driving. Dorotea stopped and lifted the cane over her head as a signal.

Ola Haver took yet another step forward but stopped himself. In his mind he saw the Greek shepherd he and Rebecka had once encountered, on a curvy mountain road in the north. The shepherd was moving his flock across the road. Like a woolly string of pearls they slowly streamed from one side to the other. Still, they brayed nervously, the lambs following the ewes and the flock keeping tightly together.

The shepherd had raised his staff like a weapon, or more likely a sign. He spoke deliberately, even though no one could hear him, with his gaze lifted to a point somewhere above the waiting cars. The stream of sheep seemed never to end, someone in the queue beeped, and the shepherd raised his staff a few centimetres higher. He spoke without ceasing. Haver stepped out of the car – he was at the front of the line – and he observed the timeless scene.

The same feeling now gripped him as he watched the old woman raise her cane at Fridh’s van. Wasn’t she also saying something? He thought he saw her lips forming words that no one could hear.

Fridh had stopped. Dorotea continued over to Blomgren’s large gate, hesitated a moment as if she was unsure of where she was going, then turned into the yard. Beatrice walked over to her.

Dorotea Svahn was out of breath. She covered her mouth with one hand, perhaps wiping some saliva from the corner of her mouth.

‘I want to see Petrus,’ she said in a strained voice.

Fridh had pulled up and Beatrice took the woman’s arm and guided her to the side so that the van could drive in.

‘He’s badly beaten,’ Beatrice said.

‘I realise that,’ Dorotea said.

‘I’m sure you’ll be able to see him later, I mean when they’ve had a chance to clean him up.’

‘I want to say goodbye. Here.’

There was a faint smell of mothballs around her.

‘Of course you can say goodbye. I’ll come with you,’ Beatrice said.

Fredriksson turned away. Haver kicked the leaves at his feet. Lindell and Sammy Nilsson looked at each other. Lindell shook her head, turned, and walked up to the house.

Beatrice accompanied the woman up to the door of the barn. Charles Morgansson had finished putting away his equipment and he made way for them. He nodded to Beatrice who took it as a green light for them to go in.

‘I think the very first blow made him unconscious,’ Beatrice said.

She felt Dorotea’s thin body tense up. She freed herself from Beatrice, took the cane as support, and sank down next to Petrus Blomgren, mumbled something, and put her hand on his shoulder. Bea was glad that Dorotea had not walked over alone in the dawn and found Petrus, but that she had just called the police and forced them to come out and take a look.

‘He was my best friend,’ Dorotea said.

Beatrice crouched down so she could hear better.

‘My only friend. We pottered around here like ancient memorials, me and him. Petrus said many times that it wasn’t right – “They had no right” was how he put it.’

Beatrice didn’t really understand what she meant.

Dorotea’s hand caressed the wool sweater. She appeared oblivious of the blackened blood in the wound on the back of the head.

‘Little Petrus, you went first. I could almost …’

Her voice was overcome with emotion. The bony hand went still, took hold of the sweater as if she wanted to pull the dead man to his feet.

‘He came over with lingonberries this autumn. More than usual. “Now you have more than enough,” he said, as if he knew.’

She braced herself on the cane and slowly straightened to standing.

‘When you are as old as I am you see things, how it is all connected. Petrus would always say it would be better to turn life around, be old first and then become younger, leave the frailty behind but keep the wisdom.’

‘That would be good,’ Beatrice said.

The old woman sighed heavily.

‘They had ten cows in here, maybe twelve. He sold the land later on.’

‘For a good price?’

‘It was good enough. He didn’t lack for anything, Petrus.’

‘It looks like he lived frugally,’ Beatrice said, taking the old woman’s arm and helping her back out into the fresh air.

‘That’s how we were raised,’ Dorotea said.

‘Do you know if Petrus had a special place for his valuable documents?’

Dorotea shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said.

The four police officers were still waiting in the yard. Beatrice had the feeling that she and Dorotea were leaving a church, as if after a funeral.

Fridh was sitting in the van and would remain there until after the old woman had left.

‘Will you pray with me?’ Dorotea asked. ‘Just a few words. Petrus was not a believer but I don’t think he’ll mind.’

Beatrice interlaced her fingers and Dorotea quietly said a few words, remained motionless for a few seconds before opening her eyes.

‘He was a magnificent man,’ she said. ‘With a good heart. May he rest in peace.’

Far off in the distance, a horse neighed.

THREE

Had she ever liked him? She often asked herself this question. At times, perhaps. That time when he tripped outside the house and fell on his face she had at least felt sorry for him. That was what he had said, that he tripped, but Laura imagined that something else must have happened since he had scraped both his cheeks and forehead.

She dressed his wounds. She did this with divided feelings: part disdain for his whimpering when the disinfecting solution stung, part tenderness at his helplessness. The skinny legs dangling over the edge of the bed, the thinning hair growing still thinner, and the hands that gripped the soiled blanket.

At other times she could hate him almost beyond reason. If she was in the house and he was nearby she had to escape, out into the garden or even out into the town, in order not to strike him down with the nearest blunt instrument. This hate was indescribable, so dark and so consuming that she believed it deformed her physically.

Even after she managed to calm herself, it could take several days before she was able to address her father in a normal tone of voice.

‘I see, you’re that way now,’ he would usually comment on her state, unable to grasp what had upset her.

Once upon a time everything had been nicely ordered, then it fell into disarray. Books, manuscripts, and loose papers piled up and formed drifts on the floor. Laura sometimes had the feeling that she was out on the rocking waves of the sea. She had given up trying to keep things in order long ago. There was simply no aspiration for order. It was not part of her father’s worldview and Laura had grown up in an accelerating chaos.

The house smelt a little odd and it was only now, a month after her father’s disappearance, that she realised what it was. She had always thought it came from the discarded clothes that were heaped together on the floor.

She had detested him because of the mess. But while she was cleaning up after him she was forced to go into his bedroom, something she had avoided doing all these years. And there was the reading lamp, the one that had been there ever since she was a little girl. It had been bought in Germany at the end of the fifties, modern at the time and now again a desired object at flea markets and auctions.

When she stood close to the lamp the odour was more pronounced than ever. Against her will she sniffed closer and closer to the hateful thing. The plastic – the lampshade consisted of mottled plastic strips – emitted a stale smell when the sixty-watt lamp was on. He kept it turned on even at night. Laura suspected that some nights he fell asleep in the armchair next to the table, submerged in some problem that had to do with Petrarch or some chess game.

Her first thought was to throw the lamp out, but it still stood in its spot next to the table. She never turned it on and the smell slowly dissipated.

Most of the things in the bedroom were untouched. Even his reading glasses still lay on the nightstand. There was also an essay from the Humboldt University in Berlin. It was about Petrarch’s Laura, about whether or not a newly discovered portrait was a depiction of her.

Laura was named after this woman from the fourteenth century who had become a literary concept and the object of research. Many times she herself felt like a concept. As a teenager she started to doubt whether or not she lived, if she even existed here and now. What did she mean to her father? She pinched herself, experienced pain, cried, and felt her cheek grow wet with tears, but did that prove her existence?

She started to think he only saw her as Petrarch’s Laura, a shadow from the past, without human qualities. No daughter to love, but a reborn literary figure. Even so she continued to live, here and now, getting up in the morning, leaving the house, walking to school, walking home, growing up.

When she had her first period she immediately told her father. Her first feeling was one of shyness, perhaps shame, but suddenly she simply said it: ‘Father, I have to buy sanitary pads.’ It was as if an unknown voice spoke through her mouth.

He put down his knife and fork and looked at her with an expression that was difficult to interpret. Laura imagined he felt offended. She rarely used the word Father. He wanted her to call him by his first name.

After a pause he resumed eating. She understood that his worldview had received a blow. He didn’t like it, she saw that.

‘Who will carry on after me?’ he would sometimes exclaim, with that combination of pride and desperation that became more strongly reinforced in him over the years.

His contribution to research was incontestable. Or perhaps it was closer to the truth to say that those who may have had reason to question his earlier work saw no reason to do so now, thirty-five years after the dissertation. At one time he had been important, but now he was marginalised and excluded from the debate.

He himself contributed to this in large part. Like a boxer who relies more on raw strength and intensity than technique and calculation, he slugged his way through the academic world. At first he was successful, in part due to his renowned ability to tire out his opponents with masses of data, many times dished out in long, apparently incoherent tirades. But as time went by he became labelled a fossil who had become stuck in outmoded ideas.

But there were still those who allowed themselves to be seduced by his words, above all when he recited some of the more emotional sonnets. He did so with such feeling and in such perfect Italian that the words by their own power appeared to hover in their own rarefied space with no room for questions, objections.

Was he a genius? Or simply an overeducated lunatic? Or both?

He was never promoted to full professor.

‘I am consistently overlooked,’ he said. ‘In Florence and Paris they realise my greatness but in this backwater one rewards mediocrity. Here inbred careerists from the land of Lilliput take the high seat, while the giants are forced to jostle just to get inside the door.’

He dug through his stacks of paper, extracted letters from colleagues all over the world, waved them excitedly in the air, and shoved them under her nose.

‘Here, here are the witnesses who shoot down the claims of the feeble-minded.’

He raised his voice, came up close to her, and forced her to study the letter, struck the signature with his index finger, and told her that the author of the letter was one of the world’s greatest authorities on the poetry of the Italian Renaissance.

‘He is a scholar, mark my words. Scholarship, not loose assumptions or flabby opinion.’

His raised his voice a notch. Suddenly he could drop his arms, turn inward, retreat to his room. Once, after an outburst of this kind, she had followed him, had stood in the doorway to his room and watched him from behind. He had dropped the letter and it had fluttered to the floor and slid halfway under the bed.

Laura had also seen other sides of her father, sides that were only rarely revealed in public. His love of the words themselves. He could become intoxicated by a single phrase, a few tentative letters on a page, as if only hesitantly entrusted to the page, a spontaneous expression of the author’s inner life. Sometimes it was quite moving, if a little tiring, when her father called her to him and read something to her, a couple of verses, parts of a sonnet, almost trembling, with his glasses perched on his nose. Often they were about love:

Tempo non mi parea da far riparo

contra colpi d’Amor: però m’andai

secur, senza sospetto; onde i miei guai

nel commune dolor s’incominciaro.

‘Isn’t it beautiful? So vivid, so expressive,’ he would always exclaim after he had let the words sink in. Laura was not expected to say anything, simply listen. Her father needed an audience. Someone who did not talk back, did not engage in sparring about the text. Someone who simply listened, enraptured. Listened to the words that intoxicated, that carried one away, transformed and gave life meaning.

‘The sonnet is superior!’ he could suddenly shout and then burst into laughter when he saw her expression of surprise and – sometimes – fear.

If only he had laughed more. That was what Alice, her mother, had said, that her father took life too seriously. He was an expert in the language of love but incapable of romance or tenderness, imprisoned in an environment where the beautiful words did not carry any weight.

Laura had noticed the tension between laughter and silence early on. Sometimes her mother would sing but she always stopped when her father approached. It was as if it was inappropriate to display joy over something as trivial as fair weather, the scent of the roses from the garden, or that a movement could be an expression of a joy in living and not simply a means to get from the desk to the dining table.

Laura’s mother was from the country. He would use Skyttorp, the name of her village, like an insult. It became a synonym for stupidity and laxity. He loved to correct her country expressions and when she used a dialect word he pounced on her like a hawk. Her language shrunk. She swallowed the words and the songs of her childhood on a small farm between Örbyhus and Skyttorp.

Laura remembered one time when her mother had cracked, how she in a forceful attack accused him of being a hypocrite: he loved Petrarch’s simple Tuscan language dialect but despised her own. Astonished, he listened to her barrage, her increasingly vulgar language, how she assaulted him in pure Uppland dialect, and finally burst out into a ringing laughter that seemed never to want to end.

‘Hysterical,’ Ulrik called her and Alice slapped him across the mouth.

She grew silent and kept up her silence when her husband was around. She died eighteen months later. She had recently turned forty-four.

As her father’s health declined and his isolation increased, as the world’s scorn, the neighbours’ pointed words and open disdain grew, Laura was erecting a strong line of defence around the house. She placed the ridiculously ugly white plastic furniture in the centre of the garden only to taunt the nearest neighbour, the aesthete who edged his lawn every other week. The furniture shone, jumped out at the professor and his wife. Later she completed this arrangement with a sun umbrella that loudly proclaimed the superiority of Budweiser.

She fed pigeons so that they would dirty the surroundings, played senseless music at high volume outside while she lay inside reading, refused to do anything about the shared hawthorn hedge that was encroaching on the neighbour’s carefully tended vegetable patch.

When the professor complained she was unapologetically rude. That worked, she knew. Insolence, an unwillingness to discuss things reasonably, vulgarity – that was what the academics in the neighbourhood found the most distressing.

She flaunted her poor taste, dressed even worse than her father, entertained loud acquaintances who sat in the white garden furniture and carried on noisily long into the night.

Her father was oblivious to it all. He only went out into the garden a few times a year when he walked around and talked in a concerned way about the increasing state of disarray but without doing anything about it. Sometimes he would say that they should hire someone to help prune the old fruit trees, but nothing was done. In the garden there were wild apple-oaks that blew down during autumn storms, groaned under the weight of mouldy fruit that was never harvested.

The state of disrepair both inside the house and in the garden became more extensive. Why did she keep living there? Sometimes her colleagues asked her this but she couldn’t answer. She tried to explain it in terms of financial considerations, but that was a lie, everyone knew that. She offered reasons such as the need to take care of her confused father. That was more satisfying but was still not completely satisfying.

Sometimes she claimed she felt so comfortable in the old house that she could never get used to a modern flat or townhouse. But people around her shook their heads, concerned that she was taking after her father.

She sat at the kitchen table with the same feeling of liberation she had felt a month ago. The radio had been on that time. The Swedish people had just voted no to joining the European Monetary Union and the kitchen was filled with commentary that did not interest her in the least. She had not even voted.

She looked out of the window, turned off the radio, and was overcome with the silence. The room shrunk. The dark green kitchen cabinets seemed to bulge out, to be coming closer. The kitchen counter – covered in dishes – seemed to expand with deep breaths.

A moment of regret, or rather, reflection, came over her like a tremor, but disappeared just as quickly. The way she had chosen left no room for doubt. Or rather, the path her life had taken was not the result of a conscious decision, was how it seemed to her. She had given herself up to a wave, a force that was now mercilessly carrying her forward, simply forward. No history, no reflection, simply a kind of quiet rush, hard as flint, that far exceeded her father’s emotions at reading those beautiful words. His euphoria was relative and fragile. He was weak. She was strong.