Frozen Moment

by Camilla Ceder

  'I want to stay here,' he mumbled, almost twisting his neck out of joint in an attempt to kiss her.

  She laughed teasingly and skipped away.

  'Oh no, Detective Inspector, you'll be late. You don't want to miss the speeches. Or the canapés.'

  The assumption that there would be canapés was a serious underestimation of the level of ambition among the top brass. Instead they were presented with an ostentatiously expensive three-course dinner. Vidstrom, the commissioner, tapped ceremoniously on his glass when they were part way through the main course. As always he started his speech by emphasising that each and every one of them should regard their invitation as a heartfelt thank you for all their hard work over the past year. And as in previous years there were a certain number of stage whispers about pay, security issues and several other much better ways in which people would have preferred to be rewarded for their efforts; some of these developed into animated discussions between tables, which eventually had to be silenced by Vidström's secretary.

  Tell didn't join in the discussion for two reasons: for one thing he thought it could well be interpreted as presumptuous by some people, since he was on quite a good salary these days in comparison to many of the other guests. The fact that he had started with nothing, or almost nothing, and had worked hard to achieve promotion was of no relevance in this particular context. And secondly, the fact that he risked his life on a daily basis - some crazed punter did pull a knife on him from time to time - for a salary that was approximately a third of the amount a twenty-two-year-old computer programmer earned wasn't something he wished to take up on this particular evening. As he saw it, it was better to be thanked with a three-course dinner than not be thanked at all.

  After the last mouthful of dessert had been shovelled down, the partygoers were let loose to mingle with their brandy glasses and cocktails in another part of the venue. Coffee cups and dirty plates were whisked into the kitchen by skilfully invisible youngsters dressed in black and white. That was the end of the freebies, but they were informed that the bar could provide anything from extra-strength beer to twelve-year-old single malt whisky.

  People gathered as usual in their normal work groups to carry on talking about the same topic they had discussed during dinner. For want of a better idea Tell went and stood by the bar, along with his former colleague Jonas Palmlöf, who had been replaced in the team by Gonzales. Karlberg, dressed in a suit for once, was also without female company, and soon came to join them.

  Karlberg looked around the room. The chandeliers above their heads were exceptionally large and suspended from a vaulted roof adorned with paintings. Tall windows with recesses wide enough to lie down in were dressed with heavy dark-red velvet drapes. A silver candelabrum burned in each and every one.

  'Gustavsberg Palace. Who's privileged enough to hang out here the rest of the time, do you think?'

  Palmlöf wrinkled his nose.

  'I believe it's very popular for parties and conferences. That's why they booked our work function between Christmas and New Year, when the rest of the country is on holiday; it was fully booked before Christmas. I don't know, I'm not all that keen on the Dracula style. It's all a bit dusty, somehow.'

  'What are you, a feng shui expert?' A blonde in a sparkly silver dress clinked her sherry glass against Palmlöf's beer glass and smiled.

  'Cheers.'

  'Cheers.'

  He turned his back on his colleagues.

  'I don't even know what that means, but you look fantastic in that dress, like a catwalk model.'

  Tell and Karlberg exchanged a meaningful look. Palmlöf was very popular with the ladies and never missed an opportunity to take advantage of the fact. With a teasing wave over his shoulder he allowed the blonde to draw him towards a group on the far side of the room.

  'Oh well, there he goes, I suppose it was only to be expected,' said Karlberg, taking a large gulp of his Heineken. 'It certainly seems as if girls like his Casanova act. He just goes for it. I'd never have the nerve. I'd be scared of being laughed at, or that thing girls do when they roll their eyes at their friends. I hate that.'

  'And you probably would be laughed at, Andreas. Cheap compliments have to be delivered in the right way, or else they're just ridiculous. It has to be done by someone like Palmlöf, who's quite obviously immune to the idea that he might seem over the top. That's why it works. It would never even occur to him that he might be on the wrong track.'

  Tell spotted Johan Björkman, a former colleague from his days on patrol, and laughed at Karlberg's gloomy expression.

  'Cheer up, my partner in misfortune.'

  They clinked glasses again, but deep inside Tell was suffused with a happiness that was growing in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol he consumed. He was a lucky man, and he gave Karlberg's shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

  'Feeling a bit low?'

  Karlberg nodded.

  'She's decided, has she?'

  'Marie, yes,' Karlberg replied morosely. 'It's not just that - she's met someone new. A mate of mine bumped into them outside some leisure centre. No doubt he's some kind of mountain-climbing market analyst.'

  'Yes, but it won't last. Relationships on the rebound never do. He's just a stopgap.'

  Tell amazed himself with his cheerfulness. However, Karlberg didn't seem inclined to be convinced. Tell decided to do what any decent man would do, follow his unfortunate friend down into a morass of alcohol. He ordered two double whiskies.

  'We could just hope that he falls down a mountain and hurts himself.'

  Karlberg looked at Tell in surprise, as if he'd never seen him be so upbeat - which in fact he hadn't - but he followed his example and knocked back the Scotch. He shook his head, laughing.

  'If I didn't know you better I might have believed Bärneflod the other day, when you overslept. He said you'd got yourself a woman.'

  Tell buried his nose in his glass, the fumes bringing tears to his eyes.

  'That's what I've always said. It isn't a workplace at all, it's a bloody coffee morning.'

  It was getting on for two o'clock when Andreas Karlberg gave in to the alcohol and let his head fall back against the soft leather armchair. People were starting to make a move.

  Tell tried to shake some life into his colleague, who opened one eye a fraction, only to decide a second later that nothing could possibly be worth the effort. Tell considered whether he should take Karlberg home with him - he could crash out on the sofa for a couple of hours until he was in a fit state to get home under his own steam. But then he thought about Seja, who might be waiting for him in the double bed, if he was lucky. That decided the matter. He called a taxi and propped Karlberg up in the street as they waited. The taxi driver shook his head anxiously when Tell gave him the address.

  'This is my own car.'

  Presumably he was afraid that Karlberg might throw up, but Tell took no notice and manoeuvred Karlberg into the back seat. If the taxi driver refused to take everyone who was drunk, he would never manage to balance his books at the end of the month.

  Tell lit a cigarette after the taxi had gone and started hunting for his cloakroom ticket. He heard voices nearby and spotted Palmlöf canoodling with the sparkly blonde under a balcony a little way off. The girl laughed again, her voice high-pitched and carefree. Tell went back inside to the stoic remains of humanity who were determined to stay till the bitter end. At the bar he met Beckman.

  'Christian. I haven't seen you on the dance floor this evening. Or anywhere else, come to that.'

  She tapped him hard on the chest, unaware of her own strength in the way people who've had a bit too much to drink tend to be. He backed away and smiled patiently, suddenly glad he'd switched to mineral water a couple of hours earlier, when he thought about Seja, and had regained perspective.

  'What's hiding in there, behind that… facade?'

  'Somebody who's very tired and is about to go home. I just came over to say hello.'

  She laughed and p
ut her arm around him. They went over to the table together to gather their things. Palmlöf and his blonde were right behind them, the night air still in their clothes.

  'Are you leaving already? Not you, Karin, surely - the evening has only just started. We can manage a couple more beers before we call it a night. Come on, Tell. I won't take no for an answer.'

  When he came back he was balancing four tall glasses of Irish coffee on a tray.

  Johan Björkman came over to join them.

  They started chatting about old memories - not that there were many. Soon after completing his training, Björkman, a dyed-in-the- wool Borås man, had been stricken by homesickness, and when he was offered a post in his home town he had accepted quicker than you could say patrol car. But it was possible to make a good career there too, he said.

  He went on to talk about the wave of narcotics that had flooded the town, finding its way into places where they hadn't even heard of drugs twenty years ago.

  'They picked up a guy in Svaneholm, no more than thirty, who'd been selling amphetamines to sixth-form students. It turned out he had a stash out in his old man's barn worth a couple of million.' He shook his head. 'The whole bloody country's being poisoned, no doubt about it.'

  Tell nodded in agreement, even if he had heard it all before and was far too tired for such a serious conversation. He tried not to stare at Palmlofs hand, resting on the blonde's knee. Björkman had introduced her as one of his inspectors.

  'At the moment the whole team is investigating a murder just outside Kinna,' Björkman went on, undeterred. 'Presumably it has something to do with drugs as well. Some guy up past the Frisjo area got shot the other day, way out in the forest. It was just like an execution, bang bang, like an American movie, then the cold bastard reversed over him in a car. Twice. There wasn't much left of the body. You have to wonder what things will be like in another twenty years. Particularly in view of the fact that they're now saying we shouldn't have any police officers in rural areas. I mean, an unmanned police station, what's the point of that? It takes a bloody hour before anybody turns up if someone raises the alarm.'

  Tell closed his eyes and tried sobering up through sheer willpower. 'Hang on. What you just told me. Can you go over it again? Tell me about the Frisjo murder.'

  Björkman looked up in surprise. 'You want to talk about work?'

  Tell nodded and reached for a half-full bottle of Vichy Nouveau. 'I do.'

  Ten minutes later - Beckman had also sobered up with impressive speed - Björkman had finished telling them about the murder, which clearly had sufficient in common with their own investigation to be worth looking into.

  'I'll see you tomorrow morning, first thing. At the station in Borås.' Tell's watch showed twenty past three. 'Let's say nine o'clock.'

  'But…' Björkman looked at Tell in bewilderment. 'But… it's New Year's Eve tomorrow. We're not at work.'

  'You appear to have missed the point,' Tell replied. 'Nine o'clock. And don't be late.'

  * * *

  Chapter 26

  Tell had found his way to the right floor in the police station in Borås and had managed to track down Johan Björkman's office. And there he sat behind his desk at precisely nine o'clock, still wearing his coat and more asleep than awake. Björkman got to his feet with some difficulty and shook Tell by the hand.

  'Bloody hell, I feel a bit rough this morning,' he greeted Tell. 'Coffee?'

  'A pot, please.'

  Björkman set off for the coffee machine, and Tell took the opportunity to look around. It was obvious that Björkman was still very tidy. The red and black files were arranged separately on the bookshelves, and not one sheet of paper sullied the empty surface of the desk.

  Tell thought about his own desk. At least he knew where everything was. Besides, he was suspicious of people who were too tidy; any form of enthusiasm for work had to be combined with a certain amount of mess, he felt. A Freudian would no doubt have pointed to Tell's father, who had made it a question of honour to maintain an absurd level of order in every single aspect of his daily life. Only when he was an adult did Tell realise that his father was something of a compulsive neurotic. This insight somehow made it easier to accept his mania.

  It hadn't always been easy. As a teenager he couldn't stand his father's routines: everything in its place, packaged in countless plastic bags fastened with elastic bands. If something ended up in the wrong place, which of course it constantly did, thanks to other members of the family, his father had to sort it out. Indeed Tell would sometimes deliberately hang the scissors on the wrong hook in the larder or move the emulsion paint to the shelf for gloss, just so he could watch - with a mixture of sadistic pleasure and disgust - his father anxiously rearranging things. As if to demonstrate that the world would come to an end if you lost control of things for a single second.

  Tell also sabotaged the orderliness that was so vital to his father because his parent made him so incredibly angry. The thought of those oceans of wasted time. All those hours he and his mother and sister had to wait. He had seen only the self-righteousness in his father's actions, his lack of awareness that there was something wrong with him, and his condescending attitude towards those who chose to organise their lives in a different way. It had been difficult to see that these habits were his father's way of handling fear and anxiety.

  These days Tell's father was no longer able to maintain such a regime, since he no longer had a home of his own; he was completely in the hands of the staff at his care home and whatever routines they chose to follow. It was undeniable that he looked quite carefree these days, despite the aches and pains that inevitably came with age. Perhaps he was enjoying the fact that he no longer had any choice.

  Björkman reappeared with a flask of coffee and two chipped mugs. Tell realised the depth of his addiction as the aroma drifted up towards his face. He was a serious caffeine junkie and had only managed to knock back half a cup that morning. He had drunk it standing up in the kitchen with the imprint of the buttons of Seja's nightshirt engraved on his cheek.

  She had stayed. She'd been there when he got home at half past three in the morning. The thought filled him with happiness but also a sense of unease that the first thing he had done, and on New Year's Eve, was to head off to work yet again. But on the other hand, she might as well get used to it. If she couldn't cope with that kind of thing, then she couldn't cope with living with him, that's just the way things were. That's what the job was like. Sometimes, at least.

  'Did you want me to come out with you?'

  'Is it far?' asked Tell, despite the fact that they both knew this was irrelevant.

  Björkman shrugged his shoulders. 'No. A few kilometres.' He leaned forward and sniffed Tell's breath. 'Are you really in a fit state to drive?'

  'No, but then neither are you. Shall we talk on the way?'

  'OK.'

  They left the police station and drove through the town just as children were starting to arrive at the play areas with their parents and the first retired couples of the day were feeding the ducks in Annelund Park. Shop owners were putting out signs advertising fireworks, and in a couple of hours the car park at Knalleland would fill up with people buying the essentials for their New Year parties. The town was getting ready to welcome in 2007.

  'Idiot!' Björkman slammed on the brakes and sounded his horn at a lorry driver who had ignored his obligation to give way. When they were on the move again, he said, 'So how will you be celebrating the New Year, Tell?'

  'I…' He hadn't given it a thought. 'I've been invited to a party by some former colleagues.' This was actually true, although Tell had forgotten to let them know whether he was coming or not. 'What about you?'

  'I'm going over to some neighbours. A few of us take it in turns to have a party on New Year's Eve. It works really well - it's hard to get hold of a taxi after midnight.'

  The windows of the car were beginning to steam up, and Björkman leaned forward to clear the windscreen. He turne
d down the radio and glanced over at Tell.

  'Who's going to start, you or me?'

  Tell went over the facts about the murder of Lars Waltz as they gradually left the main roads behind. Soon they were travelling along the increasingly narrow gravel tracks in the forests around Viskafors, the larger brick-built houses being replaced by small wooden cottages. Eventually, the pine forest was the only thing they could see; the trees were windblown, and looked as if they had been badly affected by the storms of the past few years.

  'Hurricane Gudrun wasn't exactly kind to this land,' Björkman confirmed.

  In certain places trees still lay on top of one another like pick-up sticks. They passed an area on the left-hand side where trees had been felled. Tell had stopped talking, and Björkman was thinking things over.

  'Hmm. Most things seem to match. The method. The shooting - we've only had a preliminary report from forensics so far, but in all probability we're dealing with the same kind of weapon. Deliberately run over several times by a relatively heavy car with broader tyres than the average.'

  'And the victim?'

  'Olof Bart. About the same age as your guy. Lived alone. A bit of an oddball, apparently. The neighbours didn't really have much of an impression of him - he kept himself to himself. Did a bit of everything work-wise, a lot of clearing up after the storm. He'd also done some casual work at a workshop in Svaneholm, repairing forestry machinery and so on. No family.'

  They drove down a hill to an opening in the forest and a grassy area covered in brushwood and moss in the middle of which sat a large square wooden house. It must have been impressive once, but now the red paint was flaking off, exposing strips of silvery-brown wood. Between the trees at the edge of the plot, they could just catch a glimpse of a lake.

  Tell, who had not thought about suitable clothing, felt his shoes sink into the muddy moss.

  A separate double garage lay behind the house, and the area between the house and garage was cordoned off with police tape. The lawn had been torn up where what was presumed to be a four-by-four had skidded, regained its grip and accelerated once more to run over the man. Rainwater had gathered in the tyre tracks, transforming large areas of the plot into a muddy morass. In front of the garage doors a separate area, a square measuring a couple of metres, had been cordoned off where Tell assumed the man had been found.