The princess of Burundi

by Kjell Eriksson

  He’s ignoring me, she thought. He’s upset and angry, but he’s keeping it under wraps. He’s probably had a fight with Rebecka and I’m the reason. It evoked conflicting feelings in her. She regretted what had happened, but it also generated a thrill that ran down her body. Forbidden love, she thought, and smiled when she realized how melodramatic it sounded. Berit finished talking and Lindell suddenly realized that both she and Ola were looking at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was lost in thought.”

  Ola raised his eyebrows.

  “Could you write down the names of his friends and anyone else he might go see?” he said to Berit.

  “I’ve already called everyone,” she said. “He isn’t with any of them.”

  “Do you think he knows anything about the murder?”

  Lindell caught the subtext of Haver’s question: Did Justus feel threatened? But Berit didn’t seem to understand.

  “No, what would he know?”

  “Maybe he’s seen or heard something?”

  Berit shook her head.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, but the tone of her voice revealed she was weighing this new possibility.

  “Why did he behead the fish?”

  Lindell had asked the same question, and it had driven Berit to tears. Now she hesitated before answering.

  “John sometimes called me his Princess of Burundi,” she said in a low voice. “When he was happy he had a habit of calling me special names.”

  She looked uncomfortable, ashamed, but also genuinely perplexed. Ann Lindell took her hand, which was cold. Berit met her eyes and slowly the words started to come out. She told them about Lennart’s visit and his accusations.

  When she finished, Lindell saw that Haver was trying to decide how to proceed. A few seconds went by.

  “Are there any grounds for these accusations?”

  Berit looked at him with empty eyes. She’s tired to death, Lindell thought. She’ll collapse soon. She had seen it before, how the tension grew, only to be released in screams. But Berit appeared to have some strength left.

  “We loved each other,” she said with a quiet but firm voice.

  She simply let the four words hang in the air without elaborating, as if there were nothing else to say. Lindell had the impression that she didn’t care if they believed her or not, that it was enough for her that she knew the truth and that John had known it.

  Haver swallowed.

  “Could John have been interested in anyone else?” he said, and Lindell knew he felt bad about continuing in this vein.

  Berit shook her head.

  “I knew John,” she said and took a deep breath. Haver shot Lindell a look.

  “You don’t understand,” Berit said. “We only had each other.”

  Haver swallowed again, but had to keep going.

  “Justus seems to have believed Lennart,” he said in a dry, strangely mechanical voice, as if he were trying to neutralize his own presence. “What reasons could he have for doing this if your marriage was as happy as you describe?”

  “He’s a boy who has lost his father,” Berit said.

  “You mean he’s searching for answers.”

  Berit nodded.

  “Can he have seen or heard anything that would give him an idea of who the murderer is?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Her voice was as thin as ice after the first frost.

  “Many people have said that John seemed to be planning something, a heist or some such thing. Do you have any idea what it could have been?”

  Berit stared into the table.

  “I don’t know,” she said, barely audible. “Apparently he talked to Justus about us moving somewhere, but that wasn’t anything he discussed with me.”

  “Move where?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Okay,” Haver said. “We’ll put out an alert for Justus, but I don’t think he’s in any danger. He’s probably out walking around the town.”

  Berit looked drained of energy. Lindell got up and went to check on Erik, who was sleeping in his stroller in the hall. He would be waking up soon. Haver and Berit talked in the kitchen.

  Suddenly Lindell came to think of the ham still on the stove at home. She hurried out to the others and said she had to go home immediately. Haver gave her a quick look but didn’t say anything. She went up to Berit in order to say something comforting but couldn’t find the right words. Berit looked at her without expression. May the boy be safe, was all that went through Lindell’s head.

  She ran over to the car with Erik whimpering in the stroller. There was a parking ticket on her windshield. She tossed it into the backseat.

  Her parents would be arriving in a few hours. I’ll have to buy a new ham, she thought and turned onto Vaksalagatan. At the same time the cell phone rang. She picked it up, convinced that it would be Ola.

  “I know, I know,” she said, “but the ham is going to be ruined.”

  “Hi,” said a familiar voice, and she almost rammed the car in front of her as she braked for a red light at the intersection of highway E4.

  Thirty-seven

  Justus knew where to go. There was a hole in the fence. The construction site nearby made it even easier since the scaffolding shielded him from the street.

  A feeling of power surged through him. No one saw him, no one heard him, no one knew what he was about to do. He stopped by a puddle of oil that shone with metallic darkness against the white ground, and looked back. He had left tracks in the snow but he didn’t care. He was planning to take the same route back and he could erase his tracks then.

  A piece of sheet metal sticking out of a container vibrated in the wind and the sound made him stop one more time. He looked up at the familiar building but it was only now that he saw how worn down the place was. When he was little, this had been a palace and John had been king. This was the place of the good sounds and smells. This was where his father grew to a giant in the shower of sparks, handling the black, heavy steel plate with ease. When struck, the metal resonated at a deep pitch and left a distinct smell that stayed on your fingers for days, just like the stainless steel burnished as fine as a mirror and that reflected light all over the blackened shop ceiling.

  When John and the other workers took a break in the back room, the shop seemed to rest. Justus would walk around in the silence and touch the welded seams that ran like scars across the metal. He heard voices and laughter from the back room. Often they called his name and he would sample the hawthorn juice from the Finnish archipelago and eat sandwiches with black fingerprints on the cheese.

  A car drove by on the street and Justus sneaked in behind the container, continuing on to the back of the building where there were a few windows closer to the ground. He smashed one of these with an iron pipe. He wasn’t particularly afraid of being discovered because a high fence ran along the back of the property and no one was working on the construction site.

  He cleared glass and debris from the window and hoisted himself up with the help of a pile of crates. The back room looked like it always did. There was a newspaper on the table where John usually sat. He pushed it to the ground. Where Erki sat there was a book of matches, which he picked up. Now there was no hesitation in his movements. It was as if the sight of the old lunchroom strengthened his resolve. He opened the makeshift plywood door of a storage area and dragged out a few containers of gasoline and oil. There were also jars and bottles filled with various chemicals. He carried the containers to assorted places in the shop. In Sagander’s office he poured out five liters of ligroin.

  He did a final walk-through of the shop floor, looking around John’s old workplace. He was getting dizzy from all the smells. He poured out a whole container of gasoline in and all around the lunchroom, squirting some on the table and chairs, and then crawling out the back window.

  The wind was picking up. He waited outside the window for a while before he took out the matches. The fir
st match went out immediately, as did the second. He counted the ones that were left and worried that there wouldn’t be enough. He crawled in again and grabbed some newspaper, soaking a corner in the gasoline before he crawled out again.

  Before he lit the newspaper and threw it in he thought about John. What was it he had said about dreams?

  He heard a whoosh from inside and then came something like an explosion. The remaining window was blown out and Justus was almost hit by the glass projectiles flying through the air. In awe he watched as a pillar of fire shot out from the window. Then he ran. As he was crawling out through the fence, he suddenly remembered about erasing his footprints. He hesitated before crawling back through it and looked around for something he could use to sweep the snow clean.

  Many small explosions came from inside the building and he thought about the gas. There were a number of gas bottles inside and he knew how dangerous they were. John had talked about that. He grabbed a piece of metal and ran to the back of the building. It was impossible for him to get all the way to the window, but he wiped the snow as far as he could, then ran dragging the piece behind him until he reached the street. Then he tossed the piece of metal onto a heap of scraps and ran off, laughing.

  He ran westward, into the city, but stopped himself after fifty meters. John would have walked calmly. That was smarter.

  He worried about the tracks outside the window but suddenly realized that the intense heat would melt all the snow around the building. He had been wearing gloves, so there would be no fingerprints. The man who had put his hand on Justus’s shoulder, the one who had compelled him to get up from the snowbank and who had given him a ride into town, would never connect him with the fire. He had dropped him off on Kungsgatan, probably a kilometer from the shop. Justus had told him that he wanted to go see a friend, had tried to take a shortcut through the forest, and had gotten lost.

  The emergency call came at 2:46 P.M. from someone who happened to be driving past the shop. A fire truck was on the scene in seven minutes. Two patrol cars arrived a few minutes later. They immediately cordoned off the area with yellow tape.

  “A machine workshop,” the commanding fireman explained succinctly to the police officer who walked over. “Sorry to hear about your colleague, by the way. We lit a candle at the station when we heard the news.”

  For a moment the uniformed policeman stood completely still before he picked up his phone and called in to work. The first thing he had seen was a sign saying SAGANDER’S MECHANICAL WORKSHOP. He knew that was where John Jonsson had worked.

  “I have an aquarium,” he later explained to Haver.

  Ola Haver got the call when he was on his way back from Berit’s, and he arrived on the scene some five minutes later. He had had to negotiate the blockades on Björkgatan.

  “It’s burning like hell,” the uniformed policeman had said.

  Haver, who was looking at the smoke and sparks rising into the sky, became unexpectedly irritated for some reason and snapped at his colleague that he could damn well see that. The latter had only stared back at him and mumbled something to himself.

  The wind was blowing from the east and drove the flames toward the building that was being constructed. A pile of lumber under a tarp caught fire but was immediately extinguished by the firefighters.

  Haver stared at the building. The fire had broken through the roof and yellow-orange flames were shooting up. It was a hauntingly beautiful sight. Haver saw the stress and focus in the firefighters’ faces. Haver was unable to do anything to help them and it bothered him. He grabbed the fire commander’s shoulder.

  “What do you think? Arson?”

  “Hard to say. It appears to have started in the back, but has spread rapidly to the rest of the building.”

  “By a series of explosions,” Haver said.

  “I think you could safely call them that. Come over here and let me show you something.”

  The fireman walked off with Haver hurrying behind. The heat emitted by the burning building was even more intense. Haver was forced to shield his face with his hand.

  They stopped at the hole in the fence. The fire commander pointed silently to the swept tracks on either side of the fence. Haver got down on his knee and scrutinized the snow.

  “Someone has been here and tried to sweep away their tracks,” he said and got up again.

  The sound of another explosion made him jump.

  “You’d better go back now,” the fireman said. “There’s gas in there.”

  Haver shot him a look.

  “What can you do about that?”

  “Try to cool it down,” the other one said curtly, and now all of his attention was directed at his colleagues’ efforts to contain the violent blaze.

  Haver slowly walked back to the street, went over to the construction site, and placed himself behind a tall steel container. This thing can stand up to a lot of punishment, he thought and fished out his cell phone. Ryde answered right away. Haver started to explain where he was but was interrupted and informed by his colleague that he was already on his way.

  Before Haver had time to put the phone back again it rang. It was Ann Lindell, and for a moment Haver felt that everything was back to normal. Ann wanted to explain why she had left Berit’s apartment so suddenly. She told him about the ham and her parents.

  “Sagander’s workshop is burning,” he interrupted. “It could be arson.”

  He heard her catch her breath.

  “Has the boy turned up?”

  He sensed what she was thinking.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “It could be coincidence,” she said slowly. Haver heard in her voice that she was on edge.

  “We have to make sure he’s safe.”

  Haver peeked around the corner of the container. A new explosion shook the building, but Haver didn’t think it was from the gas, because then it would have been more violent.

  “It’s burning like hell.”

  “Where is the workshop? Does it pose a risk to the surrounding area?” Lindell wondered.

  “The wind is pretty strong,” Haver said and explained where the workshop was.

  “Where do you think Justus is?” Lindell asked. “It’s getting dark now. He’s probably beside himself. I think we should take Berit’s concern seriously.”

  “Sure,” Haver said.

  He saw Ryde walking in the distance with a firefighter at his heels who was gesticulating and from the looks of it arguing vehemently, but Ryde gave him only a cursory glance and walked on. Haver smiled and told Lindell he had to go.

  “One last question,” she said. “Have you checked out Lennart? Justus might have gone to see him.”

  “Ryde’s here. See you,” Haver said and hung up.

  He waved to Ryde, who looked energized.

  “They talk too damned much,” he said, and Haver understood that he meant the firefighters.

  “There’s gas in there,” he said.

  “Did someone start it?”

  Haver told him about the tracks around the fence, and before he was finished, Ryde walked around the side of the container.

  “Idiot,” Haver said to himself.

  He stuck his head out and saw Ryde kneeling by the hole. He took a camera out of his bag and started to work. Snow started to fall. Ryde worked quickly. Haver sympathized with his eagerness, his energy perhaps bolstered by the fear of a gas explosion.

  The phone rang again, but before he managed to answer the signal cut out. He didn’t bother checking to see who had called. At that moment there was an incredible bang and Haver saw how Ryde instinctively threw himself to the ground. One end of the building collapsed completely. Haver watched in fascination as part of the roof hesitated for a moment before it started to sink as if in slow motion, sending off a shower of sparks that transformed the sky into a sparkling show.

  “Jesus, Ryde!” Haver shouted as the latter crawled through the hole in the fence and ran hunched over toward the con
truction site. Thank God, Haver thought, but was then struck by the thought that several of the firefighters had been close to the explosion. He saw how one of the firefighters’ cranes swung around and a powerful stream of water was directed into the gaping hole. Clouds of steam rose and shrouded the other end of the building completely for a few seconds. Then another fire truck with a sky lift pulled up and Haver saw two men in the cage.

  “Amazing,” he mumbled at this display of bravery, and listened to the orders shouted over the din.

  Ryde came walking down the street. He stopped under a streetlight and checked his camera. He was bleeding on one cheek but seemed completely oblivious to the fact. Haver ran over to him.

  “That was a hell of an explosion,” Ryde said. “But the camera made it.”

  “You’re bleeding,” Haver said and made an attempt to check his wound.

  “I fell,” Ryde said. “Someone has crawled in and out of that hole, that’s for sure. Hard to say if it’s one person or several, but it’s clear the guy tried to sweep away his own tracks. There’s a strange look about it.”

  “Any prints?”

  Ryde shook his head.

  “Looks like someone dragged a two-by-four behind them. I’ll try to do a more thorough check. Do you think it’s going to blow?”

  Haver shrugged. In spite of all the dramatics, he felt calm. He knew the anxiety and shock would make themselves felt later.

  The ham was a lost cause, Ann realized as soon as she got into the kitchen. The temperature had reached almost ninety degrees. She turned off the burner and pulled the pot to the side. She resisted the impulse to throw the whole thing away. It was still food. Maybe she could fry it up.

  She sighed, sat down at the kitchen table, checked the time, and thought about Justus. Where was he? Berit had called everyone she could think of, even Lennart, but the latter hadn’t answered. Berit knew he had caller ID and perhaps he was deliberately not answering. If Justus was there, he would know that she was worried and he wouldn’t have anything against letting her stew.