“Not sure. But it’s a station wagon, which would be great for Sammie. He’ll be safer in the back. We’ll get a dog gate and partition the baggage area. And it’ll give us more room when we have to pack for our house in Sunne.”
Irene looked at her husband in surprise. “What do you mean ‘pack’ for our summer house? The Saab has always had enough room.”
The summer house on the outskirts of Sunne had been owned by Krister’s parents, who had signed it over to their children years ago. In the beginning, the family had divided the weeks they spent there equally, but during the past few years it hadn’t been necessary. Irene and Krister had been able to go there whenever they wanted. Stefan almost never came over from Stockholm. Maggan’s family had bought a beachfront cabin on Lake Vänern, and Ulla’s family had bought a large boat they sailed all over Sweden during the summer.
“Ulla and Maggan want us to buy them out,” Krister said.
Irene almost choked on her wine. “We can’t afford that!” she choked out.
“Yes, we can, if we sell our townhouse and buy a condo instead.”
“Sell our townhouse!”
“Why not? The girls will leave home soon, and it’ll be just you and me. And Sammie, of course,” he added as he heard the dog’s snoring from underneath the table.
“Condos in town are as expensive as houses out here,” Irene protested.
“Not really. Especially when you consider how much upkeep a house needs. Neither of us like working in the garden. The outside window shutters will need to be painted soon, and in two years we’ll have to paint the whole thing. Not to mention that the wood on the siding isn’t that good since the house was built in the seventies when there was so much fraud in the construction industry. So that means we’ll have to replace—”
“That’s enough! We’ll sell it! But I must say, this is a bit sudden. I have to get used to the idea,” Irene said. They touched their glasses again and smiled at each other, although Irene felt a pang in her heart. Just the thought of selling the townhouse they’d lived in for fifteen years left her with a sad and heavy feeling.
Chapter 14
THE SEA’S FLINT-GRAY waves lashed against the stony beach. The whole morning, the rain clouds had hung heavy and given regular bursts of showers. Irene pushed ahead, bent over in the strong wind. She knew the way to Annika Hermansson’s house fairly well by now. Having learned from her previous visits to Styrsö, she wore thick clothing, and she had even put on a pair of mittens.
It felt as if a neutron bomb had exploded over the island. Only the scattered houses gave any sign of habitation, and the only living thing she encountered was a lone seagull, which stared at her from a perch on a stone. It took off with a cry when she approached. She saw nothing else moving until she came to Annika Hermansson’s front porch. The tuxedo cat sat on the stairs and watched her approach. Its eyes glittered with ill will.
“Hello, kitty cat. Do you remember me?” Irene asked and bent toward it.
In reply, the cat folded back its ears and hissed. Irene pulled back her hand immediately. You can’t win over everybody. Cats must know by instinct that they’re meeting a dog person.
Irene knocked loudly and then opened the door when she heard someone’s voice. The same suffocating odor as last time hit her nose when she entered. She took a deep breath before she stepped into the still-cluttered hallway.
“Hello, Annika! It’s Irene Huss. I called yesterday, and you told me I could come on over.”
She headed toward the kitchen as she talked. She heard a muttering voice from that direction, as if someone were muzzled. She stopped in the doorway when she saw the sorry-looking shape on the floor. For a second, she thought that Annika was unconscious or even near death, but to her great relief, the muffled sounds still came from her. She was alive, just stone-cold drunk.
Irene knelt beside Annika and tried to determine her condition. Annika had vomited, and the stench was incredible. She was trying to say something, but an incoherent mumble mixed with bits of vomit and alcohol was all that came out. She was lying on her side, which probably saved her from choking on her vomit. Blood was on the floor around her head. As Irene looked more closely, she saw a large cut on Annika’s left temple—not from a Parisian attacker, as Irene’s memory immediately conjured up, but from the corner of the kitchen table. Annika’s left arm jutted out at an odd angle from beneath her. When Irene tried to feel it, Annika screamed. Probably broken.
Irene stood up and got her cell phone out. She called 112 and requested an ambulance. She attempted to describe where Styrsö was.
“We’ll send out an ambulance boat. Will you be there to meet it?” asked the female operator.
“Of course,” Irene assured her. “The house is close to the water. I’ll stand right outside the door.”
“Great. I’ll relay your cell phone number,” she said. “They’ll call as they get close, so you don’t have to remain outside in this weather longer than necessary.”
“Thanks.” There wasn’t much more she could do for Annika, who was already lying in a good position and she had enough alcohol to dull the pain. Irene found a dirty blanket in the mess on the kitchen bench and spread it over her.
She might as well use the time to look around before the ambulance arrived. She slowly walked through the dilapidated house. She wasn’t afraid of disturbing anything; she moved slowly to make sure she wouldn’t step into anything smelly. She decided to start on the upper floor and headed up the creaky staircase.
The bedroom’s large gable window opened to the southwest for a fantastic view of the ocean. Irene opened it so that she could endure being in the room at all. The wind rushed in, shaking the window, but the window hook held.
There were a few framed photographs on the green-lacquered dresser. Irene walked over to get a better look.
The first photograph she picked up showed a teenage girl with a baby on her lap. It took Irene a few seconds to realize she was looking at Annika and Billy. Irene saw that Annika had once had long, reddish-brown hair. She was smiling slightly, and she looked directly, defiantly, into the camera. The baby was only a few months old and was totally bald. Irene was surprised to see how cute Annika had been as a young woman. No one who saw her today would ever guess.
The next photograph showed a skinny boy of seven or eight. He was standing shirtless on the dock, holding a fishing pole in one hand and the small fish he’d caught in the other. He was smiling, and Irene could see the gap in his teeth. His towheaded hair blew in the wind. A fishing hut stood in the background.
The last photograph showed a young man wearing his graduation cap. His face was spotted with pimples, and he definitely did not look happy in his suit and the tight white cap with its black band.
In the hallway, the telescope was in its usual place. Irene didn’t bother looking through it again. Instead, she crossed the hallway and entered the other bedroom.
The room had a stuffy-but-clean scent. Along one wall was a narrow twin bed with a dark blue terry-cloth cover washed so often over the years it was threadbare. By the window was an IKEA pine desk holding only a red desk lamp and a letterpress in multicolored glass. A faded plastic gardenia sat on the windowsill. The curtains were light blue with white squares, and they matched the worn rug on the floor. An empty bookshelf, fastened to the wall over a dresser, was the same model as in Annika’s bedroom, although it had been lacquered in blue. Also on the wall was a poster titled “The Cycle of Citric Acid.” As far as Irene could tell, it pictured a number of chemical formulae arranged in a ring. The dresser drawers were empty when Irene pulled them out. The two wardrobes were also empty. The room was clean and abandoned. No one had lived here for quite some time. Was Annika just making up a story when she said that Billy helped her out?
Irene had walked out of the room and was heading down the creaking stairs to the ground floor when she heard the front door open. She stopped mid-step and held her breath. The ambulance boat could hardly have
gotten here yet, and no one had called her cell phone, either.
At that second, her phone rang.
She pulled it out and answered loudly to ensure her voice would carry all the way to the front door. “Detective Inspector Irene Huss.”
She walked into the hallway as the voice on the other end said, “Tobbe Johansson here, from the ambulance boat. We’re heading underneath the bridge to Dansö Island now. Can you go stand in front of the house?”
“Yes, I’ll be there.”
A confused young man stood staring at her. She remembered seeing him on the ferry as she’d crossed, since there had been very few passengers because of the rain. He was just inside the door and held a plastic sack of groceries in one hand and a black plastic bag in the other. He had on a khaki-green Fjällräven jacket and matching pants. Obviously, he knew how to dress for the islands. His hood was still over his head. He put the plastic bags on the floor with a thud and pulled back his hood. His reddish-blond hair had started to thin in two deep bays on each side of his hairline. The surprise changed to anger. “I couldn’t help hearing you’re from the police. What are you doing here?” he said.
Irene flipped her cell phone shut as she said, “I called Annika yesterday, and she asked me to come here today. I found her on the kitchen floor when I arrived a while ago. It looks like she fell and broke her arm. I called the ambulance boat, and they’ll be here any moment now. They were the ones who just called. They wanted me to meet them outside. Why don’t you go on in to your mother in the meantime?”
He moved out of her way as she stepped out of the house. The fresh air felt liberating, and she filled her lungs with deep, long breaths.
“LET’S GO TALK in your room,” Irene said.
The ambulance boat personnel had already taken Annika Hermansson away, and Billy was hanging around in the kitchen, looking lost. Irene saw the exhaustion and pain on his pale face. He nodded in agreement.
Irene sat down on the pine chair, and Billy sat abruptly on the bed. He looked troubled, and his large Adam’s apple bobbed up and down beneath the skin of his skinny neck as he swallowed nervously.
“It’s not like you think,” he said defiantly.
“What am I supposed to think?” Irene asked.
“That I don’t give a damn about my mother! That I don’t care that she lives in this … shithole!” His face flushed red from his throat to his cheeks.
“So you do care,” Irene stated.
“That’s right.”
Billy swallowed a few times more before he continued. “I saw you on the ferry over. I went shopping. I always do her shopping for her. But she won’t let me clean this place.”
Both his voice and his glance pleaded for understanding. Irene wanted him to keep talking, so she asked in a neutral tone, “Why’s that?”
He glanced away and stared at the worn-out rug. He said nothing for a while, and then he sighed. “My girlfriend … my mother doesn’t like her. She—that is, Mamma—went ballistic when Emma and I decided to move in together. I’d always been the one here taking care of her. She’s been drinking ever since I was little. But when Emma and I got together … this is part of her revenge. She lives in this squalor to get back at me.”
“How long have you and Emma been living together?”
“Almost four years now.”
“But I see you keep Annika supplied with alcohol,” Irene stated.
“I have to.” Billy shrugged. “She refuses to leave the house. If I don’t get her liquor, she has friends who get it for her—and they take a big chunk of her cash for themselves. All of her money goes to liquor if they get it. I come once or twice a week to bring her booze and food. That way, there’s more control over her money.”
“I understand. And she doesn’t want to go into treatment for her alcoholism, does she?”
“You know Mamma,” Billy smiled a crooked smile.
“Not that well,” Irene admitted. “But I did meet her a couple of weeks ago. We’re working on the Thomas Bonetti case. Had you heard his previous partner in ph.com, Philip Bergman, was murdered almost three weeks ago? Annika had seen something through her telescope the last night Bonetti was alive, but she wasn’t taken seriously—she was obviously intoxicated when she called. So no one had checked back. But I came recently for a chat, and because of her information, we located Thomas’ body on Branteskär.”
Irene watched Billy’s Adam’s apple bounce up and down as he tried to figure out what to say. At last, he said, “I read about—the discovery. But Mamma never said anything about you coming to talk to her. I had no idea that she’d seen anything important. She kept going on and on about hearing Thomas’s boat that evening.”
“Did she ever mention that Nisse’s Cairn had been moved?”
“That’s all she’s talked about the past few years.”
“Three years at least. It had been moved. Thomas’s body was hidden beneath it. The killer had put his body next to the stones and then moved them, stone by stone, until it was covered. So the whole stack had been shifted about a meter. Annika was absolutely right.”
Billy nodded. “She’s actually pretty smart. She had good grades in school, but she was one of so many children, my grandparents wanted her to go to work. So she got pregnant after ninth grade. With me, of course. And after that she never had a full-time job. Sometimes she cleaned or subbed for other people. Once she met Hasse, everything went downhill fast.”
“Who is Hasse?”
“Who was Hasse, you mean. He’s dead. He drank himself to death about seven or eight years ago. Missed and mourned by no one. Not even by Mamma, but by then she was already pretty far gone herself.”
“You seem to have had a fairly difficult childhood,” Irene said, choosing her words carefully.
“It wasn’t that bad. I had my grandparents. You could almost say they raised me. And I have a number of aunts and uncles here on the island. Not to mention all my cousins. My grandfather died ten years ago, and my grandmother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She passed away not all that long ago.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Irene said. “What do you do these days?”
“I’m a chemical engineer. I work in Stenungsund, but live in Kungälv.”
“It’s quite a ways from Kungälv to here.”
“Yes, but it’s manageable.”
Irene thought about how she could delicately phrase the next question, but in the end, she was forced to simply ask directly. “Annika mentioned that you and Thomas played together when you were kids. What kind of a person was he?”
Billy looked back down at the rug, and his Adam’s apple moved up and down for a few moments. Finally, he said, “He was almost five years older than me. Nobody wanted to play with him. I didn’t want to, either, but sometimes he’d come over and pick me up. He always wanted to be the one in control, and he always boasted about how rich his father was and about all the great stuff he got. Of course, he was rubbing in the fact that we were poor and I had no father. He was a bully, which was kind of strange since he was bullied himself, all the time, you know, because he was fat and wore glasses and always turned as red as a lobster in the sun. That’s the only thing we had in common. They called him ‘the flayed rat.’ ” He grinned.
Irene almost said, You two share more than just turning red in the sun—you also share the same eye color and hair color, but she managed to stop herself. She found herself staring at him so intently he was squirming under her gaze.
“Billy, Annika said to me that she’d never told you who your father was. Is that true?”
“Yes, it’s true, and I don’t really care anymore who he was. He hasn’t come forward in twenty-eight years, so now he means nothing to me.”
Irene noticed that there was still an undertone of disappointment in spite of the defiance in his voice.
“She also told me that he paid her a great deal of money to keep quiet about him,” Irene said.
“She’s gone on and on about that
over the years. He’s supposed to be rich and married. She’s just trying to make herself more interesting.”
“You think? Have you seen her bank accounts?”
“Yes, I take care of all her money. There are no unexplained deposits. But—” He interrupted himself in mid-sentence and bit his lip before he said, almost choking, “What do Mamma’s finances have to do with Thomas Bonetti’s murder?”
“There might be an indirect connection,” Irene said.
She was lying. She really wanted to find out if Thomas Bonetti had a half-brother named Billy Hermansson. Thomas had inherited his mother’s weight issues and eye problems, but his coloring came from his father, the same coloring as Billy’s.
Billy was studying her with a suspicious gaze from his blue eyes, but then he shrugged.
“There’s one thing I’ve always wondered about. There’s been a lot of letters coming over the years. Brown envelopes, no return address. Typewritten address. And she’d always react to the letters like—well, as if she’d won something.”
“Well, it’s always nice to receive a letter.”
“You don’t get it. Mamma never receives letters. No one ever writes to her, except for these brown envelopes.”
“Have you asked her who sent them?”
“Yes, but she’d just laugh at me.”
“And it looks like she’s keeping a secret?”
“Right.”
“Like she does whenever the conversation turns to your father?” Irene asked quietly.
Billy looked at her sharply. “Maybe.” He said nothing for a moment as he frowned in thought. Irene realized he was getting ready to answer. “If, as she said, she was getting money from … my biological father … then the money probably came in those brown envelopes.”
“Do you think you can find one of them? Maybe she’s kept them.”
“I’ll look for them.”
Irene felt relieved. Searching through all the garbage in this house was something she would prefer not to do.
“Good. Here’s my card. It has my address and a phone number where you can reach me. If you find some envelopes, be careful. Don’t handle them much, but put them in a larger envelope.”
The Golden Calf Page 17
