A Darker Shade of Sweden

by John-Henri Holmberg (Editor)

  “You’re late again, Fredrik Bengtsson.” His teacher has that peremptory wrinkle between her eyebrows. Everyone in class turns towards the door. Accusing eyes follow him to his desk.

  “I’ve been to the boys’ room.”

  “Piss your pants,” Torsten hisses from his corner by the bookcase.

  Detective Inspector Maria Wern watches as the slender woman’s body is encased in a black plastic bag. The technician closes the zipper and rises clumsily, one hand to his back. Nobody has spoken in a long while. The silence of the forest makes it feel like a memorial grove. A place where mortality is natural, and yet isn’t. The eye is offended by the brownish-red stain on the cement and by the child’s bike dropped outside the door of the earth cellar.

  “A woman wants to speak to you, Wern.”

  Police officer Ek points to a white Saab. The car has driven along the gravel road straight up to the cordoned-off area.

  “Her name is Sara Skoglund. She says she spoke to you on the phone earlier today.”

  Maria takes a deep breath, tries to chase the images away and calm herself before entering the car with the upset old lady.

  “Ellen Borg,” Sara says, pointing to the cottage of the deceased, “and I live in the same apartment house. We always play bridge on Mondays. Last night she asked me if I could give her a ride to her cottage. She’s gone here for the last few months. Every Monday after bridge. We agreed that I’d pick her up today, at two in the afternoon, but I was a little delayed. Ellen doesn’t have a phone out here, so I couldn’t call her.”

  “At what time would you say you got here?” Maria asked, taking out her notepad.

  “Almost three, I think. The door was unlocked, so I went in. I called . . . but she didn’t answer. Mostly she puts her key under the flowerpot on the stairs when she walks down to the village. But this time it was still in the lock. Then I saw that bike someone had left outside her potato cellar. I wondered about it and walked over there. And then . . .”

  The woman’s face crumples in emotion. Maria gives her time to recuperate before continuing her interrogation.

  Night falls. Fredrik lies in bed, listening to the slowly ebbing sounds. The TV is turned off, but for a while yet he can hear the CD player in his older brother Leo’s room. A horse voice penetrates the walls. The electric guitar claws at the wallpaper, scratchy, full of sadness, and beautiful. Leo is in love. Therefore he listens to uncompromisingly heavy bass rock ballads. Love hurts, he says, throwing himself down on his bed to stare at the ceiling, and Fredrik tries to understand what is hurting him so. Of course it would have been best if they could have been in love together, just as they both had chicken pox at the same time. He had felt snug listening to Leo reading The Lord of the Rings. Fredrik’s room feels very lonely, especially when it’s dark and Mom isn’t at home. But Leo wants to be left alone in his agony. He showed that very clearly when he threw an empty Coke can at his baby brother’s head just a short while ago. An Advent star lights up his window. It’s at least a small comfort when so much is scary, and soon they’ll celebrate Saint Lucia’s Day in school. Fredrik has been given a verse he is supposed to know by heart. He practices until his head is spinning. In the whirlpool of sleep he lets go of reality. There are dachshunds under his bed, black slimy spirits of dead dachshunds. If Fredrik puts his legs over the edge of his bed they’ll bite him and he’ll be infected by death. That’s why he’s running through the forest without resting. They’re snapping at his pant legs. He kicks out to get loose. Runs out into the cold, black water of the creek and jumps downstream on the ice floes. That’s when he sees the face under the ice. Gray hair floating like a halo of dust and eyes staring at him from that yellow face, accusing and sly. Fredrik screams but the sound is stuck in his lungs, frozen. On the opposite bank, where his salvation is, he sees Torsten with his broken bike. His fear is greater than he can bear. Fredrik stops struggling, sinks, and is carried towards the dam by the icy creek water. He is so horribly cold that he wakes up. Then it all feels very lonely and wet.

  “Leo! Wake up, Leo!” Fredrik shakes his older brother’s shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  “The dachshunds have peed in my bed and I’m cold.”

  Maria Wern sits slumped in front of her office window, looking out at the falling snow without seeing it, lost in thought. What did Ellen Borg do in her cottage on Monday nights? The little house lacked every modern convenience. To get a cup of coffee you first had to break the ice, carry water and set a fire in the woodstove. The bedding was raw and damp and the floor cold as ice. Staying there in the summer might be charming, but in the middle of winter? Her musings are interrupted by Ek’s voice on the intercom.

  “You have a visitor.”

  A tall, thin man in a black overcoat tells her his name is Ludvig Borg. His thinning hair is parted in the middle and his eyes, peering behind wire-frame glasses, are very dark blue. Last night, Arvidsson and Ek had performed the difficult task of telling him that his mother was dead. Surprisingly, they had found Borg in his mother’s apartment. He was passing through and had walked in using his own key.

  Maria asks him to sit down and gets two cups of coffee. Ludvig declines milk and sugar. He wraps his thin hands around the cup for warmth. Despite his woolen coat he seems to be cold.

  “She really was murdered?” is the first thing he says when at last he speaks.

  “Yes. There is no doubt about it. Someone hit her from behind with a blunt object.”

  “A burglar?”

  “Perhaps. Do you know of anything in her cabin that might attract a thief?”

  “I can’t believe there was anything. My mother wasn’t well off. She had her pension. It doesn’t come to very much when you’ve worked your whole life in a post office. She could hardly manage when they doubled the real-estate tax on her cottage a couple of years ago. She absolutely refused to sell the cottage. For a while she even considered giving up her apartment to live there full time instead. I don’t know how she managed to keep both.”

  “Yes, I remember. I read in the papers about the new estate evaluations. It seemed ill advised. Many elderly people had to sell. Do you know if there are any year-round residents left in the village, or are the houses only used in the summer nowadays?”

  “Only well-to-do people can afford those houses now. The last resident to move out was the old grocer’s wife. I don’t think she sold her house, but now that she’s living in an old people’s home she rents it. I believe some nurse is living there in the summer. In the winter, there is nobody at all.”

  “I’ll kill whoever broke my bike,” Torsten says slowly and looks at the Lucia celebration boy attendees.

  They’re standing in the schoolyard in their long white shirts, holding their star-spangled paper cone hats in their hands to save them from being wafted off by the wind. Torsten stares them in the eye, one after the other, his own eyes half lidded, sucking his lower lip in to make a threatening face. Fredrik feels his stomach heaving, but tries not to listen. He wasn’t able to eat any breakfast, just drank some water. There is a beast living in his stomach, and it refuses to eat human food.

  “Whoever took my bike will get a hell of a beating from my dad. He won’t be able to walk for a fortnight. They took my fingerprints!” Torsten says and holds out his thumb. “There’s no escape!”

  Here is their teacher with the school’s Lucia, Ida, and her maids. It’s time. The girls flutter in their long white robes. The tinsel coiled in their hair and tied around their waists gleams in the moonlight. With her wavy long hair Ida looks like an elven queen. Her hair must be very soft. Fredrik would like to touch that long, blonde hair, but he doesn’t dare. In her crown of lingonberry sprigs, candles burn. Their teacher will sit at the front with a bucket of water. Last year the Lucia set fire to a curtain.

  The assembly hall is full of parents and children. But Fredrik’s mom can’t come. She works nights again. Fredrik raises the stick with its paper star and sings though th
ere is a big, nervous lump in his throat. Then there is silence. This is when he is supposed to recite. His teacher nods. The darkness in the hall is full of gleaming black eyes. Fredrik opens his mouth, but there are no words. Torsten jabs him with his star-boy stick and grins. His teacher tries mouthing something. Fredrik’s whole body freezes up. He has to pee, he suddenly feels. The star on Torsten’s stick is jabbing his armpit. There is not a sound in the hall and everyone hears the splashing which echoes from the hardwood parquet of the stage.

  At dawn, Maria Wern is woken by a two-voiced Lucia song. Krister fumbles for his glasses, wraps the blanket around his naked body and opens the front door. Emil and Linda come padding out into the hallway and listen raptly to Krister’s pupils, who stagger in more or less unsteadily after a night of revelry. Maria puts on coffee to serve them. Most of them look as if they need it after their sleepless night. One boy throws up on the stairs to the house, two of the girls fall asleep locked in the bathroom and a third suffers from frostbitten toes in her much too thin pumps.

  “Is there really any point at all to teach class on December thirteenth?” Maria asks her husband in the kitchen once the Lucia train has left them to haunt other victims among their teachers.

  “Someone has to look after them. Lots of things happen on Lucia nights that need daylight soul-searching and emotional processing. Conflicts become open, love turns sour, they have fights and get drunk. It’s a busy day for teachers. As for cops, I suppose. I suspect you’ll have your hands full today,” Krister says and caresses her cheek.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Maria helps her children dress while tidying the living room. She gathers a whole pile of forgotten items—a sweater, a CD, a bag of chips and a lot of tangerine peel. Emil is to be dressed as a gingerbread man and Linda will be a Lucia. At the day care center all the girls get to be Lucia. Linda’s wire crown is a little too big. When she pushes it to the back of her head she looks more like a deer or an elk than a queen of light. Emil has a battery candle. When he puts it in his cheek it glows red through his skin. Linda tries to do the same with her crown, gets one of the candles down her throat and throws up on her white, newly ironed gown. Quickly and despite her loud objections she is turned into a Santa. Maria puts together the flower arrangement she is giving the day care staff, puts it on the washer, feeds the cats, and turns on the dishwasher, and they finally leave, still in darkness.

  Detective Captain Hartman passes around the plate of saffron buns and gingerbread. It’s been a reasonably calm night. No traffic accidents. A drunkard smoking in bed has been hospitalized with burns. Two teenagers are sobering up in the drunk tank. Their parents have been contacted. Bredström’s jewelery has suffered a broken shop window, but nothing’s been stolen. On the whole a calm Lucia night. Ek throws himself onto the staff room couch; the surge of the cushion almost makes Maria drop her coffee cup. He looks a bit hungover. No doubt the night has been personally rewarding.

  “What did Ellen Borg’s apartment look like?” Maria asks and puts down her coffee cup at a safe distance from Ek.

  “Ordered and clean. A hell of a lot of knickknacks. A couch full of embroidered cushions, you know. She had a telescope mounted in her bedroom, pointed at the bedroom window of the apartment opposite hers. Want to bet if she knew everything there was to know about her neighbors? Then we found money. She had cash hidden away everywhere in her apartment, in the most unbelievable places. All in all, close to a hundred thousand.”

  “Her son says she was living at the edge of starvation. Are the forensics guys done out in Bäckalund?” Maria asks.

  “Yes.” Hartman holds the thermos in his hands. “Are you going back to her cottage?”

  “Yes, right now.”

  The forest road is black and cheerless. Huge drifts of snow have fallen overnight, but here and there the branches of the trees have caught the snow and the ground is bare. The contrasts create a feeling of mystery. Maria steps out of her car and shades her eyes against the rising sun in the east. Why did Ellen Borg suddenly start going to her cottage on Monday nights, in the middle of October? Did she go here to see someone? According to Sara Skoglund, Ellen didn’t have many friends, but this was where she was born and grew up. Perhaps there was someone here her friends in town didn’t know about. She’s a little odd, Sara had said. She doesn’t get along at all with her daughter-in-law. Ludvig always comes to see her alone. How does it feel to leave an active life at the post office, where you know most things about most people, to become a pensioner? To sit in a one-room apartment with your newspaper and see very few people?

  Maria is just about to step over the police tape when she catches a movement behind the curtains in the neighboring cottage. It’s the one Ludvig pointed out, the one belonging to the grocer, a larger log cabin with a porch. A woman’s bike is leaning against the gatepost. Maria walks over and knocks on the door. The ice crystals of the snow crust glitter in the sunlight. Snow crunches under her feet. The door is opened by an attractive blonde, at a guess just over twenty-five. She is enveloped by warmth. Maria hears crackling from the woodstove.

  “Maria Wern. I’m with the police. Could I ask you some questions?”

  “Lovisa Gren. I’m a school nurse.” The woman’s handshake is firm. “It’s cold outside today. Please come in. I suppose it’s about that awful thing that happened to Auntie Ellen.”

  “You’re right.”

  Maria enters and brushes snow from her feet. They sit down by the kitchen table next to the woodstove. It’s an unpainted gateleg table, adorned by a pewter tankard full of dried rowanberry twigs. On the wall above is a hanging edged in blue. The artfully embroidered letters reproduce an old proverb: A SMALL TUFT WILL OFTEN OVERTURN A BIG LOAD.

  “When did you last see Mrs. Borg?”

  Lovisa leans her chin on her hands, thinking.

  “I honestly don’t know. Probably sometime last summer. Yes, it must have been on Midsummer’s Eve.”

  “When were you out here last?”

  “At midsummer. Then I went abroad. Here it just rained all the time.”

  “Does anyone other than you ever come to this cottage?”

  “No, I would hope not. I rent it all year.”

  Maria unbuttons her coat to let the heat reach her body. Her hands are red from the cold. It feels good to hold them out to the fire.

  “How would you describe Ellen Borg? What kind of a person was she?” Maria asks.

  “To me she mostly talked about illness. Sometimes I wished I had never told her I was a nurse.”

  “I can imagine. And now you’ve come to your cottage?”

  “Yes. I read about the murder in the paper and wanted to make sure nobody had broken in.”

  “And all is as it should be?” Maria looks around with a friendly glance. Lets her glance take in the bedroom and the tousled bed.

  “Yes. I slept here,” Lovisa says apologetically. “And I haven’t made up the bed yet.”

  “You’re not easily scared. Have you ever met Mrs. Borg’s son?”

  “Ludvig. Yes, he was here last spring. He comes to plant potatoes for her. She hasn’t been able to do it herself for a long time, but she did want fresh potatoes for midsummer.”

  “So what did you think about him?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “You can tell me,” Maria says. “I couldn’t miss that undertone.”

  “I guess he’s a bit of a show-off,” Lovisa says with a laugh. “You know, always the shiniest car. Wants you to know he’s done well. He is some kind of financial wizard.”

  Ellen Borg’s little cabin is all tidiness and orderliness. The spice jars have handwritten labels and stand in perfect lines. The towels underneath the embroidered towel-rail cover have been ironed with perfect creases. The plastered brick hood above the fireplace is perfectly white, as if no fire had ever been set. Everything is in order, except for a single detail. There is a pair of binoculars on the kitchen table. The instrument li
es at an angle to the tablecloth. Did the old woman spend her summer spying on her neighbors? Perhaps, but what could there have been to see in the middle of winter? Maria puts the binoculars to her eyes to check the definition. Through the kitchen window she can see clearly all the way to the main road. Not bad. Since Ellen Borg’s cottage is the last one in the area, her kitchen window overlooks all the other houses. Maria walks through the cottage again, returns to the fireplace in the living room. Wouldn’t she have used every source of warmth, given how cold it was outside? Maria gives in to a sudden impulse and puts her arm up inside the fireplace. Feels the bricks. One of them is loose and can be pulled out. She brings it along to the window. Underneath the brick, a black notebook is tied in place with string.

  Fredrik hides his wet clothes under the bathtub, quietly so as not to wake his mother, who sleeps in the room next door. The blush of shame still burns his cheeks. Perhaps it’s a burn he will have to carry all of his life. How will he ever be able to go back to school after this? Will they let you have home schooling if you’ve peed your pants? They ought to. There was a guy in third grade who had home schooling after breaking his leg. Peeing your pants is much worse. There is a great loneliness in that realization. Fredrik puts his hand in the pocket of his dry pants, feels the cold surface of the Ring against his fingertips. In a sense he is in an emergency. So he puts it on his finger. Evil doesn’t overwhelm him all at once. He hardly even notices it creeping in as he thinks about what to do next. His thoughts veer off on a forbidden tangent, pull him in through the closed door of Leo’s room. For a while he stands in the persistent deodorant smell, staring at the new poster that has appeared on the wall. A girl in string panties on a motorbike. Fredrik thinks it’s a funny picture. She looks like a giant baby with a too-small diaper. She peers at him over her shoulder, her eyelids half shut and her lips open and pouting, as if someone has just grabbed her pacifier.