Stone Coffin

by Kjell Eriksson

  “I want to see when you called us.”

  He sighed and handed it over. Lindell selected “Recent Calls” and saw that Lindberg had made the call at 9:08 A.M. Before that he had made a call at 8:26. She also wanted to check “Incoming Calls” and see if Lindberg had received any calls shortly before the emergency call. And sure enough, someone had called at 8:47.

  “You got a call before you dialed 112. Who was that?”

  “A guy from the asphalt gang. I drive asphalt but had a little problem with the car this morning. He called to check to see if I was on my way.”

  “So you were in a hurry this morning?”

  “Yes, I should have been at the plant a little after six.”

  “Wasn’t it the case that you were stressed, got a call, lost your focus, and didn’t have time to swerve?”

  “Lay off! I haven’t run anyone over my whole life!”

  “May we contact the guy who called you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You understand that you have to stay here. We have to examine your vehicle. I don’t think you’ve hit anyone, but we have to check it out. Okay?”

  Janne Lindberg nodded. “I keep thinking about that little girl,” he said.

  * * *

  The man that Lindell had spotted in the allée had almost reached the truck by now and she decided to wait for him. He had a slight limp.

  “What’s happened?” he asked. “Did someone hit a deer?”

  “No,” Lindell said. “It’s a hit-and-run.”

  The man stopped abruptly. “Is it Josefin and Emily?”

  His voice cracked.

  “I saw them on the road,” he said. “Is it them?”

  “We don’t know. Perhaps you can help us.”

  The man started to sob.

  “I saw them on the road. I knew they were coming today.”

  “It was a woman and a little girl. Could it be them?”

  The man nodded.

  “Will you help us?”

  Lindell took a step closer to the man. She was touched by his weeping and obvious despair and she was also feeling close to tears.

  “That’s her,” the man said when Lindell raised the gray cover.

  His face was ashen and Lindell feared that he would faint.

  “Let’s go sit in the car. Then you can tell me what you know.”

  At that moment, Sammy returned. “The minister is on his way,” he said as he stepped out of the car.

  “I don’t need a minister!” the man said.

  “He’s not coming for your sake, “Lindell said soothingly.

  “Can you come over?” Ryde shouted. He was crouched down by the woman.

  “Talk to him,” Lindell told Sammy and walked over to Ryde.

  “I don’t think she died immediately,” Ryde said. “She dragged herself along the road toward her child. See?” He pointed to a faint trail of blood on the roadway.

  “She broke her nails,” Lindell said.

  “She wanted to reach her daughter.”

  Lindell kneeled and stared down intently. The woman’s hand was slender. The stones in the silver ring glittered. Lindell saw that the skin on the index finger had been worn away.

  Ryde crawled closer and bent his head to get another angle.

  Lindell could barely stand to observe the remnants of skin left on the road. The two officers looked at each other, bent over a woman’s beautiful hand on a sunny June morning.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Ryde said and got up to his feet.

  “You don’t think?”

  Ryde looked around before answering.

  “It was daylight, a straight and decently wide stretch of road,” he said finally.

  “You mean this was murder?”

  Ryde didn’t answer but got out his cell phone. Lindell remained standing where she was. The girl had picked flowers, she thought. She looked over at the gray cloth that covered the little one. The mother had not managed to reach her. How many meters were left? Seven, eight?

  A car appeared. Haver flagged it down and Lindell took out her phone.

  Three

  An initial meeting and review at the police station took place at shortly after six P.M. A dozen officers from Violent Crimes, a few from Surveillance, and a couple from Forensics were present. Sammy Nilsson led the meeting.

  “What do we know? Josefin Cederén, thirty-two years old, living in Vreta. Emily, six years. It was her birthday yesterday. We know that they were on their way to the church where Josefin’s mother is buried. They went there every year on this day. Several of the neighbors have confirmed it. Ryde, what did the pathologists say?”

  “It was a passenger car. At least according to the pathologists, that’s what the injuries indicate. Death must have been instantaneous, at least for the little girl. She was thrown in the air and must have died at the moment she hit the ground. There were some signs that the mother may have lived on for a short while after the accident.”

  “Okay,” Sammy said, “as you know, the husband, Sven-Erik Cederén, is completely MIA. As is the car, a blue BMW—99 series—with sunroof and all the extras. Haver checked with Novation, where he bought the car. With cash, I might add.”

  “Where does he work?” Lundin asked.

  “MedForsk. It’s a company that develops pharmaceuticals. High-level research. A relatively young company, a spin-off from Pharmacia. Sven-Erik Cederén never showed up to work today. MedForsk has some twenty employees and we have talked to all of them. No one has seen him.”

  “But we know that he left for work as usual,” said Norrman, who had been in charge of the door-to-door questioning in Vreta. “He left shortly after eight o’clock. We’ve talked to about twenty neighbors. The one who lives across the street said a few words to Cederén around seven. Both of them were out to pick up the newspaper.”

  “And he said he seemed completely normal,” Berglund added. “They talked about the usual, weather and wind. According to the neighbor, Cederén was like a clock.”

  “Where is Lindell?” Beatrice asked.

  “With Josefin’s father,” Ottosson said.

  “Does he live in town?”

  Ottosson nodded.

  “And in Vreta. Josefin Cederén was actually born in that county.”

  “Apart from that, it’s probably mostly moved-in outsider shits,” Haver said.

  “What do you mean, shits?” Ottosson asked.

  “Okay,” Sammy said, “we know that he left Uppsala-Näs as usual, but that he never turned up at work. Where did he go?”

  “His summer house,” Lundin said.

  “They don’t have one.”

  “Arlanda,” Haver suggested. “He knew that his wife and daughter were going to walk to the church, waited somewhere in the bushes, ran them over, and left the country.”

  “We’ve checked,” said Sixten Wende. “No Cederén has left via Arlanda.”

  “A lover,” Beatrice said.

  “We’ve put out an APB on him as well as the car. I’m sure we’ll at least know where the car has gone within a day. That’s no ordinary ride.”

  Ottosson’s certainty stemmed from thirty-five years on the job, of which the last twenty had been in Violent Crimes. Cars had a tendency to turn up. People were trickier.

  “He may also have been hit,” he went on. “I have trouble imagining that he would first wipe out his family and then disappear.”

  “People have done worse things,” Wende said.

  “I know. But to run over your own child, isn’t that too much?”

  “Maybe he was out of his mind?” Sammy said.

  “But the child,” Ottosson insisted.

  “Beatrice will take on the family’s finances, assets and debts, insurance, the whole thing. I want a complete briefing tomorrow. You can have Sixten on this too,” Ottosson said, turning to Beatrice.

  When Ann Lindell wasn’t present, there was some confusion about who should lead the conversation. Sammy had the psychol
ogical advantage, as he worked the most closely with Lindell, but on the other hand, Ottosson was the boss. Ottosson, however, often sat quietly during meetings, completely confident in Lindell’s ability to pose the right questions and assign tasks in a sensible way.

  “What’s the motive?” Ottosson asked. His role in the meeting could perhaps best be defined as the engine, weighing the arguments, asking lots of questions, forcing his colleagues to sharpen their thoughts.

  “Jealousy,” Haver said. “Maybe Josefin had found someone else.”

  “I think she was pregnant,” Beatrice said suddenly.

  Everyone’s gaze turned toward her.

  “When Ann and I examined her, I thought I could tell.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Her belly. Breasts. Especially the breasts. She just looked pregnant.”

  “What did Lindell say?”

  “She doesn’t have kids,” Beatrice said.

  “That’s so fucked,” Haver said emphatically.

  “Well, we’ll soon find out what the circumstances are,” Ottosson said and turned to Beatrice.

  “Could you see if there’s any more information available?”

  She got up reluctantly and left the room. At that moment Riis walked in. They met in the doorway without exchanging glances.

  Riis had few friends, and everyone else had to think long and hard about whether it was worth it to be friendly to the grumpy detective. Beatrice had been one of the first to abandon any attempt at cultivating a collegial relationship or even collaborating with him. “Riis is a grumpy old man in a transitional age,” she would say. “He hates us all.”

  Riis sat down and everyone waited for what he had to say.

  “Well?” Ottosson said finally.

  Riis opened his notebook with a sweeping gesture.

  “Cederén was a man with vision,” he said and looked up. “He wanted to do something with his life. He was successful, not least in terms of material wealth, he is probably unhappy, and he is very dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Mentally dead,” Riis said and sighed.

  “Are you jealous of his money?” Haver said calmly.

  Riis shot him a quick glance, smiled, and continued.

  “He has just bought a house in the Dominican Republic, if anyone knows where that is. It is a country in the sun, and that’s where Mr. Cederén wants to go. He does not want to live in Uppsala-Näs. He also plays golf. He came in first in the most recent tournament at Edenhof.”

  “Get to the point,” Ottosson said.

  “I think he ran his family over with his car and fled. He wanted to play golf in the Caribbean.”

  “I’m happy to go there and check it out,” Wende said.

  Ottosson turned and looked at him as if he were seeing him for the first time.

  “Two people have died and all the two of you can do is talk shit,” Haver said, convinced that Riis was simply counting the three days until he went on vacation. He was more than happy to turn a summer murder over to his colleagues.

  “In my opinion,” Riis went on, “the Cederéns are well-to-do, stable, well-adapted, and social. Neither of them has had any run-ins with the law before. Nothing that we have found in the house so far indicates anything unusual. There was tasteful art on the walls—or what I believe to be fine; it didn’t actually depict anything. There were thick carpets, a lot of glass, and fine magazines. As it should be, in other words.”

  “The classic question: Was there an answering machine?”

  Ottosson leaned forward to look squarely at Riis, who was leaning back in his chair.

  “No messages,” Riis said.

  “A calendar? Address book?”

  “We haven’t found one yet. He must have it.”

  “What do we know about his work?”

  Ottosson was trying to regain control after Riis’s harangues.

  “There was something,” said Riis, ignoring the change of topic. “There were no flowers, not a single potted plant. Can you believe it?”

  “Because of allergies, perhaps?”

  “Who is allergic to plants?”

  An unfamiliar silence broke out, as if everyone were trying to imagine a home without plants.

  What a group, Norrman thought. Here we are sweating away, with Ottosson sitting there like Jesus with his beard and mild face. Who is Judas? Who is Peter? Who is Thomas?

  “There are thirteen of us at this table,” he said, breaking the silence.

  They all looked around.

  “His work,” Ottosson repeated.

  “MedForsk is a so-called star performer engaged in very advanced research. Everyone that we have talked to is understandably in shock, but behind the feeling of unreality and anxiety, there was a strong sense of self-confidence, wouldn’t you say, Ola?”

  Haver nodded.

  “Yes, the place breathed success. Like a soccer team that has won enough times to feel basically invincible. Like a unified team headed into the finals, convinced they were going to win. Like an assumption.”

  “Just like us,” Riis said. “A winning team.”

  “They’re about to go public. What does that mean? Money? There might be a lot at stake. I’m bad at that kind of thing,” Sammy said.

  “‘This happened at an unfortunate time’—one of them let that slip,” Haver said.

  “Can there be a connection to the company, or is this a family drama, pure and simple?”

  Ottosson’s question was left hanging.

  “Did Josefin Cederén have any connection to the company?”

  “There’s certainly a lot of questions,” said Wende, who had come out of his shell. Earlier he had tended to sit quietly during meetings and to speak only when answering a direct question. Ottosson wanted to hear new voices but was at the same time slightly irritated at Wende’s new role. I just miss Ann’s voice, he thought, that’s all.

  “We’ll have to work through them one by one, or rather, at the same time,” Sammy said. “I think we have a pretty clear idea of our assigned tasks. It’s Wednesday today. Molin stays on MedForsk and works his way through Cederén’s computer and paper files. Fredriksson is on Vreta. Within a day we should know everything about the Cederén family’s finances and private relationships; we should have mapped out all of Sven-Erik Cederén’s movements today and at the very least have located the car.”

  The meeting ended. Ottosson stayed behind, in his seat, studying the forensic team’s photographs, turning them over one by one. He muttered something inaudibly. “Can you run over your own child?” he asked himself. The girl would have been starting school in the fall.

  When he reached the picture of the edge of the road, with the woman’s hand outstretched and the lines that her fingers had etched into the gravel, he imagined her struggle. How she had dragged herself.

  Ottosson felt a headache coming on. He felt heavy, not just in his head, but in his entire body. That morning he had felt happy about the beautiful weather, the approaching summer, and the early morning meeting scheduled with Sammy and Lindell. He had just been given the green light to raise their salaries.

  Four

  A gull was sitting at the very end of the dock. It appeared to be using the water as a mirror, admiring its whiteness, the faint curve of its beak and the sharp gleam of its eye. Its head turned slightly, as if it heard Edvard’s steps or as if it just wanted another angle on its reflection.

  Pride, Edvard thought, that is what it sees. He sat down on the bent trunk of the pine tree. The light-brown bark often offered him a little extra warmth, but today he didn’t need it. It was almost twenty-five degrees. Absently Edvard rubbed his knee. The fall from the ladder had resulted in a nasty abrasion, which smarted.

  The gull seemed unaffected by his presence. Perhaps it recognized him. You are sitting in my spot, he thought, but that’s all right. Go ahead, look at your reflection, dream a little. There was a sense of thoughtfulness about the bird that appealed to him. Maybe he�
��s pleased with the day, digesting a fish, savoring the sun. Or else it’s the direct opposite: He is melancholy, he has lost something. Perhaps he dropped that fish.

  Edvard didn’t want to interrupt, but he was also slightly irritated that the gull was lingering so long on the dock. He coughed discreetly but this didn’t help. The gull stayed put.

  Edvard waited. Viola, the old woman who owned the house that he lived in, had put dinner on the table and they were about to eat. He wanted to stand at the end of the dock for a while first.

  Suddenly the bird took off, flying out over the bay; some droppings splashed into the mat green water below. Edvard immediately stood up and walked out on the dock. For a moment he had the impulse to jump in but decided to wait until evening. It would be the first swim of the season.

  The temperature of the water here around Gräsö Island in northern Uppland had long hovered around fifteen degrees, but now he thought it had risen to seventeen, perhaps even eighteen.

  Squawking, the gull was now barely visible as a smudge across the water. It was moving toward the mouth of the bay and the open sea. Edvard wished for the same—to be able to lift off.

  The dinghy tugged sleepily on its line when a faint breeze blew in. It was not a strong burst, more like a puff or a breath. Perhaps it was the flapping of the gull’s wings carrying across the water.

  Edvard Risberg stood as far out as he could, his toes hanging off the edge of the dock, like a diver. He stretched his arms up toward the blue sky, stretched all his limbs, and looked out. The sounds of human activity could be heard from the other side of the bay. Probably a vacationer setting things in order. He lowered his arms and took a deep breath.

  Standing on the dock gave him a deep sense of satisfaction. It was his, erected on the ice at the end of February, now sunk into the mud. Inside the dock was granite, part smooth, rounded stones collected on the shore, part sharp pointed pieces shattered by the ice.

  It resisted the wind and the sea and kept the nor’easter in check. Victor’s two boats and the dinghy rested peacefully inside its protective arm. Tons of stone. Timber. It held steady, built by Victor and Edvard and Edvard’s two teenage sons, Jens and Jerker.

  Victor had built many docks and stone-filled cribs in his day, but this was likely his last. He had risen to the challenge as never before, seemingly indefatigable.