Stone Coffin

by Kjell Eriksson

  As soon as the door closed, Mortensen launched into his confession. He had driven out to the cottage on the evening of the twenty-ninth. Gabriella had again been threatening to go public with the truth about MedForsk’s illegal experimentation. She had hesitated because she hadn’t wanted to smear Cederén’s memory, but she had decided to tell the police everything.

  “And she died because she wanted the truth to come out?” Lindell asked.

  “She hated me,” Mortensen said quietly. “She accused me of Sven-Erik’s death.”

  “But you weren’t guilty of his death.”

  “I wanted to support her after he died. She was alone again. But all she did was go on and on about Sven-Erik and the experiments. I thought she liked me.”

  He paused and looked down at his hands. His breath was the only sound in the room.

  “We knew each other so well!” he exclaimed suddenly.

  The sharp odor of sweat emanating from him made Lindell have to stand up. Haver looked at her with a watchfulness in his gaze betraying his inner tension. His words fell like heavy stones in the bare interrogation room.

  “I strangled her,” Mortensen mumbled.

  “Where?” Haver asked.

  “In the kitchen.”

  “What did you do with the body?”

  “I buried it in a pile of rocks. At first I was going to put it in the car, but I got scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Everything was calm, but I thought I heard sounds in the woods the whole time. I got scared. Gabriella…”

  He broke off. Both Haver and Lindell waited for a continuation. He began to cry softly and stroked his hand over his face. A murderer’s hands, Lindell thought.

  “Did you kill Josefin and Emily?” Haver asked. He sat down where Mrs. Mortensen had been sitting earlier.

  “No, never,” Mortensen said loudly. “I would never have hurt her.”

  “But you hurt Gabriella. You killed her.”

  “But it was different with Josefin.”

  In what way, he did not specify. Lindell let it go for the moment. There would be time enough for him to explain later.

  “Who killed Josefin and Emily?”

  “I don’t know,” Mortensen said.

  “I don’t believe you,” Haver said calmly.

  “It’s true! I don’t know! I would never have allowed such a thing. An innocent woman and a child.”

  “You murdered Gabriella,” Haver pointed out.

  “Do the names Urbano and Olivares say anything to you?” Lindell asked.

  Mortensen denied any knowledge of them, saying he had never heard their names, much less hosted them during the two days that they had been in Sweden. Lindell believed him.

  “Josefin was pregnant when she died. Was it your child?” Haver asked.

  Mortensen looked alarmed but shook his head.

  “Did you have a relationship?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “We only talked,” Mortensen said. “Josefin wasn’t happy.”

  “But you knew that the destruction of the Cederén family was planned by your colleagues in Spain?” Lindell asked.

  Mortensen sat quietly as if weighing his answer.

  “They called me afterward,” he said finally.

  “Who?”

  “De Soto.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that it was necessary for Sven-Erik to disappear.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Sven-Erik wanted out.”

  “The purchase of the land in the Dominican Republic, how do you explain that?”

  Mortensen now looked completely exhausted. Lindell heard rapid footsteps in the corridor and then Riis’s voice. Perhaps Mrs. Mortensen was still out there. Mortensen stared at the door as if he expected or feared that she would come back in. His gaze was glassy. The former impression of boyishness was completely gone, and Lindell guessed that he would break down completely at any moment.

  “Did it have anything to do with the illegal animal experiments conducted there?”

  Mortensen looked up with surprise.

  “Yes, I know that you conducted illegal experiments there,” Lindell said.

  He gave her a look of amazement and a half smile.

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “You’ve done your homework,” he said.

  “That was why Cederén wanted to get out, isn’t it?” Haver asked. “He couldn’t stand the thought of the apes suffering. Some of them died, didn’t they?”

  “Maybe some of them,” Mortensen said.

  “And what do you think?”

  “It isn’t very pleasant, but sometimes things go wrong.”

  “Why did Cederén want to get out if the experiments had already been stopped?” Lindell asked.

  “I don’t know. He was so changed. I think Gabriella changed him.”

  “You called down to Málaga and told them?”

  Mortensen nodded, then directed a clear “yes” at the microphone.

  More than this, Mortensen was unable to manage. He leaned forward and closed his eyes. Lindell and Haver exchanged glances. There was both relief and a kind of hopelessness in their eyes. Haver gathered together his notes. Lindell reached over to turn off the tape recorder after first explaining that the session was over. The room grew quiet. Mortensen looked as if he had disappeared into his own world. He straightened his upper body and stared at the wall with an empty gaze.

  A murderer had confessed. Lindell was wiped out. Her muscles ached from tension. She checked the time, stood up, and went off to call a guard, who would escort Mortensen to a holding cell. Haver stayed behind. Lindell thought he was probably thinking of his children. That’s what he always did when he had that dreamy look in his eyes. He used his thoughts as a shield against all cruelty and evil.

  Once Mortensen had been led away, Lindell and Haver went to their offices, Haver in order to call home and Lindell in order to contact the prosecutor.

  * * *

  The rumor spread quickly in the building, and many of her colleagues came by to congratulate her. The chief of police called and Lindell passively received his praise. She was unable to feel any real joy. There was far to go in the investigation as a whole. Mortensen and others at MedForsk would have to be interrogated many more times, forensic examinations would have to be carried out, Mortensen’s home would have to be searched, and Moya would have to be informed of the latest developments. The search for Jaime Urbano—the most likely killer of the Cederén family—would continue, but during their last conversation Moya had not sounded very optimistic. He speculated that Urbano might be dead. In any case he was nowhere to be found.

  De Soto would be brought in for questioning, but Lindell thought the probability of his being charged with being an accessory to murder was small. It would depend on what Moya could dig up. She discussed the matter with Fritzén and he was of the same opinion. If the Spanish police didn’t find Urbano, then De Soto would slip out of their hands.

  * * *

  When Fritzén had left, Lindell continued to sit at her desk. Thoughts of Edvard returned with a regularity that alarmed her. As soon as she left the realm of work, if only for half a minute, he was there.

  She was ashamed of the rough way she had treated him. She would always remember his calm gaze after she told him that she was pregnant and his subsequent assurance that he loved her. Those were big words coming from a man like him. What was it that he had said? That he couldn’t live so far away from her. For over two years she had longed to hear those words.

  Now it was all behind her. She sat as if turned to stone. She ached with disgust at having destroyed their life together. Nothing like this could be undone. If she had only kept her mouth shut and given herself another week to think it over.

  “Edvard,” she said softly, almost inaudibly.

  She knew that she would have imaginary conversations with him for a long time to come.

  * * * />
  Lindell was brought back to life by the phone signal. It was Ryde. The red Škoda from MedForsk had been examined. Everything had not yet been analyzed, but Ryde did not think they would turn up anything significant.

  “There was just one thing,” he said. “A tiny unripe fruit, probably a pear, that was caught in the tread of the right front tire.”

  Lindell remembered the pear tree along the road to Gabriella’s cottage and the unripe fruit on the ground. She told him about the tree and he chuckled.

  “Congrats,” he said.

  “Thanks for your help,” Lindell said.

  The phone rang again, but she didn’t answer.

  Vacation, she thought. Two or three days of interrogations and writing the reports, and then it would all be over. This time.

  The telephone rang again. She stared at it as if it were a foreign object. The phone kept ringing. On the sixth ring she grabbed the receiver, but at that moment there was a clicking sound on the other end. The dial tone came on and Ann felt close to tears.

  Thirty-two

  Lindell asked Berglund and Haver to search Mortensen’s house. She didn’t have the energy. It was as if all the air had been drained out of her. She sat in her office unable to think of anything but Edvard. Could he have been the one who had called? Perhaps he had thought about it. Perhaps his love was so great that he could look past her infidelity and cruelty.

  She had lost everything. Even though she had solved Gabriella’s murder, she was unable to feel any satisfaction. Gabriella was dead. If she had only gone out to see Gabriella right away, she might still have been alive today.

  If. If only she hadn’t jumped into bed with that Bengt-Åke. If she hadn’t done this and she had done that.

  The phone rang. This time she picked up. It was a reporter from channel 4 who was looking for a comment about the solving of Gabriella Mark’s murder. Lindell didn’t understand how he had heard about it so quickly but sensed that someone at the station must have told him.

  She explained that they had apprehended a suspect who had confessed. She said nothing about the illegal animal experiments. When the reporter asked if she could come down to the studio in thirty minutes, she said no. She did not want to see herself on television.

  After she hung up she thought of Adrian Mård. It was his information that had led to Mortensen’s arrest. She dialed Mård’s number but no one answered. Suddenly she became nervous. Why wasn’t he answering? Why didn’t he return her calls after listening to her messages?

  Josefin and Gabriella, two women her own age, murdered. So too Emily, a little girl. Josefin pregnant just like herself. Images from the investigation whirled through her head and left her no peace. The vegetable beds at the cottage. The elk mother with her injured calf. Every new case left new impressions, new memories to add to the old. The evil put away. In the midst of this she had to be strong and rational.

  Never before had she missed normalcy as much as now. The appeal of a normal life with a normal man was greater than ever in the gap between the MedForsk mess and the new cases she knew were coming. In the midst of all her turmoil, suddenly she realized that some of her colleagues did enjoy a normal life. Haver did. As did Ottosson and maybe even Beatrice. They could shut their folders and drive back to a home worthy of the name.

  There was a knock on the door and Berglund walked in. His face was grim. He held a piece of paper in his hand.

  “I think I’m going to get a dog,” she said.

  Berglund looked at her with surprise. “A dog?”

  He sat down and tossed the paper onto her desk. Lindell paused for a second before picking it up. At the same time she gave Berglund a look.

  “Yes, a dog,” she said and started to read.

  The first thing she saw was Julio Piñeda’s name.

  “What is this?” she asked and looked up.

  The document was written in Spanish.

  “We found it at Mortensen’s.”

  Lindell scanned the document. She could guess the meanings of some words, but the context was unclear. Piñeda, the mystery man who managed to stay just beyond their ken, appeared here with eleven other names.

  “I talked to Riis,” Berglund said.”He knows a little Spanish. At first he thought it was a staff listing, but then he wasn’t sure.”

  She read the names again and then looked up.

  “So who are they?”

  “Riis thought it was some kind of health report.”

  “Many have suffered.” Piñeda’s words floated up into her mind.

  “The Dominican Republic,” she said and Berglund nodded.

  Suddenly Lindell was gripped by a frightening thought. What if they weren’t experimenting on primates, but on humans? That would explain Jack Mortensen’s smile. When they had started to talk about experiments on apes he had realized that the police had no idea what they were really up to.

  “Could this be human experimentation?” Lindell asked.

  “Fuck, that can’t be possible,” Berglund said. He took the page back from Lindell and stared at it.

  “Call our interpreter, the Chilean. Ask Beatrice to bring Teresia Wall back in.”

  Berglund immediately stood up and left the room.

  * * *

  Eduardo Cruz grew pale as he painstakingly translated the entire document. He sat across from Lindell and looked at her, then at the page, with an expression that indicated he assumed the whole thing was a bad joke.

  He stumbled over some of the scientific terms and explained that he did not know what all the words meant, but the context was nonetheless clear. There was no personal commentary. Everything was presented in crisp precision. It was a medical report of twelve men between forty-four and sixty-eight. The state of their health was described in blunt, concise terms. Three of them, Piñeda among these, had suffered terrible side effects. There was talk of palsy, paroxysmal attacks, and seizures.

  “What cruelty,” Eduardo said quietly. “What cruelty.”

  “It is like the Nazis and their experiments,” Ottosson said. He was standing by the window.

  “My father had Parkinson’s,” he said. “He would stop in mid-motion and simply stand there, unable to go on. He started to shake and became hoarse. By the time he died, the medication was giving him hallucinations and nightmares.”

  Ottosson turned around and looked at Lindell. He had tears in his eyes, and Lindell felt a great admiration for him in that moment because he dared to show his emotions so openly.

  “It’s genocide,” said Eduardo and his accent grew stronger with his agitation. “They think that poor people don’t have a soul.”

  Ottosson turned to him as if he had said something very odd.

  “Just a body that the researchers can play with,” Eduardo went on.

  “It’s the money,” Ottosson said. “Money decides. The soul is much lower on the totem pole. If you can gain a dime or a peseta by another’s suffering or death, there is your justification.”

  “But they are supposed to be saving lives,” Eduardo said. “They are doctors and researchers. But it’s true what you say,” he added, as if correcting his idealistic statements. “I saw this in my country when Pinochet came into power.”

  “Palsy is the same as paralysis,” Lindell said.

  She reviewed the names on the page. Ottosson was right. They were only numbers in a list. Who was this Julio Piñeda? What was his profession? What did he and his family look like? He had written a letter to seek justice, but perhaps he would never get it.

  * * *

  That evening Lindell called Antonio Moya in Málaga and told him about Mortensen’s confession and their discovery of the human trials. He listened to her account without trying to interrupt and didn’t say anything after she finished. At first Lindell thought the connection was broken, but then Moya coughed.

  “I am ashamed of these people,” he said.

  He did not show any great surprise at the macabre turn of events, and Lindell almost ha
d the impression that he had already known of the experiments in the Dominican Republic.

  He promised to bring De Soto from UNA Médico in for questioning in the morning. Lindell repeated her invitation that he visit his colleagues in Sweden. Moya thanked her but without enthusiasm, and they ended the call.

  He had sounded tired and somewhat reserved. Lindell guessed that his work was at least as difficult as hers, but she was still irritated by his muted reaction.

  * * *

  On the way to the car she bumped into Beatrice.

  “How are you?” Beatrice asked, and Lindell didn’t like her searching gaze.

  “Tired,” Lindell said curtly.

  “Can I ask you something, Ann? Are you pregnant?”

  Lindell felt the mask that she had been wearing crumble quite literally as the tension in her muscles relaxed and she showed her true face.

  “Yes,” she said, and in that moment she felt enormous gratitude toward her colleague.

  “I had a feeling,” Beatrice said. “What does Edvard say?”

  Lindell started to cry.

  “Doesn’t he want a baby?” Beatrice said.

  “It isn’t his.”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  It wasn’t often that Beatrice swore. She took a step closer and grabbed Lindell’s arm as she saw her anguished expression.

  “Are you sure you’re pregnant? Have you done a test?”

  Lindell shook her head. She hadn’t even managed to do that, but Beatrice looked as if she understood.

  “Do that first,” she said. “Then at least you know.”

  Lindell nodded and felt like a teenager.

  “You have to take care of yourself,” Beatrice said. “You have only one body and one life.”

  “I know,” Lindell said hoarsely.

  * * *

  They parted and Lindell got in her car with mixed emotions. She wanted to keep talking, but at the same time she wanted to be alone. She watched Beatrice put up her hand in greeting, drive out of the garage, and disappear.

  * * *

  They following day they conducted new interrogations with a pale Mortensen. He denied all knowledge of human experimentation and also all knowledge of the documents that had been found in his home.