Ulf and Anna spoke in perfect unison. “Non-disappearance?”
“That girl’s around,” said Blomquist. “She’s just pretending to disappear. She’ll be staying with Linnea, I imagine, because she—Signe—may have no idea that Linnea has a grudge against her. Of course they may both be enjoying the spectacle of Bim being investigated by us. Schadenfreude, as the Germans call it.”
“You really think Signe will be with Linnea?” asked Anna. “Isn’t that just a bit too predictable?”
Blomquist shrugged. “When you do what I do,” he said, “you get used to the predictable. Everything I see, more or less, is predictable. You might not see that in your position...” He looked at them challengingly. “But it’s often clear to me. Often.”
* * *
—
They stood outside the door of Linnea’s apartment, one of a number in a block of student dwellings. Ek proclaimed a piece of cardboard in the name slot outside. Ulf rang the bell, glancing at Anna and Blomquist as he did so. He was eager to locate Signe, but he did not want to find her as a direct result of information from Blomquist.
“I suspect we’re wasting our time,” he said. “Even if the bird was here, she’ll have flown the nest.”
Blomquist seemed confident. “I doubt it,” he said.
There came the sound of a bolt being drawn inside, and the door was opened. Linnea stood before them, dressed in a kimono and wearing large sheepskin slippers. Her face fell when she saw who was standing on her doorstep.
“Ms. Bengtsdotter. And...and...”
“We’re colleagues of Ms. Bengtsdotter,” said Ulf. “Malmö Criminal Investigation Authority.”
“And police,” Blomquist added.
Linnea had regained her composure. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This isn’t convenient. Please come some other time.”
Ulf shook his head. “That won’t be convenient for us. Sorry.”
Linnea glared at him. “This is definitely the wrong time for me,” she said. “It’s just the wrong time. Believe me.”
“Studying?” asked Anna. “Surely that can wait. We won’t need much of your time.”
Linnea turned to her. “No. Not studying. I’ve told you: this is not a good time.”
“You’re going to have to explain,” Blomquist said. “Tell us why we can’t come in.”
Linnea drew in her breath. “All right,” she hissed. “Since you ask, I’ll spell it out for you. I’m having sex, that’s why.”
All three were taken aback, but it was Blomquist who recovered first. “Oh yes?” he said. “In your slippers?”
She narrowed her eyes. “What’s wrong with that? Just because you people are so...so conventional.”
Ulf had to laugh. “Your generation thinks you invented sex,” he said.
And then Blomquist, without any warning, pushed roughly past Linnea. Taking advantage of her surprise, he walked quickly down the short corridor into the apartment’s living room. Ulf called out after him. “Blomquist, we don’t have a warrant.” But it was too late.
Linnea turned to rush after him, and Anna and Ulf followed. Once in the living room, they saw that there was another person there, sitting in an easy chair, fully clothed, and looking embarrassed.
“Well, well,” said Ulf. “Here you are, Signe.”
Blomquist turned to Linnea. “Your partner, I take it.”
Linnea was crimson with embarrassment. “I was only joking,” she said. “I’m not a lesbian.”
“Who said you’re a lesbian?” asked Signe. “What do these people want?”
“We want to talk to you,” said Ulf.
Signe’s surprise seemed unforced. “Why? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Where have you been?” said Ulf.
“Here.”
“All the time?”
Signe shrugged. “The last few days. A week probably.” She looked at Linnea. “It’s been about a week, hasn’t it, Linnea?”
Linnea did not answer.
“Since you broke up with your boyfriend...boyfriends?” asked Anna.
Signe looked down at the floor. “Yes,” she mumbled. “I felt I should...get out of the way.”
“Because they were angry?” Anna pressed.
Signe took a few moments to answer. “Yes, you could say that. But maybe also because I just couldn’t face them. I felt so bad about everything.”
Ulf turned to Linnea. “Did you talk to Signe about reporting this?”
Before Linnea could answer, Signe blurted out, “Reporting what?”
“That you were missing,” said Ulf.
This brought an immediate reaction from Signe. “Me? Me missing?” she exclaimed. “I’ve been here all the time. I haven’t been missing.”
Now they all turned to face Linnea, who had sat down heavily on a sofa, her head sunk in her hands. “I feel very ashamed of myself,” she said. “I didn’t see it turning out like this.”
Anna exchanged glances with Ulf.
“Tell me,” Ulf said to Signe. “Has your phone been switched off all this time?”
Signe said it had. “I didn’t want the boys to get in touch,” she said. “I just couldn’t face it.”
“And what about your parents?”
Signe made a dismissive gesture. “They’re away. They’re in Japan.”
“Oh, you stupid, stupid young woman,” muttered Ulf.
“What was that? What did you call her?” said Linnea.
“Stupid,” said Blomquist, stepping up to stand within a few inches of her. “And that’s what I call you too. Stupid.”
Anna felt that there had been sufficient calling of names, cathartic though it had undoubtedly been. “You’re going to have to come with us, Linnea,” she said.
“And me?” asked Signe.
Ulf shook his head. “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. But if I were you, I’d phone your parents immediately. Don’t worry about time zones. Just call them straight away and tell them you’re fine. Explain to them why you haven’t been in touch.”
“What, now?”
“Right now,” said Ulf firmly. “This instant.”
Blomquist was staring at Linnea. “You’re a very stupid young woman,” he muttered again. “You’ll be lucky to get community service.”
Anna said, “Let’s not anticipate too much.”
“I’m just informing her. There’ll be a vacancy in bomb disposal, I think.”
Ulf tried to keep a straight face. “Possibly deserved in this case,” he said under his breath.
“Bomb disposal?” asked Linnea.
Blomquist nodded. “You’ll soon find out,” he said.
“Peeling potatoes probably,” said Ulf.
Blomquist looked disappointed. “You’d think the army would be more enlightened about food values.”
Linnea looked confused—and miserable. “I’m really sorry,” she said. “I only did it because Bim asked me to.”
Ulf frowned. “Hold on,” he said. “Bim asked you to? Bim?”
“Yes, she wanted you to think that Signe had staged her disappearance to spite her. Then she would be arrested. She didn’t think you would arrest me.”
“But you were the one who made the false report,” Blomquist pointed out.
Linnea looked away. “Maybe,” she said. “But Bim was the one who thought it all up.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Ulf.
Anna drew Ulf aside. “Do we really need to take this any further?” she whispered.
Ulf hesitated. He glanced at the two young women, looking at one another in confused misery. He made up his mind. There was mercy for the guilty—at times—and mercy, too, for the plain silly.
“Listen,” he said. “All three of you have been very foolish—to put
it mildly.”
“I’d say stupid,” suggested Blomquist.
“That too,” agreed Ulf. “But we shall draw a veil over the whole affair if we receive undertakings from all of you that this nonsense stops right here. No more going to the police with any ridiculous stories. No more squabbling over anything—and I mean, anything. Understand?”
They stared at him in an incomprehension that turned fairly quickly into delight.
The officers did not stay, but made their way back to the Saab. Blomquist was smiling. “Well,” he said. “Solved that one.”
Ulf said nothing. He was not sure that they had solved anything. In fact, he was not sure about whether they had really got to the bottom of whatever it was that they had been investigating.
“Do you feel confused?” He intended the question for Anna, but from the back seat Blomquist answered as well. Anna said, “Yes, completely.” And Blomquist replied, “No, not at all.”
Ulf did not take the matter further. They dropped Blomquist off at his police station and then, at Anna’s request, Ulf drove her to pick up her two daughters from their swimming club, since her own car was being used by her husband. Ulf had met the girls before, and they were not inhibited in their breathless account of the afternoon’s practice races. Ulf listened with only half an ear; he was thinking about the visit to Linnea’s flat. There was something he had spotted, but of which he had not really taken much notice. Now it came back to him: a pair of men’s shoes beside a chair. They had not really registered, but now they did. What were they doing there?
In a break in the girls’ narrative, he said to Anna, “That flat...”
“Yes, what about it?”
“There was a pair of shoes next to a chair.”
“Yes,” she said. “I was going to talk to you about that. I noticed them—I wondered whether you’d seen them too.”
Ulf looked in the driving mirror. The two girls in the back seemed absorbed in a magazine. “What do you think?” he asked.
“There were men in there.”
He gave her an enquiring look. “Men?”
“They were two left shoes,” said Anna. “I noticed that. I thought it a bit odd. If there were two left shoes, then there must have been two right shoes somewhere. Two pairs of shoes—four legs—two men.”
“So what were two males doing in that flat—and why were they hiding them from us?”
Anna thought the answer obvious. “Because there was something going on,” she said. “And they didn’t want us to find out what it was.”
Ulf sighed. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew there was more to this case than meets the eye.”
“You’re right,” said Anna. “But I don’t think there’s much we can do about it—mainly because we don’t know what it is.”
“Of course it may be none of our business,” Ulf pointed out. “After all, we can’t sort out all of the world’s problems.”
“True,” said Anna. “Our role as detectives is strictly circumscribed.”
“We’re not miracle workers,” Ulf said.
“Nor avenging angels.”
They drove on. Ulf looked up at the sky. He felt a curious, indescribable happiness, and was not sure why he should feel this. Was it because he was in Anna’s company—or was it because of something quite different? He could not tell, but he remembered learning, years ago, that the important thing with happiness was simply that you should feel happy; it did not matter, the philosophers said, if you did not understand the reason why you felt happy, as long as the happiness itself was there. That was all that counted.
And then he thought: What if the shoes belonged to Signe’s two boyfriends? What if they’d been there, in the house, when they called round? Blomquist said he had spoken to one of them, but that was a few days ago. What role did they have in all this?
“I’m thinking of remote possibilities,” he said to Anna.
“Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.” Then she added, “Because the remote often becomes less remote if you think about it. And that just complicates life.”
He would need to think about that, he told himself. Later. Not now.
Chapter Fourteen
LYCANTHROPY
The following morning, Ulf prepared to leave for the small country town in which he was due to begin his investigation into the matter with which Commissioner Ahlbörg had entrusted him. He had arrived in the office early, in order to be able to leave before ten. Carl was already there, and had been at his desk for a good hour when Ulf came in. Anna would arrive a bit later, as would Erik, who was usually last in and first to leave.
“Message for you,” said Carl. “A motorcycle courier brought it. It must be important.”
He handed Ulf the brown envelope and watched as he opened it. “Commissioner Ahlbörg?”
Ulf nodded. He read the handwritten letter with growing dismay. “I know that we want to limit the number of people who know about this,” wrote the Commissioner, “but I’ve been feeling a bit concerned about your undertaking this without back-up. Perhaps I’m being a bit too careful, but I feel that you should have somebody from the uniformed branch with you—just in case. Better safe than sorry is my policy, as you may already know. So I have asked somebody to be allocated to you and I understand there’s an officer by the name of Blomquist who will be coming with you. Please impress on him the need for the utmost discretion. Warmest wishes, Felix Ahlbörg.”
Ulf became aware that Carl was watching him, and now his colleague’s curiosity got the better of him. “Bad news?” he asked.
Ulf crumpled the letter into a ball and tossed it into a wastepaper basket. Then, thinking better of it, he retrieved it, folded it, and tucked it into his pocket.
“No,” he replied to Carl. “Neither here nor there.”
That was not true. The attachment of Blomquist to this otherwise intriguing and sensitive mission was not good news at all as far as Ulf was concerned. He would now have a drive of almost an hour with Blomquist going on about steroids and potato skins and all the other things he liked to talk about. And at the other end, he imagined that the policeman would want to tag along with him, offering his insights at every turn and generally making what would otherwise have been a pleasant and interesting day in the country into an irritating chore.
Carl had guessed that the letter concerned the private task that Ulf had spoken about a few days earlier and about which they had managed to extract no information at all. “You’re going off somewhere today?” he asked.
Ulf nodded. “Yes.”
Carl waited a few moments before posing his question. “Where?”
“The country,” said Ulf tersely. “And I’m to take Blomquist. That’s what that letter was about—that’s all.”
Carl raised an eyebrow. “Blomquist?”
* * *
—
The traffic was light and the Saab, to which Ulf occasionally extended the compliment of having an inner life, seemed pleased to be on the road. The last time Ulf had driven the car any distance, it had developed a mysterious rattle somewhere in the engine compartment, but this seemed now to have disappeared. The part in question, he told himself, had either settled down or fallen off altogether; an old car was like an old body—various provinces of the central system revolted but could be pacified by nothing more than sympathy and a spot of oil. Many parts were superfluous to the main purpose, which was to get the chassis from one point to another; if that had to be done without operating windows or heating systems or any of the other optional extras, then so be it, and tomorrow there would be something fresh to worry about.
Blomquist was in a cheerful mood. They had been authorised to spend up to three days on the inquiry, staying at the Commissioner’s cousin’s spa. This was an unusual arrangement, as the acceptance of free hospitality was against departmental rules, but it ha
d been specifically approved of by the Commissioner himself, “given the special circumstances of this sensitive case.”
“I’ve never stayed at a spa before,” said Blomquist, as Ulf drove through the last vestiges of the Malmö traffic. “I take it there’ll be a gym.”
“Bound to be,” said Ulf. “People go to these places for the sake of their health. Exercise is all part of that—”
He got no further. “Oh, you don’t have to tell me that,” Blomquist interrupted. “I follow the High Intensity Exercise Programme. Have you heard of that?”
Ulf wished that he had not referred to health, but it was too late now. Sighing inwardly, he said, “No, tell me about it, Blomquist.”
“Well,” said Blomquist, “there have been a lot of studies that...”
Ulf allowed his mind to wander as Blomquist explained about high-intensity exercise. Like Blomquist, he was pleased to get out into the country, and Abbekås, their destination, seemed like a pleasant coastal town, just short of the better-known and more popular beaches of Skåne. He knew that he would have to work, and that this was not a holiday, but the weather report was encouraging, and there would be plenty of fresh air and sun. He had contemplated bringing Martin, and had established that the spa was happy to accommodate dogs, but he decided that it would be better for him to be in the familiar surroundings of Mrs. Högfors’s apartment while he was having his treatment. Progress had been made, and he would not want to jeopardise that with a sudden change of surroundings.
Ulf was not at all sure how he would proceed with this case. All that he knew so far was that there had been what the Commissioner called “unfortunate incidents” at the spa, and that these had been picked up by online reviewers. It was very easy to frighten people, and apparently this had been happening. Since the incidents had started, the spa’s room occupancy had tumbled and two of the staff had been laid off. He was curious about the incidents—he wondered whether these were acts of vandalism. There were so many ways one could interrupt the smooth running of a hotel and the peace of mind of the guests: interference with the hot water system, noise in the middle of the night, fights in the bar, the adulteration of food—a piece of rotten fish or meat tossed into the soup—could easily have the desired effect.
The Department of Sensitive Crimes Page 18
