Besides, she could not shake off the doubt. Had she really been raped? Not in the traditional sense. If she had been attacked and raped, there would have been no doubt. Perhaps that would have left deeper marks. Perhaps she would have had injuries and diseases and God knows what. But there would have been no doubt. She would have avoided the doubt. And the awful shame.
For that reason she would follow through on this project. She was firmly resolved to put the well-polished senior physician behind lock and key. With his charming smile and his damn laugh lines. And something told her that Mona Friberg would have nothing against that, either.
With the information about Peder Fryhk’s interest in war in the back of her mind, on Wednesday, Petra Westman made contact with the military. After numerous phone calls, she finally got hold of the now sixty-one-year-old major who had been Peder Fryhk’s commander during his final months at KA1. He remembered Fryhk as a lone wolf, but gave her a tip about a former Foreign Legionnaire of Hungarian origin who had been hired by the troop to train the coast commandos in hand-to-hand combat. Fryhk, according to the major, had shown a greater interest in this Andras Takacs than his fellow draftees, and he had the impression that they hit it off during the training.
Petra had an immediate feeling that she was on the trail of something interesting and thought it might be worth trying to contact Takacs. He was not hard to find. A Google search directed her to a karate club on Norrmalm where he was currently active. She was told, however, that he was away and could not be reached until Thursday.
When Petra finally came in contact with the Swedish karate champion with the Hungarian name, she was surprised to hear that he spoke with a French accent. She wondered how long he had actually been a Foreign Legionnaire, but did not ask.
“I’m looking for information about a person by the name of Peder Fryhk, who did his military service with KA1 on Rindö. You reportedly met him during the spring of 1973, when you were training coast commandos in hand-to-hand combat.”
“Yes, I remember him very well,” said Andras Takacs. “Capable guy.”
“Are you still in touch with him?” Petra asked.
“No, I haven’t seen him since.”
“How would you describe him?”
“He was strong, and had a good head on his shoulders. He was extremely interested in the training. Asked a lot of questions.”
His French accent was almost a parody.
“About anything in particular?”
“About everything we covered. He always wanted to go a step further than the others, and as a teacher you feel flattered when students show such a great interest in what you’re teaching.”
“But?”
“There was no ‘but’ there. He was excellent soldier material.”
“Do you know if he had plans for a military career?” asked Petra.
“Not in Sweden anyway. I recall that he was very critical of Sweden’s neutrality policy. On the other hand, he was extremely curious about the French Foreign Legion.”
Petra straightened up.
“I’m an old legionnaire myself,” Takacs explained. “He wanted to know all about what it was like, what was required, what you did, and how you got accepted. I gave him all the information I had. I don’t recommend becoming a foreign legionnaire to just anyone, because it’s really no walk in the park, and I told him that. But I gave him a number of useful tips.”
“Did you get the impression that he was serious?” Petra asked.
“I don’t consider that unlikely,” Takacs answered. “He would have passed the admission test easily with the qualities he had.”
“Mentally, too?”
“Are you joking? That kid was strong as an ox, both physically and mentally.”
Petra smiled to herself and noted that she and the old foreign legionnaire presumably did not have the same view of the concept of mental health.
Petra summarized the information she had. Peder Fryhk was an intelligent, educated man. Smart, well-polished, well-to-do. But he was also a liar. To put himself in a better light, he lied about working for Doctors Without Borders. In reality he was a warmonger who left a wife and child behind to murder people with whom he had no quarrel in foreign lands, with a uniform as a cover. Perhaps in Lebanon. Perhaps somewhere else. Perhaps he was just as informed about all wars as the one playing out in Lebanon. Perhaps it had also been extremely easy to rape women in that uniform. Perhaps, thought Petra, it was also the case that his daughter came about because of a rape. A rape that he camouflaged by going to the minister with his victim. Best for everyone involved. Shrewd as he was. That it was for that reason that contact between him and his wife, between him and the child, was forever broken. A deeply hidden secret that was in everyone’s interest to conceal. That must have been where it started, thought Petra. But a leopard never changes its spots. He was the person he had always been, only now he was considerably more cunning, and had refined his methods.
THURSDAY EVENING
IT WAS ALMOST THREE O’CLOCK on Thursday afternoon when Sjöberg and Hamad got out of the car outside Åkerbärsvägen 31. The snow, unlike in the city, had started to settle like a white blanket over the residential neighborhood, and muffled all the usual sounds from the subway and a few busy roads in the vicinity. A quiet twilight snowfall evoked a feeling of Christmas spirit on the idyllic street, with its mature gardens and old wooden houses. It was hard to say what his colleague’s sense of winter and Christmas was, but Sjöberg knew that as a small child he had moved to Sweden with his family from Lebanon’s civil war. Jamal Hamad was as Swedish as you could be in Sjöberg’s eyes, except that he still refused to eat pork. Possibly, despite his Swedish wife, he was more Lebanese at home than he let on to his co-workers.
The two men looked like they were exhaling clouds of smoke as with tiny, tiny steps they inched their way up the slippery walk to Ingrid Olsson’s house.
“How the hell did they think the old lady would manage this hill in her condition?” Sjöberg exclaimed, without exactly being clear who “they” were.
“Spikes,” Hamad answered factually.
“Hmm,” Sjöberg murmured, taking the house key from his jacket pocket.
They climbed up on the stoop and stamped as much of the wet packed snow from their shoes as they could, while Sjöberg put the key in the lock.
It was dark in the house and Sjöberg fumbled for the switch on the wall inside the door. The house, for some reason, felt smaller now than it had the last time, when it was literally swarming with people. It smelled old, but not unpleasant, more like cozy. It had the usual old people in an old house smell. But it didn’t feel particularly cozy. The furniture gave an even shabbier impression today than it had before. Sjöberg got a sense that the furnishings had been chosen and placed without care. Ingrid Olsson appeared to be a very lonely person and it struck him just how many lonely people there seemed to be in this country.
His own mother, for example. His father died from the complications of a mysterious illness when Sjöberg was only three years old. While he was growing up, they lived in a couple of different apartments in Bollmora, where his mother worked in the cafeteria at his school. As far as he could recall, she never socialized much and had no close friends. Her personality didn’t invite that either. She was basically a negative person, reserved and not easily amused.
Everything was in order and the house seemed clean. Hansson had done a good job as usual, Sjöberg observed. Not just as a police officer, but also in purely human terms.
“What is it we’re hoping to find?” asked Hamad when they were in the living room, aimlessly looking around.
“Papers, books, photographs, souvenirs—what do I know? Anything that might suggest a connection between Olsson and Vannerberg. A connection that perhaps they didn’t even know about themselves. Are there any storage spaces?”
“There’s a basement and a garage.”
“No attic?”
“No attic.”
&n
bsp; “We’ll take the top floor then, to start with,” said Sjöberg. “I haven’t been up there.”
They went up the narrow stairway that led from the end of the hall and Sjöberg now understood why there was no attic. The upper floor was the attic, renovated into a living area; two rather large rooms in terms of floor space, but with a steeply sloping ceiling, making large parts of the rooms unusable for anything other than storage. One was Ingrid Olsson’s bedroom and the other served as a kind of office. There was a desk and a wobbly little bookcase, plus a small table, on which there was a sewing machine.
They made a joint attack on the bedroom. While Sjöberg went through the drawers in the nightstand, Hamad turned on a transistor radio sitting on a stripped dresser by a small window facing toward the garden in front of the house. Sjöberg was startled by the sudden sound, but then smiled in appreciation. The sixties music that was playing felt happy and alive, while Ingrid Olsson’s furnishings from the same time period left an impression of sadness and hopelessness. The house also suffered from an almost total lack of books. Nor did Ingrid Olsson have any houseplants, which Sjöberg imagined must be unusual among women of her generation.
The bedroom concealed no secrets, nor did they find anything in the office that might be of interest to the investigation. The drawers in the desk mostly held sewing patterns, but also standard office supplies such as a stapler, hole punch, scissors, pens, paper, tape, and glue. The bookshelves were full of old magazines from forty years ago, meticulously organized chronologically in various types of magazine holders. The two policemen observed that this was probably a gold mine for collectors and that Ingrid Olsson could surely make a fortune if she decided to sell them, which was the most interesting thing the house had revealed so far. On the other hand, they found no connection between Ingrid Olsson and Hans Vannerberg.
For a long time they worked in silence, each occupied by his own thoughts, but one of them might suddenly start a conversation or pick up the thread to an earlier one, which for one reason or another had languished.
“Maybe Ingrid Olsson is the murderer after all,” Hamad threw out, tired of the monotonous searching.
“She has an airtight alibi, as you know,” said Sjöberg.
“Hers, sure, but she could have hired someone.”
“Perhaps through an ad in the local paper: ‘Seventy-year-old woman seeks hit man for possible partnership.”
“Did you ask her whether she has a boyfriend?” Hamad wondered.
“No, you’re right about that, damn it! Maybe the old lady has a guy somewhere. She doesn’t need to be alone just because she’s a widow.”
“We would have heard about it. Then she probably wouldn’t have to stay with Margit Olofsson,” said Hamad.
“Presumably not. I think we’ll have to abandon that theory.”
The top floor took a couple of hours for the two men to look through, the garage and basement another two, but nothing of any interest emerged until they came to the main floor. Hamad was perched on a kitchen chair, rooting in one of the cabinets above the refrigerator, while Sjöberg sat at the kitchen table examining the contents of a drawer where Ingrid Olsson apparently stored various objects with no particular home. Besides batteries, flashlights, rubber bands, a roll of cotton twine, thumbtacks, a bicycle lamp, a few keys, and a number of loose stamps of various denominations, the drawer also contained a bundle of papers. He leafed slowly through the pile and carefully studied all the receipts, discount coupons, bills, user instructions, account statements, and warranties that passed before his eyes. A receipt from a grocery store in Sandsborg gave him the idea that perhaps Vannerberg and Olsson did their shopping at the same place, and he made a mental note of that for further investigation.
“Jamal, do you remember where Pia Vannerberg works?” Sjöberg suddenly asked.
He was holding a receipt from a visit to the dentist Ingrid Olsson had made a few months earlier at Dalen’s Dental Health Service. Jamal Hamad was generally known at the police station for his extraordinary memory. If he had heard or read something, you could be almost certain that he would remember it, months, maybe even years, later. In this particular case, Sjöberg was fairly convinced that his own memory did not betray him, but to be on the safe side he wanted to double-check.
“She works as a dental hygienist at the National Dental Health Service,” Hamad replied.
“Which office?” Sjöberg asked.
“At Sandsborg over there,” said Hamad, with a gesture in a direction that Sjöberg was not capable of geographically assimilating. “I think it’s called Dalen.”
“Ingrid Olsson has a receipt from there,” said Sjöberg. “Maybe this is the connection we’re looking for.”
“Look,” said Hamad, glancing at his watch. “We’ll have to check that out tomorrow, it’s already twenty past eight.”
“Oh boy,” said Sjöberg. “Time really flies when you’re having fun. And we haven’t even gotten to the living room yet.”
“And the big job is waiting there,” said Hamad, with a hint of resignation in his voice. “That’s where she has her photos.”
Sjöberg suddenly realized that he had forgotten to phone Åsa. As he called her, Hamad concluded his work above the refrigerator and climbed down from the kitchen chair. Then the two men silently continued their hunt for the breakthrough lead.
It was already nine-thirty when they took on the last room in the house, the living room.
“I’m very curious about those photographs,” said Sjöberg, “but I don’t think I can keep going without anything to eat. I’ll go and get something edible. What would you like?”
“Whatever. No pork.”
“Okay, we’ll have to see what I can find. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Sjöberg left the room and shortly thereafter Hamad heard the outside door slam shut.
Ingrid Olsson had no particular order to her photos. Some were neatly placed in albums, but most were in the envelopes they came in after processing. Some were in large manila envelopes and others were piled in heaps right on the shelves in the cabinet. He took an envelope at random and started leafing through the pictures. There was a glorious mixture of old black-and-white pictures and color photos. A few pictures had notes on the back. One old black-and-white photograph, dated June 1938, depicted a man and a woman standing behind two small girls who each sat dangling their legs on a chair. All of them were oddly bundled up despite the time of year. He guessed that this was Ingrid Olsson and her sister posing for the photographer along with their parents. Now Ingrid Olsson was the only one left of the people in the picture, and the man she later shared her life with was dead, too.
The man who was presumably her husband appeared on a number of fading color photos, which he assumed were taken during the seventies, on a trip to what might be a Spanish seaside resort. The two of them looked happy and tanned, and the pictures were nice, if not particularly good in a photographic respect. There were also about a dozen pictures of a little wire-haired dachshund in various poses: by the food bowl, on the brown couch Hamad was sitting on, on a bed, on a lawn, in the arms of his master and mistress. Ingrid Olsson did not look much like the pictures from the seventies, but because he knew it was her, he could see the similarities that were there. She was thinner now, he thought. Her hair had been long and blonde before, now it was gray and cut short. She already had glasses at that time, but then they were large with heavy brown plastic frames, as was the fashion then.
He stopped at a black-and-white photograph of a group of children, presumably a school class, lined up in two rows in front of a wall, where several old seasonal posters were hanging that he recognized from the display windows of antique stores. The teacher stood behind them in the middle and looked serious, as did the majority of the children. He turned the picture over and read the handwritten text: “Forest Hill ’65/’66.” Then he bundled up the photographs, put them back in the envelope and turned to a beautiful album with light-brown leather
binders.
Two albums and a dozen envelopes later, Sjöberg finally showed up with food.
“I couldn’t find anything close by, so I thought it was just as well to go to McDonald’s by Globen. McChicken—is that all right with you?”
“Super.”
Sjöberg unpacked the bag of food on the coffee table and divided the french fries and drinks between them. He was having a Big Mac himself, well aware that this type of food was detrimental at his age. True, he was not much overweight, but he also worked out several times a week. Two hours of exercise was part of his job, and he used them for strength training in the police station’s own gym. Besides, together with Sandén, he had a standing tennis time in the Hellas tent at Eriksdal every Friday morning at seven o’clock, which they tried to make the best use of. He was already forty-eight, and it was crucial to keep your body in shape to prevent a heart attack.
“Did you find anything?” he asked Hamad, taking a bite of his hamburger.
“No, nothing special. Vacation pictures from the seventies and eighties, lots of pictures of some pooch—a dachshund. Maybe they couldn’t have children. Old black-and-white pictures from ancient times. Nothing with a connection to Vannerberg. Provided they weren’t on the same vacation in Spain in 1975.”
“We’ll keep going until we’ve looked through everything, anyway. If nothing else, to create a picture of Ingrid Olsson as a person. Have you seen her smiling in any of the pictures?”
“Yes, actually. She was probably happier before, when she wasn’t so lonely.”
“That’s not so strange when you think about it. Even if the chance of making new friends presumably increases with the number of smiles you spread around you.”
“By the way, I don’t think there was a camera in the house during the fifties and sixties,” said Hamad.
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