I was nervous about this, I have to admit. Before I’ve acted according to my heart, but this time my heart was not really in it. Putting Carina Ahonen to death was a purely logical decision, based on certain philosophical assumptions I’ve made. Namely, that fawning, passivity, and schadenfreude are associated with evil. She always fawned on the ones who were the driving force in the physical abuse, and praised them for their actions, with her passive presence she took an active part in the terror, and her schadenfreude reflected her drive to injure and wound others. Besides, she was the one who established the norm for all that was important: appearance, behavior, vocabulary, interests. Power radiated from her in silence, and a wrinkle of dissatisfaction on her sweet little doll’s face sent the soldiers on attack against anyone who defied the unspoken rules formed inside her silver-glistening corkscrew curls. Such a person is evil without a doubt, isn’t she? And thus does not deserve to live. Yet I wasn’t able to mobilize any real hatred before the task I had set myself. No, no feelings at all really, except possibly a small measure of old contempt.
Only a few weeks ago the very thought of killing a person on such flimsy grounds—nay, on any grounds at all—would have been completely foreign to me, but today it’s an everyday event. It’s time to stop now, before I become so blasé that gloominess gets the upper hand.
FRIDAY EVENING
IT WAS ALMOST SEVEN when Sjöberg got home on Friday, wet, miserable, and late. Since Thursday morning he had only seen his wife in a sleeping state, and he had not seen the children at all. He did not even have time to take off his wet pants before he was ordered to put the little boys to bed. The girls stormed around his legs in their eagerness to talk about things that had happened during the day, and Jonathan screamed while Sjöberg changed Christoffer’s diaper. The disappointment at the day’s failures disappeared temporarily somewhere in his mind under a compact layer of stress and irritation at the children‘s loud voices. Twenty minutes later, when the girls were sitting in front of the DVD player eating popcorn; the twins, full of whole-grain porridge, were babbling in their cribs; Simon was sitting in front of his computer; and Åsa was in the shower, he finally had time to remove his soaked pants. Then the doorbell rang and, half-undressed, he had to run over to the entry phone and let the babysitter into the stairwell. The door to the bathroom was locked, so he couldn’t get at his bathrobe, but instead had to unwillingly wriggle into his wet pants again.
The babysitter was the sixteen-year-old half-sister of Simon’s friend, Johan, one door down, who was there every other weekend. Her name was Anna, and she was a reliable girl with a mind of her own. The kids liked her a lot. There was also a feeling of security, knowing there was help available in the neighboring building if anything were to happen.
This was the first time they were leaving the twins at home with Anna as babysitter, but any problems were unlikely, since the boys usually slept through the night. The girls rushed out in the hall when they heard the doorbell, and threw themselves into Anna’s arms when Sjöberg let her in. Then he went back to the bedroom to freshen up and change quickly, before it was time to go down to the street to the pre-arranged taxi. Not until they were buckled in the backseat and had pointed the taxi driver in the right direction was there time for Sjöberg and his wife to have a moment for each other.
When you saw them next to each other, there was no doubt that Lasse was Åsa’s brother. Both were tall and slender, even if Lasse, who was a few years older than Åsa, had the start of a beer belly that he tried to conceal by means of tunic shirts and loose-fitting sweaters. Both of them were also true blonds and had similar greenish, almost cat-like eyes. Sjöberg’s sister-in-law, Mia, on the other hand, was dark, short, and a little plump, with a marvelously contagious laugh. They had no children, and though they loved children and were the best babysitters you could imagine, Åsa was convinced that they were childless by choice, even if she never dared bring up the question with either of them. Sjöberg was more doubtful, but yielded to his wife’s presumed knowledge of her own brother. Lasse was an interior designer, which was definitely not reflected in their own, rather carelessly arranged home, and Mia worked as a manager at an IT company. They travelled a lot and this was Åsa’s main argument that their childlessness was a choice.
Not until Sjöberg sank down in the somewhat worn but comfortable corner couch and took the first gulp of Lasse’s specialty, vodka and Red Bull, did he feel how tired he was. The tension of the past few weeks started letting go little by little, and the strong drink had an immediate effect. The disappointment at Gun Vannerberg’s negative response about the family’s possible residence in Österåker bubbled up to the surface of his awareness again and he let out a deep sigh. He could hear the siblings’ voices from the kitchen as Mia sank down next to him on the couch, holding out a small ceramic bowl of mammoth-sized green olives toward him.
“Why the dejected sigh?” she asked, curiously.
He took an olive and tossed it in his mouth.
“I’m just exhaling after a long, strenuous week at the dregs of society,” he answered jokingly, depositing the olive pit in an ashtray that had clearly been swiped from a restaurant in the neighborhood.
“Oh boy,” said Mia. “What are you working on now?”
“A murder in Enskede. A forty-four-year-old real estate agent who was beaten to death in an old lady’s kitchen.”
As he said that, he happened to think of another forty-four-year-old, and the fact that Mia actually grew up in Katrineholm.
“By the way, did you hear about that mother of two in Katrineholm?” he asked. “The one who apparently drowned in a tub of water a few days ago?”
“Yes, I read about that,” Mia replied. “That sounded like a gruesome story.”
“Did you know her?”
“No, I didn’t. She was three or four years younger than me, so we weren’t in high school at the same time. I didn’t even recognize the name. What was it again?”
“No idea,” Sjöberg answered, taking another olive.
“I think my mom said her name was Lise-Lott or something like that. No, I don’t remember anyone by that name. This case you’re working on now, has there been anything in the papers about it?”
“Yes, quite a bit actually, but that was a few weeks ago.”
“Do you think you’ll catch him?” Mia asked hopefully.
“Maybe we will sooner or later, but right now it doesn’t look good.”
“Then we’ll stop talking about that and entertain ourselves instead. It will ripen over the weekend and then you’ll solve it on Monday!”
“Let’s drink to that,” said Sjöberg, taking a substantial gulp from the glass and almost getting an olive pit caught in his throat.
Lasse called from the kitchen that the food was served and they got up from the couch, taking their glasses. On the large, round kitchen table a pasta buffet of unusual proportions was set out. There was a bowl of spaghetti alla carbonara, a pan of homemade gnocchi swimming in cream sauce with cheese and diced pork, a saucepan of tagliatelle with pesto smelling of garlic, a pan of homemade lasagna, and another bowl of spaghetti in a sauce made of cream, onion, and chicken liver. Alongside this a large dish with colorful tricolore salad with tomatoes, avocado, and mozzarella, and a tub of freshly grated parmesan cheese. Lasse stood behind the overflowing table opening several bottles of Italian red wine of varying origins. Sjöberg’s jaw dropped, and all he could get out was a question about whether both of them had lost their jobs, considering the time it must have taken to prepare this, as promised, “simple” Friday dinner.
They sat down around the table and dug into the amazing dishes. Sjöberg ate until he was about to burst, the sound level in the kitchen rose as the level in the wine bottles lowered, and topics of discussion flew thick and fast around the table. After the main courses were finished, a sweet smooth panna cotta was served, decorated with raspberries and blueberries on a mirror of raspberry coulis. With this they drank a w
hite port wine—and their intoxication grew.
After they had cleared the worst of it in the kitchen, they retired to the soft couches of the living room. While coffee was brewing, Mia took out her favorite game, “National Encyclopedia,” and they started debating whether they should play individually or in teams. Sjöberg, who was an individualist and hated losing, proposed the former.
“It’s already eleven,” said Mia, “and we know that you’ll win if we play individually. But if we don’t play in teams, we’ll be sitting here all weekend.”
Something clicked in Sjöberg’s head, and he suddenly felt sober. There it was again, that accent that had haunted him since the story about the murdered woman in Katrineholm on the TV news the other day.
“Wake-end,” said Sjöberg quietly, but the others heard it and looked at him with surprise.
It was the policeman from Katrineholm who had talked that way, but who else? It was very close now, it was right there in the back of his mind and wanted out. In what context had he heard that, very, very recently?
“Wake-end,” he said again, louder this time.
The other three people at the table exchanged glances among themselves, and once again looked curiously at Sjöberg and giggled expectantly. He did not notice them, though, it was so close, so close... He knew it was important. Something in his subconscious told him this was decisively important, he just knew it.
And then suddenly it came to him. He remembered his first conversation with Gun Vannerberg. The grieving, strangely-dressed Gun Vannerberg sitting on a chair across from him in his office at the police station and asking to look at the remains of her murdered son.
“I know that they would prefer that we not come until after four, but I’ll ask anyway.”
“Is that so?” Gun Vannerberg had answered. There it was, what the policeman had said in the TV interview.
“When did you last see your son?”
“Last wake-end. He was with his youngest daughter Moa and came to see me in Malmö, where I live.”
And where was this sudden insight leading him?
“What are you up to, darling?” Åsa interrupted him in his musings.
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” Sjöberg answered, getting up from the couch and quickly leaving the room.
The others shook their heads and laughed, wondering, but returned to the game preparations.
Sjöberg went into the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the tub. So the policeman on the TV news comes from Katrineholm, like his sister-in-law, but Gun Vannerberg comes from there too, he thought. Mia nowadays spoke a smoothed-out variation of the Katrineholm dialect, but Gun Vannerberg’s accent was the same as the policeman’s, he was sure of that. So had Hans Vannerberg lived in Katrineholm? In that case why had his mother withheld this information from Sjöberg? Sandén would have laughed if he could see him now, but Sjöberg was sure that he was on the trail of something decisive, he felt it intuitively and this time he relied on his intuition. But where did Ingrid Olsson come into the picture?
He got up and rushed back into the living room. Three pairs of curious eyes were aimed at him.
“I need an atlas,” he said excitedly.
“An atlas?”
Lasse looked at him in bewilderment.
“A map of Sweden, whatever.”
“I don’t know where our atlas is,” said Mia. “I don’t think--”
“I’ve got to have one. Now.”
“Maybe the neighbor has one,” Lasse suggested.
Mia saw the seriousness in Sjöberg’s eyes and got up purposefully.
“I’ll go and talk with the neighbor,” she said, walking resolutely out into the hall, putting on a pair of shoes and going out the door.
“What is this all about, Conny?” Lasse asked. “You look completely wild.”
“He’s thought of something,” Åsa answered in his place. “He’s thought of something important that has to do with the murder.”
“The murder?”
Lasse looked at him with fascination.
“Are you sitting here drinking and solving murders at the same time?”
”Yes, I hope so,” Sjöberg answered with an absent-minded smile.
At that moment the door opened again, and Mia trudged in with The Motorist’s Road Atlas of Sweden in hand. She handed the book to Sjöberg, who immediately started looking in the alphabetical index in the back.
“What are you looking for?” Mia asked.
“Katrineholm,” answered Sjöberg. “I want to see where Katrineholm is...”
“I could tell you that,” Mia suggested, but Sjöberg took no notice of the others right now.
He led his index finger along one of the columns and mumbled, “Katorp, Katrineberg, Katrineberg, Katrinedal, Katrineholm -- there it is, page 62...”
He flipped back to the page in question and studied the map for a minute or two. His eyes ran over the names of lakes, cities, towns, and villages. Purposefully he continued his search until he found what he was looking for. There it stood, clear and obvious in bold black letters, right between Katrineholm and Hallsberg: Österåker.
Sjöberg closed the atlas with a thud and looked at his beloved wife with a slightly apologetic expression.
“I’m afraid there’s going to be some work for me this weekend,” he said sorrowfully.
But inside he felt a growing exhilaration.
SATURDAY MORNING
WHEN HE WOKE UP on Saturday morning, he had a pounding headache. Although he had switched to drinking water by eleven, when he made his startling discovery, and taken two aspirin besides, and had at least ten glasses of water right before he crept into bed, he was unable to outwit the hangover. It only got harder with the years, and now he decided, as he had so many times before, to quit drinking alcohol altogether. A resolution he knew he would abandon by Saturday evening if he knew himself.
He let Åsa sleep a few more hours. After all, he would be leaving her to take care of the kids alone for the better part of the day. Even though he knew that the tasks he had before him were urgent, he realized that a few hours here or there would not change anything. Hans Vannerberg was dead, after all, and his self-imposed Saturday assignment could not change that fact.
At ten o’clock he finally woke his still soundly sleeping wife. He had been up with the five kids for almost four hours, so his conscience was mostly clear. He crept down next to her between the sheets, and took time to enjoy a few minutes of her warm, soft body against his own. Then he apologized and promised to be back as soon as possible, presumably before the twins woke up from their afternoon nap.
He hugged the children and sent them in to their sleepy mother, after which he slipped out the door unnoticed so the little boys would not try to follow him barefoot out into the dirty stairwell.
When Sjöberg came out on the street, to his surprise he noticed that the heavy clouds had scattered and the sun was peeping out for the first time in weeks. There was a strong wind and the temperature was about freezing, but he decided to walk to the police station anyway. The playground at Nytorget was already full of children, and on the benches along the side sat their parents, keeping them in sight while they played. He did not envy them. Sitting and staring in a playground was not one of Sjöberg’s favorite pastimes.
Instead of walking down Östgötagatan to the police station, he took the pedestrian path past Eriksdal. The wind was blowing right at him and he regretted not bringing his scarf. Under the bridge, two winos sat yelling with far too little clothing on for the season. Sjöberg pushed his hands deeper into his pockets when he saw them. The walk was just what he needed, however, and when he sat down at his desk he already felt more energetic.
He started by phoning Margit Olofsson’s house again to try to have a few words with Ingrid Olsson, but as he feared, no one answered. Then he tried both of Gun Vannerberg’s numbers, but got no answer there either. Finally he called Pia Vannerberg. She was at home. He asked if she had anything a
gainst him coming over for a short visit and she answered in a flat voice that she had no objections.
He took the envelope with the old photos from Ingrid Olsson’s preschool, left the police station, and took the walkway back up to Skanstull to get a southbound subway. At Enskede Gård he got off the train and walked the last stretch. Pia Vannerberg’s mother opened the door for him, and it was with some relief that he noted the recent widow was not alone with her grief.
Pia Vannerberg had no makeup on and she looked tired and worn out. She was moving in slow motion and spoke slowly, which made Sjöberg think she was on tranquilizers. It was quiet in the house. The children were nowhere to be seen, nor was their grandfather. Sjöberg assumed he had taken the grandchildren out in the relatively nice autumn weather. Mother and daughter sat down on the couch and Sjöberg in the armchair, like the last time he was there. He took out the photos and set them on the coffee table in front of the two women.
“I really have just one question,” he said, directing himself to Hans Vannerberg’s widow. “I understand that this is difficult for you, but I would like to know if you recognize Hans in any of these pictures.”
She looked for a long time at two of the pictures without recognizing any of the children. On the third photograph, which according to the writing on the back depicted the group of children from 1968/’69, she found him immediately. She pointed to a little boy with light-blond, disheveled hair and a big smile that showed he was losing his baby teeth. He was on one knee in the middle of the front row, and somehow gave the impression that he was on his way. On his upper body he wore a big-checked flannel shirt whose sleeves ended halfway up to his elbows and which let a little of his stomach peep out. He was without a doubt, the first thing an observer’s eyes were drawn to.
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