The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  His cell phone began to vibrate on the crumb-free tabletop. Göran picked it up and answered.

  “Hi, my name is Elin Traneus,” said an anxious voice.

  * * *

  “THEN IT MUST be the husband, Arvid—isn’t that almost always how it is?” said Lena more as a declaration than a question.

  They remained sitting in the kitchen downstairs. An old country kitchen with deep window niches and floors of thick pinewood that forced you to wear rag socks or slippers when the weather turned cold. Lena leaned forward with her elbows propped on the table and looked at Fredrik and Gustav with curious blue eyes. She had recently shocked everyone around her by cutting off her long, blonde hair to a more manageable brush cut. At the care home where she worked she had been given the nickname “Self-confidence Now” because of a certain resemblance to a celebrity therapist who had published a number of books on the subject.

  “Yes,” Fredrik agreed, “unfortunately that is how it almost always is.”

  Lena replaced her pouch of smokeless tobacco, pressed the used pouch into the lid of the snus box and slipped a fresh one in under her lip.

  “And he’s taken off, too; it’s gotta be him,” she said after having adjusted the pouch exactly where she wanted it.

  “Just bear in mind now,” said Gustav, “that that’s your theory. We didn’t say that.”

  Lena made a face at her husband.

  “I know the routine.”

  They were used to always talking to Ninni and Lena about new cases, at least if it was something spectacular enough to raise questions anyway. But they never said more than Göran Eide would be telling the press anyway. More or less. And they never told them about any theories or speculations that were being discussed down at the station.

  Fredrik cleared the plates that were still on the table and set them down on the counter next to the sink.

  “Traneus. Didn’t they have a daughter who died?” said Lena and looked at Gustav and then at Fredrik.

  They in turn looked at each other, but no one looked especially enlightened.

  “Not that we know of,” said Fredrik.

  “I’m almost sure about it,” said Lena and looked at Ninni this time.

  “Don’t look at me. When it comes to village gossip I don’t have much to contribute.”

  They hadn’t had a progress meeting with the rest of the team that day, and the next one wasn’t scheduled until eight o’clock the following morning. Lennart Svensson had been in Visby checking through databases. He was sure to have a solid grasp of all the family constellations and any children that may have died.

  “I think Karin knew her a little. Or maybe it was a friend of a friend of hers. But it must have been some time ago,” said Lena.

  Fredrik felt exhilarated, almost unnaturally awake despite the long day. A feeling that was familiar from the first days of an investigation, a kind of euphoria brought on by the challenge of solving the case. Completely different from the gray fatigue that would take over in four to five days if no perpetrator had been brought in.

  He walked back and sat down at the table.

  “How did she die?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lena and fingered the box of smokeless tobacco, “there was something mysterious about the whole thing, a lot of talk, very hush-hush. I know that she was brought into the hospital on a number of different occasions. It may have been cancer, or else something psychological that made her commit suicide.”

  Lena threw her arms out in a quick gesture.

  “But I really don’t know. It all feels very distant now, but I remember my sister telling me about it at some point.”

  “How long ago was this?” asked Gustav.

  “Seven, eight years ago, maybe more. She wasn’t quite grown up yet, I don’t think.”

  Ninni got up from the table and started clearing things away from the counter.

  It was her way of saying that she was tired and wanted to go to bed. Fredrik would have liked to sit there a while longer.

  “Is Simon still up?” he asked.

  “I assume so,” said Ninni, “unless he’s fallen asleep in front of the TV. You’ll have to go up and take a look.”

  “Well, there’s no school tomorrow,” said Fredrik.

  “Yeah, but he always gets so grumpy when he doesn’t get to bed.”

  A dead daughter, a murdered mother, probably killed by her own husband. A lot of death in that family, thought Fredrik.

  “All right, I’ll go up,” he said.

  21.

  Everything had changed. When Elin woke up it was as if she had woken up to a new life. The light was different, the colors, the air she breathed. She was different. Her skin, what was contained within it and that which defined her as a person, wherever that was.

  She was used to being different when she came to the island. The moment she set foot on the quayside, she left a piece of her behind her on the ferry, took a big step back in time, pulled on an awkward overall, stiff with old complexes. Then when she’d climb back onboard again a few days later, she’d find herself again at the very back on one of the pilled seats in the pet area, sullen and disappointed, bored of being forced to waste two days traveling back and forth across the Baltic.

  But now it was seriously different. Her mother was gone. Murdered. Her father was also gone. For some reason she thought of him onboard a big ship, far away. On the run, but satisfied.

  She slowly sat up in the couch. There was a bed in Ricky’s workroom, but she had always found that room to be so depressingly cold. She preferred to sleep on the couch in the living room.

  All she had now was herself. And Ricky, of course, even if he wasn’t much help. Sorry! she thought immediately, I don’t mean that. She loved Ricky. And he was a help. Yesterday he had taken care of her. The thought of that made her feel that there was still something that survived after all.

  It was getting lighter outside. There was a bluish glow coming in through the deep windows. She wrapped the blanket around her and walked barefoot across the cold floor up to one of the windows. She looked out across the little garden that without any visible boundary gave way to Ricky’s landlord’s extensive plot. To the left, however, there was an electrified fence around the well-grazed pasture where gray and black lambs stood motionless like little pruned juniper bushes in the sunrise. Then she caught sight of the Prada bag and the flattened Bag-in-Box in the middle of the lawn.

  She quickly pulled on her clothes, slipped her feet into a pair of boots in the hall that were seven sizes to big, and went out to collect her things. It was hot outside and there was an unseasonably warm wind blowing in from the west.

  She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder, took the box wine in her left hand. The purple plastic bag from the state liquor store that she had had it in, had blown away and was nowhere to be seen.

  Elin straightened her back. It said something about yesterday that they had forgotten both the wine and the bag out in front of the house. She pushed her shoulders back and slowly turned to the left. There was a woman standing outside the house next door. She was standing there blatantly staring at her. Elin raised her free hand and waved, but then quickly turned her back on the woman and began walking toward the house. She didn’t have the energy to answer any questions, could pretty much imagine what it would sound like. First sympathy, followed by fishing.

  She took refuge inside the house with the oversized boots flopping and knocking around her feet. She stepped out of them and set down the Bag-in-Box on the bench next to the upright hall mirror. She stopped and regarded her reflection from head to toe. She felt as if she’d grown older since the night before, but you couldn’t tell from looking at her. She leaned in closer and studied her face. A seam on the couch had left an impression on her cheek. She ran her finger along it.

  The policeman she had spoken to the previous evening was going to call again. He had told her to call him if they received any more threats, or 911 if she couldn�
�t get hold of him. He had sounded nice but tired, his voice not really clear. During the night it was also best to call 911, he had added. She had started to apologize, but he had cut her off telling her that there was no need. He had offered his condolences before explaining that he had some questions, but that it would be better to wait with them until tomorrow.

  And now it was tomorrow. She went out into the kitchen and set her bag down on the glossy black table and poured herself a big glass of water. She was thirsty and emptied it in a few gulps. But she didn’t feel the least bit hungry.

  She saw the bag that lay deflated on the table like a punctured beach ball and it was only then that it dawned on her that she didn’t need it anymore. She could throw it away, give it to the Salvation Army, or sell it on eBay. There was no longer anyone she had to lug it around for. Of course, her father was still out there somewhere, but she had never used the bag for his sake, not to please him because he had bought it for her. She had done it for her mother, because her mother felt that she ought to use it for his sake.

  “It’s only a bag after all,” she said to herself and slowly emptied the contents onto the table.

  * * *

  HE WAS ALL wound up like a Duracell bunny, had hardly slept during the night. Beppo was still snoring in the bedroom when he pressed his nose against the kitchen window and looked out across the parking lot outside the Konsum supermarket. Downtown Hemse. It was light outside and people had started to appear along the sidewalks.

  The apartment had two rooms. But the place was a fucking sty. Empty beer cans, liquor bottles, and dirty clothes jumbled up with hopelessly out-of-date home electronics, that Beppo had probably stolen from somewhere. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes and the floor was covered in grit and stained with ingrained crud. Not that he was particularly fussy, but whether he liked it or not, three-and-a-half years of prison discipline had made him accustomed to a certain degree of order.

  Beppo and he had been in the same class since fourth grade and they had kept in touch since school. Sporadically, but still.

  He lit a cigarette and decided to go down and buy the newspapers. He had watched the news all last night.

  The local Gotland channel on digital TV had run the same news report over and over again: “A man and woman were found dead early Friday morning at a farm in southern Gotland. The police are currently very tight lipped about the circumstances surrounding the murders.” Just think of all the things that happen when you’ve been gone for a few years.

  Beppo had bragged all day about his digital TV box, how he had bought it under the counter for just four hundred. He had pretended to be impressed. No shit?! What did the guy think he was doing? Selling under-the-counter TV boxes in Hemse, what a fucking dead end.

  He was about to light yet another cigarette when he realized that he already had one smoldering in his mouth. He put it down at the very edge of the table while he wriggled into his tracksuit jacket and pulled the zipper all the way up to his neck.

  On the way out he caught sight of Beppo’s hoodie hanging from a hook on the hall. He put it on over his tracksuit top and pulled up the hood. He didn’t feel like being recognized. It had been many years since he’d last wandered around in Hemse. He had left the island long before he went to prison, but the people were essentially the same and many would recognize him. And some of them would put two and two together.

  He took the last few drags from his cigarette on the way down the steps and tossed the butt into the boot scraper outside the front entrance. His hair hung outside the hood and he pushed it back and tried to shove it far back behind his neck.

  He had kept it long throughout his incarceration. Many had cut their hair short or shaved their heads, but he had refused. His first month inside he had gotten into a fight. He wasn’t the one who started it, and it really wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the guy who’d gone after him ripped a big tuft of hair out of his head when he’d gotten the upper hand. That punk-ass bastard.

  Three days later he had caught sight of the hair-puller a ways ahead of him in the dinner line in the cafeteria. When the guy was busy getting his food, he had snuck up behind him and buried a fork in his ass as far as it would go. The guy had groaned like wounded musk ox.

  He had been put in solitary for a few days, but after that nobody pulled his hair anymore.

  It was hot with two jackets on, but he wasn’t going far. The Hemse shopping center was just across the street. He walked into the tobacco shop and took a DN and a GT newspaper. There was one person ahead of him, a gray-haired old lady holding a newspaper.

  “My goodness, this is awful, just ghastly,” he heard her say as she waved the front page in front of the tobacconist, “why it’s only a stone’s throw away from here.”

  The tobacconist nodded behind the counter, a big, sturdy guy he didn’t recognize and who hadn’t been there the last time he had been on the island.

  “But, misfortune visits rich and poor alike,” said the old lady, and was handed her change, which it took her an eternity to put into her change purse. “Though I don’t know how fortunate they were up there before, either. That big farm…”

  She sighed a little and let her statement hang in the air a little. The tobacconist shifted his attention to him and he laid the newspapers onto the counter.

  When he emerged from the tobacconist, the metal roller shutters of the state liquor store were just being raised, exposing the double-door entrance. He stopped with his back to the tobacconist’s video shelf and looked through the window across the street at the racks full of cans and bottles. He thought for a while, but decided that he couldn’t stand there gawking outside like an idiot this time, but decided to go ahead and enter the store.

  That was another thing he’d promised himself before his release, that he would ease off on the sauce. So this was the second promise he’d broken in less than a week, he thought as he grabbed one of the gray plastic shopping baskets from the stack by the turnstile. But this would have to be written off as an exception, given the circumstances, and he could still take it easy even if he drank a little.

  He veered off before he made it to the hard-liquor shelf, stopped in the beer section and quickly put four cans of Norrlands Guld into his basket. Four cans was nothing after all, and for that very reason maybe he wasn’t going to take any more, he thought, but then realized that he couldn’t get out of inviting Beppo to join him, and immediately doubled the number of cans in his basket.

  Two guys his own age entered the store and stopped on the other side of the rack. One was wearing a blue T-shirt, the other a washed-out plaid flannel shirt and two-day beard. He didn’t recognize either of them, but looked down at the floor just in case.

  “It may sound harsh to say this, but if you ask me, if it was going to happen to anybody, it was going to happen to them,” he heard one of them say.

  He was heading off with his cans of beer when a man in his fifties came in through the turnstile. The older one called out and waved to the younger men and headed toward them.

  “Did you hear about the Traneuses?” he said in a hushed voice when he’d gotten a little closer.

  The other two nodded.

  “Apparently it was a real bloodbath. Viktor knows the woman who does the cleaning up there, and it was no joke. The poor girl’s a complete wreck, Amanda Wahlby, I don’t know if you…”

  The others shook their heads.

  “There wasn’t much left of them,” he said and lowered his voice to just a whisper, “just mincemeat. She couldn’t even tell who they were.”

  The younger man grimaced, but there was just as much curiosity reflected in their faces.

  “It’s like Stigge said just now, typical that it would happen to them.”

  “Yeah,” said the older man, “it’s almost spooky. It’s like some people have a curse on them or something. I mean, how much shit can happen to one family? And it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s the
one that did it, that Arvid.”

  “He’s always been one cocky son of a bitch,” said the one whose name was apparently Stigge.

  “And a little crazy,” said the other.

  “But of course you gotta hand it to the guy, he’s done well for himself, too. Not that I know much about it, but they say he was raking it in over there in Japan.”

  “He was rich before, too, wasn’t he,” said Stigge.

  “Maybe things have gone too good for him,” said his friend, then they went silent, suddenly aware that someone was listening.

  Three pairs of eyes turned toward him questioningly. He realized that he had forgotten to look down at the floor, and instead had stood there for a long moment staring at them and listening to their conversation on the other side of the beer rack. He immediately looked down and turned his back to them. He headed toward the checkout, had to really force himself to walk at a normal pace, felt their eyes burning holes in the back of his neck.

  He wasn’t afraid of those bozos, he would have been able to take them all on, if it came to that, but the important thing right now wasn’t to show off, but to keep a low profile. More than anything he just wanted to get out of there. Leave this goddamn shit hole of an island on the next ferry. But that wouldn’t look very good, anyone could work that one out. Chill out with a few brews as if nothing had happened was probably the best thing he could do right now.

  He lined up the cans on the checkout conveyor and forced a smile. He briefly met the cashier’s gaze. He didn’t like the way she looked at him. Not like he was just any other customer, not even like he was an oddball, but as if he reminded her of something.

  22.

  “If he has left the country, or the island for that matter, he certainly hasn’t left any trace. We’ve checked the airports, Destination Gotland, national railroad, credit cards. Nothing.”

  The tall, almost completely gray-haired Lennart Svensson had dark circles under his eyes and his wrinkles seemed more numerous and deeper than usual, but he still looked buoyant. Lennart was legendary for his ability, when he was in that sort of mood, to exasperate his colleagues during briefings with bad jokes and trivial comments, but despite being the oldest detective at CID, he could put in more hours than anyone without either complaining or bragging about it.