The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  “Not just that, of course. I spoke with Anders, threw it in his face as soon as the others had left. And for the first time he came clean. I knew about Kristina, of course, had even asked him about it several times, but he had always waved it off. This time he told me straight. Well, he wasn’t actually very clear this time, either, but he spoke about it anyway. And what he said was enough for all the pieces to fall into place. After that, there was only one thing to do and that was to leave. The children were all grown up and had moved out, so it was easy, practically speaking. But it was difficult, very difficult after more than twenty years. I was angry, sad, and…”

  She broke off in mid-sentence and looked first at Fredrik, then at Gustav.

  “Anyway, I guess that’s about what you needed to know?”

  “Yes, I guess it is,” said Fredrik. “I realize that this is difficult for you, but just one last thing.”

  Inger nodded weakly.

  “After you got divorced, do you know if Anders reestablished contact with Kristina?”

  “It sure looks that way. I mean, they died together. But, no, it was nothing I knew anything about. I understand that men are drawn to Kristina. She’s like that. But I don’t understand how anyone can cling to the memory of her for half a lifetime. She’s not worth that. Maybe nobody is, but she definitely wasn’t.”

  She paused for a moment and then continued clearly and resolutely:

  “Kristina wasn’t a good person. She wasn’t worthy of all his longing.”

  24.

  “It seems as if Anders Traneus finally got what he wanted,” said Gustav when Fredrik returned from having seen Inger Traneus out.

  “Slow and steady wins the race,” said Fredrik.

  He stood there silently for a moment in the doorway to Gustav’s room. Gustav didn’t say anything, either. Cynicisms had no place here, they just felt sordid.

  “What can you say?” said Fredrik.

  “Yeah … what can you say?”

  Fredrik leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb. Any attempt to sum it up or make a comment just felt petty. And the whole time he saw before him that abyss. Precipitous, dark, and impossible to cross.

  “So what do we do now,” asked Gustav, “should we go see the father?”

  “Yeah, let’s head over there and see how he’s doing. If he seems okay, then we’ll bring him back here. It’ll probably be a little chaotic over there otherwise, what with children and grandchildren and everything.”

  * * *

  ELIN TOOK THE heavy paper bag and carried it to the sink.

  “Are you still shopping at ICA?” she said when he had untied his shoes and came into the kitchen.

  “What?”

  “ICA! You still don’t dare shop anywhere except at ICA?”

  “What do you mean, don’t dare?” said Ricky and straightened his sweater that had been turned inside out down at the hem.

  “You know what I mean. That Father always warned us about that pinko co-op Konsum.”

  “As it happens, I do shop at Konsum on occasion. Especially in the summer. The lines are much shorter there,” said Ricky and took the tabloids that lay in the top of the bag.

  “Sure,” said Elin and started putting the groceries away.

  The bag was neatly packed with milk at the bottom and vegetables at the top.

  “I still don’t understand if he meant that communists shopped there, or that Konsum itself was a bunch of communists who stole market share from private retailers.”

  Ricky held up both papers in front of him and scanned the front pages.

  “Since when did you become such a lefty?” he asked, no longer fully engaged in the discussion.

  “Ricky, it’s not about politics. It’s about the fact that I want to be able to go and buy a carton of milk without Father looking over my shoulder.”

  Ricky turned the newspapers around so that Elin could read.

  MURDER DRAMA ON GOTLAND

  MULTIMILLIONAIRE ON THE RUN FROM POLICE

  DOUBLE MURDER A CRIME OF PASSION?

  THEY LAY IN EACH OTHER’S ARMS

  “Hemse wasn’t a hell of a lot of fun. I didn’t get a chance to think too much about which supermarket to go to.”

  Elin took the Expressen newspaper from him and quickly flipped through the pages dealing with the murder of their mother and her alleged lover. They lay dead in each other’s arms.

  “I can’t read this.”

  She tossed aside the newspaper onto the table and wrapped her arms around herself, as far as she could. She was cold and everything seemed unreal.

  “Strange that they haven’t started pestering us yet,” said Ricky with his nose in the Aftonbladet.

  “Well, we pulled the phone jack out yesterday, after that…”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right.”

  Elin left the kitchen, and went into the bedroom and started rooting around among Ricky’s clothes.

  “Could I borrow one of your sweaters?” she called out.

  She pulled on a black fleece sweater that was far too big.

  “Sure, but could you stop running around?”

  “But I’m cold.”

  “Yeah, but can’t you just sit down, or stand still at least.”

  Elin came back into the kitchen, sat down on a chair with her arms crossed.

  “So how was it, in Hemse?”

  “Strange. Fucking strange. First the news bills and then … well, you can imagine. People started coming up to me. And the ones that didn’t stared. I was barely able to finish shopping. I just wanted to drop the basket and run away.”

  “Listen, I—”

  She stopped short and looked out the window when she heard a car slow down. A red station wagon with the TV4 logo on the doors rolled slowly up to the gate while the driver pressed his nose up against the side window.

  “Journalists,” she said and nodded out the window.

  “Really?”

  Ricky turned around and looked out.

  “Yeah, really. From TV. I can’t believe this is happening to me. It’s like being in a film.”

  “What do we do?” asked Ricky and pulled away from the window.

  “Nothing,” said Elin. “We don’t open. I don’t want to speak to anyone. I just don’t have the energy.”

  Ricky looked around then rushed out to the entrance hall and locked the door.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he said, “then they won’t see us.”

  They hurried up the stairs and slipped into the study.

  “We’ll be all right here,” said Ricky.

  They sat down on the guest bed, Elin farthest back in the corner, and Ricky in the middle.

  The doorbell rang out through the house.

  They looked at each other uneasily. The doorbell rang again. A moment later, a couple of insistent knocks were heard on the window of the front door. Ricky reached out and gave the study door a shove. They sat there silently, stared at the wall opposite them and listened. Somebody spoke, but they couldn’t tell whether it was directed to them or if the ones standing outside the door were simply speaking among themselves.

  “I called Åhlbergs,” said Elin.

  “Åhlbergs, you mean the undertak—”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  “I called while you were out shopping.”

  “Were they the ones who drove Mother to … well, wherever it was they took her?”

  “No, apparently there’s someone over in Kräklingbo who handles that kind of … transport. Anyway, I thought we ought to find out what’s going on.”

  “Do they work on Saturdays?”

  “I don’t fucking know, I called home.”

  “Calm down.”

  “Yeah, well you’re asking such stupid questions.”

  Elin sighed, but continued.

  “They said that it might be a while before we can bury Mother, since the police have requested that she be taken to Stockholm for an autopsy.”

  “Do
you have to say that?”

  “What, autopsy? What am I supposed to say?”

  Ricky didn’t answer.

  “You promised to take care of it. To keep after them so we know when they’re done, so we don’t have to think about it.”

  “All right,” said Ricky mutedly.

  They sat there quietly again. The doorbell rang.

  25.

  How old would he have been? Ten?

  Could just as well have been eight or eleven. There was no time in the usual sense when the forty-four footer put out to sea from the pleasure boat harbor in Klinte, with its sails up, and soon enough the spinnaker, too, that swelled up like a huge multicolored beach ball against the deep-blue sky.

  Ricky stood at the bow holding onto the railing that extended out beyond the pulpit. Like a figurehead: a roaring lion, a pirate, a mysterious mythical hero. There were thousands of games to play, like shipwreck, fending off pirates, or pretending they were being chased by a terrible deep-sea monster, but all the games had one thing in common: The island meant salvation.

  Balmy winds swept around him, Mother and Father, Stefania, and Elin.

  The summer sailing trips could be long or short, go to Finland, Åland, or the Stockholm archipelago, sometimes all the way to Denmark, or the West Coast. But they always began the same way. With a counterclockwise lap around Gotland and a one-night sleepover on the island. Or actually they began when Father took out the sea charts the night before they were supposed to set off. Ricky got to locate the little island that lay all by itself just east of the much bigger Gotland. It wasn’t much more than a speck on the charts. A speck with a thin promontory, like an appendix toward the south.

  They never called it anything except the island, even though of course it had a name. That made it mysterious and full of secrets. The island belonged to them alone. That’s how it had always been, ever since Stefania was a little girl, when the boat was also a lot smaller and the sailing trips rarely ever went farther out than to the island.

  The first hours were always the same. Father at the helm. Mother and Stefania stretching their legs out in the cockpit, basking in the sun in their bikinis. Elin with a book, first on a mattress up on deck, then down in the cabin once she’d had enough of the sun, as long as the sea wasn’t too rough, because then you got seasick down there.

  Ricky would rush around, stand up at the pulpit, give Father a hand with things he didn’t actually know how to do, but Father helped him and acted as if Ricky had done it. He got hoisted aloft in the boatswain’s chair, or surfed behind the boat on a big black inner tube. Sometimes Elin was along, too.

  The first day was always the best. And the island. On second thought it was probably the island that was the best, rather than the fact that it came first. It was another world. It was a big island, and there was nothing else there except for a few lambs, a couple of old ruins, and a lighthouse next to a little jetty. They used to anchor the Adventure with the bow facing the jetty. Elin and Ricky were the first to jump ashore, went dashing straight up to the lighthouse and pulled at the rusty iron door. Always the same ritual, always with the same result. Then they’d spend fifteen seconds looking for a key in the seams of the limestone wall next to the base of the lighthouse before setting off toward the opposite end of the island. They ran almost the whole way and mother came after them and cried out telling them to wait, sometimes Stefania, too. “I said wait, didn’t you hear me?!” They stumbled and jumped forward in flip-flops toward the scorching hot, chalk-white stone beaches and the big, dark limestone cave that you could only enter by swimming.

  As they moved toward the interior, the island became quieter. The dry, tall grass rustled beneath their flip-flops, insects buzzed around them, and from a distance they could hear the lambs bleating from within the ruins of the old lighthouse keeper’s quarters. That was the only place where there was any shade when the sun was at its zenith. There and in the cave. But the lambs couldn’t make it in there, of course.

  The sun beat down. It was hot. They marched past the overgrown cluster of wind-battered junipers and dwarf birches where there were fire ants, continued up the bluff as fast as they could and tried their best to avoid stepping on the chalk-white bird skeletons that shone in the low-cropped grass along with white flowers that were no bigger than pinheads.

  “I’m dying, water, water, I’m dying,” they groaned one after the other like two parched desert explorers, always at the same spot, where they struggled up onto the ridge above the pebble beach. There they collapsed onto the grass, lay there with their legs splayed and caught their breath. But not for long, never long enough that Stefania caught up to them. She was never as quick as they were. She came trudging along at the same pace as Mother and Father. At least that was how he remembered her, as being slightly in the background. But she was also five years older than he was. Probably didn’t want to have too much to do with her romping little siblings.

  They got back on their feet, saw the three figures slowly drawing closer, almost camouflaged by the sun-bleached grass in their light summer clothes. From down there, he and Elin must have stood out like two steadfast little silhouettes up on the ridge. They started climbing down the steep, craggy bluff, heard a faint “be careful” behind them.

  They reached the hot, blinding beach cauldron, teetered on chalk-white stones, and looked out across the endless sea. Then, they ripped off their clothes and threw themselves into the sometimes cold water, but they still threw themselves screaming into it and swam out toward the cave, into the dark, cool cave where the clucking of the waves echoed enchantingly against the rock walls, and reflections from the sun danced off the ceilings. Elin’s hair lay pasted against her head and the water was like a wet film over her face. His heart pounded in his chest, the lurching surface of the water tickled his throat and Ricky felt warm all over his body, no matter how cold the water was.

  There they were eternal. Time ceased. They were all immortal. He, Elin, Mother, Father, and Stefania.

  26.

  This day is turning out to be like walking backward in your own footprints, thought Fredrik as they pulled up in front of the row houses with the checkered pastel facades.

  As soon as they’d climbed out of the car, the door at number 14 opened and Sofia Traneus pulled out a baby carriage where her youngest child lay fast asleep in a footmuff in the same dark-blue color as the carriage. The elder girl followed right behind and immediately took her mother’s hand when she caught sight of Fredrik and Gustav.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Fredrik. “I wish we could have brought you better news yesterday.”

  But someone had to get that news, he thought to himself. If it hadn’t been Anders Traneus lying dead in the house, it would have been someone else. There was no getting around that.

  Sofia Traneus nodded and rolled the baby carriage slowly back and forth.

  “I was just going to take the kids out for a little walk,” she said and glanced at the dozing infant. “Will it take long?”

  “No, no, you go ahead. It’s Rune we want to talk to. He is still here, isn’t he?” Fredrik asked.

  “Yes, Grandpa’s inside.”

  “Then we’ll do it here,” said Gustav and looked at Fredrik.

  “Yes, I think he’d feel better if he could stay here,” said Sofia Traneus.

  She headed off with the carriage and only once she’d disappeared around the corner did it strike Fredrik that she had been dressed in black from head to toe. Did people do that these days, or was it just a coincidence?

  * * *

  THE RUNE TRANEUS who was sitting across from them at the kitchen table was very different from the one they’d met the day before. He seemed calm, not the least bit confused and definitely responsive, but also subdued.

  “We have to ask you a few things about Anders’s background,” Gustav began. “In a case like this, it is of the utmost importance to get as detailed a picture as possible of the relationships within the family
, even going back in time, and you’re perhaps the best person of all to tell us about it.”

  “That’s possible. Yeah, that could be,” Rune Traneus muttered.

  Gustav’s plan was to steer the conversation as little as possible and draw upon Rune Traneus’s rage. Even if he wasn’t shouting and screaming and wildly throwing his arms around anymore, the anger and hatred toward Arvid Traneus still had to be in there somewhere. That was the wellspring he wanted to tap into, there was a wealth of information that could be extracted from it.

  “When you came to your nephew’s farm yesterday morning, you seemed so certain that it was Anders lying in there. Something tells me you were pretty sure even before you spotted his car parked outside the house?”

  Gustav saw how something flared up in the old man’s eyes as his thoughts were brought back to the scene of the murder. Just don’t start howling about how Arvid is the devil again, he thought to himself. But it was as if Rune Traneus just couldn’t help himself.

  “I realize that I went overboard yesterday,” he said, “but I meant what I said. That man is the devil. Arvid Traneus is Satan himself.”

  Those last words came out with added emphasis and you could detect something of yesterday’s fire in them, but he was far from uncontrolled. He said it more to himself than to Gustav and Fredrik, more like an incantation.

  So far so good, thought Gustav, but it would be great if you could be a little more specific.

  “I barely know where to start where that man’s concerned,” said Rune and twirled one of his bushy eyebrows.

  “If you focus on Anders. How was Anders’s relationship to his cousin and Kristina?”

  “I understand that that’s what you want to hear about, but it’s still difficult to know where to begin. I sensed that something was amiss, and that made me … Well, it’s impossible to describe.”

  Rune Traneus drew his hand across his mouth and shook his head. He had raisin-sized liver spots on his face and his eyes were pale somehow, diluted. He was an old man and his old age had all of a sudden become very hard to bear.

  “What could I do? Anders was a grown man, and then some,” said Rune and threw out the hand that he had just been holding over his mouth. “You can’t … It becomes difficult to interfere.”