The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  “She didn’t see any logo or anything?” Ove responded at the other end.

  “No. It had a big light yellow or beige cargo box. That was all she could remember.”

  Fredrik continued flipping through his notepad.

  “Otherwise there’s not much here,” he said.

  “It’s going out on local radio and the national news bulletin in an hour. We’ll have to see what we get in then,” said Ove.

  Fredrik shut his notepad and had to switch hands on the phone in order to be able to put his notepad in his inner jacket pocket.

  “I’ve been thinking about something,” said Ove. “This may be the answer to your question.”

  “My question? What question is that?” said Fredrik.

  “Where did Arvid Traneus disappear to? That question.”

  “You mean that this could be him…”

  “Lying buried in the field, yeah. The head and feet are missing. Arvid Traneus wore a size forty-seven.”

  Fredrik didn’t answer at once. He looked out at the farm where he had just questioned a witness. Five little black lambs were grazing around a dead, graying oak tree. At the very top of the severed trunk, someone had nailed up a birdhouse. The grass beneath the apple tree in front of the house was speckled red with fallen fruit.

  “That would change everything.”

  “Might seem a bit of a stretch, but on the other hand, we’ve got someone who’s been missing for fourteen days,” said Ove.

  “Which wouldn’t be that strange if he’d killed his wife and her lover.”

  “Which he could still have done, even if he turns up at the bottom of a hole in the middle of a field.”

  “I can’t quite get my head around it,” said Fredrik and lay his free hand on the steering wheel. “Each of the murders is so different in character.”

  “We have to be ready to consider it. We could be looking at two completely unrelated crimes. The one doesn’t have to be connected to the other,” said Ove.

  * * *

  ELIN HAD PACKED her things. She could only blame the fact that she was still there out of some kind of inability to act. It was quickly done, stuffing the few items of clothing, her makeup, wallet, and psychology books into the little sports bag she had bought to replace the Prada bag that she had used for the last time. But packing a bag was just a gesture. It was harder to actually set off.

  When darkness fell, it was as if she had lost whatever strength she had left. Tomorrow, she thought, I have to get away from here tomorrow.

  How many days had she been thinking like that?

  It was dark outside. There were lights on in the house next door, but otherwise it was completely pitch black. She couldn’t understand how Ricky could live like this. When you looked out the window, you couldn’t be sure that there was actually anything there. It could just as well be a great big void of nothingness.

  She wondered if she was starting to become paranoid, or was about to suffer another panic attack. It wouldn’t be very strange, anyway. What was she doing there? Why was she hanging around?

  Ricky had stopped trying to apologize, while she had gone completely silent. They moved past each other in the house, alongside each other in the house, but without really taking any notice of each other. Neither of them knew how to talk to the other anymore. Maybe she lingered because she knew that she couldn’t leave until they had somehow become reconciled, or at least had broken this silence. But how?

  Ricky had slept late, then kept out of sight up in the study, and now he was sitting there sunken in front of the TV for the past half hour. He was staring intently at the silly variety talk show as if it were the most important thing in the world and yet it was obvious that he was just passing the time or hiding. It was childish, but she was grateful to him for doing that. As for her, she was hiding in the kitchen with a magazine that she couldn’t get herself to actually read, with a dish that was already washed and a glass that was already empty, but which she could easily fill up again.

  She ought to leave, stop swilling red wine, go home, and focus on her studies that had been set aside for the past two weeks. It was stupid to fall behind right from the start. How many times had she thought that thought? Stupid to fall behind. Yeah, it sure was. Tomorrow, when it was light and her strength had returned, then she would take her packed bag and get on a bus. If she took the number 10, she only had a mile to walk to the bus stop. She didn’t even need to ask Ricky for a ride. But maybe that was just what she should do. Find a practical opening. Ask him to drive her to the bus stop. One minute in the car and five to ten minutes at the bus stop, before the bus came, it was all the time they would have at their disposal, maybe all the time they needed.

  And then she sank back inside herself again and everything was just dismal and hopeless. She felt a sudden twinge of pain in her stomach. She sat down with her hand pressed against her diaphragm and tried to think when the last time she’d had her period was. Maybe she ought to ask Ricky for an aspirin instead. Or ask to borrow the car so that she could drive in to buy some sanitary napkins. If that didn’t present an opening then at least she wouldn’t have to sit on the bus into Visby with a wad of toilet paper between her legs.

  She got up and looked in the cupboard where she knew the painkillers were usually kept. She didn’t need to ask for one, she could just take one. She found a Treo effervescent tablet, dissolved it in water and quaffed the bitter white flocculent liquid, rinsed the glass, and put it in the dish drainer.

  “Could I borrow the car for a bit?” she asked.

  She stood in the doorway. Ricky looked at her for a second, then over at the front door.

  “Sure, the keys are on the table in the hall,” he said and it sounded so casual and free from all subtext, the way it only can when you’re really trying to make it sound that way.

  She walked over and found the keys immediately.

  The signature tune for the news trumpeted from the TV. She pulled on her jacket, heard something about Angela Merkel and Jacques Chirac, then something about the south of Gotland, a dismembered body had been found in southern Gotland. She turned toward the TV, couldn’t help herself, was drawn inexorably toward the couch where she slowly sank down a few feet from Ricky.

  “Did you hear that?” she said and looked at the TV.

  “Yeah.”

  They were forced to sit through several minutes of Merkel and Chirac before the news anchor returned to the news about Gotland.

  What the Visby Police Department was describing a likely homicide had been discovered when a runaway pig had exposed parts of a human body buried in a field in the vicinity of Etelhem in southern Gotland. The TV screen showed police cars parked along a road, a police cordon of blue-and-white striped ribbon in front of some trees. It could have been anywhere. The picture changed to a slightly stocky man with short black hair standing behind a rectangular lectern of light-colored wood. The caption along the lower edge of the screen indicated that he was Ove Gahnström, in charge of the investigation.

  “No, the body has not yet been identified. All I can say for the moment, is that the victim is a middle-aged man, a little above average height,” the policeman answered to a question that had been edited out.

  “Do you have any suspects?”

  “It’s a little difficult to come up with any suspects until we’ve identified the body.”

  “You said that the body had been dismembered. Has that made the identification process more difficult?”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  “Have all the body parts been recovered?”

  “I can’t comment on that,” said the policeman.

  The report rounded off with a request to the public to get in touch with the police with any observation they may have made in the area. Elin froze. The news had made her think of her mother and those horrific events that had taken place in her own family home. That had presumably also aired on TV, but she hadn’t really reflected over it until now. But the last t
hing she had thought about doing that day was looking at TV.

  She got up, felt weak, had to go and do some shopping anyway. She looked at Ricky. He followed her with his gaze.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Shopping.”

  He didn’t answer.

  43.

  Eva Karlén and her team resumed the crime scene investigation early Thursday morning, at first light. There were four of them altogether, Eva and Granholm, and the two uniformed officers that had been assigned to help them. It had gotten colder. A damp mist hung over the landscape, touched the treetops, painted the branches black and wet.

  Although they kept moving, the cold dug its way in, and after a few hours they were frozen through. During the coffee break they sat in Eva’s van with the engine running and drank several cups of the hot coffee that one of the uniformed officers had brought with him in a red-lacquered steel thermos.

  “How long can a body lie in the ground before it starts to rot?” asked that same officer with the cup of coffee steaming in front of his mouth.

  Eva pretended not to hear the question, but Granholm enthusiastically undertook to answer it.

  “It depends on the conditions in the ground and how deep the body is buried. And then the climate of course. This ground here is well drained and there’s a lot of sand, so it can take eight or nine years if it’s buried at normal grave depth.”

  “Eight or nine years?” the curious police officer exclaimed and lowered his cup.

  “Before process of decay is complete, that is,” said Granholm.

  The officer nodded and seemed to be calmed somehow by the information.

  “Then of course it also plays a role if the rotting process has gotten started before the body is put in the ground,” Granholm continued.

  The windows of the van had become fogged up. You couldn’t see out.

  “Drink up now and we’ll get back to work,” said Eva.

  At a quarter to twelve they found a human head buried over thirty inches below the surface. As with the other body parts, it wasn’t packaged in any way, but had been laid directly into the ground.

  The head was buried four yards in among the trees that began behind the field. They had covered the entire field, gently raked away leaves to see if the earth underneath had been disturbed. When that hadn’t produced any results they had continued out into the forest.

  The officer who had been so interested in the rotting process had opened his eyes wide when Granholm lifted the head out of the ground. Eva was almost afraid that he was going to start touching it.

  Granholm had been right. In the cool, tightly packed sand that took over once you dug past the top twelve inches of soil, the rotting process went slowly. The head might just as well have been in a refrigerator. There were three deep cuts in the back of the head from a blunt instrument and there was some discoloration, but otherwise it was intact.

  Eva didn’t need any help from the medical examiner and dental records to identify the dead man. She recognized him from the photographs.

  * * *

  THE BUS LEFT at 2:10 p.m. from Hemse. It would make it to the old shop by twenty past at the earliest. In other words, it would be enough if she left at two o’clock sharp. She didn’t have anything heavy to carry after all.

  Ricky wasn’t home. Elin had heard him take the car out late the night before, after she had gone to bed. She hoped that he would show up before two, there were still a few hours to go, but if he didn’t she would leave anyway. This was enough now. She had to get out of there.

  She took an apple from the light-colored wooden bowl on the kitchen table, bit into the red fruit that was sweet and mealy. She heard a car pull up outside. It wasn’t Ricky, she could hear that from the sound of the engine.

  Elin was happy when she saw Göran Eide climb out of the car that had parked in the driveway. She had liked talking to him. When she told him those things that she’d never told anyone else before, he had received them without questioning any of it, almost as if it was obviously true, as if he had heard the same story many times before.

  She opened the door before he had had time to ring the doorbell.

  “Hi,” he said and introduced the woman next to him as Sara Oskarsson. “Could we come in for a moment?”

  “Sure, come on in,” she said and backed into the hall.

  She smiled, but it was as if they didn’t really want to acknowledge her smile. There was something suppressed, almost embarrassed about the two officer’s expressions when they tried to smile back. Elin couldn’t understand what was wrong. Had she done something?

  “Is your brother at home?” the chief inspector asked.

  “No. I think he’s gone to visit a friend,” she said.

  “I see. Here on the island you mean,” said Göran.

  “Yes,” she nodded, “in Visby. I think anyway.”

  They sat in the living room, Elin on the couch, and the officers each on a chair.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” said Göran.

  Elin felt her heart start pounding faster. Bad news? What did they mean? She had gotten bad news two weeks ago. Could it be Ricky? Had something happened to Ricky? But they had asked about him. They wouldn’t have done that would they, if something had happened to him?

  She sat completely still and looked attentively at the middle-aged man across the table.

  “Your father is dead.”

  Elin sat as motionless as before, without saying a word.

  “He was found dead a few hours ago.”

  Elin sat there mutely.

  “Can we get hold of your brother, do you think? It would be good if he could come here.”

  “I was just about to leave for home,” said Elin. “The five-forty-five ferry, the bus leaves at twenty past two from the shop.”

  The chief inspector had a hard time finding the words.

  “I’d be lying if I said that I understand how it feels. I can only imagine. It was less than two weeks ago that I sat here with your brother and told you about your mother. But we are going to do everything we can to help you. The best thing would be if we could get hold of Rickard and…”

  “We’re not getting along very well right now,” said Elin.

  “Is there anyone else you can call, who…”

  “No,” she cut him off again.

  She didn’t need to hear the rest of the question. There was no one left here.

  “We could ask the priest here in Levide to…”

  “No,” she said abruptly, “no fucking priest. We’ve got to get hold of Ricky.”

  She got up from the couch with her fingers tightly clasped.

  “We’ve got to get hold of Ricky,” she repeated.

  “Yes, we’ve got to do that,” said Göran Eide and stood up, too, “but I still think that it might be good to—”

  “No fucking priest,” Elin interjected. “I’d rather just have something to help me sleep.”

  “We can call the district doctor,” said Göran.

  “Sure, why not,” said Elin without great interest. Göran looked at his colleague.

  “Could you…?”

  She got up and left the room. Elin sat there silently until she had gone out.

  “Where did you find him? Was it in Tokyo? Had he committed suicide? Jumped from the seventieth-floor balcony?” she rambled off without looking at Göran.

  I’ll never get away from here, she thought. Now there’s Father, too. Another one to bury. Another call to the undertakers. I’ll get stuck here. What’s going to happen with everything? Is it just Ricky and me now?

  The chief inspector said something to her. She didn’t hear what he said.

  “What?”

  “Wouldn’t you rather sit down,” he said.

  “No, I don’t want to sit down. I have a bus to catch,” she said resolutely.

  “I think it might best if you…”

  “Aren’t you allowed to catch a bus if your father’s dead? Is it illeg
al or something?”

  “No, but I think it would be better if you sat down. We need your help to get hold of your brother. We’ve got to get hold of Ricky, don’t we?”

  Elin sank down onto the couch. Felt how the down seat cushion gave way and drew her into a loose grip. She heard the female officer’s mumbling voice out in the hall. Soon the cars full of journalists would be back. Wouldn’t it be better to board that bus out of here after all?

  “Was it in Tokyo?” she asked. “Did they find him in Tokyo?”

  The chief inspector gave her one of those looks again, that was meant to be a calm, friendly expression, but that didn’t quite know where to go.

  “No,” he said, “your father was found dead about twelve miles away from here, near Hejde.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hejde?”

  “Yes. It came as a surprise to us, too,” said Göran.

  Elin cupped her hand to her mouth, then stiffened and stared at Göran.

  “Hejde. But … Wasn’t that … the thing that was on the news yesterday? They said Etelhem.”

  “They weren’t very precise.”

  “You mean that it was … that that’s the same … that that was my father?”

  Göran nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s right. Unfortunately, it was only this afternoon that we were able to establish his identity.”

  44.

  The sound of the car door slamming shut echoed through the station garage. Göran hurried across the cement floor, hauled out his access card, and held it against the reader before he punched in the code to enter the building. The front desk stood empty and his footsteps across the linoleum floor were quiet and dry.

  He had been wrong about Arvid Traneus not still being in the country. He had been wrong about it taking months, perhaps years before they found him. He had been wrong about Traneus still being alive. Instead they found him dead, buried out in a field, not far from his home in Levide. It remained to be seen whether he had been wrong also about Arvid Traneus having killed his wife and her lover.