The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

He walked past the pantry, nobody there, either, and opened the door to the cafeteria with his access card. There were only two staff members left. One was wiping off the tables and the other was just going to start counting the register, but they let him buy something anyway. He chose a Loka mineral water and a little bar of 70 percent chocolate, which was strategically placed right next to the cash register. Such was the life of a chief inspector who’d reached the meridian of life. Water, healthy candy, and no cigarettes.

  He paid, opened the bottle, and left so that they could close. Outside the door he ran into Peter Klint. The prosecutor looked buoyant, but in an ominous way. He was glowing extra brightly, like a bulb does shortly before it goes out for good.

  “So, our prime suspect is dead,” said Klint. “Do you still think he did it?”

  Göran wondered if Klint just wanted to discuss it, or if it was meant as a gibe, but it was impossible to tell from looking at the prosecutor’s face. He did have a smug smile on his face, but he looked like that all the time these days.

  “It’s quite possible, but at this point your guess is as good as mine,” said Göran and guzzled half his bottle of water.

  He was hot and thirsty. They had ended up staying with Elin Traneus for longer than expected and it had been a stressful afternoon.

  “Could it have been a robbery-killing?” asked Klint who looked cool and comfortable in his light-blue polo shirt.

  “I’ve considered that. That someone may have come to the house in Levide, held Kristina and Anders hostage while someone else took Arvid Traneus out to force him to withdraw money from his bank account,” said Göran.

  “But then something went wrong,” Peter Klint filled in.

  “Very wrong. What speaks against it is the unlikelihood of all three of them—the husband, the wife, and her lover—being in the house at the same time. But of course it can’t be ruled out that the robbers walked right into some kind of a confrontation between the three of them.”

  Klint pointed toward the stairs and they started to walk while Göran downed what was left in his bottle.

  “Another possibility of course is that a person or persons unknown were out to get Arvid Traneus, but accidentally killed Anders instead,” he said with a voice that was straining to keep down the bubbles that were on their way up again.

  “And then corrected their mistake,” the prosecutor filled in.

  “Yes, but whichever it is, the question remains, why would they go through the trouble of burying Arvid Traneus, a time-consuming and pretty risky thing to do, especially when you consider that they left Anders and Kristina in the house anyway?”

  “Maybe the killers knew about the rumors of domestic abuse,” Peter Klint suggested.

  He was walking diagonally in front of Göran and glanced back at him over his shoulder as he spoke.

  “You mean they buried Arvid Traneus in order to make it look like he had killed his wife and her lover and then left the island?” said Göran.

  “Exactly.”

  “Nice try, as they say in soccer, but…”

  “You can say it went off the post if that’s what you mean,” said Peter Klint.

  They shared a quick laugh together and Klint pushed open the door to the meeting room where everyone was already gathered.

  Klint’s idea wasn’t a bad one, in fact it was very smart, which was just what made it seem less credible. Murderers’ attempts to cover up their crimes were, in Göran’s experience, seldom shrewd chess moves planned several steps in advance, but rather desperate actions taken to save their own skins. He and his fellow officers had misinterpreted the pieces to the puzzle, as had Klint. But what the prosecutor had now done was to construct a scenario to fit their misinterpretation. That was not a good way to develop a new approach to an investigation.

  At the same time, he had to admit that he had trouble letting go of the notion that Arvid Traneus had killed his wife and her lover. But who, in that case, had killed Arvid Traneus? Was it a murder or a robbery-killing completely unrelated to the first event? Did it have to do with business, unpaid debts, someone he’d wronged somehow? He ought to make another attempt with the company in Tokyo, even if it seemed a bit implausible for Arvid Traneus’s murder to have links stretching all the way over there. Or was it as simple as that; someone had caught Arvid red-handed and chosen to mete out their own form of justice? The son? They hadn’t been able to reach him since last night.

  Göran stopped short in the middle of that thought. Was he on the verge of making the same mistake all over again? The last time he had interpreted someone’s absence to mean guilt and flight, it had turned out to mean the man’s death.

  He looked around the table, met district police commissioner Agneta Wilhelmsson’s eyes momentarily. It was high time to get the meeting under way. Without thinking about it, he pushed the little bar of chocolate into his back pocket. He would find it there two hours later, mushed and melted.

  * * *

  OVE GAHNSTRÖM PICKED up.

  “Hello, Ove speaking.”

  “Hi, it’s Carina. I’m sending over a tip that came in that you should take a closer look at. There’s a girl who works over at the state liquor store in Hemse who claims that she saw a guy who was together with one of the Traneus daughters years ago. She hadn’t seen him for years, but now he popped up in Hemse just around the same time as the murders in Levide. Apparently she’s seen him a few times, but it’s only now that she realized who it was. She seemed to think that he’d had some kind of brush with the law, but she wasn’t sure how.”

  “Wait,” said Ove, “have you sent it already?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll just bring it up.”

  The computer had gone into sleep mode. Ove thrummed his mouse impatiently with his fingers as he waited for the screen to come back on, and could then bring up the tip. He quickly skimmed through the text.

  “You didn’t take down a description?” he asked as his eyes scanned the last few lines.

  “Uh … no, I didn’t think of it, since she was so certain of his name.”

  “She was sure about it?”

  “Yeah, not the slightest hesitation,” said Carina.

  Leo Ringvall, Ove read from the screen.

  “Thanks for letting me know,” he said.

  “Sure thing,” said Carina and disappeared with a click in the receiver.

  Ove hung up just as Fredrik swept past in the corridor. Ove called out to him.

  “What do you think of this,” he said and pointed at the screen. “Leo Ringvall, about thirty years of age, ‘brush with the law,’ some kind of connection to the Traneus family from years back through the now-deceased eldest daughter Stefania. Suddenly shows up in Hemse around the same time as the murders.”

  Fredrik leaned forward over the desk in order to see better.

  “‘A brush with the law,’ whatever that means,” he said.

  “Seems a little unlikely, but interesting,” said Ove. “Could you go down and speak to the tipster?”

  “Seeing as you’re asking me so nicely, I can hardly refuse,” he said and smiled.

  Ove smiled widely back.

  “Great, then it’s agreed.”

  Fredrik looked at the screen again.

  “If he spent time with the daughter then he knows that they’ve got plenty of cash. He gets into some money problems and comes up with the idea to pay them a visit.”

  “Let’s see,” said Ove, “Carina didn’t pull his file, so I don’t have his personal identity number, but it ought to be possible to limit the search anyway…”

  Ove filled in a few of the fields in the search form and pressed return. They both silently looked through the list of hits that came up. Leo Ringvall had served out a three-year prison sentence for grievous assault that had ended just three weeks earlier.

  “This might be something,” said Fredrik.

  Ove clicked up a photo. A long thin face framed by shoulder-length black hair stared vacantly
from the screen with pale gray eyes.

  “Long, black hair,” said Ove.

  He wrote down the witness’s name in his pad, ripped out the page, stood up and handed it to Fredrik.

  “Drive down there and speak to her, and I’ll talk to Göran.”

  * * *

  THE TYPICAL FRIDAY rush to buy alcohol for the weekend was nowhere to be seen at the state liquor store in Hemse. A few stray customers were slowly wandering around with gray shopping baskets hanging from their arms, scanning the racks of bottles. The premises had been refurbished as a self-service store a few years ago. Self-service state liquor stores seemed to go hand-in-hand with the rapid breakdown of the country’s national alcohol policy, which had, for all intents and purposes, been doomed since the EEA agreement was signed in 1992. Fredrik guessed that it would take at the most ten years before every Swedes’ wettest dream came true: wine and liquor sold at regular supermarkets.

  Sitting at the only open checkout was a young man with golden yellow streaks in his reddish-brown hair. Fredrik walked up to him and showed him his police badge.

  “I’m looking for Marie Barsk.”

  “She’s in the stockroom,” said the man at the register and looked around uncertainly.

  He reached for an intercom next to the register, but stopped short.

  “Well, you can just go on back there, I guess; you are the police after all,” he said and smiled wryly.

  “I’ll try to resist the temptation to swipe anything,” said Fredrik.

  “Just head straight into the stockroom and you’ll find her,” said the cashier.

  He pointed to a gray door at the back of the store that was propped half open by a stack of wine boxes.

  Fredrik entered a storage area with redbrick walls, full of pallets stacked with unopened boxes. Guided by the sound of ripping cardboard, he spotted a woman bent over a pallet of Spanish Navarra wines. She cut open the boxes with a light-green carpet knife.

  “Are you Marie Barsk?” he called out to her across half the space.

  The woman gave a start, straightened up, and looked at him questioningly.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Fredrik Broman, Visby Police Department,” he said and flashed his ID once again. “You called in with a tip. I’d like to talk to you about that.”

  Marie Barsk remained standing where she was holding the carpet knife. She looked put out, as if this wasn’t at all what she had been expecting when she’d called the police hotline that had been published in the newspapers.

  “Is there a problem?” asked Fredrik.

  “No, no,” she said and stayed where she was.

  “Is there somewhere we could sit down for a moment?” he asked.

  “We can go sit in the coffee room,” said the woman and broke out of her paralysis.

  She put the knife down on the one of the opened boxes and showed Fredrik into a room that lay immediately to the right of the entrance to the stockroom. He let her go in first and then pulled the door closed behind him.

  It was a small room that was completely white, with a white laminated table, six white chairs, a kitchenette, and a window looking out onto the loading dock. On the stainless steel surface between the stove hotplates and the sink, stood three lavender-colored ceramic mugs.

  They sat opposite each other at the table. Out of habit, Fredrik took the spot closest to the door.

  “I’m here to talk to you about the person that you saw in the store,” he said.

  Marie Barsk had dirty blonde, naturally curly hair that spiraled a ways down her straight shoulders. There was something odd about her gaze and now that they were seated at the table Fredrik saw that she had a white spot in her right iris.

  “You submitted a name. Are you sure that’s his name?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course I am. We went to the same school for five years,” she said and looked at Fredrik.

  Although her gaze was steady, he got the impression that there was something anxious about it. Maybe it just had to do with that spot.

  “In the same grade?” he asked.

  “No, he was one grade above me, here at Högby.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Of course. He’s got long, slightly mussed-up black hair. Down to about here,” she said indicating with her hand at her shoulder. “Long thin face, looked pretty pale. He’s not very big, but compact somehow, sort of strong without being hefty.”

  “How tall is he?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say he’s short exactly, but … I guess he’s about medium height, a little less maybe. Whenever he’s been in here, he’s always been wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled up. That was why it took awhile before I recognized him.”

  Outside the windows behind Marie, cars were pulling into the customer parking lot of the Hemse shopping center.

  “But you could see that he had long hair, even though he was wearing a hood?” asked Fredrik.

  “Oh, sure. You could tell. But of course I also know from before that he had long hair,” she said.

  There was a faint clinking of bottles out in the stockroom.

  “How many times have you seen him in the store?”

  “Three, four times, maybe.”

  “And when was the last time?”

  “The day before yesterday.”

  “Last Wednesday then,” said Fredrik.

  Marie Barsk nodded and tugged at the seam of her gray uniform shirt.

  “Did you get any sense of whether he maybe lives close by or if he came by car? He wasn’t holding a set of car keys or anything?”

  “No, no idea. We only see a short stretch of the street from in here. And if you sit with your back to it, then you don’t see anything.”

  She clasped her hands together in front of her and looked at Fredrik, waiting for the next question.

  “What can you tell me about Leo Ringvall? What do you know about him?”

  “Well, like I said we went to the same school for five years, but we never hung out. Except for maybe ending up at the same parties a few times. He started out at Säve, but then he left after first grade. But you’d still see him around here in Hemse even after junior high. First I think he lived in Klintehamn, but then he moved here, to Hemse, or his family did anyway, and then something happened and they all moved away some ten or twelve years ago maybe.”

  “Do you know where they moved to?” said Fredrik.

  “To the mainland. Stockholm I think it was.”

  “You don’t know what caused them to move?” asked Fredrik.

  “I think his father lost his job. At the time people were saying that he stole something from his work, that that was the reason, but I’ve since heard that that wasn’t true at all, that a number of people got laid off because the company was doing badly. I don’t know.”

  “But Leo Ringvall had some kind of a relationship with Stefania Traneus?”

  “Yes. That was when we were in ninth grade. Stefania and I were the same age. She was in the parallel class at Högby,” said Marie Barsk.

  “Sounds like a bit of a mismatched couple,” said Fredrik.

  “It didn’t last very long, either. I think her father had something to do with it. That he banned her from seeing him. But she was very … how can I put it, almost obsessed with Leo. You can get like that at that age. Whatever your parents don’t want you to do … well, you know.”

  How do you do that, Fredrik wondered to himself. How do you get a fifteen-year-old to stop seeing someone she really wants to see?

  “But you’re saying that it ended anyway?”

  “There were a number people who said that Stefania’s father had scared Leo away somehow. Though I can’t say how you’d go about scaring off Leo. He was pretty wild as I remember.”

  “But still just a teenager,” said Fredrik.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Marie smiled vaguely, as if she saw Leo in front of her as the boy he once was. Had Arvid Traneus gone after him, physi
cally? Or had he gone after Stefania?

  “Do you remember who Leo Ringvall hung out with back then?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure, I probably remember pretty much everyone,” said Marie Barsk without having to think about it.

  “We can start with those closest to him,” said Fredrik and smiled, and heard just then how someone called out for Marie from the stockroom.

  “Then you can go,” he added and started writing down the names that she gave him.

  45.

  Elin sat in the couch with the receiver pressed to her ear and listened to Molly’s hoarse voice, hoarse because she had been speaking in such a low tone that her voice was on the verge of disappearing completely.

  “I wish that I could be there,” whispered Molly.

  “I wish you could be here, too,” said Elin and there was a long silence.

  She felt clearer in the head, the painkiller had started to work. She had also gratefully taken the sleeping pills she had received from the district doctor that the police had sent for. They had allowed her to sleep straight through the night, but she had woken up with a heavy head and fuzzy thoughts. The painkiller helped, the way it helped with most things. She ran her left hand through her hair, felt that she needed to wash it. Her pale face was reflected in the empty TV screen.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Molly hissed from receiver.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” said Elin.

  That was true and yet not. She needed someone who said something, who said a lot, but she didn’t need any pity or someone to work through everything that had happened. She needed someone who called and talked about Freud’s interpretation of dreams, about the pitfalls of CBT, about how drunk she had gotten at the last college pub crawl, about an incredible bargain they’d found at Tjallamalla, anything; even somebody calling up to complain about their pain-in-the-ass boyfriend.

  Since she had told Molly that her mother had been murdered, Molly had called her once. One single time in two weeks. It made her angry. It made her even more angry since she realized that she had nobody on the island. There was nobody that she really cared about and who cared about her. Not anymore. Well, Ricky of course, but she hadn’t seen him since yesterday night. And he wasn’t calling, either.