The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  “Yes.”

  “You’re thinking of what it said in the diary?”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “Do you think that Rickard’s the one who did it?”

  “I think he knows something. He’s protecting someone, or else he’s directly involved. Maybe he needed money, tried to make some deal with Ringvall, but everything went wrong. Ringvall flipped out and killed all three. Or else it was Rickard who did it, although I have a hard time believing that.”

  “I have a hard time believing that, either. That kid’s no maniac. But there’s gotta be some reason why he disappeared,” said Sara.

  “Rickard is the key to this case. That I’m sure of.”

  Sara lay a hand on the roof of the car, looked over toward the fishing boat.

  “Well,” she said then, “why not? Let’s go out there and take a look. Will you call Göran?”

  * * *

  SARA AND FREDRIK sat at the very front of the prow during the crossing. The boat didn’t seem to be used for fishing at all, anymore. The net winch may have still been there, but the interior of the boat was scrubbed clean and freshly painted and cross benches had been added for people to sit on.

  When they came out of the sheltered harbor inlet, the boat began to slam into the waves that were coming head-on. The occasional spray from the sea reached them in the form of a fine mist.

  Evert Söderman stuck his head out from one of the windows on the side of the wheelhouse and hollered to them.

  “You can squeeze in here with me if it’s getting too cold for you out there.”

  “We’re fine!” Sara shouted back. “We’re protected from the wind here.”

  “One hell of a bumpy ride though,” said Fredrik to Sara.

  When the bow plunged down into the larger troughs they were lifted slightly off their bench and landed again a split second later with a hard bang.

  Closer to the island, the waves settled down and the crossing became more pleasant. Evert Söderman steered in toward the thin headland that jutted straight out to the south. You could just make out a jetty at its midpoint, probably built to facilitate the maintenance of the lighthouse.

  He stuck his head out the side window again.

  “I usually take the tourists over to those cliffs over there,” he shouted while pointing, “but in this wind it’s better we go ashore at the jetty.”

  Söderman had wanted to take them out free of charge since it was police business. He didn’t have much else to do just then anyway, he had said. In the end, Fredrik managed to convince him to accept payment. It was the police department that would be footing the bill anyway, he had argued, not him or Sara personally. That had worked and Söderman had accepted. The question was whether that wasn’t his intention all along.

  Göran had said yes to the expense and urged them to be careful. “Look around; if you’re right, you just stand by and call for backup.”

  The Anita wasn’t a fast boat and the headwind was slowing her down even more. It took nearly half an hour to reach the jetty. Evert Söderman put the throbbing diesel engine into neutral, threw out the fenders, and leaped ashore with a rope in his hand. It went so quickly and smoothly that neither Fredrik nor Sara had a chance to offer to help.

  They stepped ashore. Evert Söderman held out a steadying hand to Sara, but Fredrik had to manage on his own. The surface of the jetty had recently been refurbished. The pressure-treated planking still shone green.

  “I’ll wait here,” said Evert Söderman, “but if the wind turns northerly, then I’ve got to move. Then I’ll have to head over to those cliffs, but you’ll see that.”

  A narrow path led north from the jetty and beyond it loomed the Östergarnsholm’s eastern lighthouse.

  “So, if you were to come out here in a little outboard, where would you go ashore?” asked Fredrik.

  “Well, there’s a beach on the north side of the island. I guess I’d try over there. Then you could pull up the boat and tie it to a tree,” said Söderman and slowly turned around as he spoke as if it helped him to visualize the island’s topography.

  “Maybe the stone beach on the west side,” he continued, “but then you’d probably have to raise the engine and wade in with the boat. There’s a whole bunch of rocks out in the water, almost like a reef, but you could probably make it in there somewhere.”

  * * *

  THEY LEFT EVERT Söderman by the boat and started to walk toward the lighthouse. They didn’t have a map with them, but had studied Söderman’s sea chart before setting off from Herrvik. The lighthouse seemed the best place to start looking, and then head west by way of the north beach.

  Fredrik glanced back toward Söderman who’d gotten back onboard his boat. He wondered if they were subjecting him to any kind of danger by letting him wait there. What if they did find Rickard Traneus, and he was armed and tried to escape from the island? No, he decided that the risk of that happening was slim. If Rickard Traneus really was out there he wouldn’t run. Anyone who came out here, wasn’t trying to get away, they were coming for something else. What that might be he could only guess.

  After some thirty yards, they were no longer sheltered from the wind. There was a stiff breeze and they realized that the island must have provided them with some protection from the wind during the crossing. The waves were even higher on this side, with jaggedly spuming white caps. The wind was cold.

  “If he’s been holed up out here since last Thursday, he must have gone inside one of the buildings,” said Sara. “It’s cold as all hell.”

  “Yeah,” Fredrik agreed, “or else brought a tent out with him.”

  He stuck his hands under his arms to warm them up and felt the skin on his face tighten.

  “I have to admit, now that I’m out here, I’m starting to think I’ve taken you on a wild-goose chase.”

  “M-hm,” said Sara and turned toward him in order to be heard in the wind, “but if we assume that he fled in panic and this place has a very strong positive association for him, something that is clearly connected with his family, then it’s not such a bad idea.”

  They approached the towering lighthouse that rose up some sixty-five feet into the sky. Facing them was a solid door that was protected by an arch a few inches deep. Fredrik left Sara by the door and took a walk around the lighthouse, looked out across the flat terrain, and peered up at the windows of the lighthouse and the balcony-like platform fifteen or sixteen feet up.

  “The door’s locked, securely, and nobody’s tried to get in,” said Sara once Fredrik had circled the base.

  “We’ll continue down there,” said Fredrik and pointed at a low structure a short distance away. The building had a tin roof and wood siding. The windows had metal shutters that were locked with padlocks, and the front door was shut with a heavy crossbar that was also fitted with a solid padlock. They repeated the same procedure. Fredrik headed around the building and checked that all the padlocks were secure. The metal felt heavy and rough in his fingers, pitted from salt and oxidation.

  “No,” he said when he came back, nobody’s been here.

  They continued west, turned up toward the beach that Evert Söderman had mentioned. A few trees and bushes partially blocked their view of the narrow beach. They separated and walked on either side of the vegetation, Sara on the sea side and Fredrik on the landward side. He walked through the tall grass that rustled softly as it got pressed against the ground. The bushes weren’t big and soon he could see down across the beach, small rocks that gave way to coarse sand at the edge of the water. He stopped.

  All the way up by the bushes lay a white plastic boat with light-green interior. Sara had stopped on the other side. She stuck out her hand and pointed at the tracks among the rocks. You could clearly see where the boat had been pulled up, blue bottom paint had been scraped off against the bigger rocks. It must have been tough going. A line attached to the bow had been lashed to a big rock just in front of the boat. It was secure there. The water wasn�
��t likely to make it that far up the beach except in very heavy winds coming in straight from the north.

  “Shit,” Sara swore softly and stamped her feet repeatedly as she moved a few steps down across the beach. “Fucking hell.”

  “What is it?” said Fredrik.

  “Fire ants,” she hissed. “I stepped right onto an anthill.”

  She brushed along her shins with her hands.

  Fredrik walked up to the boat. Inside it lay two graying wooden oars, but nothing else. He lifted the cover of one of the hollow thwarts. In the stern one lay a light-blue bailer, in the other nothing.

  “If there was a gas tank then he’s taken it with him, or else hidden it somewhere,” he said.

  “He can’t have rowed out here in this weather,” said Sara who was still eyeing the ground suspiciously.

  “No, but it wasn’t blowing that hard last Thursday, if that was when he came.”

  Sara rounded the boat and stood next to Fredrik. The waves were an ugly gray, as if the sea were made of mud. They looked toward the east end of the island where the cliffs rose up. Way at the top of them stood the old lighthouse, cement gray against an equally gray sky.

  57.

  Rickard was standing in the back entrance behind the kitchen, listening. He was listening just as he had listened to Mother and Father when he was little. Countless times he had stood behind a corner, listening to their voices as they rose and fell, sank to a mumble, and sometimes exploded. He had never really intended to eavesdrop. It had been more or less like now. He had rushed over to see them, filled with thoughts of his parents, of being together with them, when he heard something that caught his attention, a word, an intonation. He couldn’t explain exactly what, but it had made him stop.

  He had stood and listened like that so many times that he knew when Mother said the wrong thing. He couldn’t understand why she did it. If he could understand when she said the wrong thing, then she must have known, too. Did she say the wrong thing on purpose? It ought to be so easy to avoid it. He knew just what she shouldn’t say. He could have sat there like a prompter in a booth in the floor and helped her. He knew when she could still turn it around, and when it didn’t matter what she said anymore, when she had crossed that invisible line that meant that it could only end one way. When it got to that point, he wouldn’t stay, then he would sneak back to his room as quietly as he could.

  Why did she do that? Everything could have been so much better if she just wouldn’t do the wrong thing. Father would have been happy. Life would have been so much simpler for all of them. Especially for Mother. Why did she always say the wrong thing?

  It wasn’t something like that that stopped him this time. No discordant inflection or red-flagged word. It was the voice itself. The voice that was wrong.

  The doorbell had echoed through the house without anyone coming to open, so he had unlocked the garage door and rolled his bicycle into the empty garage. He had checked the refrigerator to see if there was any beer. He had thought that there might be some now that Father was home again. But there hadn’t been any. He must not have had time to buy any yet, or else had changed his habits while he’d been in Tokyo.

  He had sat down at the kitchen table and flipped through the morning paper. When he had finished glancing through it, impatiently, without actually reading anything, and still no one had shown up, he had gone out to the garage again to replace the blade on the lawn mower. He had bought a new blade a week ago, but hadn’t gotten around to putting it on yet.

  At first he hadn’t been able to find it, had thought that Father must already have done it, but then he had spotted it hanging from a hook on the wall, still in its unopened packaging.

  He had heard the cars pull up the driveway. Two cars, one immediately behind the other. It was strange. He had heard them climb out and walk toward the front door, and he had stuck his head out the back entrance to call out to them when he heard the front door opening. But the voice had stopped him. It wasn’t Father’s voice. It was somebody else’s. So he had stopped to listen.

  Now he was standing there in the back entrance listening to the distressed voices that every so often became so hushed that he could only make out a word here and there. He stood with his head lowered, his gaze fixed on the large terra-cotta floor tiles, all his concentration focused on the voices.

  “Well, what was I supposed to have done?” He heard his mother’s voice, quivering and changed.

  “You can’t…”

  The stranger’s voice was angry, cut her off abruptly. It sounded like he swallowed the rest of his words.

  “We mustn’t see each other,” he continued firmly. “Not now. We’re going to be together, but not now.”

  “But…”

  “You’ll have to get a new phone, a new SIM card.”

  The voice vibrated as if it were being tightly controlled and could explode at any time.

  “Aren’t they going to find out anyway? About us, I mean. Sooner or later?” said his mother.

  She sounded small and confused in a way that Ricky had never heard her before.

  “It’ll take them a while. We don’t have to hand it to them on a silver platter. And we’re going to get through this.”

  “But what if they ask me? Eventually they’re going to come out here and ask me. I can’t lie about it, can I?”

  Ricky heard how she fumbled for something, stability, a way out … He stared vacantly into the wall, saw his mother in front of him, tried to imagine the other person.

  “It’ll take them a while. Right now we just have to take it easy. Not see each other. You certainly can’t come rushing over like that.”

  “But I can’t take it,” she whimpered.

  She sounded so pitiful now. The strange man breathed heavily.

  “Now you listen to me. You can do this. You’re going to stay here and you’re going to handle it. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  His voice didn’t sound nearly as encouraging as his words. It was hard, firm, on the verge of shouting. Ricky clenched his fists.

  “No! Nobody can blame me, can they? Who could blame me?”

  “Stop it!” the strange voice commanded. “It won’t do you any good to…”

  “I don’t think many people would blame me,” his mother interjected.

  “Kristina, stop it!”

  Ricky’s heart was pounding hard. He could feel his pulse in his temples. His head was searing hot. He could hear her footsteps, anxiously pacing between the living room and the dining room. She was constantly in motion, spoke as she moved.

  “It’s terrible to have to say it, but he was the one who … he did this to himself … in the end … he did it. Maybe I sound like some kind of monster, but he did this to himself.”

  “That’s right. He did it to himself. And you’re not a monster.”

  Now the voice sounded enthusiastic, almost happy, had really found something, agreed.

  “You set yourself free. You were a prisoner. He deserved it many times over. He wasn’t a man, he was a coward; an abusive, vicious…”

  The voice faltered, seemed unable to find the right words, words that were suitably scornful. For a long time Ricky couldn’t hear anything but panicked breathing.

  “Should I go to the police?”

  “No!” The stranger bellowed. “What the hell are you saying? Haven’t you been listening? It’s like you said. He did this to himself. He deserved to die. You’re no monster. He’s the monster.”

  Rickard listened. He was wearing the work gloves. The new, razor-sharp mower blade was pointing at an angle toward the floor from his tightly clenched right hand.

  58.

  He had seen the fishing boat emerge from Herrvik harbor and pitch and roll its way through the waves. At first it had held a course that pointed straight at him. Whoever was at the helm must have used the old lighthouse as a landmark. Then when the boat changed course and started heading south, he had thought that it would continue on past, but
as soon as he had realized that it was on its way to the jetty he had moved upstairs so that he could follow them more easily.

  He was careful to stay well away from the window. He had to move sideways in the room in order not to lose sight of the two people who came ashore. They walked up toward the lighthouse and he assumed that that was the purpose of their visit. They disappeared from view for a moment but then suddenly reappeared, headed down toward the beach.

  At that point he understood that they had come looking for him. Someone must’ve seen him on the way over. What else could have led them here? Elin? Could she have sensed it, worked it out?

  As soon as they reached the beach they would know he was here. Was this the end approaching? There was no way out. The end washed up like black spume from the sea. He saw the bleeding eyes. He saw his mother’s gaze. Was it accusing him? No, that would have been so much easier. It was heartbroken, despairing, and dying. The long cut across her chest was bleeding profusely. It drenched him while she drowned in it.

  He raised his heavy head and peered down at the two figures who were drawing closer. Now he recognized them.

  59.

  There weren’t many glimpses of the sun left in the darkening cloud cover. They had the wind at their backs as they trudged up the bluff. There was a crunch beneath Fredrik’s shoe. He looked down and discovered a little bird skeleton that he had just crushed with his foot.

  Up on the bluff, they were completely exposed to the wind. Sara’s straight black hair whipped back and forth across her face. She held it back with her left hand as she searched for a hair band in her jacket pocket and quickly put it up in a ponytail.

  They hurried up to the lighthouse, Sara first, followed by Fredrik who kept a vigilant eye on the windows above.

  “I think the door’s open,” she whispered.

  The graying wooden door appeared to be closed at first glance, but when Fredrik looked more closely he noticed an inch-wide space between the door and the frame. In the middle of it a thin band of light-colored wood shone amid the gray. Sara had also seen it. The door had been broken open.