Black Lies, Red Blood: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  “Capital,” Beatrice interrupted the torrent of words.

  Bergman abruptly fell silent, but recovered fairly quickly.

  “Exactly,” he said with emphasis. “Cash is required, not enormous amounts, but still.”

  Beatrice suspected that Bo Gränsberg did not have any concealed assets.

  “A direct question: Do you have that kind of money?”

  “Not exactly, but quite a bit.”

  “And Bosse?”

  “He was going to arrange it,” said Bergman, looking unhappy, because he was smart enough to realize that Bosse’s violent death might have concerned money.

  “He was going to put in a smaller portion,” he explained. “Not fifty percent, that is.”

  “How much?”

  “Around a hundred and fifty grand.”

  “That’s a lot of money for an unemployed, homeless person.”

  Bergman nodded. He turned his eyes away. Suddenly he realized that there was a coffee mug in front of him and he took a gulp.

  “Lukewarm,” he said.

  “What do you think?” Beatrice asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How was he going to get hold of a hundred and fifty thousand kronor?”

  Göran Bergman took another gulp.

  “It’s a bit sensitive,” he said at last. “I don’t know if I should talk about it, but you’ve met Gunilla, Bosse’s ex, she’s a really good lady, you know. She has always—”

  “Can she come up with that amount?”

  Beatrice had the impression that Gunilla Lange lived quite frugally, but on the other hand, perhaps that was why she could invest so much money on a homeless, alcoholic former husband.

  “A hundred anyway,” said Bergman.

  “That’s a fair amount,” said Beatrice, and Bergman nodded in agreement.

  “Why? Bosse was perhaps not the safest investment you could imagine.”

  “No, but the fact was that he was sober for a couple of months. He really believed in this project, and I did too. I know we would have made it work. And I think Gunilla saw that too, she had seen him in his prime. He made decent money back in the good old days.”

  “But then he was sober, uninjured, and had a well-ordered life,” Beatrice objected.

  “That’s true, but he really wanted to. Adamantly. ‘This is my chance,’ he said.”

  “Was there anything between Bosse and Gunilla?”

  “No, no, but I think they still liked each other a lot. He often said that.”

  “But he had another woman, from what I understand?”

  “That one,” said Bergman. “She’s just after money. Do you know that old hag is a gambling addict? She can sit in front of those machines for hours on end. And sometimes she goes to Åland and gambles away tons of money on roulette.”

  “She never wins?”

  “Ingegerd is a loser,” Bergman maintained.

  “And then she broke up with him?”

  “She did,” said Bergman bitterly. “And Bosse had a relapse and got stinking drunk for two days. Deep down he knew that Ingegerd wasn’t good for him, but he was still depressed, because you need someone to hug now and then.”

  Beatrice nodded.

  “Do you have someone to hug?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. He smiled that crooked smile again. “Ursula is her name. The best thing that’s happened, they always say, but for me it’s true. A good lady like that is like a gift from above. She’s the one who gets me to paint too. She took a few paintings to a gallery in town and this fall I’m going to have a show. Can you imagine that?”

  He shook his head and observed the painting on the easel again.

  “Not that one maybe,” he said, laughing nervously, but soon became serious again. “But Bosse got back on his feet! He sat here and sweated and shook for a whole day. And I made coffee and painted and we talked and talked. He crashed over on the couch and came out like a human being. The next day he went and picked up a few things he had with that bitch. Bosse was strong sometimes. I know we would have managed it! Östen, the guy from the gallery, was here and took a look. He wanted to see more paintings. He called me a naivist and damn it, I probably am naive sometimes, but Bosse and I would have made the company work.”

  “I think so too,” said Beatrice.

  Bergman gave her a quick look. His eyes were misty.

  “In a way I expected this,” he said. “Bosse was a very sad man.”

  Seven

  Over the two days after Bo Gränsberg was found the image emerged of a man who had just gotten back on his feet. It was Beatrice who used Göran Bergman’s words at the morning gathering.

  At the time of his death Bosse Gränsberg was forty-four years old, born in Domkyrko parish. His parents, Gerhard and Greta Pettersson, both worked at a clothing company, his mother as a seamstress and his father as a kind of factotum watchman and chauffeur. When Bo was five years old they changed their surname to Gränsberg, after the place in inland Västerbotten where Gerhard was born.

  He had no siblings and his parents had been dead for many years. According to Gunilla Lange, he had pleasant memories of his upbringing and she had never heard him say a bad word about his parents.

  What Beatrice produced about his adolescence barely deviated from the pattern for a working-class boy: no brilliant performance in school, with his best grades in math and PE; after completion of elementary school, training as a construction worker at the Boland School, and then a job right away as a carpenter at BPA. There he stayed for five years before he took a job as a scaffolder. Göran Bergman was one of his coworkers.

  Bergman was the primary source of information, and his opinion was that then, at age twenty-five, was the best time of Bosse’s life. He had been with Gunilla for several years, they rented a two-room apartment in downtown Petterslund, he was hardworking and earned good money, his involvement in sports gave him friends and strengthened his self-esteem.

  Then came the accident. A faulty anchor in a facade, his own mistake; in one stroke, a single bolt changed his life. At first he was hopeful, even though the doctor at the construction industry health office was pessimistic about his chances of returning to his old job, and encouraged him to get retraining. Bosse on the other hand was convinced that the injury would heal; a construction worker has to take a few knocks, he reasoned. But as the months passed and the pain did not subside, his mood became more and more bitter and contrary. He turned to the bottle for consolation. Until then, according to Gunilla, he had a relaxed attitude toward alcohol, drank no more than most, and despised those who couldn’t handle liquor.

  After repeated promises of sobriety, and just as many relapses, Gunilla left him, even though she was still in love with him. She left him to protect herself, aware that wives of alcoholics could never control their own lives, but always became victims, whether or not they drank themselves.

  Bosse moved to a studio apartment in Eriksberg, intensified his drinking, was sent to a treatment center but soon quit the program, and then his decline accelerated. After a year he was evicted from the apartment. Bo Gränsberg became one of a growing army of homeless people.

  The change came during the late winter of 2007. Göran Bergman and Gränsberg had kept in touch the whole time, even if during the most difficult periods it was sporadic, when the idea of a joint investment in a scaffolding and service business for construction companies came up.

  Bergman was convinced that they would succeed, and as he was presenting his case Beatrice let herself be convinced with him. When it came to scaffolding, the naivist amateur painter was a realistic pro. She had also made inquiries among others in the industry, and all had testified to his capability and enterprise.

  Gränsberg got similar ratings, even if they were darkened by his drinking in recent years. But the majority were prepared to agree with Bergman: Their business concept was not crazy at all. The chance that they would succeed was fairly good.

  “It’s cruel,”
said Beatrice after her presentation. “After so much misery, just when he starts getting back on his feet again, he gets clubbed to death. He was on his way back up again, but got knocked down for good.”

  “Thanks, Beatrice,” said Ottosson, coughing and looking slightly helpless.

  The squad chief was known for his soft heart when faced with human shortcomings, but also of man’s capacity, out of degradation, perhaps impotence and hate, to shake it off, stagger on, and simply get back up. That kind of thing always made him teary-eyed.

  Berglund’s afternoon session at “The Grotto,” where he spoke with a dozen of Gränsberg’s “brothers in misfortune,” as he put it, resulted in a similar picture.

  “He was a good guy, that’s how you can summarize the whole thing,” said Berglund.

  “Hallelujah,” said Riis. “Are we at a Salvation Army meeting? Aren’t there any stains? The guy drank and was a tramp. How did he get money? No thefts or minor assaults, not even shoplifting? He was no angel, was he?”

  “Tell about the trailer,” Ottosson encouraged Morgansson. Ottosson was ashamed of Riis, mainly perhaps because Fritzén, the prosecutor, was present.

  Morgansson explained that they had found three fingerprints in the job site trailer, besides Gränsberg’s. Two had been identified. Johnny Andersson and Manfred Kvist, two homeless men, had left their prints in a number of places. Both had also admitted that they visited Gränsberg, but could not say when, other than that it was during the past month. Kvist had slept over on one occasion on the floor in the trailer. That was at the end of May.

  They had not found anything of great interest, no alcohol or narcotics, and nothing that looked like stolen goods.

  Morgansson’s report was brief and concise as usual. Lindell observed him during the presentation and found that he had been getting better and better.

  “The third print?” she asked.

  “Well,” said the technician with a quick glance at Lindell. “We found it on the cover of a notebook, the ordinary kind with a shiny black cover and lined pages. It looks brand new, the price tag is still on the back, and nothing was written in it.”

  “Can it be the sales clerk’s print?”

  “Probably not,” Morgansson drawled. “Unless we’re talking door-to-door sale of notebooks, because we found the same print on one of the windowpanes, the one by the table. Or pane, it’s actually plastic. My theory is that the unknown individual was sitting at the table, pushed up the window to get a little fresh air, and then locked it with an adjusting screw. Or maybe simply opened it and threw something out the window, but that doesn’t change the picture. The print is there.”

  Morgansson stopped talking and they realized by his expression that he was done.

  “Perhaps the man in the car,” said Sammy Nilsson.

  Everyone turned toward him.

  “I got a tip today. I was rummaging around at the murder scene and ran into two guys doing cable work. As you’ve seen, a cutting runs along the road past the murder scene. This morning there were people there. They were doing some excavation work, cable laying or something. I realized that they must have been there awhile and stopped. To summarize, they had seen a car parked fifty meters from the discovery site, approximately where we parked ours. That was Monday, they were dead sure of it. Tuesday and Wednesday they were at a different job. We found Gränsberg on Tuesday, when he’d been lying there a full day, according to the medical science.”

  “What kind of car was it?” Ottosson asked.

  “The guys in the cutting said a white one, a little run-down, make unknown.”

  “When?”

  “After their coffee break at eleven it was just there. Then it disappeared without them noticing it. They were down in the cutting of course and had limited visibility.”

  “Anders Brant has a white Corolla,” Sammy Nilsson continued. “Eight years old. It’s in his parking space.”

  Ann Lindell looked down at the table. Damn jerk, she mumbled inaudibly, over and over again.

  “And he’s still missing?” asked Fritzén, the prosecutor.

  “Yep,” said Sammy. “He packed up and left Tuesday morning.”

  “We’ll have to go into his apartment,” said Fritzén. “There’s no other alternative. We’ll bring in the car too.”

  “Doesn’t he have a cell phone?” asked Fredriksson, who had so far been silent.

  “Not turned on,” said Sammy. “I’ve checked the flights on Tuesday. He left home about eight and we know he went to Arlanda, terminal 5, international departures, that is. There are countless conceivable destinations.”

  “Check them all,” said Fritzén. “He must be on a passenger list.”

  “Madrid,” said Ola Haver. “He went with Spanair to Madrid. The ticket was purchased on the Internet on Friday of last week.”

  Ottosson smiled broadly and gave Fritzén a look. For once Sammy Nilsson looked disappointed, not to mention taken by surprise. Beatrice also grinned and made a thumbs up in the direction of Haver, who however did not abandon the poker face he had put on the past week.

  “I’ll be damned if it wasn’t that hack who was there and smudged his prints in the shed,” Riis commented.

  To him all journalists were rabble.

  “You said that Brant came to his residence early Tuesday morning by taxi. Where did he take it from?”

  Lindell stared at her colleague and then turned her gaze toward Sammy Nilsson, who seemed to have recovered after Haver’s unexpected initiative as far as Madrid was concerned.

  “Vaksala Square,” he said. “According to the taxi driver he was walking along Vaksalagatan and hailed the car.”

  Lindell exhaled audibly. Brant had evidently walked some distance from her home, but she realized that her concealment could be discovered at any time. Maybe her phone number was jotted down in an address book in his apartment? Her secret—that she and Brant had been lovers, or whatever other people would call it—would crack the day they checked Brant’s calls from his home phone. Almost certainly he had called her from there. What would she say? That he had called for an interview? That he was an acquaintance of a friend that she got together with now and then? Or should she go see Ottosson and tell him what was going on?

  With every minute it was getting harder to be honest, with every second that passed she looked more and more like a liar, and even more important in the eyes of her colleagues, one who was obstructing a murder investigation.

  Maybe he’d only called her from his cell phone? She seized that straw, even if it was fragile, and decided to wait and see. If only she could make contact with him first!

  On Tuesday evening she phoned Görel, who had no idea where Brant might conceivably be, nor how he could be reached. She had no e-mail address for Brant. When Lindell asked, it turned out that they had met at a salsa class. He was not much of a dancer, Görel thought. Lindell mumbled something and thanked her, and quickly ended the call by blaming Erik.

  Is this how they feel, it struck Lindell, the ones who are questioned by us and stick with half-truths and evasions as long as possible? They don’t need to be guilty of anything, but shame or misdirected loyalty makes them stand out as tortuous liars.

  The prosecutor decided on a house search, “on weak grounds,” as he himself admitted, but they did not have much to go on. The hope was that they would be able to establish that it was Brant’s prints in the trailer. And the car would be brought in for technical investigation, even if the chance of directly linking it to the crime scene was not that great. For one thing several days had passed, for another the installation workers had not seen the parked car at close range. Besides, the road up to the area where the trailer stood was coarse, crushed gravel. So no one was counting on any certain tire prints, even more so as several police vehicles had used that same access road.

  The group discussed further, reinforced by the prosecutor’s decision, how the investigation should otherwise be run. Berglund was eager to continue talking
with the homeless at “The Grotto.” Beatrice Andersson’s task was to have yet another conversation with Gunilla Lange and her new husband, Bernt Friberg. Based on that she might possibly question Göran Bergman again. Ola Haver would devote himself to the Madrid lead, and seemed content with that when he got up and left the room. Beatrice looked after him, but when he turned in the doorway it was Lindell’s gaze he sought.

  * * *

  “So how are things going for you?” asked Ottosson, turning toward Lindell, when the discussion on Gränsberg was taken care of and the prosecutor had hurried off.

  To hell, she thought about answering.

  “With the disappeared girl, I mean.”

  “I realize that,” said Lindell in a curt, slightly fatigued tone. “Well, I’ve found a witness,” she continued, telling about Yngve Sandman’s observations, and that she judged it to be a hot, credible tip.

  “Found” did sound good. She did not mention that the tip had been neglected the day after the disappearance.

  She had renewed contact with the parents and some of Klara Lovisa’s friends, to try to ferret out whether there was possibly anyone in her circle of acquaintances who might match the young man by the roadside, but had not produced anything new.

  “I’ll keep rooting. Maybe there’s an unknown young man around here now with a life on his conscience.”

  “You think she’s dead?”

  Lindell nodded and Ottosson got that furrow between his eyebrows.

  “Klara Lovisa was not a girl who disappears of her own free will,” said Lindell.

  Lindell was aware that such a judgment was risky, because what can you know about another person’s thoughts? They had experienced this before, how an apparently well-functioning youth ran away, to resurface again after a while, in another city, in another country. It might take a day or two, but even six months or more. She herself had a case with a young girl who after two years was found in Copenhagen. Maybe that was why Lindell had been assigned Klara Lovisa? If it could happen once, then … perhaps Ottosson had superstitiously reasoned.