Black Lies, Red Blood: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  Is this what Erik will turn into, thought Lindell, taciturn and a little sullen, unwilling to look you in the eyes?

  “First I want to say that we do not suspect you of anything. You were in Gävle when she disappeared. We know that you and Klara Lovisa were seeing each other last year, wasn’t that the case?”

  Another nod, and now the boy appeared on the verge of tears.

  “Then she broke up with me right after New Year’s,” he said. “On New Year’s Day.”

  Lindell nodded. She knew all this from when they questioned him back in April.

  “Do you have a new girlfriend?”

  Andreas shook his head. Lindell sensed that he still thought a lot about Klara Lovisa. Not only because she disappeared in a dramatic way, but because he was still in love with her.

  “Was any other boy interested in her? I mean, did she hint anything?”

  His jaws tensed, and he gave her a quick look.

  “She didn’t say anything, that she had met someone else, or something?”

  “No, she just left.”

  “But perhaps you suspected—”

  “No, I said that!”

  “Okay,” Lindell backed up immediately. “I believe you, but as you understand this can get a little tedious. I want to know what happened, just like you. Did she say anything at all about other boys? I mean, she is pretty.”

  “There was someone stalking her last fall,” Andreas said suddenly.

  “What do you mean by ‘stalking’?”

  “Well, he was after her.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t want to say anything, just said something about some retard who was trying. He was going to invite her to Stockholm.”

  “I see, why did she tell you that, do you think?”

  He responded with a sigh.

  “To make you jealous, perhaps?”

  A bird, Lindell thought it was a blackbird, came hopping across the lawn in front of the terrace where they were sitting. She observed the bird and thought about how she should keep coaxing.

  “What were they going to do in Stockholm?”

  “Shop and go to Gröna Lund, or something, I don’t know.”

  “But there was no trip to Stockholm?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  He smiled a joyless smile.

  “Do you think it was someone from school?”

  “No, it was someone older.”

  “How much older?”

  He shrugged.

  “He had a driver’s license, anyway. She said that.”

  “When exactly was this? Fall, you said.”

  “Maybe some time in September.”

  “And then she didn’t say anything about this unknown admirer?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Lindell felt sorry for the boy in front of her, for his way of nervously and unconsciously taking hold of his left wrist with his right hand and twisting it around, back and forth, as if he was trying to slip off a bracelet, and inhaling through his nose as if to steel himself to not start crying. It was torture to make him go through this again.

  It was summer break, he should be doing fun things, celebrate that nine years of school were over, lie on a beach or whatever, instead of meeting a police officer and recalling the girlfriend he still dreamed about. There was nothing exciting about that, only regret. The memory of Klara Lovisa would fade, but Lindell was convinced that for his whole life he would remember her shoulder-length hair, lovely profile, and tender young breasts, which perhaps he had caressed. Perhaps they had slept with each other, perhaps it was the first time for both of them.

  “What happened last fall with Klara Lovisa? Were things going well in school for her, did she do anything special, did anything happen that you can recall?”

  “No. Everything always went well for her.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary, something that made her worried, something that maybe passed quickly, but that she was sad or angry about for a while?”

  “No, not that I remember.”

  “Did you sleep with each other?”

  Andreas’s cheeks turned beet red, and then his ears. His earlobes appeared to be red-hot. He shook his head.

  “She didn’t want to,” he said quietly.

  “But you wanted to?”

  He nodded.

  “She wanted to wait.”

  “Until when?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. She observed his hands, very powerful for belonging to a young boy, but still unproven, both at work and perhaps at caressing. His nails were well-cared for.

  “Thanks, Andreas,” said Lindell, extending her hand. “I’m sorry that I stirred everything up again.”

  He awkwardly took her hand.

  “I think about it every day,” he sniffed, and now the tears burst forth. “I think about her all the time.”

  She continued holding his hand in hers, squeezed it.

  “She was so fine, and now she’s gone! She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “We don’t know,” said Lindell, squeezing his hand even harder. She realized that there was nothing consoling to say.

  “We liked each other. A lot.”

  “I understand that. You’re a good guy.”

  She refrained from saying that he would surely meet another girl to fall in love with. That was not what he wanted to hear right now.

  * * *

  Lindell turned out of the driveway at Andreas Davidsson’s home, after speaking a little with his mother, a woman with a limited vocabulary, who followed her out with a tormented expression.

  What a shitty job, she thought, and she immediately thought of Anders Brant. Now was when she needed someone to call, someone to make plans with for the evening, and then the jerk goes and gets dragged into a murder! And puts her in a pinch besides. If he had just said where he was going, she thought, realizing that would not have changed the situation appreciably.

  She forced herself to think about Klara Lovisa and the unknown admirer who wanted to invite her to Stockholm. A handsome guy who knew how to hit on a younger girl, but in her case had evidently lost out. Older, Andreas had said. Where, in what context, does a teenage girl meet an older guy? Was it the son of someone in the neighborhood?

  She knew she was on the right track. Or at least convinced herself of that, because for lack of anything else this was the only thing that had any substance.

  September 2006, she thought. Klara Lovisa is courted by a guy with a driver’s license, but turns him down. How does he react? Does he give up or keep trying? Klara Lovisa did not say anything else about it to Andreas, but that didn’t need to mean squat. Maybe she had let herself be influenced by continued courtship, and then broke up with Andreas after New Year’s?

  Lindell put on the brakes and checked in the rearview mirror before she made a U-turn and took the same way back.

  The woman of limited vocabulary was at a total loss for words when Lindell turned onto the driveway to the Davidsson house again and got out of the car. She just stared at the police officer.

  “I forgot to ask Andreas one thing,” said Lindell. “Is he still at home?”

  His mother opened her mouth but said nothing. Lindell was seized by a strong distaste when passivity was so obviously given a face.

  “Is it okay to go inside again?” she asked.

  The woman did not answer but managed to point toward the door and nod. Lindell opened the door and called the boy’s name. His head almost immediately stuck out from the second floor. He looked perplexed, and a little worried.

  “Just one thing,” said Lindell.

  The boy took a few steps down the stairs.

  “What did you do on New Year’s Eve?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “I was with some friends.”

  “Not with Klara Lovisa?”

  “No, she was at a different party.”

  “With who?”

  “Her soccer frien
ds.”

  “She played soccer?”

  “Well, not then. She quit, but she was at their party.”

  Lindell stood silently a moment.

  “When did she quit?”

  “The team, you mean? Last fall. They had a few matches left. She said that some of them were mad at her because she quit right then.”

  “What’s the name of her team?”

  “The Best.”

  “The team is called ‘The Best’?”

  “Yeah, like, they wanted to be the best.”

  “Were they?”

  Andreas shook his head.

  “Thanks,” said Lindell, pushing open the outside door with her elbow.

  The woman was still in the same spot. She had a planting trowel in her hand.

  “Nice kid you have,” said Lindell.

  “He hasn’t done anything,” said the woman. “So why are you coming here all the time? We were in Gävle! He has nothing to do with the case! He wasted all his time on her, and not just time either!”

  Lindell stopped in pure surprise that Andreas’s mother could express more than five words in sequence.

  Magdalena Davidsson took a couple steps closer to Lindell. She raised the planting trowel threateningly.

  “If you only knew!”

  “Knew what?”

  “He had to run around with those advertising flyers, selling socks and God knows what, just for her.”

  “You mean Klara Lovisa?”

  The woman stopped a moment and stared at Lindell.

  “Why don’t you say her name? Her name is Klara Lovisa.”

  “I know that perfectly well! He fell behind in school. She wanted things and Andreas couldn’t say no. He’s too nice, way too nice, I told him that. And now you’re persecuting him. He has nothing to do with this!”

  “No, no one has alleged that either, but he knew Klara Lovisa well.”

  “He doesn’t need this pressure. He has to put this behind him. This fall he’s going to study, start high school. It’s going to be a lot of work for him.”

  GUC, thought Lindell, he won’t have to work too hard there, not if you were to believe half of what Sammy Nilsson had to say anyway. He had a nephew who took his qualifying exams there last spring.

  “I’m sure it will work out,” said Lindell politely.

  Klara Lovisa had been in dance class at the Vaksala School and would have continued with dance at a school in Stockholm this fall.

  Ten

  The police work puzzles, Sammy Nilsson thought as he observed his associates in front of the whiteboard. Maybe he picked up that phrase from some book or comic he read in his youth, he didn’t know.

  On the whiteboard were a dozen names, two of which were women, Gunilla Lange and Ingegerd Melander.

  The strange thing was that all of them, with the exception of Anders Brant who had moved there with his family as a ten year old, were born and grew up in the city, a fact that Berglund pointed out. Uppsala was a city people moved to; many came to study or teach at the two universities or got jobs in industry or healthcare. A service city, which at one time had been just as much an industrial city. Berglund mentioned once how few students there had been well into the sixties, before the education explosion started. How then there were brick factories, shoe and coat factories, Uppsala Ekeby with its ceramics, a wire-mesh mill that then transitioned to making synthetic wires for the paper industry, a silk-weaving mill, as well as soap factory, breweries, chocolate factory, and bicycle manufacturing.

  The university had expanded and now there were tens of thousands of students, while the industrial epoch was only a memory. Replacement in the form of a pharmaceutical industry and high-tech laboratories could not compare with the time when the streets and residential neighborhoods of Uppsala were filled with regular folks, as Berglund put it.

  Typical for the new era was that the two areas that were most talked about, where the jobs of the future were concerned, were production of antiwrinkle compounds and development of computer games.

  But everyone on the whiteboard, except Brant, was a native and stemmed from the other, for the most part vanished, Uppsala.

  They were all acquainted with the murdered man. One of the two women, Gunilla, had been married to him, and the other, Ingegerd, had a relationship with him until quite recently.

  One of them, Göran Bergman, had worked with Gränsberg. The others had been drinking with him, except for Bernt Friberg, who lived with Gunilla Lange. None of those questioned had any idea what connection Brant had with Gränsberg, but his work as a journalist was the only reasonable explanation.

  There were ten names in all. One of them perhaps was the murderer. Purely instinctively they ruled out Göran Bergman, whose grief seemed to be genuine. Nine remained.

  Which of them could conceivably have a motive? All of them, the three investigators decided.

  Berglund thought it was a drinking thing.

  “There was a spat in Gränsberg’s trailer that went downhill,” he thought. “It started as an argument about something trivial, then out came an iron pipe and suddenly one of the combatants was lying there.”

  Beatrice believed it might be Bernt Friberg and the motive would be jealousy.

  “He was opposed to Gunilla’s loan of a hundred thousand to her ex-husband,” Beatrice asserted. “She told me she hadn’t talked about her plans, but that Friberg found out by accident and then went completely nuts.”

  “Did it come to fisticuffs?” Berglund asked, and Sammy Nilsson smiled at his word choice.

  “Not that I know, but Friberg seems to be a hot-tempered type, who easily boils over,” said Beatrice. “When I questioned him he sat with his fists clenched the whole time, his face was bright red and when I brought up the subject of Gränsberg and his good relationship with Gunilla, Friberg spit out his words. He was really furious, even though he ought to be a little calmer with Gränsberg out of the game.”

  “He didn’t even try to keep a straight face?” Sammy Nilsson asked. “Now he could sit there and pretend to grieve and talk nicely.”

  Beatrice shook her head.

  “I believe in Brant,” said Sammy Nilsson, “and that is for a single reason: He was demonstrably there.”

  “It’s not established,” Beatrice objected.

  “The gravel that was in the tire on his Toyota comes from the road up to the trailer, I’m dead sure of that. We have his prints there, and then he leaves.”

  “The trip was planned before the murder,” said Berglund. “It was booked a few days before.”

  “Perhaps the murder was planned,” said Sammy Nilsson.

  “Why?”

  “That’s our job to figure out,” said Sammy Nilsson and smiled.

  “The brothers in misfortune, then, as you call them,” said Beatrice, turning to Berglund. “Do you have any favorites?”

  Berglund shook his head. Beatrice had hoped he would come out with a name, because they all had great respect for the older officer’s intuition. He had hit it right many times, above all in the cases where the victim’s and murderer’s background was like his, that is, what he always summarized as “east of the Fyris River.”

  “Brant and Gränsberg are the same age,” Sammy Nilsson said suddenly. “Can that be something?”

  Berglund understood immediately what he meant.

  “You mean they were in school together?”

  “I’ll check on that,” said Sammy Nilsson.

  Beatrice continued the brainstorming. “If we don’t believe it’s a drinking thing or jealousy, what motive is there? What can Gränsberg know or have that is so valuable that it motivates violence? He was not a rich man, owned no property, and actually had nothing anyone else could conceivably be after.”

  “An old grudge, perhaps?” Sammy Nilsson tossed out. “Something that happened many years ago. Maybe Gränsberg cheated the murderer out of money, didn’t pay back a loan, or whatever.”

  “And now the rumor got out that Gr�
�nsberg was going to invest a lot of dough to start up a company with Bergman,” said Berglund, picking up the thread. “Then the murderer saw his chance to collect the old debt. Gränsberg obviously refused and the result was a few blows to the head.”

  “We’ll have to question Bergman and Gunilla Lange again,” said Beatrice. “Maybe they have some idea.”

  “What about the alibis for his buddies?” Beatrice asked.

  “Tolerable,” said Berglund, consulting his notes, which was a change from before.

  Since Berglund’s operation, when a tumor was removed from his brain, his memory had gotten worse, that was apparent to everyone at Homicide. Before, he could reel off names and connections like running water. On the other hand this might be a completely normal sign of age. Berglund only had a few months left until retirement.

  “Manfred Kvist we can probably count out completely,” said Berglund. “In the morning he actually had a foot care appointment, he showed me his feet, and if there’s someone who needs foot care it’s dear Manfred. From there he went straight to the Mill and met some buddies. They had a little aquavit, Manfred was going to arrange something to go with it and went into Torgkassen. When he came up to the register he didn’t have enough money and there was a little kerfuffle. That’s confirmed by two employees. Then he and his buddies went out on the square to have lunch, that is, a seventy-centiliter bottle of aquavit and a lukewarm hot dog. A guy who sells flowers at the square thought they were yelling too much and told them so. He knows Manfred from before and was quite certain he was part of that merry troupe. Mustafa, or whoever it was, had been to buy flowers that morning and was quite sure it was on Monday.”

  Berglund read from his notes and started up again.

  “In the afternoon he was at ‘The Grotto,’ that’s quite clear and then—”

  “We can probably remove him, in other words,” said Sammy Nilsson. “The others?”

  “Two of them, Johnny Andersson and one Molle Franzén, you surely recognize them,” said Berglund, looking up, but both Beatrice and Sammy shook their heads. “They’re a little unclear about what they were doing on Tuesday. Both had been drinking pretty heavily the whole weekend and probably on Monday as well and don’t remember too much.

  “Johnny maintains in any event that he visited his aged mother at a home for the elderly in Svartbäcken, he does that every Monday afternoon, but when I spoke with her she remembers even less than her son. She’s obviously senile. A woman on the staff claims to maybe remember Johnny, but she also said that she may have been mistaken about the day, it might have been Tuesday.”