Black Lies, Red Blood: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  It was as if she wanted to churn through everything one more time, now with Sammy as a sounding board.

  “In any case he really exerted herself. Most just shovel a little moss on top and hope for the best. If you bury a body one meter down, the chances are very good that it will rest in peace.”

  Lindell nodded.

  “It’s the way he went about it that makes me wonder,” she said. “Think about it! Fredrik Johansson has just strangled a young girl, a girl he wanted to have sex with or perhaps even raped. Perhaps to shut her up he strikes her, tries to cover her mouth, she struggles, he takes a chokehold, pushes her down against the floor. She becomes quiet. He discovers that she’s dead. He finds a shovel and—”

  “Maybe it’s in the shed,” Sammy interjected.

  “Maybe, but otherwise it’s almost spic and span in there, a chair and an old wooden box were the only things, so why would a spade be standing there, waiting to be used? But okay, he takes the spade that’s there, or, as I think, he brings along a spade, digs a gigantic hole fifty meters away, carries the body there, and covers it over.”

  “Well, that’s probably what happened,” said Sammy Nilsson calmly.

  “No,” said Lindell. “That’s not what happened. Fredrik isn’t the type. He would wet his pants, curl up in a corner, and fall apart.”

  “We’ve seen stranger things happen.”

  “We have, but this is too professional, if you get what I mean. Not a single mistake. And even if we accept that Fredrik is that cold and does everything right, it collapses on another matter.”

  Lindell paused.

  “And that is?”

  “The timing. We will never get him convicted. Klara Lovisa left home at ten thirty. At eleven thirty Yngve Andersson sees them on the road. That seems credible. Fredrik calls her, picks her up somewhere, and they talk a little in the car, drive off toward Skärfälten, have engine trouble, and decide to walk the final stretch. What happens then we can only guess at. An hour and fifteen minutes later, a quarter to one, the tow truck driver Allen Pettersson gets a call. He keeps a log and for that reason he’s dead certain of the time. Fifteen minutes later he’s there. Then Fredrik Johansson is standing by the car, waiting. He seems completely normal, jokes a little with Pettersson, rides along in the tow truck. Half an hour later the car is at the garage.”

  Lindell’s idea of checking with the towing company had been a long shot. To give her thinking some new impetus, she drove out and took a position along Route 72, watched cars, buses, trucks, and other work vehicles pass in a steady stream. How did Fredrik and Klara Lovisa get to Skärfälten? Bus was one possibility; they could have walked up to the bus stop across from Flogsta, which was about ten minutes from Berthåga and Klara Lovisa’s home, but was that likely? Fredrik would certainly want to impress her, he wanted to come cruising up in his dad’s car, not bump along on an intercity bus.

  The conclusion Lindell drew, standing by the side of the road, was that something had gone wrong with the car, but Fredrik hadn’t given up. Lust is a peculiar motivating force, and they started walking toward the hut.

  She immediately phoned the trainee, Nyman, who willingly took on the task of making calls to the towing companies. She had no idea how many there were.

  “An hour or so,” said Sammy, “for some pretty words, protests from Klara Lovisa, strangulation, grave digging, and a walk back to the car. But he may have called the towing company from the shed. He knew it would take a while for the truck to get there.”

  “In principle, I agree,” said Lindell. “But during those seventy-five minutes he and Klara Lovisa have to walk the last stretch up to the shed too. I timed it from the place where Yngve Andersson saw them. It took thirteen minutes at a pretty good pace. His attorney is going to pulverize the timetable.”

  “You think someone else dug her grave?”

  Lindell nodded.

  “And the court is going to believe that, if the defense plays its cards right.”

  “How did he come up with the idea of taking her there?”

  “He’d been near there picking mushrooms with his mom. The shed looks like it’s been there a long time. From what I understand it was not the first time he’d taken a girl there either.”

  “So you don’t think he’s guilty of the murder?”

  “Guilty of having dragged her there, but perhaps not of homicide.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t you suppose I’ve racked my brain about that?” said Lindell.

  “Three alternatives,” said Sammy. “One,” he said, holding up his index finger. “Freddy returned later. Two”—another finger in the air—“some local talent runs into Klara Lovisa and strangles her. And three, a third person comes to the shed after Fredrik left, ends her life, and digs the grave in peace and quiet.”

  “I’ve been thinking along those lines too,” said Lindell, studying Sammy’s way of holding up three fingers, thumb, middle finger, and index finger, making it look like an obscene gesture.

  “The third man,” said Sammy with a smile, and started whistling, but fell silent when he saw Lindell’s tormented expression.

  Sammy Nilsson raised the bundle of papers in a knowing gesture, making an effort to get up, but sat back down on the chair at once.

  “Are there any houses in the vicinity, where Fredrik or someone else could have retrieved a spade?”

  “Five houses within three hundred meters, including Yngve Andersson’s,” Lindell replied. “I’ve asked Nyman to collect all the shovels and spades from those places. He’s a farm boy so that suits him well.”

  “I heard he was there when you questioned Fredrik,” said Sammy Nilsson.

  “So someone spilled the beans,” Lindell noted with a tired smile. “Well, shock tactics in a broad country dialect can frighten even the toughest guy.”

  “So now Ryde gets fifty spades to look at?”

  Lindell nodded absentmindedly. Sammy Nilsson got up; he realized that in her thoughts she was already on her way somewhere else. She had that thoughtful, clairvoyant expression that had marked her the past week, and he wondered whether there was anything to Morgansson’s speculations about an affair between her and Haver. The rumor that Haver was getting a divorce was already going around the building. He had evidently talked with Beatrice, apologized to her, and then asked Ottosson for a few days off to bring some order on the home front.

  Haver had not said a word about divorce, but everyone assumed that was the reason for his accelerating dissatisfaction recently. He could “work from home,” was Ottosson’s extremely generous proposal, and they agreed that Haver would continue to investigate where Anders Brant had gone, whether he was in Spain or had traveled on from there.

  Contacts were made with Interpol and the police at the Madrid airport, but producing passenger lists from all the various airlines proved more difficult than Haver could have imagined. But the Spanish machinery was in motion, as Ottosson put it at a meeting.

  Sammy Nilsson observed Lindell. Had she lost weight? In any event she looked pale and tired, and Sammy did not believe that Klara Lovisa’s death was the sole reason. He considered asking what was up with her, but Lindell anticipated him.

  “Sammy, will you stay a moment,” she said, gesturing toward the chair he had just got up from.

  Something in her voice, but above all the worried expression, her entire posture, made him immediately close the door and sit down again.

  She looked inquisitively at him; Sammy Nilsson got the impression that she was assessing him. Was he a suitable audience for what she obviously now had to get off her chest? She lowered her eyes, moving her hands mechanically over the papers in front of her, as if she was trying to put order into the mess, before she braced herself.

  “I’ve not been completely honest,” she began, and Sammy Nilsson feared the worst. The last thing he wanted was a soap opera at the unit, with all that would entail. Then she spoke uninterruptedly for ten minutes, gave the background and
told how the story between her and Brant had developed, that on Tuesday, the morning after the murder of Gränsberg, he disappeared without saying where he was going and how she then tried in vain to locate him, to get some sign of life, before finally receiving the peculiar—to say the least—message on the cell phone.

  “Witness to a murder?” Sammy Nilsson exclaimed. “And he just takes off?”

  “Yes, it’s completely improbable! And the man I’ve had with me at my home each and every night, having sex!”

  He looked at her with surprise.

  “‘May be problems,’ that flipping idiot wrote. Yes, it’s clear there’s a problem!”

  “Take it easy,” said Sammy Nilsson, who had never seen Lindell so off balance. “There must be a reasonable explanation.”

  “I thought so too,” said Lindell. “But why didn’t he tell me, instead of taking off as if he were guilty?”

  “Maybe he is guilty,” said Sammy Nilsson calmly.

  Lindell stared at him.

  “He knew Gränsberg over twenty years ago, they played bandy together, they have demonstrably had contact—the notebook in the shed, Brant’s prints on the window, and Gränsberg’s prints in the Toyota.”

  Lindell closed her eyes.

  “What should I do?” she mumbled desperately.

  Sammy Nilsson realized that it was not worth saying that she should have put her cards on the table from the start.

  “Talk with Otto,” he said.

  “He’ll never trust me again!”

  “There’s no other way. If you drag it out even longer, it will be ten times worse.”

  Lindell nodded, as if she already understood the simple fact that a lie creates new lies, until the abscess one day mercilessly bursts.

  “I’ve texted him again,” said Lindell, and now there was only resigned fatigue in her voice. “I wrote that he’s in a bad way, that he must make contact, preferably come home. I don’t get what he’s thinking, he knows I’m a police officer. Can you understand?”

  “Talk with Otto,” Sammy Nilsson repeated, who did not want Lindell to keep speculating about what had happened.

  “I’ll give him another twenty-four hours,” said Lindell.

  He looked at her with an expression as if she were an alcoholic who for the fifty-eleventh time pronounced a solemn vow of total abstinence.

  “Don’t doubt me! Support me instead. There’s a lot at stake, don’t you get that?”

  “Sure,” said Sammy Nilsson, “I get it. This is about the murder of Bosse Gränsberg, among other things.”

  “I know! You don’t need to point that out!” said Lindell with an aggressiveness that surprised herself.

  “You had a good thing going,” Sammy Nilsson observed more than asked, and he was thinking about Brant’s apartment and what they found in his bed and the open package of condoms. Lindell’s hair color was light, while the strands of hair they found were really dark. He was happy that Lindell was not directly involved in the case and hoped she would never need to read the report from the technicians. But there was an obvious risk that she would find out about it.

  Lindell nodded. She was reluctant to say how many hopes she had already associated with this man.

  Ann Lindell was not one to talk about her private life at work, which also led to recurring speculations about what was really going on, but Sammy Nilsson was close to her. Behind his roguish image there was seriousness and wisdom, she knew that.

  “There are lots of things I’d like to tell you, but we don’t have time,” she said at last. “It would be too long a story.”

  “The story of your life?”

  Lindell nodded again. She was on the verge of tears.

  Sammy Nilsson again made a move to get up and at the same time dropped the bundle of papers, which flew out like a fan across the floor. He swore, got down on his knees to sort the printouts and pick them up in the right order.

  Lindell sensed he was doing this out of consideration for her situation; he wanted to give her time to collect herself.

  “How’s it going for you and Melander on the stairs?”

  “It’s mostly Bea who’s working on that,” said Sammy Nilsson from the floor, with his back toward her. “I’m working on the bandy crew. I’ve talked with all of them except two.”

  “Is that producing anything?”

  “Not much, but it feels good to be dealing with them. The picture of Gränsberg is getting filled out a little more too.”

  He got up, tidied the bundle, and smiled at Lindell, who smiled back.

  She felt relief. Someone knew her secret anyway. Now it was a matter of gathering even more courage and telling Ottosson.

  “One thing is peculiar. In the trash bag there was a kitchen towel with Melander’s blood on it. One theory is that during the evening she got a smack from Johnny, wiped it off and put the towel in the trash, and later went out to throw away the bag. But how credible does that seem? Get a beating and then clean up?”

  “You know how people are,” said Lindell. “There’s no logic, or there is, it just looks different. She obviously had no intention of throwing the guy out, calling us or the women’s crisis center, she just wanted to tidy up. And this is an injury that isn’t possible to distinguish from the injuries she got in the fall, you think?”

  “The doctor can’t see anything that links Johnny to an assault. She evidently tumbled several turns on the stairs, even ruptured her spleen. Johnny admits he threw a chair, but that it didn’t hit Melander, just the bedroom wall.”

  “Question him again,” Lindell said.

  “We will, but no one really knows where he is. Maybe it was stupid to release him so soon, but we don’t really have anything on him. His buddies maintain that he has a lair somewhere but no one knows where it is, or else they don’t want to snitch on him. In my opinion Johnny’s a bit of a petty thief and maybe a fence.”

  “What a mess,” said Lindell, sighing.

  “It reeks,” said Sammy Nilsson, leaning over and giving her a pat on the cheek, before he left the office.

  Twenty-five

  He read the new SMS with growing disbelief. What were u doing w Bo Gränsberg? Where & when was the murder, who?? Contact me now, return to Sweden! Don’t u see how bad this looks for u otherwise? & me! So far I’ve kept quiet about us. Do u have something to hide? I don’t want to believe that. Ann.

  It exuded desperation and confusion. How did she know about his collaboration with Gränsberg? Had he done something crazy and tried to get out of it by putting the blame on someone else? But that was not like him.

  Brant had been on good terms with Bosse ever since their bandy days. There were those who found him a bit too reserved, but Brant discovered that when the taciturn Gränsberg finally expressed an opinion, it was often well thought out. He reminded him more than a little of a man Brant had worked with in the Africa Groups of Sweden; besides being a man of few words and a construction worker, like Gränsberg he possessed an unfailing capacity to see through rhetoric. Perhaps this was because they were listeners more than talkers, they didn’t fill time and space with unfiltered chatter, didn’t drown in their own words, but focused instead on assessing the speechifying of others.

  This was a quality in short supply in the various solidarity groups in which Anders Brant had been active, and he envied Gränsberg his sparse but precise comments about the verbal pirouettes of politicians and corporate leaders. There was no dissimulation with Gränsberg. He was a leftist in an unaffected way—that too was in short supply—a perception that Brant understood had its background in Gränsberg’s upbringing and experiences from the world of work.

  Brant was then living with a woman, Gunilla Tidlund, who worked with Bosse’s wife. The two Gunillas were good friends and they socialized a fair amount.

  One summer in the early 1990s they rented a house together in the archipelago for a few weeks. This was the time of the banking crisis, wage freezes, the rampages of the Laser Man, and not l
east the growth of New Democracy, the anti-immigrant party that won seats in Parliament under the leadership of an aristocrat and a pop music impresario.

  Bosse figuratively disrobed the party leaders, and, after a couple of drinks on the veranda facing Kanholmsfjärden, could also do a clever imitation of Ian and Bert, both their body language and the racist spewing they so tactlessly provided the world of politics.

  When their sports days were over, and Brant’s travels really took off with long stays abroad, the contact between them diminished. They might run into each other in town, exchange a few words, but no more than that.

  * * *

  When they came in contact again over the past winter Gränsberg was in poor condition, basically living day to day and usually on the street. The scattered under-the-table jobs he could get were not enough to reestablish his self-esteem or build up his finances and an acceptable life in a lasting way.

  For a few months Brant had used Gränsberg as an informant. The former scaffolder was now more talkative, and his analysis was no longer as sharp and penetrating. He communicated his experience of life as a homeless person with barely concealed bitterness.

  Brant could not really take his idea of a construction services firm seriously, and even less so after Bosse presented his plan for financing it, a proposal for “mutual benefit.” Brant had to smile when he heard him lay out his plan and entice him with a diplomatic phrase that sounded foreign in the context, as if he was talking about an audacious but completely innocent business deal.

  Brant had been tempted by the idea, but rejected it almost immediately. But that moment while he considered the proposal, the brief hesitation that arose most likely because it came so unexpectedly, had been enough for Gränsberg. He continued to be in touch, nagging about how foolproof the arrangement was.

  At last Brant had to put his foot down. The last time they met was in Gränsberg’s temporary home, which he chose to call the job site trailer. Once again he took out the documents and tried to convince him. Brant then made it clear that he had never paid for information and would not do so this time either. Gränsberg evidently realized that this was the last word and gathered up the papers, carelessly pushed them together, and stowed them away again.