Black Lies, Red Blood: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  “His business seems to have moved in the well-known gray zone,” Beatrice continued. “There are, as we know, less conventional methods for getting your way.”

  “Even murder?”

  “Yes, that had occurred to Henrietta.”

  Hällström nodded.

  “But she knows this Fedotov?”

  “They’ve met, but he was not the one watching their house. According to her, Fedotov prefers not to travel abroad. On the other hand his sons have visited Sweden and Uppsala, even stayed with the Kumlins.”

  “But we don’t know if it was the fence man who murdered Kumlin,” Sammy interjected. “He evidently went up in smoke at eight thirty. Either he left the area or else he went into the garage, waited there all night, and went to work in the morning when Kumlin was going to take his car and drive to Arlanda. That could mean he knew that Kumlin would be leaving the house in the morning.”

  “He didn’t leave a trace,” Beatrice Andersson observed in the antiphony that arose between her and Sammy Nilsson.

  “A pro,” said Hällström, and Beatrice gave him a tired look that showed what she thought about that comment.

  “Then we have Luthander’s information that there have been several unexpected visitors on the street recently,” Sammy resumed. “On two occasions he saw what he characterized as a stranger on the street. If that person was on his way to Kumlin we don’t know, no one else on the street noticed the man, and no one has expected or received a visit either. If we rely on Luthander’s information that this wasn’t the ‘Russian,’ if we’re calling him that, then who was he?”

  “It may be someone who tried to visit someone on the street two times, but this someone was not at home,” said Beatrice Andersson.

  “Someone doing reconnaissance,” Fredriksson tossed out.

  “What bothers me, seriously,” Beatrice resumed, “is that the ‘Russian’ hangs around so long, completely visible. We have three witnesses, besides your buddy Luthander, who saw him standing there by the fence. Why? If the idea was to kill Kumlin that was unusually stupid.”

  “It went wrong,” said Sammy. “The mission was to frighten, then it went overboard.”

  “Did he stay in the garage the whole night?” Hällström asked. “I have a hard time believing that.”

  * * *

  For an hour they argued back and forth, until they started repeating themselves. It was the prosecutor who proposed a break, and it was as if that suggestion let the air out of the gathering.

  The group broke up, but Sammy Nilsson stayed behind. He could not settle down. He was thinking about the Gränsberg-Brant-Kumlin connection. It had barely been discussed but it was arguably the most interesting.

  If they could establish and understand such a connection, everything would be resolved, that was his firm conviction.

  He left the meeting room and went to his own office, where he sank down in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. He ought to go home, but was unable to relax. He took out the photo that he had taken from Brant’s apartment and studied the team members.

  Brant, the joker in the deck, Lindell’s lover, the Spanish traveler Brant, whom Ola Haver had all the trouble in the world locating. Sammy Nilsson guessed that Haver was not making any great efforts, he probably had his hands full working things out on the home front. Probably he had just dutifully sent a few e-mails to the Spanish police with questions that were now floating around in the virtual world of cyberspace.

  Why did Brant take off? Why do people leave the country anyway? To get away, to work, or simply to go on vacation. At the start of the investigation Sammy had been convinced that Brant was hiding; now he was no longer so sure, perhaps due to what Lindell had told him. Would she have dated a murderer?

  Suddenly it occurred to him that among all the piles of papers on the journalist’s desk there was a folder marked Putin.

  He looked at the clock—six thirty—reached for the phone and called Lindell at home, who answered after the first ring.

  “Hello!”

  There was suppressed tension in her voice.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Huh? Is that you, Sammy? With what?”

  Lindell’s voice seemed to be coming on scratchy connections from the other side of the globe.

  “Life. Have you talked with Ottosson?”

  She had not. An e-mail from Brant had changed the picture, as she said, but did not want to tell what it was about. This irritated Sammy Nilsson, and he let her know it too.

  “But he’s clean,” said Lindell. “In any event where Gränsberg is concerned, I mean.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Brazil, in a city. In the atlas … I looked it up. It’s called Bahia. Or Salvador actually.”

  “The atlas,” said Sammy Nilsson, as if he found it unbelievable that people looked things up in something as old-fashioned as an atlas.

  “He knew Gränsberg but has nothing to do with the murder. It was a different murder.”

  “What do you mean, different?”

  “In Salvador, of a homeless person,” said Lindell tiredly. “He witnessed it.”

  “Unbelievable,” said Sammy Nilsson. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen. Would—”

  “One moment!”

  Sammy heard Lindell set down the receiver. In the background bizarrely loud sounds from a TV were heard and he understood that she was yelling at Erik. The volume was lowered somewhat and Lindell returned.

  “What did you say?”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Well, I, no, no,” Lindell protested. “Erik is just a little—”

  “Are you depressed?”

  Lindell did not answer. He could picture her, even if he hadn’t seen her new apartment, which she claimed to feel so at home in, but it was not comfort and coziness that Sammy Nilsson associated with Ann Lindell at just that moment. He knew she’d been drinking, he recognized the signs, the slightly elevated pitch in her voice and the bad syntax.

  “Ann, listen to me! I’m coming over, so we can talk.”

  The only thing he heard was Erik singing along with a song that boomed from the TV.

  “Ann, are you there?”

  Was she crying?

  “Sure, a while longer anyway, but it’s a little heavy right now,” she said at last.

  “Is 4B your apartment number?”

  She hummed in reply.

  “No entry code?”

  “Three-eight-three-eight,” said Ann Lindell. “My shoe size times two. I do have two feet.”

  But not particularly steady ones, thought Sammy Nilsson.

  “Don’t drink any more! I’ll be there in half an hour, maybe an hour, just have to swing by home. Put on some coffee. Sit down with Erik on the couch, talk with him.”

  “Okay,” said Lindell. “I’ll…”

  She fell silent, Sammy Nilsson waited for a continuation, and when it came it was suddenly a sober Lindell who was talking.

  “I think I know who murdered Klara Lovisa.”

  * * *

  Sammy Nilsson parked on Österplan, a short distance from Lindell’s residence, and remained standing a moment. It was a lovely evening, the air was warm and trailing from a grill on one of the courtyards was the aroma of meat cooking.

  A freight train lumbering north made the ground vibrate. The heavy train creaked and lurched. He counted the cars, forty-eight of them, and it occurred to him that he had wanted to be an engineer when he grew up. Imagine sticking to a track and never leaving it.

  Höganäs was an area he seldom if ever visited, either personally or on the job. In statistical terms it was a peaceful part of Uppsala. He had had one assault there, and as he walked past the building where the wife of a glazier had been severely beaten, he peeked into the yard, and stopped in amazement. The glazier’s wife was sitting in a lawn chair, reading. Sammy Nilsson could see that it was the same novel, by the most recent Nobel Prize winner, that he himself was trying to read in the even
ings. The glazier himself was in front of a grill with a spray can in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. He said something, the woman looked up and smiled, but immediately went back to her reading.

  Sammy Nilsson hurried on before they caught sight of him. He would surely be recognized and he felt embarrassed, as if he was guilty of something indecent.

  * * *

  Ann had freshened up both the apartment and herself in the hour that had passed since they talked. There was a scent of cleanser, mixed with coffee, and she had showered.

  “Erik just fell asleep,” she said.

  Sammy carefully closed the door. The evening sun was shining in through the windows in the living room, capturing the swirling dust and giving the apartment a strangely suggestive, opaque character, a romantic but at the same time ominous introduction to a French noir film from the fifties, with a woman placed like a fragile, dreamlike detail at the outer edge of the picture who would slowly back into the room and disappear.

  “I made coffee,” she said barely audibly, as if she was testing whether her voice would hold, while Sammy kicked off his shoes and curiously looked around in the dark hallway.

  He still had the feeling from his encounter with the glazier and his wife that he was intruding, peeking into something extremely private. He did not socialize with his colleagues; the barbecue every summer at Haver’s was actually the only occasion they got together in an organized way. He might have a beer sometimes with Morgansson in tech, in any case before Morgansson met the woman he had now moved in with, but he was the only one.

  The impression of intruding was unexpectedly mixed with a feeling of tenderness for Ann Lindell. She was sitting on the couch, her hair wet, straight-backed, ready to pour coffee. A plate of cookies was set out, as well as a jug of milk.

  “You have a really nice place,” he said. He was seized by an impulse to take hold of her, pat her on the cheek, or something physically tangible, but realized that would be idiotic. She was on tenterhooks and was doing everything not to show her emotions. A pat might make her fall apart, he knew her that well.

  Once before, a few years ago, he had picked up the pieces after her. That time she was sitting alone at a bar, drinking. A patrol officer, who was there to have a bite to eat and dance, phoned Sammy and told him that his colleague probably needed to go home and go to bed, otherwise things might go very wrong.

  Sammy had gone there immediately, found her blind drunk, and carted her home. That time he stayed with her the whole night, slept on the couch they were now sitting on, and the next morning had a long chat with a hungover, regretful Lindell. A chat that sank in, he realized afterward, even though they never brought up the incident later and what had been discussed that morning at her kitchen table.

  He had asked her where Erik was and she said he was staying with his “relief family,” and explained that occasionally it felt so heavy that she did not know whether she could manage bringing up her son, and that he was really the one who needed to be relieved from her, not the other way around.

  He called the patrol officer and asked him to keep quiet about what happened, and as far as Sammy could tell he had done that, he had never heard any comments or gibes at work anyway.

  After that she pulled herself together and from what Sammy had heard Erik stood out as a well-adjusted boy. It seemed as if that morning Ann definitively decided to put her love and longing for Edvard Risberg on the shelf, even if she later admitted to Sammy that for long periods it still hurt a lot. As recently as last year, in connection with her investigating a murder in the archipelago, and in doing so came geographically very close to Edvard, the misspent love story put her out of balance for several weeks.

  He sat down alongside her. The living room was, if not boring, conventionally furnished. He understood that Ann had not spent any time looking through home decor magazines. It was dutiful and functional. The only thing that deviated was a large oil painting on the opposite wall.

  She noticed his interest and told about an artist, now a very old man, who had painted a single motif his entire life, Lake Vättern, on whose shore he was born and had always lived.

  “I bought it twenty years ago, I actually borrowed money from my parents to get it, and I don’t regret it. It goes with me. It’s the only advantage with Ödeshög, being close to Vättern, or ‘the sea,’ as Dad called it.”

  “He’s succeeded,” said Sammy.

  “Lovely but cold,” said Lindell, lost in thought.

  “Klara Lovisa,” said Sammy, who wanted to break the slightly ominous mood, at the same time pouring milk in his coffee mug.

  “The last Mohican,” she said, and dismissed Sammy’s perplexed expression with a hand gesture. She then told about the necklace they had found on Klara Lovisa and that no one, not even her parents, recognized. She had drawn the conclusion that it was the murderer who had given her the jewelry.

  “Nice,” said Sammy. “First a chain around the neck and then a chokehold.”

  “I asked a teenage girl here in the building, she takes care of Erik sometimes, where she bought her jewelry and whether this particular type was popular. She listed a number of stores and today I’ve been making the rounds. Got a bite at the first one, Silver and Such, on Drottninggatan. The clerk recognized the necklace immediately and said they had sold a lot in the past six months, with the exact inscription Carpe Diem.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much,” said Sammy. “I mean, that’s a lot of customers. It would be better if it were something unusual.”

  “I was prepared,” Ann resumed, and now she smiled for the first time. “The clerk pointed out my candidate right away.”

  “What the hell?”

  “I’d gone around to three schools and picked up yearbooks, you know, with photos of everyone in class. I let her browse and speak up if she recognized a customer. In the third yearbook I showed her she put her finger on a face without hesitating: It was the last Mohican. She was dead certain of it.”

  “He had a Mohawk haircut, in other words.”

  Lindell nodded.

  “I thought like this: If and when Fredrik Johansson left Klara Lovisa alone in the forest hut, what did she do then?”

  “Tried to get away from there,” said Sammy, happy at the change in Lindell, from slurring to lucid, but he was also listening to her with a feeling of unease. He had seen something similar before, when she stubbornly shifted into higher gear on the last drops of fuel like a gasoline engine before it finally coughs and falls silent.

  “It was her birthday, she wanted to go to town, she was angry besides and maybe shocked at Freddy’s attempt, but she could not readily call her parents and ask them to come and get her.”

  “She called the last Mohican,” Sammy interjected.

  Lindell nodded again.

  “Andreas Davidsson. He has such an unusual hairstyle that you remember him, and that was what I was hoping for. Like I said, the clerk was quite certain about it. My theory is that Andreas got on his moped right away and took off. In the morning he had sent her an SMS, Klara Lovisa knew he would show up, and that he would certainly not tattle, the boy was deathly in love with her. This would put her in his debt, so of course he showed up. Then it goes wrong. She gets her present and hangs it around her neck, but when Andreas wants to screw her, it goes wrong. Perhaps she lets something slip, tired of all the horny boys, and Andreas suddenly understands that he is never going to have a chance.”

  “A lot of assumptions,” Sammy Nilsson objected. “Does he have a moped, for example?”

  Lindell nodded and continued.

  “She leaves home without jewelry, afterward murdered with jewelry. Anders bought just such a necklace a few days before. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

  Sammy sighed. He realized that Klara Lovisa and Andreas might just as well have met earlier in the day, and that she then received the chain as a present. On the other hand, why would the boy lie about such a thing?

  “And one more thing,
” Lindell resumed. “But this is just a feeling. I think his mother knows something. She seemed more than allowably confused and nervous. If I bring in mother and son and put pressure on them separately, then someone will break down, sooner or later. I actually think sooner.”

  Sammy Nilsson had great respect for Lindell’s “feeling.” It didn’t always lead right, but often enough that you could take it seriously. She seemed to have recourse to a kind of inner direction finder, an instrument that made her the capable police officer she was.

  “Have you talked with Ottosson?”

  Lindell looked at Sammy Nilsson in confusion.

  “About what?”

  “This?”

  “Yes, we’re bringing in Andreas and his mom early tomorrow, early as hell.”

  Sammy Nilsson nodded, drank the last of his coffee, which had gotten cold.

  “Then you’re not allowed to drink anymore this evening,” he said, fixing his eyes on hers. She returned the look a few seconds before she lowered her head like a penitent.

  “Do you know what I did after we talked?”

  “Showered.”

  “Yes, but first I stuck my fingers down my throat and vomited. Erik didn’t hear anything, he has his own karaoke club right now. He’s been at it constantly for a couple weeks now, he sings along with every single TV program and video, sweet but tiresome after a while. I had just had two glasses of wine and you know I don’t need much, even more so when I haven’t been eating right. Then I drank a liter of milk and showered. I didn’t want to be drunk when you came.”

  “Anders Brant,” said Sammy.

  She nodded.

  “What’s happened?” he continued.

  “Do you really want to hear? It’s a depressing fucking mess, filled with stupid love, a lot of hope, but just as much disappointment and anguish, dreary to listen to if you’re not involved.”

  “Tell me,” Sammy encouraged her, knowing that it would sound just as drearily predictable as Ann foretold.

  “I think he has a woman in Brazil,” she said. “He didn’t say that flat out in his e-mail, but between the lines it was clear enough. Maybe she’s the one who was here and visited. And now he’s there.”