Black Lies, Red Blood: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  Myhre paused and turned toward Fredriksson.

  “There’s the answer, Allan, to where all Kumlin’s millions come from: liquor, oil, corruption, and misappropriation of everything that can be sold.”

  “So we can’t count on any help from the authorities?” Sammy Nilsson asked.

  “Hardly,” replied Myhre.

  “And Millgren will probably not cooperate?”

  “Not in the slightest now,” said Myhre.

  Sammy Nilsson smiled at the expression and how the modest Myhre was so sure of himself.

  “The process goes on,” Myhre resumed. “Russia’s economy is like a giant organism that floats around. If a tentacle is cut off, the body twitches, but the cut surface heals quickly and new tentacles grow out.”

  “Kumlin was only a tentacle, good for two hundred million,” Beatrice observed.

  Myhre nodded and continued his lecture.

  “Millgren continues his activity, his agreement with Fedotov and Kumlin probably rests on relatively solid legal grounds, he’s probably not that dense. Maybe he has to take a little shit, there will be some talk about divided loyalties, but who will really be surprised?”

  “There is a catch,” said Sammy Nilsson. “The neighbor lady with the dog, the one who walked past Kumlin’s house, maintains that the man by the fence did not sound foreign, that he said something about the dog. She maintained that he said the word “pooch,” “nice pooch,” or something like that. How probable is it that a Russian—”

  “But she wasn’t sure, and besides her hearing is very bad,” Beatrice objected. “When I talked with her I had to more or less shout.”

  “The lady with the dog,” said Fredriksson. “It’s always some bastard with a dog.”

  “You’re in top form,” Sammy Nilsson grinned. “Did the system break down over the weekend? Was there a free-for-all in the fourth race?”

  Fredriksson only glared. The fact was that Nilsson’s dig was right, his system had broken. If Nelson Express had behaved himself Fredriksson would have taken home almost four hundred thousand. Now he had to be content with a miserable eighteen grand.

  “I won,” he muttered.

  “It shows,” said Sammy Nilsson ironically. “And how does it feel when you lose?”

  “But why does Kumlin have to die?” Beatrice said suddenly.

  Her question expressed what they were all thinking, that the motive was decisive for whether they would have a reasonable chance to solve the murder. If there was a connection to the Russian mafia, the probability was great that the murderer was already out of the country and forever inaccessible to justice.

  “Maybe he was playing both sides,” Sammy Nilsson threw out at last.

  “With who?” asked Myhre, well aware that they would probably never get a clear picture of the whole thing.

  Forty-two

  Moments of happiness, when fate smiles gently and generously, came seldom to Ann Lindell, but now she was experiencing such a moment of grace.

  She had called Klara Lovisa’s parents to confirm what she already believed.

  Now she was sitting in her office, completely motionless, with her hands clasped on the desk, smiling broadly, even grinning occasionally.

  She sensed that what she was experiencing at that moment was like the feeling a craftsman or artist has before a completed work.

  The only sorrowful thing in the context, which somewhat soiled it all, was the sad finding against which she experienced happiness at this time. It was after all about the death of a young girl. But that did not take much away from the feeling of quiet triumph. Detective Inspector Ann Lindell had succeeded.

  She thought about looking for Ottosson to tell him, but more than anything else she wanted to sweep into his office and submit a finished package to him and Prosecutor Molin, where everything was signed, sealed, and delivered, so she decided to savor the sweetness a little longer.

  Then came the worry. Basically it had been lurking there the whole time, but suddenly the fear of failure struck with full force. She could not be 100 percent certain; did her eagerness to solve the murder make her draw hasty conclusions? Her intended submission of evidence was fragile, to say the least.

  She got up indecisively and gave the notes on her pad a final look before she hurried out of the office, shut the door, jogged over to the elevator, and pressed the button. But she then changed her mind, and took the stairs to Forensics.

  Forty-three

  “I saw Bosse the day he died.”

  Gunilla Lange looked up. The information came unannounced, spoken in a casual tone of voice, as if he were telling something very ordinary.

  “What are you saying? You were at work, weren’t you?”

  “That day I was in town,” said Bernt Friberg. “I was helping Gurra with a leak.”

  “And you’re just telling me now?”

  He nodded in response.

  “Where?”

  She feared the worst and did not want to hear. She was afraid that the relative calm of the past few days, when she fought her way back to some kind of normalcy, would now be over. Was this the start of a confession? Was her husband a murderer?

  “I saw him walking along the road, so I stopped and picked him up. He was going to the trailer.”

  “Why was that?”

  Gunilla’s voice was shrill and challenging.

  Talking was not easy for Bernt, the words often sat deep inside, but this time it seemed as if he wanted to get rid of a burden. That was how Gunilla understood his unusual talkativeness.

  He told her that right before the nine o’clock break he was on his way to Spikgatan, where the company had its storeroom and office, to have a bite to eat and pick up a few spare couplings and bends for the job he and Gunnar Melin were working on. He went on in great detail about the difficulties they had with the leak outside an apartment building in Gunsta. It was an emergency call. The foreman called in the morning and told him to skip Stockholm and instead join up with Melin who was already on the scene with a backhoe. Unfortunately first thing in the morning they had severed an electrical cable, which admittedly was completely outside the cable plan, but that obviously created even more problems.

  Gunilla let him go on with his exhaustive account, afraid of what was to come. As long as he was talking pits and backhoes everything was calm.

  According to Bernt, Bosse Gränsberg had been radiantly happy that morning. There was no sign of the usual slightly bitter, careworn air that was his trademark, an attitude Bernt always had a hard time with. During the short car ride Bosse had chatted. He was sober and reasonably well-dressed. He explained that he had been forced to look for a phone booth as his cell phone had disappeared.

  Bernt drove him all the way up to the trailer. An impulse made him get out of the car. They chatted awhile about old times.

  “I really had nothing against Bosse,” Bernt explained. “You may not know it, but we worked together many years ago. We got along fine then.”

  Gunilla Lange became more and more surprised. Never before had Bernt spoken so calmly about her former husband. Neither of the two had mentioned that they had worked together before either. But was the reason for the admission was that Bosse no longer constituted a threat?

  “Who did he call from the phone booth?”

  “He didn’t say, other than that it was important as hell. But before I left he said something strange. He said something like ‘Now Ivan would get a good thrashing.’”

  “Who’s Ivan?”

  “No idea,” said Bernt. “And then he added that he was ‘going to make big money.’”

  “He said nothing else about Ivan?”

  “No, nothing except that he would get a beating. Actually there is an Ivan, a pipefitter from Gamlis, who I worked with a long time ago, and who Bosse knew too, but he must be retired now. I have a hard time believing that’s the Ivan Bosse meant. And then there’s a paver named Ivan, who worked at BPA a long time ago, but—”

 
“And then you left?”

  “Then I left.”

  He looked at her with a steady gaze. I have to believe him, she thought. He can’t lie, he mustn’t lie.

  “I felt a little uneasy,” Bernt continued. “I mean, Bosse was happy and all, but that talk didn’t sound pleasant. And it wasn’t either. He died a few hours later.”

  “Why haven’t you told this to the police?”

  Bernt looked at her a few moments before he answered.

  “What would they think? And what would you think?”

  “But now you’re telling me.”

  He nodded.

  “I wanted you to know. If it should come out, I mean. If anyone saw us.”

  Bernt suddenly got up from the table. After every meal he usually cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, but now he left the kitchen and disappeared into the living room. Gunilla heard the lid of the old secretary desk being lowered. Bernt returned with an envelope in his hand.

  “Here,” he said, handing over the envelope. “We’re going to take a trip.”

  “Trip?”

  “In August.”

  “We’re taking a trip? Where to?”

  For several years she had nagged that they should travel abroad and suggested different destinations, but Bernt had always resisted.

  “Cape Verde,” he said.

  She stared at him incredulously.

  “Not that many people go there. I thought it would be nice to avoid the crowds.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the middle of the Atlantic,” said Bernt. “It’s an island.”

  She could not keep from laughing.

  “Of course it’s an island,” she exclaimed, “if it’s in the middle of the Atlantic. You’re completely out of your mind!”

  He nodded and smiled for the first time since he came home from work.

  Gunilla took the travel documents out of the envelope. Two weeks on Cape Verde with departure on the fourth of August. That was when her vacation began.

  “But you—”

  “I’ve moved up my vacation,” he said.

  She browsed through the travel documents, but did not really understand anything other than that the hotel was called something with Vista.

  “I think it will be fine,” he said.

  She pushed the papers to the side.

  “You have to tell the police that you met Bosse,” she said.

  “They’re going to think it was me.”

  For a moment it struck Gunilla that perhaps it was Bernt who had killed her ex-husband. She looked at the colorful brochure about the Atlantic island group, read a line about a music festival on one of the islands, raised her eyes and looked at Bernt, who had started clearing away dinner. He could have done it. He was overcome by anger sometimes. Then he was changed beyond recognition. Once he hit her. Then she was prepared to leave, but he asked for forgiveness, and she stayed.

  Was the talk that he and Bosse had a friendly chat about old times a lie? Had they quarreled? About her, about the money that she might conceivably loan out?

  She dared not ask, afraid to trigger his anger.

  “You have to talk with them,” she said.

  He turned and looked at her, but she dared not meet his eyes. In one hand he was holding a plate, the other was holding hard onto the edge of the counter.

  It was here in the kitchen that he hit her. That time his anger was triggered by what she considered a trifle. One of her coworkers had unexpectedly called and asked whether they could go out. Bernt was working late and Gunilla thought she could take advantage of that, she seldom went out, and left a note on the kitchen table.

  They went to Hijazz, had something to eat, and listened to a blues band. When Gunilla came home she found Bernt drunk at the kitchen table. She had had wine and stumbled a little when she went up to give him a kiss on the cheek. She was met by accusations of infidelity and a hit across the mouth.

  “Cape Verde is beautiful,” he said.

  Gunilla Lange did not want to go to an island in the Atlantic. She wanted to get rid of the growing sense that something was wrong, shake off the feeling of worry and fear. She wanted to grieve alone, it occurred to her.

  After the murder of Bosse at first she only felt a great sorrow and loss. Bosse had been the love of her life, and now he was gone forever.

  Then when she found Bernt at the kitchen table early that morning, the fear had come. There was something in his behavior that she did not understand. And now this, that Bernt had encountered Bosse perhaps only an hour or two before the murder. Was he concealing anything else? What had they really talked about? The feeling of not being able to trust the man she lived with made her uneasy.

  And Cape Verde of all places! Was the trip only a way to confuse the issue, get her to think about something else?

  Forty-four

  It was as if Friday’s collapse rinsed a lot of waste products out of Ann Lindell. Was it the chat with Sammy Nilsson that created this peculiar sense of inner purity, or was it as simple as the fact that she had not had a drink in four days?

  “I don’t care about you,” she mumbled, but knew that this was partly just play-acting. Her thoughts this morning revolved around Anders Brant, and she could not decide what to think. One moment she felt a thrill of happiness at his arrival, and the next moment remembered the events of the past two weeks.

  “Mom!”

  Erik was tugging on her sleeve. She could hear from his tone of voice that he had asked her something, but she had not registered what it was about. She crouched down and put her arms around his shoulders and neck.

  “Kiss,” she said.

  Erik shook his head with an expression beyond his years, as if he wanted to say: Give it up now! But he gave her a quick peck on the check before he freed himself and set off.

  Ann Lindell left the preschool behind her with a feeling of energy.

  For the police, Tuesday was an in-between day, with few reports and alarms. Even the number of visitors in reception went down significantly on the second day of the workweek. It was as if even criminals were low on energy.

  But for her it would be a different kind of day, Lindell realized. Sammy Nilsson would be meeting Brant at Arlanda and in the meantime she would break a murderer.

  The day before she had summoned him for questioning at ten o’clock. He expressed no surprise, only a poorly concealed fury that “a whole day would be ruined.”

  “There are just a few additional questions we need to have on tape,” she said to calm him, smiling to herself and thinking that she would be very pleased to help ruin ten or fifteen years of his life.

  * * *

  It was Allan Fredriksson who went to meet Håkan Malmberg at the reception counter.

  “Where’s Lindell?”

  Allan was making small talk with a colleague at the counter while he pointed with one finger vaguely upward.

  “Excuse me,” he said at last. “Lindell is up there, she asked me to get you.”

  “What do you want?”

  Fredriksson observed him with surprise.

  “Solve a murder,” he said. “That’s all.”

  Fredriksson took the lead and led Håkan Malmberg to the interview room where Lindell was waiting. She got up and welcomed him.

  “Would you please take off your bandanna and jacket,” she said. “It can get very warm in here.”

  He shook his head, but obeyed and hung the leather jacket on the back of the chair.

  “I’ll take care of the bandanna,” said Fredriksson, snapping it up.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Listen now, Malmberg!”

  Lindell’s voice cut through the room.

  “We think you’ve been doing a little too much talking. Yesterday when we spoke you stated that you had not talked with Fredrik Johansson since last fall. Is that still true?”

  “Yes, damn it! Why would I talk with him?”

  “What do I know? Have you spoken with Klara Lovisa�
��s parents since she was found?”

  “No, I don’t know them.”

  “You haven’t spoken with anyone at all about Klara Lovisa since she was found, is that correct?”

  “Yes! Like I told you, I’ve been on vacation.”

  Ann Lindell observed Malmberg.

  “Think now, you have a chance to change your mind. We’re recording our conversation, do you realize that?”

  “What is this?”

  “You haven’t spoken with anyone, okay,” said Lindell. “When we discussed Fredrik Johansson, you said something to the effect that you thought he was a bastard but that you didn’t think him capable of killing Klara Lovisa and burying her. Do you still think that?”

  “Sure,” said Malmberg. “Do you have to do everything twice at this place? And why aren’t you arresting him, instead of taking up my time?”

  “Tell me how you knew that Klara Lovisa’s body was buried in the forest,” Lindell challenged.

  “Huh?”

  “You heard me,” said Lindell calmly.

  “Everyone knew … What do you mean? Huh? How…?”

  Håkan Malmberg’s confusion was immediate and total.

  * * *

  Ann Lindell observed Håkan Malmberg’s sweaty forehead and listened patiently to his flat denial. When he realized he was in a bad way, Malmberg demanded that a lawyer be present. One joined them after an hour-long break in the questioning, looking almost indifferent. Ann Lindell got the feeling he didn’t like his client, but concealed his antipathy behind a bored expression.