Night Rounds

by Helene Tursten

  Dearest Anna!

  My vacation weeks are the last week of July and the first week of August. I will arrive at Stockholm Central Station on July 26. We can head straight to Ingarö as far as I’m concerned. It sounds absolutely wonderful that you’ve managed to rent a house on the island! I feel that I need to rest up. This year has been filled with work, and it’s much harder to be the house mother and head nurse than I thought it would be! But now I have a nice, comfortable apartment. What a difference from the tiny room I had before, where I had to share kitchen and bathroom.…

  Irene quickly read the rest of the letter. Not one word about Hilding or Lovisa Löwander. She sped through the other letters as well. Same negative result. Not one word about love—or any other emotions, for that matter—just small stuff about happenings at work and in daily life.

  The last letter was entirely different. It also began with a poem, but there were only a few lines below the quote. Irene felt strong emotion at the date: March 21, 1947. It must have been written a day or two before Tekla hanged herself.

  Irene leaned back in her chair and tried to think. Why had Anna kept these letters of all letters? Did they contain some important information somehow? Tekla and Anna had grown up as sisters. Did they have a secret code?

  She felt her brain slow to a stop. No use continuing. Time to go to the coffee machine and get another cup.

  She’d just dropped the required two crowns into the machine when she heard a familiar voice.

  “There you are. Any scoops for me today?”

  Kurt Höök didn’t sound angry, just sarcastic. Extremely sarcastic, actually. Perhaps he was entitled, Irene told herself.

  She turned around with an innocent smile on her lips. “Well, hello. Can I offer you a cup of coffee? Not as good as yours over at GT, but this will have to do.”

  Höök shrugged and mumbled something that Irene took as a yes. She stuffed two more crowns into the machine and handed him a steaming-hot cup. She hadn’t thought of any strategy, just walked ahead as Höök followed her to her office. He stopped with raised eyebrows as he reached her door.

  “Are you moving in or moving out?”

  Irene laughed, but she could understand his quizzical expression. Files, folders, and paper were strewn everywhere. The paper bags containing Tekla’s and Hilding’s books and clothes stood on the floor.

  “You won’t believe me. These things belonged to the ghost nurse. They fill two whole bags.”

  “Somebody is putting you on. People here didn’t have paper bags back then. Especially not ones with a grocery-store logo on them.”

  Amazing how this guy spotted things. He was right, of course. Irene hoped he wouldn’t ask about the suitcases.

  “Where did you find all this stuff?” Kurt Höök asked. “And is this everything?”

  Irene could almost sense his professional antennae go up. She was just about to give him a noncommittal answer when something occurred to her. Someone had broken into the suitcases recently. What had been taken from them?

  She was jolted from her musings as Höök added, “And why are you wasting time sorting through it?”

  Irene waved his questions away and pointed him to a chair. Her brain went into overdrive as it tried to churn out a story not too far from the truth. She made a tentative effort.

  “As you know, we found Linda Svensson hanged in the hospital attic at almost the same place where the ghost nurse Tekla had hanged herself way back when.”

  Irene took a large sip of coffee as she decided where to go next.

  “In one corner of the attic, we found three old suitcases. They’d been recently broken into. One of them belonged to Tekla Olsson, and the other two belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Löwander—that is, Sverker’s parents. Now I’m sorting through them to see if anything here is important, especially since someone had broken the locks to get into them. Whoever it was must have been looking for something, but what?”

  “If they found it, it would be long gone, Höök pointed out.

  “True. Still, we have to sort through everything just in case there’s something we missed. Probably not, but you never know.…”

  She let her sentence trail off for a reason. She took another long sip of coffee. Höök bent his long body over the desk and picked up the pile of faxes before she had a chance to stop him.

  “What are these?”

  “Old letters Tekla wrote to her foster sister in Stockholm.”

  “Why in the world would you read these?”

  Irene didn’t like his inquisitive stare and sharp questions. Why did she ever invite the most inquisitive journalist in all of Göteborg into her office? But here he was!

  “We were tracking down Tekla’s sister, but, unfortunately, she’s deceased. We did find her son, and he was the one who faxed these to us.”

  “Why would these letters be of interest?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Irene could tell how dumb she sounded but decided to maintain her tack. She watched Kurt Höök flip through the letters. Then he started to arrange them by date. Thoughtfully, he read through them and hummed to himself. Finally Irene couldn’t restrain herself and burst out, “Do you think they might be in a secret code?”

  Höök gave her a sharp look. “What do you expect to find?”

  She decided to tell the truth without revealing everything. “Details about an affair. We know that an unhappy love affair was behind Tekla’s suicide.”

  Höök looked at the pile of papers with renewed interest. Still reading the letters, he said, as if it were just a passing thought, “And why would the reason behind an old suicide be of interest?”

  “Honestly, we don’t know. However, we believe you found the truth in your article. The murderer was wearing an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform so that he would be taken for Nurse Tekla. We believe that Mama Bird saw him that night. We believe that’s why she was killed. Once your article was published, the murderer knew that Gunnela Hägg had seen him. We believe that the killer knew of her existence prior to the nurses’ murders, since he knew immediately she was the ‘anonymous neighborhood woman.’ ”

  Höök’s face darkened, but his voice had a bit of belligerent guilt. “You can’t say that my article was the reason she was killed.”

  “No, we’ll never know that for sure. These are our hypotheses.”

  Silently, Höök read through the letters a second time. At length he shook his head and said, “No, there’s nothing in the text. It must be in the poems.”

  “The poems?”

  “Every one of her letters starts with a poetry quotation. Maybe this was a trick they used to convey something to each other they didn’t want to write down.”

  “Maybe. But Anna didn’t use poetry in her letters.”

  “But Tekla did in the letters that Anna saved,” Kurt Höök replied.

  That thought hadn’t crossed Irene’s mind as she’d read. She’d only glanced at the poems.

  Now she read them again, and with the recent revelations the poems seemed to fit into what Irene knew of Tekla’s life history.

  The poem in the first letter, dated July 19, 1945, was a happy summer poem and contained no hidden message as far as Irene could tell. On the other hand, the second letter, dated August 25, appeared more somber:

  As friendly evening stars burn

  And send their rays down to the valley,

  He looked at his servant,

  See! He saw as the loved one sees.

  WAS TEKLA TRYING to say that Hilding had declared his love for her? “His servant” seemed fairly belittling, but maybe that’s how Tekla saw her relationship to the much older head doctor.

  The two poems following also did not appear to have any connection to a love story, but the poem of the fourth letter, dated December 10, 1945, made Irene’s jaw drop.

  Take me.—Hold me.—Touch me softly.

  Embrace me gently for a moment.

  Weep awhile—such a sad truth.

  Wa
tch me sleep a moment with tenderness.

  Do not leave me.—You want to stay,

  Stay then until I myself must go.

  Place your loving hand on my forehead.

  Yet a little while longer we are two.

  “This is not a love poem. It’s so … filled with pain and sorrow,” Irene said.

  Höök nodded. “Certainly it was a painful love story, especially when you consider she killed herself.”

  Of course Tekla’s illicit love affair gave her great pain. Having to give up her lover and then even her child would still be in the future here. This poem was simply about her pain in the relationship with Hilding. Irene didn’t mention this to Höök, but she had to give him credit for his intuition. Surely an invaluable quality in a journalist.

  There seemed to be no connection to the love affair in the letters written between January and April 1946, as far as Irene could tell. On the other hand, the letter dated June 7, 1946, was as clear as a bell:

  He came like a rushing wind.

  What does the wind care for what is forbidden?

  He kissed my cheek,

  He kissed all the blood from my skin.

  The kisses should have ended there:

  He belonged to another, he was on loan

  One evening only in the time of the lilacs

  And in the month of golden chain.

  “Well, that takes the cake! I know this poem. Hjalmar Gullberg. You can’t get any clearer than this. She regrets having an affair but finds she can’t resist him. ‘He comes like the wind …’ and she just toppled right over!” Kurt laughed.

  “Hjalmar Gullberg. She had one of his poetry books, I remember.”

  Irene went to the small pile of books. On the top was a poetry collection by Hjalmar Gullberg. She flipped through its pages until she found the poem. It took a second for her to realize that the quote had been changed.

  “Look here. Tekla writes ‘He belonged to another, but in the book it says ‘You belonged to another.’ And she also writes ‘He kissed my cheek …’ while the book says ‘He kissed your cheek.…’ ”

  “Well, there’s your code,” Kurt said calmly.

  Irene could hardly restrain herself as she flipped to the next poem. The letter was dated November 30, 1946:

  We women we are so close to the brown earth

  We ask the cuckoo what he expects from spring

  We throw our arms around the cold fir tree

  We search the sundown for signs and comfort

  Once I loved a man, he believed in nothing.…

  He came one day with empty eyes

  He left one day with forget written on his forehead

  If my child does not live, it is his.…

  It was a horrible poem, heavy with anger and a reproach to the callous, coldhearted father of her child. Probably well deserved.

  The last poem, which headed the letter Tekla wrote just before her suicide, at first appeared to be totally innocuous, but Irene shivered as she realized how the few lines connected to Tekla’s death:

  I intend to undertake a long journey

  It will be some time before we meet again

  This is not a hasty escape, this plan has been in my mind for a long time

  Though I could not speak of it till now

  She must have been declaring her intention to commit suicide. And she had taken a trip, if only to Göteborg.

  Kurt Höök stood up and stretched his long body. “How about we have a Friday-night drink?” he asked.

  Irene almost said yes, but then Hannu and Tommy appeared at the door. They threw questioning looks at Irene and Kurt.

  “Sorry, we’re not done working yet,” Irene told Kurt in a light tone. “Thanks to you, we’ve solved the mystery of the letters.”

  Kurt nodded, wished them all a good weekend, and disappeared down the hallway.

  Tommy lifted an ironic eyebrow and did an imitation of Höök. “ ‘How about we have a Friday-night drink?’ Since when has he ever offered someone a drink? Watch out for the fourth estate, Irene. The mass media can do a number on a tiny little police officer.”

  To her annoyance, Irene could feel that she was blushing. It was crazy how Tommy suddenly had so much to say about the men around her. He must think I’m going through a midlife crisis, Irene thought, and she started to laugh. That was the least of her problems!

  “He was just helping me figure out if there was a secret code in these letters. How are things with Siv Persson?”

  “We drove her to the airport and made sure she was on the evening flight to London. Her son lives there. I called him, too, and we all agreed that was the best plan. She was extremely relieved. These past twenty-four hours have been rough on her.”

  Tommy told Irene about Siv Persson’s late-night encounter with the blonde. She couldn’t say if the person was a woman or a man dressed as one. Both Tommy and Hannu were convinced her story was true.

  “We have to believe that this murderer is likely to kill again. Siv Persson is the last living witness,” Tommy concluded.

  Irene turned to the letters and showed them how the poems that began them contained hidden messages.

  Hannu nodded and said, “It’s as if she’s left word for us from the other side of the grave.”

  IRENE’S HOUSE WAS filled with the tempting scent of good food. Only Sammie noticed as Irene came through the door, but he exhibited his usual joy. She could hear cheerful chatter and the clatter of utensils in the kitchen. Both girls were home and helping their father make dinner. It sounded very pleasant. Irene’s mouth was already watering as she followed the wonderful aromas into the kitchen. Filled with expectation, she heard her husband say happily, “Hello, sweetheart. Dinner’s almost ready. Go ahead, sit down, pour yourself some beer.”

  Krister bent to take a bubbling casserole from the oven.

  “We worked together on dinner tonight. And guess what. Papa’s going to go on a diet.” Jenny said, beaming.

  “So what’s the menu you’ve created?”

  “Endive gratin covered in cheddar cheese, served with boiled sugar peas and a tomato salad,” her daughter said with pride.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And what’s for dinner?”

  Her whole family looked at her in surprise and answered in chorus:

  “This is the dinner!”

  Sadly, Irene anticipated lean times at the Huss household.

  Chapter 18

  SATURDAY FLEW BY in a blur of long-overdue tasks. Clipping Sammie’s coat was chore number one, certainly high time by now, since he was beyond shaggy. He hated every minute of it, but once it was over, he pranced about and showed off. Must feel great to be rid of half a paper bag’s worth of excess coat, Irene thought. She hadn’t clipped him too severely, since winter wasn’t over yet.

  Afterward the entire family pitched in with the cleaning, laundry, ironing, and weekly shopping.

  To Irene’s great relief, Saturday’s dinner included meat: a wonderfully aromatic pork-chop stew with the last frozen chanterelles and lingonberries from their fall harvest. Krister had purchased a red Chianti slightly flavored with black currant. Jenny happily microwaved the leftovers from yesterday’s vegetarian dinner, while Katarina opted for the pork. Both girls had soda.

  Krister lifted his glass, cleared his throat, and said, “Skoal, my girls. To my new life!”

  Irene’s expression probably revealed her questions about his resolve, but she lifted her glass anyway.

  “Jenny and I talked through things yesterday afternoon,” Krister continued. “Vegetarian food is trendy, and I’ve had a number of customers asking for more vegetarian dishes. And I need to lose at least forty pounds.” He grabbed his big belly and hoisted it up. He had really gained weight the past few years. He turned to Irene and asked, “Sweetie, did you notice any difference in flavor in this dish?”

  “No, it’s really good.”

  Krister appeared content. “Great. Instead
of heavy cream, I used half-and-half. It’s the first time I’ve tried it. My old kitchen chef used to say, ‘Real ingredients should never be compromised. Real butter and real cream, boys.’ But the real deal has its disadvantages.” Again he grabbed his belly and jiggled it.

  “Perhaps you should also take up jogging,” Irene said thoughtfully.

  “Are you crazy? Do you want me to have a heart attack? Jogging is not my style. But I’ve promised myself that I would take Sammie on a one-mile walk every day, in all weather. And every Sunday I’m going to do laps at the Frölunda community pool.”

  Irene could hardly believe her ears. They never had much in common when it came to exercise. Irene enjoyed jujitsu and jogging on her own. Not to mention handball and weight lifting, though she’d quit handball after the twins were born. Something had to give. At least weight training was part of her job and she was paid for those hours.

  “Jenny and I decided that we’d be eating vegetarian three times a week and the other days would be fish or meat. What do you say?”

  “Can you really lose weight that way?”

  “Yes indeed. If you don’t add too much cream and are easy on the oils. Jenny doesn’t eat dishes with cream, so her food will have even fewer calories.”

  “But I do have to keep eating sunflower seeds and nuts to get the energy I need,” Jenny added.

  Katarina shrugged. “Fine by me.”

  Irene was still inwardly convinced that hard times had certainly come for the normal eater at the table.

  • • •

  IRENE WOKE UP on Sunday morning feeling that she’d had a restless night. She should have been well rested; it was already after 8:00 A.M. But one question had been gnawing away at her subconscious: What had been taken from Hilding’s and Tekla’s suitcases?

  Irene took Sammie on a quick walk so he could pee before she jogged away by herself. She took a shorter route today, only five kilometers. That was enough. Maybe she’d keep Krister and Sammie company on their walk later. Before then she hoped to solve this riddle that wouldn’t leave her in peace.