The Night of the Fire: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  Bodin was standing by the car talking on the phone, but ended the call when Sammy was approaching.

  “That was the medical examiner. He told me that they found a tattooed swastika on the neck of the woman in the smithy. There was a little skin that was undamaged, and at the hairline was an amateurish tattoo. About one centimeter in size.”

  “Swastika. Who the hell is she?”

  “Nice village,” said Bodin.

  “Let’s drive over to the farm,” Sammy decided.

  * * *

  “No, I don’t know who she is,” said Waldemar Mattsson. “A passing acquaintance.”

  “The bicycle that was outside the smithy,” said Bodin.

  “I’ve never seen it before.”

  The farmer was sitting opposite Bodin at the kitchen table. Sammy had chosen to lean against the kitchen counter.

  “Come on now!” he said.

  “Maybe it’s Friman’s daughter,” said Mattsson after a long silence.

  “Who is Friman?”

  “They live in the village, but now they’re sailing at sea. They started a while ago and are going to the Caribbean, I think. They have a daughter who maybe showed up now when her parents are away. I have the idea that she was living somewhere up north.”

  “Did Daniel talk about her?”

  “No, never.”

  “Why do you think it might be her?”

  “She … got a little crazy, ran away. I know that Kalle Friman was really angry. I think the idea was that she would go along on the sailing trip. He’d planned that trip for a couple of years, and then she backed out at the last minute.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Don’t remember. I can call Andreas, he knows.”

  “Call him!” Sammy said. “And see to it that he comes here, we want to talk with him, even if he doesn’t seem that eager.”

  “He’s working.”

  “You said that, but this is murder and arson we’re talking about,” said Bodin.

  Mattsson picked the phone up from the table, entered a speed-dial number, but couldn’t reach his son.

  “Maybe my wife remembers.”

  “Ask her.” Sammy felt growing irritation at the farmer’s slowness.

  “She’s sleeping,” he said, making it sound as if it were a betrayal.

  “Maybe you should do that too.”

  “Last night I got up and had the idea that I was a Negro. Silly, huh?”

  “Were you having a dream?”

  “I sleep with support socks, all the way up to the knees, and when I swung my legs over the edge of the bed they were completely black, and of course they are, the socks that is. But it was strange, becoming a Negro just like that, a feeling of suddenly becoming someone else.”

  “These days we don’t say Negro, do we?” said Bodin.

  “When did the police get sensitive about such things?”

  “Do any colored people live here in the village?”

  Mattsson twisted his head and aimed the bloodshot eyes at Bodin.

  “Do you say colored? We have a Yugoslav, a Polish woman, a few Finns, and a guy from Bangladesh, that’s all, I think. And then a Filipina, but she seems to be on the way out. As it sounds in any event. Otherwise it’s as usual, like it’s always been.”

  “Do you feel threatened?” asked Sammy, who wanted to get him to talk. Maybe something interesting would come out of this somnambulant babbling.

  “The UN is barging in,” Mattsson continued. “Not really, but I understand that people get angry. All the subsidies, and then we can’t afford anything else.”

  “Are you feeling pinched?”

  “Damn but you’re nervy, you know that?”

  Bodin smiled in response. “I just wanted to tease you a little.”

  “Go right ahead, but not in my kitchen. When the school burned many people were crying. And it was a fine school, that it was. I went there for six years. They say that Daniel set the fire, and it’s probably that bloody nobody who talks a lot of shit, but he ought to keep his big mouth shut. I told him so.”

  “Which nobody?”

  “The carpenter.”

  “Gösta Friberg, you mean?”

  “Are there other carpenters?”

  “And what did he say then, when you said that he should shut his mouth?”

  “He’s afraid, always has been, and since his old lady died it’s gotten worse. He spent a whole fortune on Irma, but what did it do, not a thing. And then the preacher on the other side of the road, and his sister on the neighboring farm. What a lot of bullshit. Although he’s capable, Bertil, I have to say that.”

  Sammy unconsciously took a deep breath. He was up to his neck in discomfort. The pettiness of village life stood out even clearer. At the same time he was smart enough to understand that the fine threads that bound the village and its history together were critical. Fragile threads, which were now strained and threatened to break. Perhaps some had already broken? If they could sit in Mattsson’s kitchen for a few days a pattern would emerge, he was sure of that. If they could walk through the village, visit more kitchens, sit down, take the time to listen, then the two arsons and Daniel’s murder could be solved, he was equally sure of that. The answers were in the village kitchens and bedrooms, on farmyards and in machine sheds, but police work was only like that in the best of worlds, because there weren’t that many policemen. The slowness that was required was an absurdity.

  “And then your bloody colleague, that Lindell woman, who is still playing cop. Tell her to shut down that operation and tend to the cheese instead.”

  “Tell us about the guy from Bangladesh,” said Bodin.

  “He came here and started at the creamery. He minds his own business, lives down at Nelander’s. Now he has a different job. He’s ugly as sin, but otherwise…”

  “Does he threaten you?”

  Mattsson did not reply, but instead stood up and opened the door to an old-fashioned pantry, with shelves from floor to ceiling, and rooted around among glass jars and cans before taking out a bottle with a syrupy content.

  “I got this from Dacka, but it’s damn well undrinkable. Made in his home village, he said. Arrack.”

  “Why did you get the bottle?”

  “He drives a moped and isn’t too good at it, so to speak. He tipped over one morning, I was behind him and stepped on the gas a little, so he probably got extra nervous. I had to help him up. I took the moped on the truck bed. Astrid bandaged him up.”

  “Dacka, is that what he’s called?”

  “No one can pronounce his name.”

  “Aren’t they Muslims in Bangladesh, I mean, do they drink?” Bodin asked, evidently amused.

  “If they get away from the mosque they booze like pigs, I’ve been told, but he’s probably some other sort, Buddhist or something.”

  How does he manage, it struck Sammy, he’s just lost a son. He had the dizzying thought that it was his own child who had been murdered, but dismissed it just as quickly as it showed up.

  “Shall we have one?” said Mattsson, holding up the bottle, the dregs of which clouded the grayish liquid.

  “Don’t think so,” said Sammy.

  “I can have a taste, you’re driving,” said Bodin.

  Mattsson reached for two shot glasses, which were conveniently on a shelf an arm’s length away.

  “A thimbleful,” said Bodin.

  Mattsson poured, and they carefully took a little sip, swallowed, and looked at each other with a slightly astonished expression.

  “This is what they call multicultural,” the farmer said.

  “My God,” said Bodin. “But this is probably revenge because you threatened him on the road.”

  “Dacka has a sense of humor,” said Mattsson.

  “Are you drinking?”

  Wendela Mattsson had soundlessly slipped up behind them, and stood in the door wearing an old dressing gown. Her hair was disheveled and her features likewise, as if she could not really decide wh
at expression to put on.

  “We’re tasting Dacka’s cough medicine, if you recall,” said Mattsson, but obediently set aside the glass on the kitchen counter at once. Yet there was something irritable in his voice, which perhaps did not have so much to do with her slightly impertinent tone but instead seemed to be a kind of routine everyday irritation, as when things have dried up between two people who’ve lived together a long time and the bearings are creaking. Sammy recognized it from his own marriage.

  “Do you know anything?” the woman asked, and it took a moment before Sammy understood that the question was directed at him.

  “No, not really.”

  “It struck me that it may be Friman’s daughter,” said Mattsson.

  “Lovisa, you mean? But she lives in Ludvika.”

  Mattsson gave Sammy a look that could mean: She clearly remembers that.

  “She had a swastika tattooed on her neck,” said Bodin.

  “That was why the Frimans wanted to get away,” said Wendela. “They thought the girl would reconsider when she got to see a little of the world.”

  “The world is coming here,” said Mattsson, but without actual edge, as if he didn’t really trust his own nagging small-mindedness now when death had once again struck in the village.

  “She got into bad company,” Wendela said, making an effort to continue, but nothing more came, as if her energy were used up. She immediately looked very tired, leaned against the doorpost gasping for breath. Her husband stiffened and made a vague movement, as if he might be forced to intervene.

  “I’m used up,” she said, turned away and staggered off.

  * * *

  It did not take Bodin long to produce Lovisa Friman’s personal data. From the passport office he got a photo, less than two years old. It showed a young woman with shoulder-length hair and a rather commonplace appearance; there was nothing to “hang on to,” as Bodin put it. It was impossible based on the picture to determine whether it was Lovisa who had died in the smithy.

  “Does she look like an orthodox Nazi?” said Sammy.

  Bodin gave him a look, perhaps unsure whether he was joking. They were sitting in the Mattssons’ garden chairs behind the house.

  “What do they look like?”

  “Like you and me,” said Sammy.

  “I’ll go to Friman’s,” said Bodin, “if you’ll wait for Mattsson Junior.”

  The Friman residence was a kilometer or so away. They got driving instructions from Waldemar Mattsson. Bodin took off and Sammy followed him with his gaze, and the feeling that they were doing something meaningful grew. He looked once again at the picture of Lovisa, which Mattsson had printed out in his farm office. “Nazi,” he said tentatively. It seemed so unnecessary, such a fine girl, at the start of her adult life. Burned up. Sammy made an involuntary association to the Holocaust and everyone who went up in smoke there. Now she got to taste her own medicine. Perhaps it was an unjust thought, because of course he knew nothing about Lovisa Friman.

  Nineteen

  A young man came walking across the lawn. Sammy understood that it was Daniel’s brother, although it was hard to see any resemblance. Andreas was dark, as if he came from a southern European country, fairly tall, and simply good-looking, as Sammy spontaneously characterized Mattsson’s oldest son. He was dressed in a pair of sturdy work pants and a reasonably clean T-shirt. Put a suit on him and he would be a hunk, Sammy thought.

  Sammy stood up, and they looked at one another for a moment before shaking hands.

  “Sad,” said Sammy, wanting to add something traditional about extending his condolences, but there was something in Andreas’s facial expression that made such a line unnecessary, even foolish. They had met very briefly during the investigation of the school fire, but another officer had done the questioning of the Mattsson family.

  Andreas simply nodded, and sat down with a grimace.

  “You’re working,” Sammy observed.

  “What should I do otherwise?” He told Sammy unexpectedly verbosely who he was working for at the moment, driving for Peab in Dannemora. “You’ve got to take advantage, things are going well now.”

  “Do you know Lovisa Friman?”

  “Was she the one who died in the smithy?”

  “We don’t know that, but it came up as a suggestion from your dad.”

  Andreas hummed and looked away. “It’s not impossible. I heard some talk that she was back. And she’s always been dense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dim-witted enough to go with Daniel.”

  “Was Daniel dim-witted too?”

  Andreas leaned forward, put his arms on the table, and sighed. Normally a gesture of confidence, quite different from his father’s blunt attitude and body language. “He was a dreamer,” he said at last. “Someone who was always someplace else.”

  “What did he dream about?”

  Andreas hummed again and closed his eyes. “I’m really tired.”

  Sammy repeated his question. Andreas opened his eyes, looked around, seemingly disoriented, as if he had to survey his surroundings.

  “I can take it,” said Andreas. “Driving gravel for days on end, eight hours a day, often more. I can take it, because I have to, but mostly because I can set aside money to get out of here. Then you don’t have time to float in the air, like Daniel did. You just keep going, save up, and then leave.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “The Philippines. Diving. I’m a diving instructor. In the worst case Thailand. There’s always work. I spent a winter on Ko Lanta.”

  Something aggressive came over him. Sammy sensed that he sometimes had to defend his interest in diving.

  “That would be something, learning to dive.”

  “Come down, I’ve had guys in their sixties get certified.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” said Sammy. “And the farm and the hauling business?”

  “Daniel would take that over, that was the idea. Or that’s what Waldemar thought.”

  “And that wasn’t something you were upset about?”

  Andreas sighed, raised his arms straight up, and then clasped his hands and let them rest behind his neck, leaned back, and looked toward the sky. “Maybe at first, when I realized how it was, how everything fit together, but now it doesn’t matter.”

  This was what Sammy appreciated about his occupation as a policeman: the privilege of being able to see the cards. Often it was not a complicated game. Every person had a price, and even if they raised the stakes it came to a point where the cards had to be put on the table. They weren’t there yet, he realized. He had one card, or rather the edge of a card that was peeking out, maybe it was a low card, maybe a face card, maybe an ace.

  Andreas Mattsson gave a dual impression, on the one hand open, childishly immediate, on the other hand strangely powerless. It was not just physical tiredness, there was something else that held him back and gave his gestures a resigned impression.

  “What is it that fits together?”

  Andreas sighed and looked unexpectedly embarrassed, but did not reply.

  “And what happens now?” Sammy asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know a damn thing about this farm.”

  “You dream about diving. What did Daniel dream about? You said that he was a dreamer.”

  “He could get really hotheaded. Even when he was sober. Some people got scared, but I mostly got tired of the game, because I knew that he wasn’t doing well.”

  “Why?”

  Andreas looked around again, as if he thought that someone was eavesdropping.

  “Sometimes I got the feeling that he was gay. He had girlfriends and that, sometimes for a little longer time.”

  “There was a girl in the smithy.”

  “Yeah, yeah, he was with girls, I said, but I think he wanted to try something else.”

  “But you think he was afraid of it?”

  Andreas nodded.

  “You don’t have a pictur
e of the girl who died?”

  “Yes, but she was severely burned,” said Sammy.

  “I want to see.”

  “We’ll have to wait until my partner comes back.”

  “I have to go talk with my dad, but I’ll hear when your buddy arrives. Is that okay?”

  “It’s fine,” said Sammy, who had nothing against having a few seconds to himself. It was the talk about diving that disturbed his focus. Angelika seldom if ever wanted to travel anywhere. He always wanted to go, and it had only gotten worse with the years. He thought unbidden about Lindell, who went away, not that far, but still. It was a journey, a kind of flight, that she actually completed. When they were colleagues he had sometimes daydreamed, and a few times at night, that he and Ann would take off together, leave everything behind. It was when Ann started talking about how she had to get away, break her alcohol dependence, break with life as a police officer, that Sammy in his thoughts had followed along, let go. One time he’d asked “Where should we go?” and Ann had been upset. She later apologized and blamed her sensitivity on the fact that she’d been drinking, but they both knew that there was a reason for the tears, as if an underground river broke through for a few seconds. “Erik is everything,” she said, as if she was excusing herself. Sammy knew that she struggled to give him a reasonable life, not least to maintain her son’s respect for her. He guessed that without Erik she would have totally collapsed, her worry and fear about the past and what was to come had been so deep. Besides the work situation at Violent Crimes, there was the islander Edvard, who sat like a thorn in her heart. The fact was that Sammy sometimes felt jealous when Ann talked about how stupid she’d been to let Edvard slip away.

  * * *

  Bodin returned with a neutral expression, but his introductory remark, once he’d sat down, was anything but. “I think it’s her, Miss Lovisa.” He reported that no one had answered when he knocked at the Frimans’, but that there were signs that someone was living there. There was a trash bag on the front stoop, and a few more in the garbage can.

  “Did you find anything? In the bags I mean?”

  Bodin shook his head. “On the other hand I talked with the nearest neighbor. He maintained that he saw Lovisa Friman most recently the other day, and then on a bicycle. There was no bicycle at the house.”