The Night of the Fire: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  “I’m a Nilsson. She married me.”

  “But kept her maiden name.”

  “Say that you were jealous.”

  “I was jealous,” said Ann. “But that went away pretty quickly.”

  Sammy Nilsson got up.

  “She is so much more,” he said, more vehemently than he had intended. “She has a big heart, even if maybe it’s not noticeable. I still like her, I think.”

  “If you have a big heart, and it’s not noticeable, then what use is it? There’s a major risk that those around you only see the cool smile and the beautiful nails.”

  “Maybe you’re right. My daughter thought it was better that we got a divorce, even if she didn’t say that flat out.”

  “Speaking of which, I found a dead badger in my bed.”

  “What?!”

  Ann told him in detail about the stinking animal carcass and how she felt compelled to change all the bedding.

  “You didn’t report it, I understand.”

  “No, but it’s getting a little repetitive, first the doves, then the badger, and now the board through the window.”

  “What doves?”

  She told him about the doves with the broken necks that someone had left in her mailbox.

  “Carrier pigeons,” he said with a grin.

  She didn’t smile.

  “That fell at their post.”

  She smiled, but it was only to be friendly, he understood that very well. Lindell was not much for wordplay.

  “Who?”

  “No idea, but the Vikings Ottosson and Sanberg are probably a good tip.”

  “Shall we bring them in?”

  “On what grounds?”

  To stir the pot, he thought, but did not say anything. Instead he made a gesture that could be interpreted as indifference.

  “Doves and badger,” he said, sitting down again. “Were they ordinary doves?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lindell. “I’m not a zoologist.”

  “But you are a former police officer. You didn’t spend much time on the doves, threw them away, and then there wasn’t any more to it, right?”

  “I took pictures of them.”

  She picked up her phone, browsed to the pictures, and held up the screen.

  “These are no ordinary pigeons that sit and shit on the roof of the cathedral.”

  “Aren’t they stock doves?” said Lindell.

  “Yes, but these are foreign.”

  She looked at the pictures, five in all.

  “I understand,” she said.

  “Send the pictures to me,” said Sammy. “I’ll check around a little. Maybe there are unaccompanied doves from Farawaystan.”

  Lindell made a face that only expressed tedium.

  “You’re like old Berglund,” he said, “judging people by name and origin.”

  “He didn’t judge, but he was attentive to names and origin, as you call it. That made him—he noticed that many people wanted to come from nicer homes, wanted to be a little superior, like a sickness. He didn’t want that.”

  “Yes, he was a good policeman, a good person,” Sammy said. “I know.”

  “Sure, I’d also like to be a millionaire, have a classy apartment in Copenhagen and a small estate on Jutland,” Ann said.

  “Drop Angelika now!”

  “Whatever.”

  “She’s probably the one who’s going to drop me.”

  They looked at each other. No longer young, but not yet decrepit. Colleagues, but somehow not. Loving, but never completely with each other.

  “The two of us are probably not just friends,” said Sammy, “but allies.”

  “We’ve both lived in an illusion,” said Ann. “Me with my Edvard and you with your Angelika. So different, but there have been parallels anyway, don’t you think?”

  “You make cheese. That’s why he comes here. Cheese makes him calm.”

  She held up her hands in front of him. He took them and brought her palms against his cheeks.

  “That’s the nicest thing you’ve said in a very long time.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Two days in May passed. The sun was a searchlight and the fields were crackling, smoke blew in from the north, but this time it wasn’t arson, but a forest fire near Andersbo. Two days in May, when the investigation of the arson and murder of Daniel Mattsson hung in the balance.

  Sammy Nilsson was working from his side. He had seldom if ever been more focused. He refused to think about Angelika and Mölle, he didn’t call, didn’t text, didn’t think about the marriage that threatened to go under. Instead he compiled what they’d arrived at so far, printed out, rewrote, and read again. In the center to start with was the Mattsson family, as if it was all a traditional homicide investigation, but the perspective shifted more and more to apply to Tilltorp as a phenomenon. The village emerged organically; it was as if he could touch it. Sammy had always been good at visualizing. Now he constructed the landscape, populated it and gave the various actors roles, let them speak and improvise, filled in himself where they hesitated or kept silent. The whole thing became a drama that he staged in his mind. He liked that, it livened him up, and during these two days he became, if not a better person, then in any case a better detective.

  Ann Lindell worked from her side too, even though she was off for two days. There was a fervor in her thoughts and body. Every time she stepped out in the yard she looked toward the potato patch to see if any small shoots had appeared. She had to wait. So much joy in one place. She pulled the garden hose over and set it down. “Downpour” was a word that came to her. Had she ever used it before? She didn’t need to stand there and watch the water as it worked its way ahead, flooded, “pearled” as Edvard expressed it once. She would never forget it, that time on Gräsö when together they planted a vegetable garden for Viola, the archipelago woman that Ann came to love like a wise grandmother. Now the water pearled, and was sucked in, down in the light soil, which before her eyes changed character, dampened, saturated, darkened. She did not need to stand there and watch over it all, but the longing was too difficult. For a couple of days she was expectant, she wanted to see Edvard, hold him, wanted to feel his hands, or at least hear his voice on the phone, and she told herself that it wouldn’t be long. Everything she did aimed ahead. It’s spring I guess, she thought, but understood that it was so much more. It was life, suddenly so urgent, so short.

  * * *

  “The doves,” said Sammy.

  “Google it,” Bodin said with a smile.

  “They’re diamond doves, I’ve already figured that out, but who the hell has such a thing at home?”

  “Sam Rothe,” Bodin spit out, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and Sammy saw that his colleague was as surprised as he was.

  He entered the name in the computer and at the same time picked up his phone.

  “Hi, this is Sammy Nilsson from the police in Uppsala. We met, as perhaps you recall.”

  Bodin made an attempt to imitate Rothe’s stupidly bewildered expression, but could not keep from laughing.

  “I see, it’s cool, I have a question that’s outside of work. The daughter of an acquaintance really wants to get a rabbit, and then I happened to think of you. You sell them too, don’t you?”

  Bodin drew a rabbit on a confiscation report that was on Sammy’s desk.

  “How nice. Do you have other animals, I was thinking about birds?”

  The pen stopped and Bodin looked up.

  “Nice … funny … even guinea fowl. Good! Maybe I’ll stop by later today.” He ended the call.

  “It’s Friday,” said Bodin.

  “He has different kinds of doves,” said Sammy. He already knew how it fit together.

  “Are you going there today? I promised to come home at a reasonable time.”

  “I’ll drive out myself, no problem,” said Sammy. “I’m a bit curious about this guy. He even has a donkey.”

  “Greetings to it in particular,” sa
id Bodin, whose mood had steadily improved during the week.

  * * *

  Ann remembered Astrid’s party. It had taken a backseat during the last few dramatic days. What present do you get for an eighty-year-old? Flowers was the obvious answer. Five kilometers away was a little nursery. She had bought things there before and was comfortable with the eccentric gardener. He was talkative in an undemanding way, and very knowledgeable. She walked around the garden to see if there was anything she needed to add to her flower beds, locked the door, and then took off.

  Gösta was standing by the road with his hand on the mailbox. Ann stopped and told him where she was going. “Should I buy something for Astrid from you too?” Just as she said that, her body was permeated by a wave of pure delight. It must have been noticeable, because Gösta observed her with a perplexed look before he answered.

  “Buy something beautiful” was all he said, reaching for his wallet and taking out a hundred-kronor bill.

  “The weather should be nice,” she said.

  “If that’s good I don’t know, it hasn’t rained for a month.”

  “I watered the potatoes today.”

  “What kinds have you planted?”

  “Maris Bard, and now I’ll see if the Hungarian has any Asterix left.” It gave her a rare satisfaction to be able to speak that sentence.

  Gösta grinned. “See you,” he said.

  Ann drove away, but immediately met an oncoming vehicle and moved to the side. A truck squeezed past, and as it did she glimpsed movement outside Efraimsson’s workshop. It was Bertil, who stood with his arms crossed, a somewhat strange pose for him, she thought. And then a younger man who was gesturing. It was Andreas Mattsson. He was angry, you could not interpret his body language any other way. They were the same height, and resembled a couple of boxers who were puffing themselves up at the weigh-in before a title match. He was good-looking, she observed, before a thought struck her. “Of course, that’s how it is,” she mumbled, and some of the question marks were straightened out. “That’s how it fits together,” an insight that opened new perspectives where village life and what had happened the past few months were concerned. Ann stayed where she was, and so that she wouldn’t seem too intrusively curious she picked up her phone from the passenger seat and put it to her ear, pretending to talk while she studied the two. The conviction that her suspicions were well grounded grew when Andreas Mattsson turned around completely and headed for his BMW. Bertil remained standing outside the workshop. Nothing seemed to upset that man, she thought, not even Andreas Mattsson’s obvious fury.

  Bertil followed the yellow car with his gaze, and caught sight of Ann. She raised her hand in a greeting and continued her charade. The BMW darted away in the opposite direction.

  * * *

  The master gardener’s name was Istvan, naturally, like all Hungarians. He was a bachelor, about seventy years old, marked by a life of physical labor in all kinds of weather. His skin was like an alligator’s, his back bent and his hands strong, even if somewhat crooked from rheumatism, and he was apparently equipped with an unshakable stubbornness. He had a limp, which he tried to conceal. His most prominent feature otherwise was gentleness in dealing with his customers, combined with sternness when it came to the care of plants.

  The nursery was small and outdated; even the old hotbeds remained and were used for propagation and as a stopover for summer flowers. Ann enjoyed his company. He was generous with information and advice, and for her he represented a kind of faith in people’s ability to overcome difficulties and unexpected setbacks in life, which had been bestowed on him in large measure. He had lost his family in Sweden, his mother and an older sister, and the few relatives in Hungary had been decimated. There was a solitude around Istvan that moved Ann deeply. There was of course no possibility for confidences, or for her to say something more openly consoling. She was one of many customers, not particularly regular besides, and his attitude where personal things were concerned marked a distance that could not be bridged so easily.

  The choice was a blue-flowering African lily in a pot, not cheap, from herself, while on Gösta’s behalf she bought a white hydrangea. Gösta would have to add a few more tens.

  “Very good choice,” said Istvan. “The lily must be brought inside during the winter,” he added.

  “I’ll have to do an internet search,” said Ann.

  Istvan wrapped the plants with great care. It turned out that he knew Astrid Efraimsson very well. He sent along a greeting to the birthday girl.

  “Come by and congratulate her, she would be happy,” Ann encouraged him.

  “That’s not possible on a Saturday in May,” Istvan replied, and his parting words as Ann stood by the exit were that he hoped for rain. “At least twenty millimeters.”

  I shouldn’t shop there, she thought on her way home. She loved the garden and the flowers, and liked Istvan a lot, but there was a sorrow about him, a sometimes poorly concealed melancholy, that she was drawn into like a moth to a lantern. Perhaps the run-down environment contributed, the carpet of moss under the homemade greenhouse tables, crooked and in some places rotten gables, the dripping faucets and leaking water connections, the yellow reminder notes on the old cash register, notes that had paled and lost their relevance, and over all this the greenhouse roof’s shadow color of chalk, which created a ghostly feeling of white blood that had run down the patched glass panes. When Istvan could no longer manage, all this would deteriorate very quickly and definitively, and as a destructive finale the facility would be razed, perhaps by machinery from Mattsson’s fleet, hauled away in containers to make room for two or three single-family houses.

  She wanted to shake the old man, hug him, and even stroke her hand across his rough cheeks. There was so much to say to a man of his caliber, there were so many questions to ask, about his childhood in Budapest, what happened to his father in 1956, a man in the government, Istvan had only hinted that his father had difficulties, how and where his sister had lived, and not least where his love for plants came from. Plants were the light in his life, that much she understood. With people he had signed a kind of peace treaty.

  * * *

  “Are they edible?”

  Sammy Nilsson understood immediately that the question was an unkind slap in the face of the breeder, and made an attempt to smooth it over.

  “I mean, sometimes you see rabbit in stores, and in southern Europe…”

  “What stores?” Sam Rothe whispered.

  “City Gross,” Sammy improvised.

  Rothe shook his head. He didn’t look well. Even the straggly wisps of hair seemed affected by some complaint.

  “Which rabbits are the most popular?” They were walking along rows of hutches where the poor things were kept. There were small ones with soft, wooly pelts, Sammy thought they resembled toy animals that he’d once bought for his daughter. Others were fat and rough, and gave an aggressive impression.

  “It depends,” Rothe answered after a while. “How old is the girl?”

  Sammy was completely nonplussed, before he recalled that he had fabricated a daughter of an acquaintance, as a pretext for going out to Rothe’s mini-zoo.

  “Twelve,” he answered, wanting to get away from the stinking gnawers. “Do you have birds too?”

  “That’s a different thing. Not as easy to care for.”

  “Yes, that’s clear, but I’m just curious.”

  They rounded a building and in a courtyard a large enclosure for ducks, chickens, and what Sammy thought were geese appeared. Some looked extremely gray and plain, like on any Swedish farm, others more spectacular in grand colors and strange plumage. It looked professional and well-ordered. In the middle was a pond with a little island, on which there was a little house. Cackling broke out as they approached.

  Rothe now showed a completely different side. He was active, laughed and shouted things incomprehensible to Sammy to his wards, and the din increased. Sammy praised the facility. If Rothe had proble
ms in his contact and interactions with people, this was where he came into his own.

  “You mentioned that Lovisa was here and wanted to buy meat to grill.”

  “Buy? She stole. She never bought nothing her whole life. They took a miniature pig and some doves. Someone in her gang was French or something, I think, and he liked doves. Lovisa just laughed when he walked around in the aviary.”

  “What kind of doves?” Rothe did not reply, but instead devoted all his attention to dragging a water hose to the pond, but Sammy knew that he was on the right track. “Was Daniel Mattsson with them?”

  “He’s not a good person.”

  “Should I turn on the faucet?” asked Sammy, who realized that a dialogue with Rothe was not like a normal conversation.

  “There’s no rain coming,” said Rothe.

  Sammy took out his phone, browsed to the pictures of the doves Lindell got in her mailbox. “Was it ones like this they swiped?”

  “Where’d you take that picture?”

  “Doesn’t matter, were they like this?”

  Rothe nodded. “I recognize Betsy.”

  “Do you have names for all of them?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks,” said Sammy, and he meant it. “This is really sad for you, I get that. Did you recognize anyone who was here and stole your animals, other than Lovisa?”

  “There were so many. Some of them live in Tilltorp.”

  “Have you seen them in your parents’ house?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Sebastian perhaps? Or Stefan?”

  Sam Rothe did not answer immediately. “I know that I’m a little … but when I came there they called me a lot of things. Lovisa was drunk. I never drink, but she does all the time. And the others too. I have my animals. I don’t want to be with anyone. Maybe they’ll beat me.”

  “You have it nice here,” said Sammy.

  Rothe nodded. “I’m nice. They know that. You have to be nice, otherwise they quarrel.”