The Night of the Fire: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  * * *

  Without Sammy registering it he had arrived in Gimo. He turned to the side of the road, stopped the car but let it idle, sat completely still for a few minutes before he took out his phone and called Ann. She answered immediately. “We’re on a coffee break,” she said, and he understood that she was at work. “But I can wave when you drive past.”

  “We’ll talk later,” said Sammy, clicking off the call. On the way out from Uppsala he’d had an unexpressed feeling that together they would visit Sebastian Ottosson. It wasn’t the first time he’d had the idea that they were still colleagues, although it happened less and less often, but he understood how significant she’d been. And still was. If he ever were to flee to work out the tangles in his life, it wasn’t Therese in Östhammar or anyone else who mattered, it was Ann.

  Maybe she and her coworkers were still sitting against the wall of the creamery, having coffee, sunning themselves and waiting for the cheese to behave. He drove past without waving. He parked across from Sebastian’s house. There was plenty of room, the fence around the school property had been removed, and he could drive up on the lawn in front of the ruin. It no longer smelled of arson, but summer. A scrubby gooseberry bush, perhaps a remnant from the school garden, had already blossomed over and Sammy could sense the minimal unripe fruits.

  He crossed the road. Sebastian was nowhere to be seen. The Alfa was still there. It was a clean Giulietta, six years old, Sammy had checked. He had no relationship to Italian cars, but it appeared to come from there, from the south. The doors and hatch were locked. The interior was well-cleaned, the only loose object was a pillow in the backseat.

  “What do you want?”

  The voice came from above. Sebastian Ottosson’s head was sticking out from a window on the top floor.

  “I’m looking for Rasmus,” said Sammy.

  “Why is that?”

  “You know.”

  “He’s in Thailand.”

  “Why is the car here?”

  “I drove him to the airport. The car gets to stay here.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “Saturday evening.”

  “Can you come down? It feels a little crazy to talk like this. We can sit down out here.”

  Sammy thought about Rasmus Rönn, his immaturity, as if he hadn’t really grown up. The shove that he delivered on the stairs and that almost made Sammy fall down had been an expression of that, like something on the schoolyard, as if he hadn’t understood that it wasn’t a great idea to shove a policeman. If it had been someone else Sammy would have taken him into Uppsala, scared the shit out of him, but he hadn’t really taken Rasmus seriously.

  They sat down on the back side of the house. Between the bushes they had a partial view toward Bertil Efraimsson’s house and workshop. Sebastian was dusty with plaster, with impressions from a mouth guard that covered part of his face. His hands and forearms were stained with paint.

  Sammy started by talking renovation. Sebastian answered willingly but briefly. “You’re keeping at it,” Sammy observed.

  “I want to get the house fixed, because I have to get started outside, have to make a fence for the goats soon.” He told him about his plans, now more expansively. Sammy had seen the pile of fence rolls. “I have some buddies, and Bertil will help out. He has a little tractor too.” Sebastian looked at Sammy a bit defiantly, as if he wanted to say that he had friends, a plan, a life.

  Sammy nodded. He would have liked to help out, in another context, in another world, but he couldn’t say that. The kid would certainly not understand.

  “I’ve helped drive fence posts,” he simply said. “Grandpa had a little place.”

  They sat silently for a moment. It’s strange, thought Sammy, what country air does to a person.

  “But I mostly got to carry the mallet,” he added, before he started on his actual errand. “You know what happened last Saturday. Hökarängen. Is Rasmus involved?”

  “Do you mean—?”

  “Exactly, seven innocent people died. Has he bragged about dynamite, and what you can do with it? Did he set off a bomb and then run off to Thailand? Did he tell you anything?”

  Sebastian shook his head.

  “Was he shaky last Saturday? Maybe a little speedy? You know that his brother Björn stole explosives at a construction site?”

  “It’s not my thing.”

  Sammy took that as an admission that he knew about the theft.

  “I want to work with what’s mine. I don’t give a damn about anything else.”

  “What’s wrong with you? What in the hell is wrong with Tilltorp, with Gimo, with this fucking Nazi countryside? You don’t give a damn about anything or anyone. Okay! Who’ll buy your goat cheese, have you thought about that? Will Stefan, your buddy? Rasmus? Your racist friends who vote for SD and burn down schools? Your neighbors? Not likely. They don’t care about fine cheese for two, three hundred kronor a kilo. Cheez Doodles maybe, but not goat cheese.”

  Sebastian gave Sammy a quick look, there was a hint of fear but also doubt that he’d really heard right.

  “If I burned down your house because I didn’t like your hairstyle, or because I hated goats, would you be happy?”

  Sammy stood up, incapable of sitting still. He kicked at the ugly IKEA table. A type of table that was on each and every balcony in the city. It fell over and Sebastian threw himself forward to catch it.

  “What the hell,” said Sebastian, but without sharpness, picking up the table.

  Sammy walked away a few meters, afraid that he might also attack Sebastian. Take him into Uppsala, pick that bastard to pieces, he thought.

  “Do you think I like…?” Sebastian began, but fell silent when he saw the policeman’s expression.

  Sammy walked away, stood so that he could look out over the ground where goats would soon be grazing. The thoughts of Angelika returned, they had been germinating in the back of his mind ever since he woke up, maybe he had dreamed about her, and now they blossomed out. I’ll escape to Denmark, he thought, the idea that had taken hold, even though he suspected it wasn’t worth the trouble. He would be rejected. And Skåne or Denmark was not the right environment for reconciliation. True, the gatehouse on Jutland where they’d had such a good time was still there, but the thought that they could re-create some kind of trust there was stillborn. Something more was required to rescue their marriage, they needed a miracle.

  “I don’t want to,” he mumbled and turned around. Sebastian was still sitting there, observing him, probably unsure what was happening, perhaps aware that he had gained an advantage.

  “There’s been a lot going on,” said Sammy.

  “I don’t think he went to Thailand. I drove him to Arlanda, but I don’t think he got on the plane.” Everything came as in an exhalation.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “It was something that occurred to me.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He talked about his brother, that he was worried about him.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “He didn’t say it directly, but that Björn had changed, gotten nervous. I’ve met his brother and he’s never been the nervous type. On the contrary: He’s the one who always had to calm Rasmus down. They were supposed to go together to Phuket, they got a charter at the last minute, you know, but then Björn backed out. He said he had to work, but what the hell, he’d already gotten the time off. And if there’s anyone who’s worked, it’s him, he probably has who knows how many hours of overtime.”

  That the Rönn brothers would travel together was news to Sammy. He left Sebastian, went around the corner of the house, left a voice message for Stolpe and told him what he’d found out. He then called Bodin, who actually answered, and repeated it all. “Pop down, maybe Stolpe is still questioning Björn Rönn. And you can probably check the flight last Saturday, if both were supposed to go, and if Rasmus Rönn really left.”

  Bodin did not seem to be in his best m
ood, perhaps he was grumpy because Sammy had taken off alone, but he did not protest, simply couldn’t. They ended the call, despite Sammy’s attempt to prolong the conversation. He wanted to keep talking, hold up the damned cell phone, which he usually despised, as a shield against the reality he was forced to subdue. He had Sebastian to relate to. The goat farmer.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “When it was burning and you understood that people would die, what did you think then?”

  “Mostly later,” Sebastian answered after a few seconds of silence. “Then I thought, Nice to be rid of those darkies. They were right across from where I was going to live. But it’s a shame about the ones that died.”

  “And then?”

  “I talked with Granddad. He was actually crying, it was the first time I saw him cry. He went to that school. He told me that his dad had been a foster child at several places and had to move around all the time. He was like one of those refugees that you see on TV, Granddad said. With no peace, as he said several times. That was what he said: ‘With no peace at all.’ Several times. Granddad got a little gaga at the end, he babbled on.”

  “And your granddad then? What was it like for him? Did he get any peace?”

  “He did well, because his father and mother … They built this house and they could live here their whole lives.”

  Sammy turned away. A car went past.

  “So you started to think.”

  He sensed more than saw Sebastian’s nod.

  “Gaga. But he was nice, Granddad. He believed in me.”

  Sammy did not want to ask about Sebastian’s parents, where were they? What was it like for Sebastian as a child?

  “You’re not on Facebook?”

  “Nah,” said Sebastian, looking embarrassed, as if he’d been caught with something shameful. “For a while before, but it takes so much time. You have to sit and ‘Like’ all the time.”

  “Or dislike,” said Sammy.

  Sammy was convinced that Sebastian knew who set fire to the school, but this was not the time to pressure him about that. Maybe he also suspected where Rasmus Rönn was hiding out, if he wasn’t sitting by a pool in a tropical country. Instead Sammy, himself surprised at the quick turn and choice of subject, told Sebastian about Ann, what a capable police officer she’d been and how much she liked living in the village.

  “She’ll probably be off work soon.”

  “She usually walks past,” said Sebastian.

  “I’m going for a drive,” said Sammy. He wanted to add something, but was aware that it could go wrong when many thoughts and notions crossed each other. Sometimes it was better to keep your mouth shut.

  He stopped anyway. “Listen, Sebastian, you know that the owners of the creamery, I don’t remember their names, but—”

  “Anders and Matilda,” said Sebastian.

  “They were really upset about the fire. I heard them the following day. They would never forgive you if you were involved in setting it.”

  “But I wasn’t involved—”

  “They would never buy any milk from you, not even a deciliter.”

  “But I wasn’t there!”

  “They don’t know that.”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “If anyone tells them that you were involved, then it’s over for you and your goats.”

  It took a moment before Sebastian Ottosson understood the meaning of Sammy’s hint, but by then Sammy had already disappeared around the corner of the house.

  * * *

  He didn’t know where he should go, so he stayed standing by the car. Maybe he ought to take off, but it was as if he’d gotten stuck in the village with the beautiful fields and the ugly name. That was what Bertil had said when he described Tilltorp, and it was true. In a way it was an idyll, but under the surface it was ugly, even repulsive. Like Jutland, he thought and smiled to himself. Like fucking Jutland!

  When he turned around, his thoughts disturbed by a noise from the other side of the road, he caught sight of Bertil Efraimsson. He was rolling a sheet-metal barrel across the ground, kicking it with his foot and following behind, giving it another kick. It looked as if it amused him. The barrel hit the wall of the workshop and stopped. Bertil arranged what Sammy thought was a kind of base, where he raised the barrel and measured so that it stood right under the downspout.

  Sammy crossed the road and onto Bertil’s property. “Now all that’s lacking is a little rain.”

  “This may be the last barrel I set out,” said Bertil. “They usually last for ten years before the rust gets them.”

  “When I was little my dad set out barrels to collect rainwater. There were probably bugs in them.”

  “Divers,” said Bertil, “who breathe with their rumps.”

  Sammy remembered this very well, how they floated up with the back end first, as if gasping for air, to then take off down into the darkness. He could never kill them, like he did with other beetles, in glass jars with cotton swabs drenched in ether. When they’d quit twitching he ran needles through the ring sheath and body, and then mounted them in boxes. But the divers he left alone. He became their friends.

  Sammy cursed himself for starting to think about his macabre collection of insects. There was so much there, in the years between eleven and thirteen, that was heavy, and that he tried to dispatch to oblivion.

  “There are divers in the barrel over there,” said Bertil, pointing toward one end of the house. Sammy went there, while Bertil went into the workshop.

  It was a two-hundred-liter barrel, no more than half full. A wood stick was driven down into the barrel. He understood that it was because of the squirrels. The water surface was smooth, dark. In the depths a beetle was visible. It moved leisurely at first, to then pick up speed, as if it discovered that it had an audience. It floated up, exactly with the back end first.

  Bertil, who had rolled out a new barrel, joined him. Together they observed the diver, who took a few strokes.

  “Do you know that the wake after a beetle who swims in water is always at thirty-nine degrees? That also applies to tankers, sailboats, everything. Always thirty-nine degrees. The laws of physics.”

  “God’s order,” said Bertil.

  * * *

  Without anything else being said they started walking, heading for the slightly sloping pastureland that was squeezed like an arrow between workshop and forest.

  “Here my old man had pigs that rooted around, long before they started talking about free range and all that organic stuff. As far as I know they never ate anything artificial.”

  Bertil swept his gaze across the ground. Groups of boulders rested like mossy gray flocks of prehistoric animals between the scraggly tufts of sedge, a single rough-hewn fence post stuck up like a beacon that searched for its missing comrade, and scattered rowans, grown crooked in the inhospitable soil, struggled on stubbornly in a kind of resistance movement.

  “This is my land,” said Bertil. “I could never leave it.”

  Sammy had nothing wise to say, however much he tried, he knew that deep down. There were stories that touched what he thought Bertil wanted to express, but they weren’t suitable for the moment. The last barrel, he thought, was that what called forth this unexpected melancholy in Bertil?

  “Then we ate them up.”

  Sammy understood that he meant the hogs, and that it was a very conscious statement to break the mood, put a stop to it. They turned back, and remained standing outside the workshop.

  “The boy was capable, and people are lacking who have the patience. He had that. And the eye.”

  “You mean Omid?”

  “Just him. The only boy who has worked in this workshop, since I was that age myself. He would have done well for himself.”

  “Is it profitable?”

  “Can be,” said Bertil. “Now it’s in demand again, handiwork.”

  “You wanted him to stay here?”

  Bertil’s facial ex
pression changed character for a moment, a hint of a smile was visible, but also a hasty glimpse of pain, as if he’d clearly seen the possibility of a still-living workshop, but at the same time understood what was unrealistic about such a thought. Then he took a deep breath.

  “He’ll be sent away, the politicians have decided that.”

  They parted. Bertil returned to the last barrel, Sammy walked away toward the car. He felt as if the village had invaded his brain. He was put under the influence, as in all investigations of serious crimes, where people always exposed themselves. Murder had that effect. What had happened was no ordinary shooting in an area that in the media was proclaimed a no-go zone, even if naturally there were points in common. If he could explain Tilltorp, then he could explain and unravel the skein that was called Sweden. That was perhaps why his thoughts, and he thought Ann’s too, often returned to Berglund, the old fox at Homicide who without having wished it or even understood had come to influence a whole generation of younger colleagues. But Berglund’s conclusions had also led him wrong, that life, and the mechanisms that guided people’s doings, were simpler before. That thought was false. It wasn’t better before, it wasn’t easier to understand your time before. It was simply that the tools for analyzing and understanding seemed to be frittered away, like when you lacked that Phillips screwdriver in your toolbox.

  When did I last hear someone figure things out in understandable terms? Sammy asked himself. He had arrived at the car but remained standing with his hand on the door handle. When did I last hear a party leader give a context, a perspective, and a reasonable way forward? They were all bewilderingly alike, except one, the Sweden Democrat. And he got sympathy! In the fall he would get the votes, Sammy was convinced of that. Maybe not Bertil’s vote, but certainly Sebastian’s and probably the retired carpenter’s.