A Darker Shade of Sweden (12 page)

She thought about the deadly sins, of all the holy scriptures that had warned generation upon generation of what unbridled passion could do to society and to men. That warning was always timely.

She nodded to herself. The flame fluttered in the draft from her hand when she took her pen to start writing her next sermon. She would talk about greed.

Carl-Edvard Palm was sitting on his porch, red both from sunburn and fury. His new wife was equally furious but less red. She used sun lotion. The only ones chirping with joy today had been his daughters.

“Do you know what the girls told me when we had lunch? The old bastard wrote another will just a couple of weeks after I had gone to all the trouble to help him out,” he had told his wife.

“But how could he do something like that?” his wife said incredulously.

“That's what you get for trying to fix things for a senile old childless fart,” he said.

“And you worked so hard,” she said in an injured tone.

“I stood all the costs, I did all the work, and what did it get me?” Palm said. “Not a damned thing, that's what.”

“It's really unfair,” his wife said.

“I won't even get the fee for selling the house. It seems one of them actually means to live in it. Can you imagine? It's all come to nothing,” he said bitterly.

But perhaps something could be salvaged, after all. He drove to his office, made a photocopy of the stonecutter's bill and payment receipt for the black tombstone and wrote out a bill. To the sum and his rate for helping out, he added the highest-allowed market interest. It came to quite a decent amount. On his way home, he mailed the bill to the estate of Paul Bergström.

Born in late 1953 in Lövånger, a town of then only a few hundred
(
now some 750
)
inhabitants on the far north coast of Sweden, Eva Gabrielsson studied at Umeå University, where she met her life-long companion, Stieg Larsson, in 1972. She later studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and has worked as an architect, project developer, and government expert on issues concerning sustainable building and maintenance. She lives in Stockholm.

THE RING

A
NNA
J
ANSSON

Anna Jansson was born and grew up in the important medieval trading town of Visby, founded in the tenth century, on the island of Gotland, which lies in the Baltic east of both the Swedish mainland and the much smaller island of Öland. She began publishing crime novels in 2000, and in her first book introduced Maria Wern, a young police woman who has remained the protagonist in fourteen novels and a very few short stories, including this one.

In the first few novels, Wern works on the mainland but accepts extra assignments on Gotland during her summer vacations; by the time of the seventh novel, however, she has moved there permanently. In Anna Jansson's novels, considerable attention is given not only to the crimes committed and the police investigations, but also to Maria Wern's problems as a committed professional trying to juggle her work, her two children, her romances, and private life into some semblance of functioning order.

In 2010, Anna Jansson also began writing a parallel series of crime novels for young adults, starring the eleven-year-old Emil Wern, Maria Wern's oldest child who, inspired by his mother and his reading, sets up a private detective agency.

Anna Jansson is one of Sweden's most popular crime writers. Her bestselling novels have also been filmed for both TV and cinema release, with Maria Wern portrayed by leading actress Eva Röse.

WHEN HE SAW THE BEER CAN TAB GLEAM UNDER THE THIN ICE COVERING
the pool of water he understood that it was the Lord of the Rings. In the magical brightness of the streetlight the secret was revealed to him as it had been when Elrond ruled Rivendell and Gandalf was still called the Grey. Deep within his boy's heart he had anticipated that something like this would happen.

“Today, Tuesday, December the twelfth, Fredrik Bengtsson is chosen to be the Ring-bearer,” he says out loud to himself. At the very edge of his consciousness he can hear the school bell giving its second call to class. The school yard is empty. The ring resting in its coffin of ice looks deviously inconspicuous, but nevertheless it will soon change the world.

Next to the bicycle stand there is a sharp stick. Fredrik is still in pain from the previous recess, when Torsten attacked his back with it and yelled “piss your pants” so the girls in his class could hear it. The wooden sword is the tool he needs. Liberator of the Ring. With a single stroke, the invaluable power is his. Fredrik takes the Ring in his hand and puts it on his finger in the name of Gandalf and the elves and the surly dwarves. It doesn't feel special, not to start with. But then, when he looks at Torsten's new, cool bike in the stand, with a hand brake, twenty gears and double shock absorbers, something happens within him. His teeth grow sharper and his eyes shrink to small, glowing fires. Rough, black hair slithers out of his hands and his nails grow into claws. The Ring-bearer does something Fredrik Bengtsson in class 1A would never dare. He steals a bike.

Downhill the bike is going much too quickly. The street is all ice. Streetlights pass by dangerously fast. Fredrik tries to brake by pedaling backwards, then in a panic tightens the hand brake and crashes. Thanks to his gloves he doesn't skin his hands on the asphalt, but he gets a tear on his knee. The bike's fender is dented and its enamel is scratched. If he hadn't worn the Ring he would surely have cried from fear and pain, but not now.

The Ring-bearer looks forward. The forest road calls to him. There is a whisper in the frosted crowns of the trees. A whisper of legends. He mounts his steel steed and enters the labyrinth of the black tree trunks. By the frozen flow of the creek is a village of small, gray cottages covered by turf roofs. At the far end, just where the pasture begins, there is a grassy hillock with a small door of decaying wood. That's how hobbit houses look. Now he has to be watchful. Fredrik crouches down behind the compost bin and pulls the bike down with him. There are black riders. You have to be careful. Just as Fredrik pulls off the Ring and puts it in his pocket he sees the door in the grassy hill open and a dark figure emerges and disappears towards the forest. He glimpses a face. Good or evil? Enemy or friend? He waits for an eternity of shivering seconds. The morning sun quietly filters down through the branches and eats the shadows. Supported by the bike he sneaks closer to look into the earth cellar. The door is slightly ajar. There is no trace of the roundness and friendliness characterizing hobbit homes. The walls are rough and the cold sticks to his body. Fredrik gropes farther in and his foot hits something on the floor. Something looking like a sack of potatoes, yet doesn't quite. He fumbles in his pocket for the cigarette lighter he took from his big brother's jacket earlier in the morning. With the slim flame in his hand he bends down, looking through the smoke of his breath straight into a pale, yellow face. Two eyes stare glassily at him. A mouth gapes with a toothless upper jaw. The dentures have fallen to expose much too pink gums. He stands mesmerized for a few immobile seconds, then runs towards the light. Runs through the forest while his thoughts scatter like frightened birds.

“You're late again, Fredrik Bengtsson.” His teacher has that peremptory wrinkle between her eyebrows. Everyone in class turns towards the door. Accusing eyes follow him to his desk.

“I've been to the boys' room.”

“Piss your pants,” Torsten hisses from his corner by the bookcase.

Detective Inspector Maria Wern watches as the slender woman's body is encased in a black plastic bag. The technician closes the zipper and rises clumsily, one hand to his back. Nobody has spoken in a long while. The silence of the forest makes it feel like a memorial grove. A place where mortality is natural, and yet isn't. The eye is offended by the brownish-red stain on the cement and by the child's bike dropped outside the door of the earth cellar.

“A woman wants to speak to you, Wern.”

Police officer Ek points to a white Saab. The car has driven along the gravel road straight up to the cordoned-off area.

“Her name is Sara Skoglund. She says she spoke to you on the phone earlier today.”

Maria takes a deep breath, tries to chase the images away and calm herself before entering the car with the upset old lady.

“Ellen Borg,” Sara says, pointing to the cottage of the deceased, “and I live in the same apartment house. We always play bridge on Mondays. Last night she asked me if I could give her a ride to her cottage. She's gone here for the last few months. Every Monday after bridge. We agreed that I'd pick her up today, at two in the afternoon, but I was a little delayed. Ellen doesn't have a phone out here, so I couldn't call her.”

“At what time would you say you got here?” Maria asked, taking out her notepad.

“Almost three, I think. The door was unlocked, so I went in. I called
. . .
but she didn't answer. Mostly she puts her key under the flowerpot on the stairs when she walks down to the village. But this time it was still in the lock. Then I saw that bike someone had left outside her potato cellar. I wondered about it and walked over there. And then . . .”

The woman's face crumples in emotion. Maria gives her time to recuperate before continuing her interrogation.

Night falls. Fredrik lies in bed, listening to the slowly ebbing sounds. The TV is turned off, but for a while yet he can hear the CD player in his older brother Leo's room. A horse voice penetrates the walls. The electric guitar claws at the wallpaper, scratchy, full of sadness, and beautiful. Leo is in love. Therefore he listens to uncompromisingly heavy bass rock ballads. Love hurts, he says, throwing himself down on his bed to stare at the ceiling, and Fredrik tries to understand what is hurting him so. Of course it would have been best if they could have been in love together, just as they both had chicken pox at the same time. He had felt snug listening to Leo reading
The Lord of the Rings
. Fredrik's room feels very lonely, especially when it's dark and Mom isn't at home. But Leo wants to be left alone in his agony. He showed that very clearly when he threw an empty Coke can at his baby brother's head just a short while ago. An Advent star lights up his window. It's at least a small comfort when so much is scary, and soon they'll celebrate Saint Lucia's Day in school. Fredrik has been given a verse he is supposed to know by heart. He practices until his head is spinning. In the whirlpool of sleep he lets go of reality. There are dachshunds under his bed, black slimy spirits of dead dachshunds. If Fredrik puts his legs over the edge of his bed they'll bite him and he'll be infected by death. That's why he's running through the forest without resting. They're snapping at his pant legs. He kicks out to get loose. Runs out into the cold, black water of the creek and jumps downstream on the ice floes. That's when he sees the face under the ice. Gray hair floating like a halo of dust and eyes staring at him from that yellow face, accusing and sly. Fredrik screams but the sound is stuck in his lungs, frozen. On the opposite bank, where his salvation is, he sees Torsten with his broken bike. His fear is greater than he can bear. Fredrik stops struggling, sinks, and is carried towards the dam by the icy creek water. He is so horribly cold that he wakes up. Then it all feels very lonely and wet.

“Leo! Wake up, Leo!” Fredrik shakes his older brother's shoulder.

“What is it?”

“The dachshunds have peed in my bed and I'm cold.”

Maria Wern sits slumped in front of her office window, looking out at the falling snow without seeing it, lost in thought. What did Ellen Borg do in her cottage on Monday nights? The little house lacked every modern convenience. To get a cup of coffee you first had to break the ice, carry water and set a fire in the woodstove. The bedding was raw and damp and the floor cold as ice. Staying there in the summer might be charming, but in the middle of winter? Her musings are interrupted by Ek's voice on the intercom.

“You have a visitor.”

A tall, thin man in a black overcoat tells her his name is Ludvig Borg. His thinning hair is parted in the middle and his eyes, peering behind wire-frame glasses, are very dark blue. Last night, Arvidsson and Ek had performed the difficult task of telling him that his mother was dead. Surprisingly, they had found Borg in his mother's apartment. He was passing through and had walked in using his own key.

Maria asks him to sit down and gets two cups of coffee. Ludvig declines milk and sugar. He wraps his thin hands around the cup for warmth. Despite his woolen coat he seems to be cold.

“She really was murdered?” is the first thing he says when at last he speaks.

“Yes. There is no doubt about it. Someone hit her from behind with a blunt object.”

“A burglar?”

“Perhaps. Do you know of anything in her cabin that might attract a thief?”

“I can't believe there was anything. My mother wasn't well off. She had her pension. It doesn't come to very much when you've worked your whole life in a post office. She could hardly manage when they doubled the real-estate tax on her cottage a couple of years ago. She absolutely refused to sell the cottage. For a while she even considered giving up her apartment to live there full time instead. I don't know how she managed to keep both.”

“Yes, I remember. I read in the papers about the new estate evaluations. It seemed ill advised. Many elderly people had to sell. Do you know if there are any year-round residents left in the village, or are the houses only used in the summer nowadays?”

“Only well-to-do people can afford those houses now. The last resident to move out was the old grocer's wife. I don't think she sold her house, but now that she's living in an old people's home she rents it. I believe some nurse is living there in the summer. In the winter, there is nobody at all.”

“I'll kill whoever broke my bike,” Torsten says slowly and looks at the Lucia celebration boy attendees.

They're standing in the schoolyard in their long white shirts, holding their star-spangled paper cone hats in their hands to save them from being wafted off by the wind. Torsten stares them in the eye, one after the other, his own eyes half lidded, sucking his lower lip in to make a threatening face. Fredrik feels his stomach heaving, but tries not to listen. He wasn't able to eat any breakfast, just drank some water. There is a beast living in his stomach, and it refuses to eat human food.

“Whoever took my bike will get a hell of a beating from my dad. He won't be able to walk for a fortnight. They took my fingerprints!” Torsten says and holds out his thumb. “There's no escape!”

Here is their teacher with the school's Lucia, Ida, and her maids. It's time. The girls flutter in their long white robes. The tinsel coiled in their hair and tied around their waists gleams in the moonlight. With her wavy long hair Ida looks like an elven queen. Her hair must be very soft. Fredrik would like to touch that long, blonde hair, but he doesn't dare. In her crown of lingonberry sprigs, candles burn. Their teacher will sit at the front with a bucket of water. Last year the Lucia set fire to a curtain.

The assembly hall is full of parents and children. But Fredrik's mom can't come. She works nights again. Fredrik raises the stick with its paper star and sings though there is a big, nervous lump in his throat. Then there is silence. This is when he is supposed to recite. His teacher nods. The darkness in the hall is full of gleaming black eyes. Fredrik opens his mouth, but there are no words. Torsten jabs him with his star-boy stick and grins. His teacher tries mouthing something. Fredrik's whole body freezes up. He has to pee, he suddenly feels. The star on Torsten's stick is jabbing his armpit. There is not a sound in the hall and everyone hears the splashing which echoes from the hardwood parquet of the stage.

At dawn, Maria Wern is woken by a two-voiced Lucia song. Krister fumbles for his glasses, wraps the blanket around his naked body and opens the front door. Emil and Linda come padding out into the hallway and listen raptly to Krister's pupils, who stagger in more or less unsteadily after a night of revelry. Maria puts on coffee to serve them. Most of them look as if they need it after their sleepless night. One boy throws up on the stairs to the house, two of the girls fall asleep locked in the bathroom and a third suffers from frostbitten toes in her much too thin pumps.