Authors: Hakan Ostlundh
“Where were you today between eleven thirty and twelve thirty?”
“I was having lunch with my husband.”
Sara was about to ask a follow-up question, but Elisabet Vogler got there first.
“Here in the house, that is.”
“What did you have for lunch?” said Fredrik.
Elisabet Vogler looked surprised.
“You mean seriously?”
“That I want to know what you had for lunch? Yes.”
“But what is this?”
Elisabet Vogler smiled and sought eye contact with Sara and Gustav in turn, but met no signs of sympathy.
“This concerns a serious crime so I must ask you to answer the question,” said Fredrik.
“Of course,” she said with exaggerated willingness. “We had cod with dill sauce and potatoes. You’re welcome to come in and look in the trash. There was a little left over that I thought about giving to the chickens.”
Fucking hag, thought Fredrik, we ought to take her along to Visby.
Malin was sitting on Ellen’s bed, with Ellen and Axel on either side, reading from one of their favorite books,
Children in the Water
. It had been Malin’s favorite book, too, when she was little. The pages were well thumbed and the cover was torn.
Henrik was downstairs unpacking the alarm system she had convinced him to buy. She had a somewhat guilty conscience for having first argued for an alarm that cost almost seven thousand kronor and then not wanting to be in the house at all. But the circumstances had changed. To say the least.
Now as she sat with the children in bed it felt good anyway. You could see that they felt secure. But she could not keep from thinking that it was a false sense of security. There was someone out there who knew where they lived. Who had been inside their house. Who had lured their daughter away in a car. A blond woman. The same woman who had been staring at her by the school?
Axel squeezed closer to Malin and pointed at the nursery troll Ture in the book.
“He’s pulling out the plug.”
Axel always said that when they got to the pages with the sharks with mean eyes and mouths full of razor-sharp teeth. As if to reassure himself that everything would be fine.
“Hmm,” said Malin, to confirm but still not completely give away the ending.
Malin looked at him before she continued reading. Axel’s eyes were fixed on the book. He had slept through the commotion on Saturday evening and he had no idea what had happened to his sister today. Or did he? Had Ellen told him anything? Should she ask her not to say anything to Axel, or was it best to let it be? She felt uncertain.
“Read,” said Axel.
He made a little drum roll with his legs against the edge of the bed.
Malin continued to read. The nursery troll Ture pulled out the plug, all the sharks and the entire ocean ran out through the sewer and the story was over. She shut the book. Axel immediately jumped down from the bed, ran over to the turquoise secretary, and pulled out paper and crayons. The once drab brown piece of furniture had been left in the house when they moved in. Malin had repainted it.
Ellen stayed sitting beside her.
“Can’t you read some more?” she asked.
“No,” Axel protested.
“You don’t need to listen if you don’t want to,” said Malin. “You can sit there and draw.”
“No,” said Axel.
“But stop,” said Ellen.
Ellen had not mentioned the woman in the car at all since they left the school. Unless she had said something to Axel when Malin was not present. Didn’t she think about what had happened? Perhaps it was nothing more to her than the immediate, the very surface. Someone had asked her to show the way to the ferry and promised to drive her back to the school, but then did not keep the promise so she was forced to walk almost a mile.
Could it be that simple? Malin was doubtful. If nothing else surely Malin’s, Henrik’s, and all the other grown-ups’ worry had spilled over on her and made her wonder what she had really been involved in. The police. That they went home before the school day was over.
A night at a hotel would only add to that.
“I have to ask you about something,” she said quietly, placing one arm around Ellen’s back.
Ellen did not say anything.
“That lady in the car that you rode with, what color hair did she have?”
Ellen looked at her.
“Light-haired. I already said that.”
“Yes. But I was just thinking that you can be light-haired in different ways. Take Lisa, for example. She’s blond, but not all of her hair has the same color. Here and there it’s almost like strands—”
“I know. Like light brown,” said Ellen with sudden fervor.
“So I was thinking whether you remembered how this lady’s hair was. Was her hair completely even in color, or was it more like Lisa’s? Or perhaps it changed in some other color?”
Ellen seemed to lose interest again when Malin brought the conversation back to the woman in the car. She looked down and rubbed her nose.
“Do you remember that?”
Ellen sighed.
What was it Sara Oskarsson had said to Henrik? You don’t need to torment her with it. Was she doing that now? Tormenting her?
“It was light hair,” said Ellen. “Lighter than Lisa.”
Malin stroked Ellen across her back with her palm.
“Sometimes blond hair may have a little red, too, without anyone thinking about it. That is, you say that it’s blond, although actually it’s a little bit red, too. It doesn’t look really red, more like pale orange, but we usually say strawberry blond.”
Malin smiled at Ellen, who had slithered forward a little so that she could dangle her legs over the edge of the bed.
“She wasn’t red-haired.”
“No, I understand, but that wasn’t really what I meant, either. If someone is red-haired, you see that right away. But some…”
Malin interrupted herself when Ellen glided down from the bed and went over to the secretary desk where her little brother was sitting with his head bowed over the paper and the crayons poised. Presumably he was drawing sharks and Ture. Ellen stood quietly and followed the movements of his hand across the paper.
Malin decided that there was no point in asking her more right now. She would follow the police officer’s advice and wait for a suitable moment, but she could not wait too long. This was serious. They had to find out what she knew.
Five minutes later Ellen was sitting on a stool alongside her brother and drawing, too. It was tempting to sneak up and see what was appearing on the paper, but Malin chose instead to leave her in peace. She could look at the drawings later. The wadded-up and discarded ones as well as the proudly displayed ones.
Gustav did not have much to say on the way back to Visby, either. They left the car in the garage and Sara hurried off to make a call.
“Is there something?” Fredrik asked.
“No, no, nothing in particular,” Gustav replied quickly.
They went up to the crime unit and Gustav slinked into his office, sat down heavily behind his desk. Fredrik remained standing in the doorway.
“I was just wondering. You’ve hardly said ‘boo’ the whole day.”
Gustav looked at him with surprise, as if he did not understand why Fredrik hadn’t gone to his own office.
“Sometimes you just have other things to think about. That’s not so strange.”
“Sure,” said Fredrik.
He tapped awkwardly on the doorpost and was turning around to go when he heard a deep sigh behind him. It was a little too demonstrative not to mean something. That he should stay, for example. He turned around slowly, prepared to quickly leave if he had interpreted the sigh wrong.
Gustav was looking down at his right hand; he clenched it and opened it.
“It’s Lena.”
“Lena?” said Fredrik.
“Yes,” said Gustav, and continued in a low voice, almost absently, “she has some suspicious symptoms.”
Fredrik took a step into the office and closed the door behind him.
“Suspicious symptoms? That doesn’t sound good.”
He thought that the words were clumsy, but he had to make some kind of response.
“Yes,” said Gustav. “She has had strange prickly sensations and numbness in her legs. And she has felt—”
He interrupted himself and swallowed before he continued.
“This has been going on for a while. It doesn’t hurt or anything and she … Well, you know how it is. You think it’s nothing, it will pass. But this has just continued. Pricking, numbness, strange creeping sensations in her legs, plus she has felt tired. She called her sister; she’s a nurse.”
Gustav looked out the window, up toward the roof of the police station, as if he wanted to assure himself that no one was in flight from the jail’s exercise yard.
“She started crying,” he continued. “Her sister, that is. When Lena told her she started crying.”
Fredrik felt himself turning completely cold. Gustav had not even said what it was Lena might conceivably be suffering from, but he sensed it. Parkinson’s, MS, ALS.
“Well, that was really cheerful,” said Gustav.
Fredrik hummed in response.
“They suspect MS.”
“Do you know that?”
“They’ve taken samples and then there are a number of other tests. It’s clearly not easy to make a diagnosis.”
“But you don’t know. She can still turn out to be okay?”
“Yes, but after her sister’s crying spell the mood is pretty low, as perhaps you understand.”
“Yes,” said Fredrik.
He sought desperately for something sensible to say, but the more he exerted himself, the more blocked he became. During the eighteen months he had been away from the job after the accident Gustav had been the colleague who supported him most. Not so much through words, of course, but by stopping by and visiting. At least once a week he had stopped when he had been out on some errand anyway. Sometimes on the weekends he rode his bicycle. That made Fredrik feel that he was not completely cut off from work, that there really was a way back. It would be too bad if he couldn’t repay that in some small way.
“When will you find out?” he was finally able to say.
“We have an appointment, or Lena has an appointment, for a return visit next Monday, so I assume it’s then that—”
“And Martin?”
“We haven’t said anything yet. We thought it was just as well to wait.”
Martin had moved to the mainland to study, just like Joakim, but had chosen a completely different path. He was studying to be a psychologist in Lund. Fredrik was both surprised and fascinated by these occupational choices that seemed to come out of nowhere. One year the kids were sitting in front of a video game, the next they were going to be a psychologist and a photographer. Where did that come from?
“It could be a false alarm.”
“We have to hope so,” said Fredrik.
Gustav got up and wriggled out of his jacket.
“But you can keep this to yourself,” he said. “Lena doesn’t want rumors to start before we know ourselves.”
“No, of course. I won’t say anything.”
Henrik was standing on a ladder, mounting a motion detector up by the ceiling, when Malin came into the kitchen.
Their large kitchen was more practical than charming. After seven years as a café owner she wanted it to be functional. Normally she got inspired when she came in there, started thinking about new recipes to try and write about. But today was different.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“Not bad,” said Henrik. “How are things with Ellen?”
“It seems okay. Or it seems good. Listen, there’s one thing; I haven’t said anything about it before but…”
She came closer, stopped alongside the ladder. Henrik lowered the screwdriver and looked at her.
“I spoke with Fredrik Broman today. I thought it was best.”
“About what?”
She told the whole story about the reddish-blond or possibly blond-haired woman outside the school and the idea that Ellen had perceived the hair color as blond, or light-haired. That it could be the same person.
“Are you sure?” said Henrik.
“Yes. There was something about her. She stood there much too long. I’m completely sure.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” he asked.
It was not that she hadn’t wondered about that herself. But it was always easy to second-guess.
“It was right after we found the first picture. I felt completely paranoid. I thought I was imagining things.”
“But you did see what you saw?”
“Yes, of course, but thought that I overinterpreted. I thought that maybe she was just a little off or was thinking about something, or what do I know.”
“But now you’re sure?”
“Yes. Sure enough to say that there was something about her. What happened yesterday puts things in a slightly different light, doesn’t it?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Every incident about which there’s the least little question is worth mentioning.”
Henrik slowly rotated the screwdriver in his hand, his gaze lost somewhere at the other end of the room.
“What is it?” she said, looking up at him.
He did not answer.
“What is it?” she repeated.
“Nothing,” he said, and now he met her gaze.
“Sure there is. I see that there’s something,” she said.
He shook his head.
“It’s just a little … I mean, I understand that you thought it was unpleasant, but…”
He threw out his arms, waving the screwdriver a little.
“But what the hell, Henrik. There is something. You’re thinking about something.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing. It was just something that occurred to me.”
“But you can say what it is, can’t you?”
“Of course, it…”
He climbed down from the ladder, put the screwdriver down on the counter, and looked seriously at her. Malin felt the hair rising on her arms. She did not like that look.
“But say it then,” she almost roared.
“It’s probably nothing,” he repeated. “But there was something about how you described her and…”
“Yes?”
He swallowed.
“It reminded me of a girl I was with a long time ago. It was in Stockholm, but she was from here, or from Fårösund, that is.”