Authors: Hakan Ostlundh
“So,” said Fredrik. “From the middle of August and on, have you been at home here during that entire time?”
“Yes.”
“And can you tell us when Katja has been here, if we start around the middle of August and go forward?”
Sonja Krstic looked at a wall calendar that was hanging alongside the refrigerator.
“I have to think about it.”
She got up and fetched the calendar, browsed back one page to August.
“Hmm…”
Her head was hanging over the calendar.
“She was gone awhile here somewhere,” said Sonja, circling in the weeks between the tenth and the thirtieth of August.
She moved her finger between a few different dates and hummed to herself.
“Yes, now I know, it must have been this week, the seventeenth to the twenty-third. She came back on Saturday. I remember that. I was out with some people from work on Friday. It was the first time after vacation that we were out.”
“So she came back on Saturday the twenty-second?” said Fredrik.
“Yes. She was gone that week. It is possible that she left already over the weekend, but it may have been on Monday, too,” she answered.
“But definitely between Monday and Saturday, perhaps longer, and at the longest from Saturday to Saturday? Is that what you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” said Sonja Krstic.
“Where was she during that time?”
“She said she was going to visit friends. Some in Gothenburg, maybe in Stockholm.”
“Did she say who?”
“No. She didn’t mention any names. She said that she wanted to improvise a little, that it might just as easily turn out completely different. She was eager to see something new.”
“Did she mention any places she was interested in going to?”
“No. Or we talked about it a little in general, but that was probably mostly me carrying on. I work in the travel industry.”
“Do you remember what places came up?”
“Yes, it was probably places like Österlen, Koster, Gotland, the High Coast…”
“Was there anything Katja reacted to in particular?”
“No, not as I recall. No more than anything else.”
“How was she going to travel?” said Fredrik. “Did she have access to a car?”
“I think she rented one.”
“Did she usually do that?”
“Sometimes, but she also borrowed. She has borrowed my car a few times when she was only going to be gone a day or two, but this was, of course, a bit longer.”
“When did she last borrow your car?”
“Sometime last spring. The end of March, I believe.”
They continued to go through the time from the twenty-second of August until today. Sonja could not pinpoint the date exactly, but Katja Nyberg had been gone a couple of nights around the twenty-sixth. If she had been out of town or only spent the night somewhere else in Malmö, Sonja did not know.
“You didn’t ask?” Sara wondered.
“Yes, but she said only something vague about a friend.”
Then she had gone away again a week later and thus was gone until last Monday.
“Did she say anything about where she was going that time or did she just disappear?”
“No, she said she was going to visit a friend. I got a feeling that she had met a guy because she left so often, so I didn’t want to keep asking. And it was apparent that she didn’t want to talk about it.”
Fredrik was surprised that Katja traveled so much back and forth. He had believed that she had remained on Gotland, at least between the time she rented Henrik’s house and lured Ellen away. There were not that many days in between. That she went home could mean that she did not have a plan to start with, perhaps felt finished with Henrik, but then changed her mind when she came home and returned to Gotland.
“You said to our colleagues that Katja did not seem to be feeling well,” he said.
“Yes, actually,” Sonja Krstic said with a nod.
“Can you expand on that?”
“I did talk about when she passed out in the bathroom, are you aware of that?”
“We heard about that episode,” said Sara.
“It was probably a kind of low-water mark, or whatever you want to call it. But this has been going on quite awhile. I think it started when her temporary position at
Sydsvenskan
ended. She’s had a hard time getting work as a journalist, she’s done a number of other things, so that job probably meant a lot to her.”
“It was just that? Nothing else?”
Sonja leaned her elbows against the table and looked meditative before she answered.
“I got a feeling that it was connected to some guy, too. Last fall she said that she had met someone. She seemed really in love. She didn’t say too much, but you could see it on her.”
“She didn’t mention any name?”
“No, but she said that she met him in Copenhagen. I think it ran out in the sand pretty quickly. She didn’t say anything else about it anyway. I thought that maybe he was the one she had started seeing again, in August when she was gone so much.”
“You’re not afraid of guns, are you?”
He stared at her without answering. Alma held the shotgun aimed in his direction, but not straight at him.
“There’s no danger,” she said. “It’s not loaded.”
“Okay,” he said submissively, feeling the cold slowly subsiding.
“I thought that since you’re living out here all by yourself, then—”
She held out the shotgun with both hands.
“But it’s up to you.”
She cocked her head and looked at him uncertainly.
“Do you think that was dumb?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “But I’ve never used a shotgun.”
“I can show you.”
She changed her grip on the shotgun, went back to the car, and fished out a paper carton in the folds of the red blanket.
“We can go a little ways into the forest here.”
Alma nodded in among the trees beyond the neighboring house. Over there the forest was denser and it was dark between the tree trunks.
“Bengt and Ann-Katrin are probably at work. We won’t disturb anyone.”
“Okay,” he said without having thought about whether he really wanted to have a shotgun in the house.
* * *
The recoil was less than he had expected, the shots louder. There was a big difference between standing five feet from Alma when she shot and having the gun right next to his ear.
The shot tore up a big gash in the bark on the pine he had aimed at. Alma said something, but he could not hear. He was still half deaf after the shot.
“What?”
She came closer.
“How does it feel?”
“All right.”
He had no idea how you talked about guns.
“You hit the target. That’s the most important,” she said.
She was standing so close that he could feel her breath as she talked. It was just the two of them, the struggling old Fårö pines, and the melancholy whispering of the wind in the treetops. It was so intimate. Extremely intimate with a perfect stranger who was his sister. And just before he had been the world’s loneliest person. It was as if in one moment he had crossed a thirty-year vacuum. He had stepped over an endless abyss, as if it never existed.
“Isn’t it kind of strange,” he said.
“What is?”
“Us,” he said.
Alma looked at him seriously. Her lips twitched a little as if she was searching for a word.
“Yes,” she said, and fleetingly placed her hand on his upper arm.
The pines stood silently around them. He knew nothing about the woman who was standing before him, yet emotions were churning around in his chest as if she was one of the most important people in his life.
“One more time,” she said, pointing at the light patch on the trunk of the tree.
Henrik raised the shotgun and fired off the second cartridge. Hit the same spot.
In the temporary deafness after the shot he thought that neither of them referred to what the shotgun and his little target practice was really about.
Shooting at a person.
Alma reached out her hand for the shotgun. He handed it over. She opened the gun, let the empty cartridges fall out on the ground, and gave it back. Henrik let it rest open on his forearm, as he had seen people do in movies. He felt a little silly, was not at all sure that was how you really did it.
Alma looked at him thoughtfully. At first he thought she was going to comment on how he was holding the gun, but she said nothing, just continued looking at him with that worried gaze.
“Is there something?”
She smiled cautiously, but then became serious again.
“Not everything is the way you think.”
What did she mean? The shotgun firing? What had happened in his house? Malin and Axel? He looked at her in confusion.
“It’s not that easy for me to talk about this,” she said.
“About what?”
The words frightened him. What was it she was suggesting? He wanted to know now.
“Mother. You. Us.”
She said it quietly, almost whispering, but it was as if every word were made of lead, sank to the bottom in him and made it impossible to get away from there. He felt dizzy.
“I don’t know how much you know, but I’m quite certain that you don’t—”
She interrupted herself and quickly touched his arm again.
“Grandma talked about it before she died.”
She was speaking so quietly that he had a hard time hearing her.
“I don’t understand. Does this have something to do with Malin and Axel? That they—”
Alma quickly shook her head.
He was relieved, but at the same time filled with a new discomfort.
Alma said something and this time he could really not interpret the words. He happened to think about Ellen. How long had he really been gone? He had only meant to go up to the parking area.
“Alma, listen … I have to go back.”
She understood and took a deep breath.
“Daddy hit you.”
He stood completely dumbfounded. The ground rocked beneath him.
Alma looked searchingly at him and he could see that she was afraid. As if he would accuse her. Perhaps hit back.
“Hit me? But I was only—”
“A little child, not much more than an infant.”
“Is that true?”
“That was what she said, that he hit you. Mother didn’t dare have you stay there.”
“Ernst?” he managed to get out. “You mean Ernst?”
Alma nodded without averting her eyes.
“Grandma wanted to report him, but Mother begged and pleaded that she shouldn’t do that.”
Henrik was forced to look away. He heard what Alma was saying, but still didn’t understand. Where did this truth fit into his life? Did he need it at all? He didn’t want Ernst Vogler in his life.
“That was damned high-minded of her,” he said with a bitter sneer she could not see.
“Love isn’t always so easy to comprehend. Sometimes it makes us into the kind of people we don’t want to be.”
What did she know about that? He opened his mouth to protest, but when he saw her tormented eyes he stopped short. They stood quietly and looked at each other.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last.
“Did he hit you, too?”
“No.”
Because they were girls? Because they were his? He looked down toward the house.
“I have to get back.”
“Me, too.”
Alma handed over the carton of cartridges. He weighed it in his hand.
“I hope you don’t need to use them,” she said.
They started walking toward the house. It was not far, they had only stepped into the edge of the forest.
They stopped in front of Alma’s Saab.
“Well,” said Alma.
How do you say good-bye to someone you had suddenly come so close to, but didn’t know at all?
“See you,” he said.
“Yes.”
He took a step backward. She reached out her left hand toward him and for a brief moment he took it and squeezed. It felt like an offense, but he didn’t know against what.
They parted, but up by the gate he happened to think of something.
“A shotgun like this, is it legal to just have it at home? Shouldn’t it be locked up?”
“You’re not even allowed to have it,” said Alma.
Henrik made a face.
“But you should store it somewhere where your daughter can’t get at it.”
Ellen, he thought. This, too, was for her sake.
As soon as they ended the interview with Sonja Krstic they started going through Katja Nyberg’s belongings. That didn’t take long. Täll had done most of the work for them. On the desk he had set out three Polaroids he found in one of the dresser drawers. Three black-and-white pictures of Katja Nyberg. They were slightly reminiscent of the pictures of Stina Hansson, but Nyberg had kept her clothes on.
Fredrik carefully turned them over to see whether there was anything written on the back side, a date perhaps, but the reverse sides were blank. They confiscated the pictures, as well as the correspondence card from St. Petri.
“Do you think she’s run off?” said Fredrik while he put the pictures in an envelope.
“No,” said Sara. “Perhaps she’s gone off somewhere, just to get away for a while, but I don’t think she has fled. I think she believes she has been too smart for us.”
Sara ran her hand over the computer. It looked strikingly expensive compared with the meager furnishings, but that was probably because the computer was her professional instrument.
“I don’t dare start this, then I’ll probably get a scolding from Eva.”
“No, don’t do that.”
“We’ll take it with.”
Sara leaned down and disconnected the power cord.
“Sheesh, it’s really dusty back here.”
She carefully brushed her gloved hands against each other. A dust bunny the size of her little finger fell to the floor.
“Excuse me, may I come in?” Sonja Krstic’s voice was heard from the other side of the closed door.
“Yes, come on in,” said Sara.
She opened the door before Sonja was able to.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” said Sonja, looking doggedly at them.
“Yes?” said Sara.
“If Katja really has done something … Well, you’re not saying anything, but…”