Authors: Hakan Ostlundh
She interrupted herself, then went on.
“I think it feels uncomfortable not knowing. I’ve seen on TV about those murders on Gotland. But it can’t very well be that, can it?”
She fingered a pendant that was hanging around her neck on a thin gold chain, let it run back and forth while she talked.
“I understand that it feels uncomfortable,” said Sara. “But as Fredrik explained, all we can say is that your tenant is suspected of a serious crime.”
Sonja looked back and forth at them.
“But what should I say when she comes back? I think it’s—”
She took a breath and Sara took the opportunity to interrupt her.
“The important thing is that you contact the police here in Malmö. You can say to Katja that you have to go to the store, and then call from your cell phone. All you need to say is that you’ve been asked to make contact when Katja Nyberg comes back to this address. They know the rest.”
“But—”
Sara interrupted her again.
“Do you have a toolbox?”
“Toolbox?” said Sonja Krstic.
“Yes.”
Sonja looked puzzled and slightly irritated. Fredrik was following the conversation, he, too, a bit puzzled before it occurred to him why Sara was asking.
“I have some tools. Do you need something, or what?”
“I just want to look at them.”
Sonja Krstic shook her head slightly and backed out of the room. Sara and Fredrik followed, watched her open a closet door at the other end of the hall.
“They’re somewhere in here at the very bottom. It’s a little messy.”
Sara crouched down in front of the broom closet and looked into the lowest shelf.
“It’s a little hard to see,” she said, leaning down even more.
“I know, it’s a little dark.”
Sara ran her fingers over the bottom of the closet, got up, and held up her hand in the light under the ceiling lamp. Her fingers were covered with dust, dirt, and small white grains.
“Do you usually keep laundry detergent there?”
“Yes. I just ran out, but…”
Sara twisted her hand under the light.
“I know, it’s one big mess,” Sonja Krstic sighed.
It could very well be, Fredrik thought. And the hammer that killed Malin and Axel had in some way come in contact with laundry detergent.
He went to get a bag in the case he had left behind in Katja Nyberg’s rented room. Sara gathered up more of the dust from the bottom of the closet and brushed it down into the bag. She folded it up, marked it, and handed it back. Then she crouched in front of the closet again and searched among the tools.
“Do you have a hammer?” she asked Sonja.
“Yes, of course.”
“I can’t find one.”
“Yes, but wait,” said Sonja Krstic, crouching down beside Sara.
Sonja pulled out a large chisel, a pincer, a staple gun. There was a heavy clatter of metal.
“Strange,” she said. “It’s not here.”
Henrik had gone through the whole house several times. The top floor, the main floor, the bedroom, the kitchen, the study. Finally he was forced to accept that there was no ideal hiding place. He put the shotgun on the top shelf in the hall closet and concealed it behind a sweater.
Alma had shown him how to detach the bolt. He could have spread out the parts in different places to be quite certain that no one would be able to use the gun. But he had quickly given up that alternative. He could easily imagine how he would fumble with the bolt and not get it in place when it was really needed.
And how would he know when it was needed? Who was he going to defend himself against? Stina? The police had thought it was her. They locked her up, but now she was out. Back in Fårösund.
Did they think it was Katja? He tried to picture Katja in the house in front of the portraits in the study. How she poked out their eyes with a pencil. Or how she crouched over the toy box and …
No, it was much too bizarre, much too crazy. Not to mention the thought that she could have … killed. This was a person he had been close to. He didn’t know her all that well, he had to admit that, but she was still a regular, normal person. That much he could say.
Henrik divided the cartridges in various different hiding places. Some in the study, some in the kitchen, and a few up in the big cabinet in the sitting room. For each and every one of the hiding places various scenarios played out in his head. Also thoughts he did not want to have, but that intruded, compulsively.
When he was done he looked at the front door. Had he locked it? He could not see from where he was standing and took a couple of steps toward the door. Yes, the lock was vertical. Even so he felt compelled to go over and feel it.
Was he going crazy? Or was he crazy for having returned to the house? He turned his back to the door and went over and checked the alarm. It was working as it should. All three cameras were functioning. He closed the closet doors. He thought that one of them did not close properly. Was the shotgun touching it?
He took a step back and peered toward the closet. Did it matter? No. That one of the doors was slightly open did not make it obvious that there was a gun hidden on the top shelf. No one would notice it.
He went into the living room and sat down on the very edge of the couch. He had to pull himself together. He thought that by not taking the pills he would be more focused, but it didn’t seem that way. The sleeping pills were, of course, ruled out, but the others? He would never manage this if he couldn’t calm down.
He got up, went into the kitchen, and took out the pills from the cupboard to the right of the stove. The pills were almost ridiculously small. Smaller than the head of a match. Should he take one?
Ellen called from upstairs.
“Yes?” he called back.
“Can you come here?”
“I’m coming.”
Not now. Not yet. Wait awhile. A few deep breaths. Focus. One more try.
“I’m coming, honey,” he called again.
As he passed through the hall he could not keep from looking at the front door. The lock. What position was it in really?
There were not many departures from Malmö to Bromma on Saturdays. They had to fly via Arlanda on the way back. Fredrik and Sara lined up behind a group of charter tourists returning home at the gate in terminal three when Fredrik got a call from Henrik Kjellander.
“I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I haven’t been that easy to get hold of,” Fredrik excused himself. You should have called yesterday, he thought.
“You wanted to ask me about Katja Nyberg,” said Henrik.
“Yes, but I think it’s best if we sit down and take a little time.”
“Okay. Can you come here? It’s a little hard for me to come to Visby. With Ellen, I mean.”
The line was moving quickly forward. A red digital eye scanned the boarding passes.
“We’ll have to see how we resolve that. Right now I’m boarding an airplane, but I’ll call you as soon as I’m back in Visby. Say, in an hour? Will that work?”
“Sure.”
Sara got her boarding pass scanned ahead of him.
“Good, then that’s what we’ll do.”
“Listen…” said Henrik.
Fredrik handed his boarding pass to the woman in the dark blue suit and fluorescent green silk scarf. Was there a law that women who worked at airports had to wear a silk scarf?
“Do you really suspect Katja Nyberg?”
Fredrik looked around before he answered.
“More than suspect I would say. But I can’t really talk about that now.”
“Have you talked with her? What does she say?”
“We haven’t talked with her. At the moment we don’t know where she is.”
“But then how can you say…?”
“We are as good as certain about this.”
Sara held open the door for him. He nodded in thanks and came out on the tarmac. A gust of wind made him blink involuntarily.
“I really have to go now,” he said. “I’ll call in an hour.”
A short walk up to the plane and then they were on board.
* * *
Gotland showed up as a grayish brown strip right above the surface of the sea when Fredrik laid his head against the window and peered over the wing. Soon he could see Fårö to the left. They were flying low enough that it would be possible to interpret certain patches of color. Yellow in the sound—ferry; white and black in the middle of the island—church. He tried to find Henrik Kjellander’s house, but it was too far away, fused together with the surroundings.
* * *
Before they went up to the department they carried what they had confiscated from Nyberg’s room into the tech unit. Sara locked it in one of the cabinets and let the key disappear in the slot.
The time was ten past five. Most of the day had gone to the trip to and from Malmö. The detour through Stockholm was time-consuming.
They went straight to Göran Eide’s office, where he and Peter Klint were waiting for them.
“Now all that remains is to find Nyberg,” the head of the investigation squad said.
“Not hardly,” said Sara. “We still don’t have a single piece of evidence that she really has been on the island.”
“There you’re mistaken,” said Klint. “The technicians in Malmö have compared fingerprints from Nyberg’s rented room on Spånehusvägen and fingerprints from the summer cabin down at Sudret.”
“They match?”
“At least one holds up as technical evidence. Nyberg is being booked in her absence.”
“And Gustav has questioned Larsson again, the owner of the cabin,” said Göran. “It turned out that he has an acquaintance at
Sydsvenska Dagbladet
who was there and visited last year. Katja Nyberg must have heard him talk about the cabin on a coffee break.”
They were almost there, thought Fredrik. Göran was right, now it was just a matter of finding her.
“It’s high time to get to that interview with Kjellander,” said Klint.
“Oh crud. I promised to call him.”
He looked at the clock. It had been more than an hour since Henrik called.
“I think we’ll question him this evening,” said Sara. “I want to know what happened at that hotel.”
Sara’s words made the travel fatigue scatter. It was clear they should do it now.
They looked at Klint.
“I can wait until tomorrow morning,” said Klint. “It’s up to you.”
Sara turned toward Fredrik.
“What do you say?”
“Let’s go. I’ll call him at once.”
Malin smiled from the screen, standing there with vegetables, cheese, and olive oil. She was never really satisfied with that picture. Said she thought it looked like she was standing at attention. It wasn’t really that bad, the picture was quite all right, but it would have been better if Henrik had done it, he knew that.
He certainly could have done it, too, if Malin had only asked. But she did not want to bring it up with Coop. And he understood that. It gave an unprofessional impression when people started dragging their married halves into work situations.
It was strange that Malin’s pages were still up on the website. Hadn’t they thought about that? Or had they thought about it and decided it would draw people to the site if Malin was still there?
Henrik had promised himself not to go there. Truly convinced himself not to do it. Yet here he was doing it. Manically. After every visit he decided that this was the last time. Really. He forbade himself.
You might think there would be no difference between going to that website and sitting and looking at a photograph. But there was. When he looked at a regular picture of Malin or Axel he could feel sorrow, despair, or in the best case a kind of aching nostalgia. When he went to Malin’s blog, on the other hand, he was filled with a deep, night-black disappointment. He sank inexorably. He must have been there five or six times before he realized why. When he went to a site on the Internet he somehow expected that the site would be different than the last time he was there. Some news, a post, a comment, maybe even a new picture.
In some idiotic way, he could not explain it otherwise, he was hoping for a sign of life.
He looked up from the screen, out the window, but was met only by his own mirror image. He heard a car up on the road. It was driving slowly. He could hear the gravel crunching under the tires. Could it really be the police already?
He closed the lid of the computer, got up, and turned off the desk lamp. He stood quietly and listened while the trees outside the windows slowly came into view and assumed contours. The engine sound had stopped. A car door opened, then a long silence before it closed.
Henrik went out in the hall, opened the protective cover of the alarm, and activated the camera that was aimed up toward the gate. He actually saw better on the little display than he would have if he looked out the window. Just like the display on his own digital camera, it reinforced the light.
It took a moment, then a figure showed up by the gate. She stopped and looked around before she unhooked the hasp and pushed open the gate. Henrik immediately recognized her. She had done something with her hair, but there was still no doubt that it was her.
At first it was only recognition, then came something else. He noticed that his hands were trembling slightly, and in the next moment a strong feeling of fear came over him. He stared at the woman on the screen. She was not there for the first time. There was something domestic about her movements as she pushed back the gate behind her and looked down toward the house, directing her gaze right into the camera. He panted. The adrenaline was rushing in his veins.
He tried to collect his thoughts. Ellen, first and foremost. He listened for sounds from the top floor. She was asleep, but she had fallen asleep early. Sometimes she woke up again after an hour or so if she fell asleep before eight. He slipped up the stairs as quickly as possible without making them creak. He peeked into the children’s room. Ellen seemed to be sound asleep. He closed the door and hurried down again.
A glance at the display. She was walking slowly down toward the house.
Henrik opened the closet, swept aside the sweater, and took out the shotgun that Alma had loaned him. Then there were the cartridges. The kitchen or the study? The kitchen was closer, but there he would be visible from outside. He chose the study, but first set the gun down on the hall floor, right next to the baseboard. Thought that it was stupid to walk around with it, stupid if she caught sight of it. She might have gone the other way around the house, of course.