The Preacher (38 page)

Something was wrong with the lock. The key wouldn’t turn in the proper direction. After trying for a while, she realized that it was because the door wasn’t actually locked. She was sure that she’d locked it when she left home a week ago. Anna told the children to stay where they were and carefully opened the door. She let out a gasp. Her first flat of her own, in which she had taken so much pride, was destroyed. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture left undamaged. Everything was smashed to bits, and all over the walls somebody had sprayed black paint like graffiti. ‘WHORE’ was on the living-room wall in huge letters, and she clapped her hand to her mouth as the tears came to her eyes. She didn’t need to wonder who had done this to her. What had been gnawing in the back of her mind ever since she’d talked to Lucas had now become a certainty. He had clearly begun to fall apart. The hatred and anger that had always simmered just beneath the surface was breaking through his mask.

Anna retreated to the landing. She took both her children and hugged them tight. Her first instinct had been to ring Erica. Then she decided that she would have to take care of this herself.

She’d been so happy with her new life and had felt so strong. For the first time she had felt like her own woman. Not Erica’s little sister. Not Lucas’s wife. Her own. Now it was all in tatters.

She knew what she had to do. The cat had won. The mouse had only one place to take refuge. Anything not to lose the children.

But there was one thing. She was willing to give up herself; he could do whatever he liked with her. But if he ever touched one of the children again, she would kill him. Without hesitation.

It had not been a good day. Gabriel had been so upset over what he termed the assault by the police that he locked himself in his office and refused to come out. Linda had gone back out to the horses, and Laine sat alone on the sofa in the living room, staring at the walls. The thought of Jacob being interrogated at the police station brought tears of humiliation to her eyes. It was her instinct as a mother to protect him from anything bad, whether he was a child or an adult. Even though she knew that the situation was out of her control, it felt as if she’d failed. A clock ticked in the silence and the monotonous sound had almost put her in a trance. When someone knocked on the front door, she nearly jumped out of her seat. She opened the door with trepidation. Nowadays every knock seemed to bring unpleasant news. So she wasn’t greatly surprised to see Gösta standing there.

‘What do you want now?’

Gösta flinched with embarrassment. ‘We need your help with a few questions. At the station.’ He seemed to be waiting for a torrent of protests. But Laine merely nodded and followed him down the stairs.

‘Aren’t you going to tell your husband where you’re going?’ Gösta asked in surprise.

‘No,’ she said curtly, and he gave her a searching look. For a brief second he wondered if they had pressed the Hult family too far. Then he remembered that somewhere in their complicated relationships there was a murderer and a missing girl. The heavy oak door fell shut behind them, and like a Japanese housewife Laine followed a few paces behind Gösta to the car. They drove all the way to the station in a tense silence that was broken only by a question from Laine, who wanted to know if the police were still holding her son. Gösta merely nodded, and Laine spent the rest of the trip to Tanumshede staring out of the window at the passing countryside. It was already early evening, and the sun had begun to colour the fields red. But the beauty of their surroundings was not something either of them noticed.

Patrik looked relieved when they came through the doors of the station. In the time it had taken Gösta to drive out there and back, Patrik had restlessly paced in the corridor outside the interrogation room, fervently wishing that he could have read Jacob’s mind.

‘Hello,’ he said, nodding curtly to Laine when she arrived. It was starting to feel superfluous to keep introducing himself, and under the circumstances shaking hands seemed an altogether too ingratiating gesture. They weren’t here to exchange pleasantries. Patrik had been a little worried about how Laine would handle their questioning. She had seemed so fragile, so vulnerable, with her nerves terribly exposed. He quickly saw that he needn’t have worried. As she walked behind Gösta she looked resigned, but calm and collected.

Since Tanumshede police station had only one interrogation room, they went into the lunchroom and sat down. Laine said no thanks to a cup of coffee, but both Patrik and Gösta felt the need for a caffeine infusion. The coffee tasted bitter but they drank it anyway, although not without a grimace. Neither of them knew how to begin, and to their amazement Laine was the first to speak.

‘Your colleague here’ – she nodded towards Gösta – ‘said you had a few questions.’

‘Ye-e-es,’ said Patrik hesitantly. ‘We’ve obtained some information and we’re a bit unsure how to handle it. We don’t know how it fits into the investigation. Perhaps not at all, but right now time is too short to handle anything with kid gloves. So I’ll get right to the point.’ Patrik took a deep breath. Laine continued to meet his gaze unmoved, but when he looked down at her clasped hands resting on the table, he saw that her knuckles were white.

‘We have received a preliminary result of the analysis of the blood samples we took from your family.’ Now he also saw her hands start to tremble. He wondered how long she would be able to retain her apparent composure. ‘And first of all I can tell you that Jacob’s DNA does not match the DNA that we found on the victim.’

Right before his eyes, Laine started going to pieces. Her hands were now shaking uncontrollably, and he realized that she had come to the station prepared for the news that her son had been arrested for murder. Relief shone in her face, and she had to swallow several times to check the sobs rising in her throat. She said nothing, so he went on.

‘However, we did discover something odd when comparing Jacob’s and Gabriel’s blood. It clearly shows that Jacob cannot possibly be Gabriel’s son … ?’ With his tone of voice he made the assertion into a question and then waited for Laine’s reaction.

But the relief that Jacob had been cleared of murder charges seemed to have lifted a stone from her breast. She hesitated only a second before saying, ‘Yes, that’s correct. Gabriel is not Jacob’s father.’

‘In that case, who is?’

‘I don’t understand what this has to do with the murders. Especially now that Jacob is apparently not guilty.’

‘As I said before, right now we don’t have time to sit and decide what’s important and what isn’t, so I’d appreciate it if you would please answer my question.’

‘Of course we can’t force you,’ said Gösta, ‘but a young girl is missing and we need all the information we can get our hands on, even if it seems irrelevant.’

‘Will my husband be told about this?’

Patrik hesitated. ‘I can’t promise anything, but I see no reason why we should run and tell him. But,’ he hesitated, ‘Jacob does know about it.’

She gave a start. Her hands began shaking again. ‘What did he say?’ Her voice was now no more than a whisper.

‘I won’t lie to you. He was upset. And of course he wonders who his real father is.’

A heavy silence settled over the table, but Gösta and Patrik waited her out calmly. After a while she answered, still in a whisper. ‘It’s Johannes.’ Her voice took on strength. ‘Johannes is Jacob’s father.’

It seemed to surprise her that she could say that sentence aloud without a bolt of lightning crashing through the roof and killing her on the spot. The secret must have grown heavier and harder to bear with each passing year, and now it seemed almost a relief for her to let the words spill from her lips. She kept talking, fast.

‘We had a brief affair. I couldn’t resist him. He was like a force of nature that just came and took whatever he wanted. And Gabriel was so … different.’ Laine hesitated over her choice of words, but Patrik and Gösta could easily fill in what she meant.

‘Gabriel and I had already been trying to have a child for some time, and when it became evident that I was pregnant he was overjoyed. I knew that the baby could be either his or Johannes’s, but despite all the complications it would involve, I fervently wished that it would be Johannes’s. A son by him would be … magnificent! He was so alive, so beautiful, so … vibrant.’

A shimmer came into her eyes which brightened her features and in one blow made her look ten years younger. There was no doubt that she had been in love with Johannes. The thought of their affair, even after so many years, still made her blush.

‘How did you know that it was Johannes’s child and not Gabriel’s?’

‘I knew it as soon as I saw him, at the very second he was placed at my breast.’

‘And Johannes, did he know that Jacob was his son and not Gabriel’s?’ Patrik asked.

‘Oh yes. And he loved him. I always knew that I was only a passing amusement for Johannes, no matter how much I wanted something more, but with Jacob it was different. When Gabriel was out of town, Johannes would often come over to look at the boy and play with him. Until Jacob got old enough that he might say something, and then Johannes had to stop,’ Laine said sadly. ‘He hated to see his brother raising his firstborn, but he was not prepared to give up the life he was living. And he wasn’t prepared to give up Solveig, either,’ Laine admitted reluctantly.

‘And how was life for you?’ Patrik asked with sympathy.

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘At first it was hell. Living so close to Johannes and Solveig, seeing them with their boys, brothers to Jacob. But I did have my son, and later, many years later, I had Linda. And this may sound improbable, but over the years I actually came to love Gabriel. Not the same way I loved Johannes, but perhaps in a more realistic way. Johannes was not a person anyone could love at close range without being destroyed. My love for Gabriel is not as exciting, but it’s easier to live with.’

‘Weren’t you afraid that the truth would come out when Jacob got sick?’ asked Patrik.

‘No, there were other things I was much more afraid of,’ Laine said sharply. ‘If Jacob died, nothing would have any meaning, least of all who his father was.’ Then her voice softened. ‘But Johannes was so worried. He was in despair that Jacob was sick and there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t even show his fear openly, couldn’t sit by his son’s side at the hospital. It was hard for him.’ She lost herself in a distant time, but snapped out of it, forcing herself back to the present.

Gösta got up to refill his coffee cup and raised the pot enquiringly to Patrik, who nodded. When he sat down again he asked, ‘Was there really no one who suspected anything, no one who knew? Have you never confided in anyone?’

A frown passed over Laine’s face. ‘Yes, in a moment of weakness Johannes told Solveig about Jacob. As long as he was alive she never dared do anything about it, but after Johannes died she began insinuating things that turned into bigger and bigger demands as her money began to run out.’

‘So she practised extortion?’ said Gösta.

Laine nodded. ‘Yes, for twenty-four years I’ve been paying her.’

‘How could you do that without Gabriel noticing? Because I presume large sums were involved?’

Another nod. ‘It wasn’t easy. But even though Gabriel is finicky about the bookkeeping for the farm, he’s never been stingy with me. I’ve always been given money when I asked for it, for shopping and personal items, and the household in general. To pay Solveig I had to economize. I gave her most of what I got.’ Her voice was bitter, with an undertone of something even stronger. ‘But I assume that now I have no choice but to tell Gabriel everything. So from now on, I won’t have that problem with Solveig any longer.’

She gave a wry smile but soon her expression turned serious again. She looked Patrik straight in the eye. ‘If there is anything good to come out of all this, it’s the fact that I no longer care what Gabriel will think, even though it’s something that has haunted me for thirty-five years. The most important thing for me is my children, Jacob and Linda. That’s why nothing else matters except that Jacob has now been exonerated – because I assume that is the case?’ she said defiantly, narrowing her eyes at both of them.

‘Yes, it does seem so, yes.’

‘Then why are you still holding him? Can I go now and take Jacob with me?’

‘Yes, you can,’ Patrik said calmly. ‘But we would like to ask you one favour. Jacob knows something about all this, and for his own sake it’s important that he talk with us. Spend some time with him here and talk through everything. Try to convince him that he mustn’t hold back anything he knows.’

Laine snorted. ‘I do understand him, actually. Why should he help you after all you’ve done to him and our family?’

‘Because the faster we work everything out, the sooner you can all get on with your lives.’

It was difficult for Patrik to sound convincing. He didn’t want to tell her about the results of the analysis that showed that the perp may not have been Jacob, but it was still someone related to Johannes. That was their trump card, and he didn’t intend to play it until it was absolutely necessary. Until then he hoped that Laine would believe what he said and accept his reasoning. After waiting a moment he got what he wanted. Laine nodded.

‘I’ll do what I can. But I’m not sure that you’re right. I don’t believe that Jacob knows any more about this than anyone else.’

‘That remains to be seen,’ was his curt reply. ‘Are you coming?’

With hesitant steps she walked towards the interrogation room.

Gösta turned to Patrik with a frown. ‘Why didn’t you tell her that Johannes had been murdered?’

Patrik shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. But I have a feeling that the more I can stir things up between the two of them in there, the better. Jacob will tell Laine, and hopefully that will knock her off-balance too. And maybe, just maybe, we can get one of them to open up.’

‘Do you think Laine is hiding something too?’ said Gösta.

‘I don’t know, but didn’t you see the expression on her face when we said that Jacob had been taken off the list of suspects? It was surprise.’