Elisabeth Berntsson took off her glasses, folded them up, and placed them on the desk. “No,” she said. “Drunkenness.”
“Maybe as a catalyst. Hardly as a reason.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
Hjelm switched tactics. “Why did you delete all of Hassel’s e-mails?”
Chavez pointed out, “That wasn’t very difficult to trace.”
Hjelm gave him a look that he hoped would not be too easily interpreted as grateful.
Elisabeth Berntsson, however, seemed to have other things on her mind. An inner battle was being waged behind the naked concentration on her hardened face. Finally she said, “The copious relations you were talking about took place primarily with me. Larsa needed something a bit more solid than that twenty-year-old. It was practically over already; all I did was hurry the process up a little. A catalyst,” she said with a sardonic touch.
“And then? Was it the two of you forever and ever amen?”
Berntsson snorted. “Neither of us was particularly interested in forever and ever amen. I suppose we were both too scarred by the downsides of cohabitation. And had developed a taste for the alternative. One-night stands are really nothing to sneeze at. Me, I lead an active social life and want to be free to do what I want. And Larsa’s tastes were probably more in the vein of… the younger age groups. For me, he was a decent lover and a more or less reliable part of my life. Like a TV show, maybe. Same time, same channel. And I do mean channel.”
Hjelm made a quick decision. “Did he let you read the threatening e-mails?”
“I got tired of them. They were all different variations on the same theme. An almost unbelievable amount of persistence. A fixation. Someone had found a scapegoat he could lay all his life’s frustrations on.”
“He?”
“Everything suggested it was a man. Male language, if that makes sense.”
“How many were there?”
“There were only scattered sprinklings of them for the first six months. During the past month, they accelerated into a veritable flash flood.”
“So it’s been going on for just over six months?”
“About that.”
“How did Hassel react?”
“At first he was pretty shaken up. But when he realized that they seemed to be written mostly for therapeutic purposes, he became more thoughtful. As though he were pondering his past actions and what he was being punished for. But later, when they started to come more frequently, he got scared again and decided to fly the coop for a while. That’s how the New York idea was born.”
Hjelm didn’t comment on the cost of this escape. Instead he said, “Can you describe the contents of the e-mails in greater detail?”
“Very explicit descriptions of how evil Larsa was and, above all, what would be done to his body. They said nothing about what wrong he had actually committed. That was what made him nervous, I think: that the source was so vague.”
“Who do you think it was?”
She fingered her eyeglasses, turning them at different angles on the desk. Then she finally said, “It must have been an author.”
“Why?”
“You’ve read what Larsa wrote.”
“How do you know that?”
“Möller told me. Which means you know that he didn’t mince words about things he disliked. That was what made him stand out as a critic. That was how he built up his nationwide reputation. But when you do that, you hurt people. And sometimes when people are hurt, they never get back on their feet. Bad blood always comes back around.”
Hjelm wondered at her strange final comment. Was she quoting someone?
“Did the sender write like an author?” he asked.
“A fallen author. Yes.”
Hjelm usually didn’t touch his cheek in public, but now he scratched his blemish absentmindedly. A small flake of skin floated down toward his pant leg. Elisabeth Berntsson watched it expressionlessly.
He gave Chavez a meaningful glance, then said, “So we’re back where we started: why did you delete all of Hassel’s e-mails?”
“I didn’t.”
Hjelm sighed and turned to Chavez. His partner had had enough time to fabricate a story, but Hjelm wasn’t sure he was in on the plan; after all, they’d gotten a little rusty.
Chavez was in. “We arrived here at the editorial office at 15:37. At 15:40, Bertilsson asked you about Hassel’s password. At 15:41, he entered it; it was wrong. He went back to you, and you came up with the correct password at 15:43. We got into Hassel’s inbox at 15:44. By then everything had been deleted. I found the time stamp of the deletion: 15:42, two minutes after you had learned what we were doing and given us the wrong password.”
Chavez had done his homework and had outdone his teacher by a mile: if you’re going to lie, lie in great detail.
Elisabeth Berntsson stared deep down into her desk.
Hjelm leaned toward her. “If you weren’t the one who wrote them, then why delete them? To salvage Larsa’s reputation? Hardly. Where were you on the night between the second and third of September?”
“Not in Newark,” she said quietly.
“Have you been going around hating him all these years? How did you have time to write all this hate mail? Did you do it during working hours?”
Elisabeth picked up her glasses, unfolded the earpieces, and settled them onto her distinguished nose. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them to meet Hjelm’s. The gaze he saw was a completely new one.
“I suppose you could say I loved him. The hate mail was about to break me.”
“So you hired a hit man to make the pain end?”
“Of course not.”
“But he told you who he suspected was behind them, right? And you deleted everything to protect his murderer. Sort of strange behavior toward the dear departed, isn’t it?”
Now she looked determined, but not in a self-confident way; rather, she was determined not to speak at any price. She wasn’t going to say anything more.
But she said more than words could have: “It’s private.”
Then she broke down. It was unexpected for everyone present, including herself, but the repressed sadness came tumbling out in long, sweeping waves.
When they stood up, Hjelm realized he liked her. He would have liked to place a comforting arm around her, but he knew the comfort he was capable of offering wouldn’t go very far. Her sorrow was much deeper than that.
They left her alone with her pain.
In the elevator, Chavez said, “A pyrrhic victory-isn’t that what it’s called? Another victory like that, and I’m done for.”
Hjelm was silent. He told himself he was planning his next step. In reality, he was crying.
Bad blood always comes back around.
In the taxi to Pilgatan, they didn’t say much. “It’s lucky she didn’t check the times,” said Chavez. “I was at least five minutes off.”
“I don’t think she was planning to let us leave without a confession,” said Hjelm. Then he added, “You did an excellent job.”
He didn’t have to tell Chavez where they were going. On their way up the stairs of the stately building on Pilgatan, between Fridhemsplan and Kungsholmstorg, he said, “You remember the password, don’t you?”
Chavez nodded. When they arrived at the top floor, Hjelm took out a set of keys and unlocked the three locks on the door marked “Hassel.” They stepped into a gym; the entire enormous hall had been converted into an exercise room.
Apparently, in a previous life, Lars-Erik Hassel had been an alchemist on the hunt for the fountain of youth.
They walked past modern glass vases and ceramic pots and arrived at modernity: a computer on an antique desk in the middle of the living room.
Chavez turned it on and settled into the grandiose easy chair that functioned as a desk chair.
“Do you think he has a personal password?” Hjelm asked, leaning over the seated hacker.
“No, not at home,” said Chavez. “If he does, we might have a problem.”