“No. Everything always went well for her.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary, something that made her worried, something that maybe passed quickly, but that she was sad or angry about for a while?”
“No, not that I remember.”
“Did you sleep with each other?”
Andreas’s cheeks turned beet red, and then his ears. His earlobes appeared to be red-hot. He shook his head.
“She didn’t want to,” he said quietly.
“But you wanted to?”
He nodded.
“She wanted to wait.”
“Until when?”
He shrugged his shoulders. She observed his hands, very powerful for belonging to a young boy, but still unproven, both at work and perhaps at caressing. His nails were well-cared for.
“Thanks, Andreas,” said Lindell, extending her hand. “I’m sorry that I stirred everything up again.”
He awkwardly took her hand.
“I think about it every day,” he sniffed, and now the tears burst forth. “I think about her all the time.”
She continued holding his hand in hers, squeezed it.
“She was so fine, and now she’s gone! She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“We don’t know,” said Lindell, squeezing his hand even harder. She realized that there was nothing consoling to say.
“We liked each other. A lot.”
“I understand that. You’re a good guy.”
She refrained from saying that he would surely meet another girl to fall in love with. That was not what he wanted to hear right now.
Lindell turned out of the driveway at Andreas Davidsson’s home, after speaking a little with his mother, a woman with a limited vocabulary, who followed her out with a tormented expression.
What a shitty job, she thought, and she immediately thought of Anders Brant. Now was when she needed someone to call, someone to make plans with for the evening, and then the jerk goes and gets dragged into a murder! And puts her in a pinch besides. If he had just said where he was going, she thought, realizing that would not have changed the situation appreciably.
She forced herself to think about Klara Lovisa and the unknown admirer who wanted to invite her to Stockholm. A handsome guy who knew how to hit on a younger girl, but in her case had evidently lost out. Older, Andreas had said. Where, in what context, does a teenage girl meet an older guy? Was it the son of someone in the neighborhood?
She knew she was on the right track. Or at least convinced herself of that, because for lack of anything else this was the only thing that had any substance.
September 2006, she thought. Klara Lovisa is courted by a guy with a driver’s license, but turns him down. How does he react? Does he give up or keep trying? Klara Lovisa did not say anything else about it to Andreas, but that didn’t need to mean squat. Maybe she had let herself be influenced by continued courtship, and then broke up with Andreas after New Year’s?
Lindell put on the brakes and checked in the rearview mirror before she made a U-turn and took the same way back.
The woman of limited vocabulary was at a total loss for words when Lindell turned onto the driveway to the Davidsson house again and got out of the car. She just stared at the police officer.
“I forgot to ask Andreas one thing,” said Lindell. “Is he still at home?”
His mother opened her mouth but said nothing. Lindell was seized by a strong distaste when passivity was so obviously given a face.
“Is it okay to go inside again?” she asked.
The woman did not answer but managed to point toward the door and nod. Lindell opened the door and called the boy’s name. His head almost immediately stuck out from the second floor. He looked perplexed, and a little worried.
“Just one thing,” said Lindell.
The boy took a few steps down the stairs.
“What did you do on New Year’s Eve?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“I was with some friends.”
“Not with Klara Lovisa?”
“No, she was at a different party.”
“With who?”
“Her soccer friends.”
“She played soccer?”
“Well, not then. She quit, but she was at their party.”
Lindell stood silently a moment.
“When did she quit?”
“The team, you mean? Last fall. They had a few matches left. She said that some of them were mad at her because she quit right then.”
“What’s the name of her team?”
“The Best.”
“The team is called ‘The Best’?”
“Yeah, like, they wanted to be the best.”
“Were they?”
Andreas shook his head.
“Thanks,” said Lindell, pushing open the outside door with her elbow.
The woman was still in the same spot. She had a planting trowel in her hand.
“Nice kid you have,” said Lindell.
“He hasn’t done anything,” said the woman. “So why are you coming here all the time? We were in Gävle! He has nothing to do with the case! He wasted all his time on her, and not just time either!”
Lindell stopped in pure surprise that Andreas’s mother could express more than five words in sequence.
Magdalena Davidsson took a couple steps closer to Lindell. She raised the planting trowel threateningly.
“If you only knew!”
“Knew what?”
“He had to run around with those advertising flyers, selling socks and God knows what, just for her.”
“You mean Klara Lovisa?”
The woman stopped a moment and stared at Lindell.
“Why don’t you say her name? Her name is Klara Lovisa.”
“I know that perfectly well! He fell behind in school. She wanted things and Andreas couldn’t say no. He’s too nice, way too nice, I told him that. And now you’re persecuting him. He has nothing to do with this!”
“No, no one has alleged that either, but he knew Klara Lovisa well.”
“He doesn’t need this pressure. He has to put this behind him. This fall he’s going to study, start high school. It’s going to be a lot of work for him.”
GUC, thought Lindell, he won’t have to work too hard there, not if you were to believe half of what Sammy Nilsson had to say anyway. He had a nephew who took his qualifying exams there last spring.
“I’m sure it will work out,” said Lindell politely.
Klara Lovisa had been in dance class at the Vaksala School and would have continued with dance at a school in Stockholm this fall.
Ten
The police work puzzles, Sammy Nilsson thought as he observed his associates in front of the whiteboard. Maybe he picked up that phrase from some book or comic he read in his youth, he didn’t know.
On the whiteboard were a dozen names, two of which were women, Gunilla Lange and Ingegerd Melander.
The strange thing was that all of them, with the exception of Anders Brant who had moved there with his family as a ten year old, were born and grew up in the city, a fact that Berglund pointed out. Uppsala was a city people moved to; many came to study or teach at the two universities or got jobs in industry or healthcare. A service city, which at one time had been just as much an industrial city. Berglund mentioned once how few students there had been well into the sixties, before the education explosion started. How then there were brick factories, shoe and coat factories, Uppsala Ekeby with its ceramics, a wire-mesh mill that then transitioned to making synthetic wires for the paper industry, a silk-weaving mill, as well as soap factory, breweries, chocolate factory, and bicycle manufacturing.
The university had expanded and now there were tens of thousands of students, while the industrial epoch was only a memory. Replacement in the form of a pharmaceutical industry and high-tech laboratories could not compare with the time when the streets and residential neighborhoods of Uppsala were filled with regular folks, as Berglund put it.
Typical for the new era was that the two areas that were most talked about, where the jobs of the future were concerned, were production of antiwrinkle compounds and development of computer games.