“It sounded like they were smashing apart the furniture,” said the neighbor directly below Melander’s apartment.
The police had found a battered chair in Ingegerd’s bedroom, that was all. But a chair in the hands of the wrong person can produce a lot of noise, as Beatrice put it.
Then it was quiet.
“Johnny Andersson fell asleep,” Sammy Nilsson speculated.
No one heard when Ingegerd fell down the stairs.
“She died immediately in any event.”
Beatrice looked at him. They were sitting in the police station cafeteria, discussing Melander’s case.
“She didn’t have that much alcohol in her body,” said Bea.
“Enough for a stumble.”
Sammy Nilsson did not want to think about the unfortunate woman. While they waited for the medical examiner’s report and the autopsy, Beatrice organized the door-knocking and compiled biographical facts about Ingegerd Melander. There was a sister in Norrköping who had now been informed. She questioned Johnny Andersson again, and in the meantime Sammy had devoted several hours to the thirteen names from the bandy team. During the afternoon the list had expanded to fifteen, when the restaurateur Svensson called and added the remaining two players on the photo.
So far Sammy had not found any sensational information. Five of the bandy players were in the crime registry for minor offences, just as many in the enforcement office’s files, one of them was in hospice, dying of cancer, and two had been living abroad for a long time. They had the same address at a resort in the Philippines. Sammy immediately drew the conclusion that they were pedophiles.
The list had been reduced to twelve names. Sammy had managed to contact seven of them. All of them knew that their old teammate had met a violent death. None of them had been in contact with Gränsberg in recent years, in principle since he put his ice skates on the shelf. Sammy fished cautiously about Anders Brant, but had not produced anything substantial.
Now he did not want to sit and speculate about an alcoholic woman’s unlucky fall and death, but instead get hold of the remaining five individuals.
“It’s typical,” Beatrice continued. “The woman dies while she’s cleaning house and the man is sleeping off his bender.”
Sammy Nilsson sighed.
“What did Johnny say?”
Beatrice reported that he confirmed that they had quarreled, nothing serious according to him, as he had been too drunk. Drunk talk, he called their exchange of words, no physical violence had occurred. The broken chair he explained by saying that Ingegerd barricaded herself in the bedroom and placed the chair against the door to keep Johnny from coming in. “I wanted to cuddle a little,” he explained. When he tried to force the door the chair fell into the room and when he entered he stumbled on it, took hold of it in fury and threw it against the wall. There was also a mark on the bedroom wall, approximately at chest height.
“Breaking apart a chair is physical violence, wouldn’t you say?” Sammy objected.
He could picture the scene in his mind.
“Yes, but he didn’t hit her, just the wall.”
“She had a really nasty bruise on her arm and shoulder,” said Sammy.
“From the fall on the stairs, Amrén thought.”
Jonas Amrén was the medical examiner, whom Sammy had christened “Loose Lips” because he was so uncommunicative.
“It will probably turn out that we put Melander in the files,” said Sammy.
“We can’t prove a crime was committed,” said Beatrice, with a bitter tinge to her voice.
Sammy Nilsson sensed that she suspected that Johnny Andersson assaulted Melander and perhaps flat out pushed her down the stairs, but both knew that at the present time there was nothing that supported such a scenario. There was nothing to run to the prosecutor with.
“When we released Johnny this morning he only talked about Ingegerd Melander’s apartment, whether he had a chance to take it over.”
“It’s a municipal rental unit, isn’t it?”
“Of course, Uppsalahem has its own waiting list, but he was carrying on about buying it under the table somehow. Not a word that he was sorry she’d broken her neck.”
“He wants to move on with his life,” Sammy said casually and got up. “And I have to attend to the teammates.”
Twenty-two
Tuesday morning was promising. The sun shone in between the windowsill and blind. Ann Lindell was already awake by five o’clock. I’ve got to make a longer curtain, she thought, something she’d had in mind since spring.
Perhaps she was wakened by the sunlight, or possibly by the dream, traces of which now lingered in her mind. It had been a real mishmash. Fredrik Johansson, Klara Lovisa, and Anders Brant had been there, as were Sammy Nilsson and Ottosson. It was not a good dream. Eroticism, work, and a desperate sense of loss, of getting too late a start in everything she did, made her wake up sweaty and worried.
“I miss you,” she mumbled, pushing off the overly warm covers.
Anders Brant had not been in touch, either by e-mail or SMS. Maybe he was in some kind of trouble and could simply not communicate, but she pushed that unpleasant thought aside.
If it had not been for everything that was hard to explain about Anders’s disappearance, it would have been a thoroughly good morning. She was well on her way to cracking the mystery of Klara Lovisa’s disappearance. Today would be decisive. She had decided to take Fredrik Johansson to the scene in Skärfälten; he was going to show them the hut. A dog handler would go along. She was certain of finding Klara Lovisa somewhere in the surroundings.
A good day, except for Fredrik who would be arrested for homicide, alternatively manslaughter; she was equally sure of that.
Klara Lovisa’s mother had called the day before, just as Lindell was about to leave work to hurry to the preschool. They had not spoken for a while, but Lindell was certain that the rumor that Fredrik Johansson was being questioned had spread among Klara Lovisa’s friends and on to her mother as well.
Lindell had not told her everything and definitely not the truth. Fredrik was being questioned simply because he might have information that was interesting; that was her white lie.
Now when he had been held in jail overnight the rumors would intensify.
Her body wanted to stay in bed. She was far from rested; the turbulence of the past few days had left its mark. A week before she had been unreservedly happy, satisfied, and slightly optimistic. Now the picture was more divided.
But there was also a more prosaic reason that she was dawdling. The dream had made her wet; in the vacillation between dream and waking up she could feel his hands on her body. There was a tingling in her abdomen as she thought back to the Brant of the dream and how he had recently been in her bed.
She drew her hand across her belly, but it felt wrong to touch herself, that would be admitting that Brant was gone for good. Self-stimulation would only mean a return to her former life’s meager substitute for real love, so she let her hand rest.
Instead she got out of bed, pulled on the blind so it flew up with a bang, opened the window, and observed the blossoming mock orange bush in the yard. She hoped that a breeze would carry a trace of its aroma to her.
Even though she had not yet showered she pulled on a recently washed T-shirt, just to take in the citrus-scented fabric softener. In the building opposite there were many retired eyes up early, who would enjoy getting a look at a bare-breasted police officer. Here everyone knew who she was. It had attracted some attention when the very first week she was driven home in a marked police car.
The birds were also experiencing a lovely morning. They were going full tilt, broods of baby birds had to be fed. The building manager had set up lots of birdhouses in the lindens on the grounds and on the little back building. Lindell could sometimes see him studying the sparrows and titmice, and whatever else there might be. She thought the caretaker preferred the feathered tenants in the little houses to those in the bigger building.