Whether all this was true neither Ryde nor Fredriksson knew, but they devoted a minute or two to it.
“But we have found something else,” said Ryde. “As you recall, there was a chair in the hut. The veneer on the back of the chair was cracked and there was a red thread stuck to it. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the case, but it’s the only foreign thing we’ve been able to find. Do you want to see it?”
Ryde took Fredriksson to Johannesson’s office, picked up a plastic bag from the desk, and held it out. Fredriksson viewed the thin thread.
“Cotton,” said Ryde. “Seven centimeters long. And it doesn’t come from the girl’s clothing.”
Fredriksson sighed. He realized that a thin thread was not much to go on, but did not want to disappoint Ryde. Because even though the technician was an experienced policeman, he often showed unbridled enthusiasm where the possibility of moving forward in an investigation was concerned, primarily if the basis was a detail that the tech squad had fished up.
“Nice,” said Fredriksson. “Now it’s just a matter of finding the rest of the garment.”
Ryde carelessly tossed the bag back on the desk.
“Of course you will,” he said and smiled.
“Okay, Eskil, I’ll send Nyman up. He gets to escort the spades back.” Fredriksson concluded his visit to the tech squad and left a contented Ryde.
Fredriksson returned to his office. Despite the light tone in the gossip with Ryde, when he experienced how much the grumpy old technician really meant to the squad, he was depressed. He felt worn out and confused. He took the resolution of the mystery of Klara Lovisa’s disappearance very much to heart.
She had probably been raped. The autopsy could not provide any unambiguous answer but the doctor had expressed it in terms such as “this mostly indicates that” and “one could probably consider.” The body had shown injuries that “with great probability” could not be explained other than by assault, but such weak statements could not be used in a possible future trial.
It was bad enough that Klara Lovisa had been found murdered, but the results of the autopsy further darkened the mood.
Fredriksson longed to go home, or rather to the forest. Almost every day he took a long walk along an old logging area, which had good prerequisites for developing into a first-class raspberry patch, followed a ditch toward a marsh, rounded the wet hollows, and then returned home. It usually took half an hour. He noted the daily changes in nature, let himself be intoxicated by the aroma of myrtle. He talked to himself, because his wife was completely uninterested in trudging around in the woods and deep down Fredriksson was happy about that. Here he could be in peace and feel calm.
But the past few weeks it was becoming harder and harder to find that calm. He experienced what all the others also expressed in various ways: It was too much.
He forced himself to focus for a while on the two investigations in which he was involved, Gränsberg and Klara Lovisa. Simply the fact of needing to divide himself was depressing, but with the current personnel situation it was necessary.
It went fine for a few minutes.
Then he chose the forest.
Twenty-seven
“You were looking for me?”
The voice was nasal and light, in contrast to the intense background noise on the phone, like a massive carpet of sound from a busy highway or perhaps a noisy industrial environment.
“And who is this?”
“Håkan Malmberg.”
She searched her memory and remembered before the pause was too long. Malmberg was Klara Lovisa’s coach. She had tried to find him for a few days, but since then had not given it much thought.
“Exactly. Thanks for returning my call.”
“I’m on vacation and don’t check my messages very often,” said Malmberg, as if to forestall her question of why he had waited to get in touch with her.
“It’s okay,” said Lindell. “Where are you now?”
“Värmland. What’s this about?”
“Klara Lovisa. You were her soccer coach.”
“I know that,” said Malmberg. “Who have you arrested?”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw on Text-TV that you found the murderer.”
“We have arrested someone, yes,” Lindell answered evasively.
“So who is it?”
Lindell did not reply; he ought to realize that she couldn’t mention any names. She was the one who was asking a few questions instead.
Håkan Malmberg maintained that he had not seen Klara Lovisa since her departure from the team, only caught sight of her in town on a few occasions. His statements were careful, but below the doctored summary Lindell could detect his irritation, or how he, in September the year before, had become really indignant.
“It was in the middle of tournament play, and Klovisa was a real cog,” the coach asserted. “It didn’t feel right at all that she just packed up and left.”
He could not give any reasonable explanation for her unexpected defection, but was not particularly surprised. At that age many players suddenly gave up sports.
At last Lindell asked the question about what relationship Fredrik Johansson and Klara Lovisa had.
“Is it him? The hell you say! That fucking weasel.”
“What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t deal with him, he was sick in the head, and not especially good either. And then his godawful staring at the girls on the team. He was…”
The continuation drowned in the noise that surrounded Malmberg. Lindell thought it sounded like a whole convoy of trucks passing. She suggested that he should move to a quieter place.
“My battery is low,” Malmberg asserted.
“When are you coming to Uppsala?” Lindell shouted.
“In a few days,” came the garbled response.
“Call me then!”
“Okay,” said Malmberg and ended the call.
Lindell set her phone down on the shelf next to the window. When the call from Malmberg came she had been staring out the window. The heat of the past few days had built up for a proper discharge and now it was pouring down with tropical intensity. The heavy raindrops pattered against the window and the rumbling from the thunderstorm that was first visible as a dark front toward the west was coming closer and closer.
The rain transported her in time and space, to the backyard in the house in Ödeshög, with the rain pouring over her naked body. Her mother stood in the patio door yelling that she would catch pneumonia but Ann could not hear in the thunder, or did not want to hear. She turned her back, shut her eyes and ears, closed everything out, and extended her arms to the sky.
She was seven years old. In the fall she would be starting school. It was a trivial memory, but her earliest one. Many people could recount experiences at an early age in detail, but this storm, the feeling of the rain that whipped her goose-pimply skin and how she felt herself being transformed, was her first real recollection from childhood.
There were other fragments, but the storm of that summer day was her first coherent memory, where she could recall that she had a thought of her own. There was also defiance. Her mother was powerless, she did not want to go out in the pouring rain. Ann was only five meters away, but inaccessible.
She sensed that the talk about pneumonia, which she understood was a disease, was just talk. She did not think she would get sick. On the contrary, the rain would make her healthier.
But if she were to go out naked now and stand in the inner courtyard of the police building and defy both weather and convention, she was not sure the same feeling of purity and liberation would come over her. The innocence of childhood was gone.