It felt like a weight, this experience of being someone else, no longer Ann, the girl in the rain. She was Lindell, a cop; at times very effective, sometimes less so. She was the mother of Erik, age seven, present, needed, and loved by him. She was a woman who loved nakedness and touch, from words, rain, and from another person’s warmth and hands.
To what extent and in what order she was all of this, police officer, mother, and woman, shifted of course. Combining it was often the most intricate puzzle of life.
Right then by the window she experienced for a few moments that she was not anything at all. She saw only the girl in the rain before her.
The past few days she had lived as if in a vacuum, her body a walking shell, mechanically performing movements and gestures-speaking, functioning, interacting with others. She functioned in triple roles, but without any meaning or goal.
It ached like mental whiplash. Someone, or something, had hit her hard in the back to make her move forward, and sure enough she took stumbling steps in the direction that was pointed out as the right one. But it ached so much.
She turned around. The rain had eased up somewhat, the storm appeared to be taking a northerly course, would probably pass over Bälinge and Björklinge. On her desk was a plastic bag. It had been there since the morning, but she had not really thought much about the contents, and this lack of involvement, a both unexpected and unwelcome preoccupation, was due to one thing: The sign of life she received from Anders Brant, he who in the past few days had somehow come to incarnate Ann Lindell’s three different roles.
What did he have to do with Gränsberg’s death? Who was he? Where was he? And on the personal level, did they have a future together at all? Would Erik accept him?
It was as if she couldn’t bear to deal with any of the questions and preferred to regress to the first memory of childhood where the girl Ann, in a feeling of bodily freedom, with the rain pounding, in her undeveloped slenderness, took the first careful, unconscious steps toward becoming the woman Ann Lindell. And beyond the purely physical, in the conscious, euphoric defiance of her mother there was a longing for freedom that made her long from that moment to be away, and as soon as it was possible, flee Ödeshög and train to be a police officer, all the time with the goal of becoming a very competent one.
Now she was submerged in melancholy. Extremely absentmindedly she had poked in her investigation of Klara Lovisa and out of pure habit maintained a kind of minimal dialogue with her colleagues, a back-burner Lindell.
She realized that it was Brant’s unbelievably brief, almost aggressive message that created this gloom, reinforced by the rain and the recollection of that early childhood memory. It all flowed together-mother, woman, and police officer Ann Lindell. And the result was a melancholy passivity. If anyone were to say anything that might be perceived as the least bit critical of her, she would burst into tears, and if someone were to say that she was a good person, a good police officer, or a good mother, the result would be the same.
She took a deep breath, forced herself away from the window, and over to the desk.
The plastic bag was an ordinary confiscation bag and contained a necklace, consisting of a thin chain and two small silver disks. Each disk had a word engraved on it. Ann read Carpe Diem, capture the day. Pathetic and trite to say the least, so that it had lost its significance, she thought, but realized that for a sixteen year old it might be perceived differently.
Klara Lovisa had been wearing the chain. Her parents had not recognized it and maintained that they had never seen it before, which Lindell had no reason to doubt.
So Klara Lovisa received it on the day of the murder, her birthday. From who? Probably not from the murderer, who cleaned out her pockets, took her cell phone, and wallet. Why then leave a necklace behind that perhaps he had given her a few hours earlier?
Lindell’s conclusion was that Klara Lovisa received the chain on the morning from someone other than the one who a few hours later would strangle her.
Who was this someone? The one that Lindell immediately thought of was Andreas Davidsson. Wouldn’t a silver necklace be a suitable present from an infatuated teenager trying to win his girlfriend back? But he had maintained that he had not seen Klara Lovisa on the morning she disappeared, and why should he lie about that?
Silly question, Lindell muttered immediately, people lie all the time. Sometimes out of habit, many times without realizing that unnecessary lies only hurt their own cause, sometimes instinctively because they believe the truth is dangerous, as if it would be easier to consistently stick to the untruth. Deny everything and you become inaccessible, they seem to think. One untruth leads to another, and then they are sitting helplessly stuck in a tangle of lies. To then get loose, sort out the lies from truth after the fact, becomes a nearly impossible task.
Anders Brant was cheating! The insight came so suddenly that it felt as if she was having a stroke. There was a stabbing pain around her temples as if knives were being driven into her head. She took hold of her head. The pain was indescribable.
He’s lying to me, she thought. The pain, which did not last more than a second, was replaced by a massive headache, and for a moment she thought something really had burst, a winding artery that had given up from the pressure.
Lindell took this as a sign, not based on any of the superstitious comments, often ominous, that her mother loved to strew around her, but that this was her subconscious mind’s way of sounding an alarm. She concluded that her brain had registered something she was not consciously able to perceive, and was now warning her, trying to get her to understand and formulate.
Duplicity. She pushed the chair back from the desk, and with her elbows on her knees she leaned her head into her hands. She drew on all her strength to read signals that until how had been hidden from her. What had he really said about their relationship? Nothing really. He had a way of expressing himself, in a superficial way clear and lucid, but on closer inspection vague and possible to interpret in various ways. She could now remember several occasions when she experienced just such uncertainty about his words.
On those few occasions they talked about the future, it was as if he either joked it off, or put several layers of information on each other, relativizing what he had just said by adding something new.
She had enjoyed listening to him and took it as a part of his style of reasoning, as if his journalistic activity unconsciously forced him into ambiguities and reservations, like an attorney who talks and talks in long twists and turns, considering all aspects. An occupational injury.
But were the ambiguities perhaps just an expression of duplicity? Had he simply played with her? The idea was completely inconceivable. It couldn’t be that way, mustn’t be that way.
That man had taken a real hold on her, and if he were now to be torn out of her, the damage would be extensive. Her body, which functioned better than the deficient judgment of passion, signaled betrayal. It ached.
Lindell got up quickly, the desk whirled around before her and she reached for the chair behind her for support.
Ann Lindell went to Ottosson to tell him. She wanted him to listen to her without showing any agitation or even surprise. It struck her that perhaps Ottosson knew about her relationship with Brant and was only waiting for her to tell him what was going on of her own accord.
Ottosson was on the phone, but waved her in. The call was personal, planning a children’s party, from what Ann could make out. Ottosson was smiling the whole time and the call dragged on.