Beatrice Andersson phoned Berglund, who promised to spend a few hours of the afternoon at “The Grotto,” to possibly make contact with a few people who could provide information about Bosse’s recent doings.
Am I grieving for him? She had repeated the question silently to herself since the police left her. They must have talked at least a couple of hours, then shook hands and said good-bye. The female police officer was sweet, complimented her on the curtains, asked whether she had sewn them herself. Not everyone noticed such things. The other one’s gaze had wandered, as if he was ashamed or afraid of her.
Yes, I’m grieving, she decided. I am grieving the life we could have had. For sixteen years they had been married, for two periods, like a soccer match. A long first half, which lasted twelve years, was good. Then came the accident.
They had no children. She mourned for that. Maybe him too. Of course that’s how it was. He loved kids. During all those years they had barely talked about it. They were both responsible for their childlessness, so why should they gab about it? She knew, purely rationally, that it was idiotic, but after the abortion, when she was nineteen, an intervention that he had supported, she saw childlessness as a punishment. She-they-had a chance, and they blew it.
Would things have been different with a child? Doubtful. Children were love, but not life, she had heard a girlfriend say once, and that phrase had etched itself into her awareness.
Their lives, mainly Bosse’s, had developed along a path that no one could have foreseen. He had always been a proud man, and that would become his great torment. Pride was easy to bear as long as he had something to be proud of, but then what?
She told the police about his work, about the years when he came home sober, full of life, and just proud. He worked hard and made good money. And then: a single nerve in his body that was torn apart and made him useless as a scaffolder. Unable to raise his arm. The pain. Being useless, looking up at the facades and knowing.
“How did it happen?” the male police officer asked, the first time he had shown any deeper interest in Bosse’s fate.
She told about the accident and how it had upset Bosse’s life forever, and along with it their life together. He could not blame anyone, it was his own mistake, his eagerness to get it done quickly, that doomed him to idleness. He cursed his own clumsiness, called himself an “amateur.”
Like so many others he chose liquor. He said “booze,” never alcohol or more specifically vodka, gin, or whiskey. Booze it would be. She thought it sounded crude, but that was probably the point. There was nothing sophisticated, nothing enjoyable in Bosse’s drinking habits. Booze was oblivion. Booze was hate. Booze was separation from life.
She got up, went over to the window, and looked out over the yard. In the background was a glimpse of the newly constructed police building. They didn’t have far to go to convey their message. How could anyone work as a police officer? A high-rise full of crime, hate, lies, guilt, and sorrow. She should have asked how they put up with it, but suspected there was no good answer.
The clock in the living room struck one. Soon Bernt would come, he was taking off early to visit the construction industry health office later in the afternoon. They would have scalloped potatoes and fried pork loin. She would tell about Bosse’s death. Bernt would not ask many questions. She understood that deep inside he would be relieved, perhaps even happy. He was jealous that someone else had been so significant in her life, before she and Bernt met, a kind of retroactive jealousy that she never understood. Bernt had also been married before and talked freely and easily about his former wife.
He would not want to see her tears or listen to her stories. And she would try to please him. Cry now, not later, she thought. And she cried, cried over a wasted life. Bosse’s. And perhaps her own, she wasn’t sure. Her demands on existence had never been all that great, but she sensed that there was another way to live.
From the oven came the aroma of the casserole. She took out the pork and started cutting it up into slices. He liked them thin and only lightly fried. Suddenly her movements stopped. The police wanted her to come to the morgue and identify her former husband.
“You are the next of kin, from what we understand,” the female police officer had said.
So it was, she thought, I was and am his next of kin. The police would pick her up at three o’clock.
How many slices will he want? The sight of the pork nauseated her. She set the knife aside. How did he die? It had not occurred to her to ask about that. What if they’d made a mistake and the dead man was someone else?
After the visit with Gunilla Lange, Ola Haver and Beatrice Andersson decided to look up the other woman on the list, for the simple reason that she was the only one with a permanent address, on Sköldungagatan in Tunabackar.
Ingegerd Melander was drunk, not conspicuously, but enough to make Haver feel uncomfortable. It was still only the middle of the day. He was immediately seized with antipathy, studied the woman’s slightly worn features, the wrinkles that ran like half-moons on her cheeks, and which deepened when she screwed up her face to conceal her intoxication. This had the opposite effect.
Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail, which still made her look a bit girlish. Behind the ravaged face Haver could sense a woman who had once been really attractive.
“I’m going to the store,” she said for no reason when they introduced themselves.
“We’re here for Bosse Gränsberg,” said Ola Haver.
Beatrice glanced furtively at him.
“May we come in and talk a little?”
Ingegerd Melander shook her head lightly and her noticeable confusion increased, but she stepped to one side to let them in.
They sat down at the kitchen table. Beatrice did not say anything about curtains, because there weren’t any. The kitchen was otherwise strangely clinically clean. Not a gadget to be seen on the kitchen counter, the table, or other surfaces; no potted plants adorned the windowsill. The only thing that suggested any human activity was a wall calendar from Kjell Pettersson’s Body Shop. Ola Haver noted that yesterday’s date was circled in red.
“I have some bad news,” Beatrice Andersson began.
“It always is where Bosse is concerned,” said the woman.
“But you haven’t had a visit from us before on his account, have you?”
The woman shook her head.
“What’s he done?”
“Nothing, as far as we know,” said Ola Haver. “He’s dead.”
At that moment he loathed himself and his work. The impulse to get up and rush out of the apartment was almost too much for him.
The woman’s body contracted as if she had been given an electric shock, and she collapsed across the kitchen table, as if she were an inflatable doll someone had stuck a pin in. Just then the outside door opened, and they heard someone calling, “Hello in there!”
Beatrice leaned over the kitchen table and placed her hand on the woman’s trembling shoulder. Ola Haver stood up. A man came into the kitchen whom Ola Haver immediately thought he recognized.
“What the hell are you doing here?” said the man.
In his eyes there was a mixture of surprise, suspicion, and fury.
“My name is Ola Haver and I’m a police officer.”
“I can see that!”
“We have some bad news.”
“You always do,” said the man.
He glanced over Haver’s shoulder.
“What have you done to Ingegerd?”
“Bosse Gränsberg is dead,” said Haver.
“Huh?”
The man swallowed.
“Dead?”
Haver nodded.
“What the hell! Why’s that? Did he kill himself?”
“No, someone else killed him.”