“Okay,” said Lindell. “I’ll…”
She fell silent, Sammy Nilsson waited for a continuation, and when it came it was suddenly a sober Lindell who was talking.
“I think I know who murdered Klara Lovisa.”
Sammy Nilsson parked on Österplan, a short distance from Lindell’s residence, and remained standing a moment. It was a lovely evening, the air was warm and trailing from a grill on one of the courtyards was the aroma of meat cooking.
A freight train lumbering north made the ground vibrate. The heavy train creaked and lurched. He counted the cars, forty-eight of them, and it occurred to him that he had wanted to be an engineer when he grew up. Imagine sticking to a track and never leaving it.
Höganäs was an area he seldom if ever visited, either personally or on the job. In statistical terms it was a peaceful part of Uppsala. He had had one assault there, and as he walked past the building where the wife of a glazier had been severely beaten, he peeked into the yard, and stopped in amazement. The glazier’s wife was sitting in a lawn chair, reading. Sammy Nilsson could see that it was the same novel, by the most recent Nobel Prize winner, that he himself was trying to read in the evenings. The glazier himself was in front of a grill with a spray can in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. He said something, the woman looked up and smiled, but immediately went back to her reading.
Sammy Nilsson hurried on before they caught sight of him. He would surely be recognized and he felt embarrassed, as if he was guilty of something indecent.
Ann had freshened up both the apartment and herself in the hour that had passed since they talked. There was a scent of cleanser, mixed with coffee, and she had showered.
“Erik just fell asleep,” she said.
Sammy carefully closed the door. The evening sun was shining in through the windows in the living room, capturing the swirling dust and giving the apartment a strangely suggestive, opaque character, a romantic but at the same time ominous introduction to a French noir film from the fifties, with a woman placed like a fragile, dreamlike detail at the outer edge of the picture who would slowly back into the room and disappear.
“I made coffee,” she said barely audibly, as if she was testing whether her voice would hold, while Sammy kicked off his shoes and curiously looked around in the dark hallway.
He still had the feeling from his encounter with the glazier and his wife that he was intruding, peeking into something extremely private. He did not socialize with his colleagues; the barbecue every summer at Haver’s was actually the only occasion they got together in an organized way. He might have a beer sometimes with Morgansson in tech, in any case before Morgansson met the woman he had now moved in with, but he was the only one.
The impression of intruding was unexpectedly mixed with a feeling of tenderness for Ann Lindell. She was sitting on the couch, her hair wet, straight-backed, ready to pour coffee. A plate of cookies was set out, as well as a jug of milk.
“You have a really nice place,” he said. He was seized by an impulse to take hold of her, pat her on the cheek, or something physically tangible, but realized that would be idiotic. She was on tenterhooks and was doing everything not to show her emotions. A pat might make her fall apart, he knew her that well.
Once before, a few years ago, he had picked up the pieces after her. That time she was sitting alone at a bar, drinking. A patrol officer, who was there to have a bite to eat and dance, phoned Sammy and told him that his colleague probably needed to go home and go to bed, otherwise things might go very wrong.
Sammy had gone there immediately, found her blind drunk, and carted her home. That time he stayed with her the whole night, slept on the couch they were now sitting on, and the next morning had a long chat with a hungover, regretful Lindell. A chat that sank in, he realized afterward, even though they never brought up the incident later and what had been discussed that morning at her kitchen table.
He had asked her where Erik was and she said he was staying with his “relief family,” and explained that occasionally it felt so heavy that she did not know whether she could manage bringing up her son, and that he was really the one who needed to be relieved from her, not the other way around.
He called the patrol officer and asked him to keep quiet about what happened, and as far as Sammy could tell he had done that, he had never heard any comments or gibes at work anyway.
After that she pulled herself together and from what Sammy had heard Erik stood out as a well-adjusted boy. It seemed as if that morning Ann definitively decided to put her love and longing for Edvard Risberg on the shelf, even if she later admitted to Sammy that for long periods it still hurt a lot. As recently as last year, in connection with her investigating a murder in the archipelago, and in doing so came geographically very close to Edvard, the misspent love story put her out of balance for several weeks.
He sat down alongside her. The living room was, if not boring, conventionally furnished. He understood that Ann had not spent any time looking through home decor magazines. It was dutiful and functional. The only thing that deviated was a large oil painting on the opposite wall.
She noticed his interest and told about an artist, now a very old man, who had painted a single motif his entire life, Lake Vättern, on whose shore he was born and had always lived.
“I bought it twenty years ago, I actually borrowed money from my parents to get it, and I don’t regret it. It goes with me. It’s the only advantage with Ödeshög, being close to Vättern, or ‘the sea,’ as Dad called it.”
“He’s succeeded,” said Sammy.
“Lovely but cold,” said Lindell, lost in thought.
“Klara Lovisa,” said Sammy, who wanted to break the slightly ominous mood, at the same time pouring milk in his coffee mug.
“The last Mohican,” she said, and dismissed Sammy’s perplexed expression with a hand gesture. She then told about the necklace they had found on Klara Lovisa and that no one, not even her parents, recognized. She had drawn the conclusion that it was the murderer who had given her the jewelry.
“Nice,” said Sammy. “First a chain around the neck and then a chokehold.”
“I asked a teenage girl here in the building, she takes care of Erik sometimes, where she bought her jewelry and whether this particular type was popular. She listed a number of stores and today I’ve been making the rounds. Got a bite at the first one, Silver and Such, on Drottninggatan. The clerk recognized the necklace immediately and said they had sold a lot in the past six months, with the exact inscription Carpe Diem.”
“That doesn’t sound like much,” said Sammy. “I mean, that’s a lot of customers. It would be better if it were something unusual.”
“I was prepared,” Ann resumed, and now she smiled for the first time. “The clerk pointed out my candidate right away.”
“What the hell?”
“I’d gone around to three schools and picked up yearbooks, you know, with photos of everyone in class. I let her browse and speak up if she recognized a customer. In the third yearbook I showed her she put her finger on a face without hesitating: It was the last Mohican. She was dead certain of it.”
“He had a Mohawk haircut, in other words.”
Lindell nodded.
“I thought like this: If and when Fredrik Johansson left Klara Lovisa alone in the forest hut, what did she do then?”
“Tried to get away from there,” said Sammy, happy at the change in Lindell, from slurring to lucid, but he was also listening to her with a feeling of unease. He had seen something similar before, when she stubbornly shifted into higher gear on the last drops of fuel like a gasoline engine before it finally coughs and falls silent.