“Really!” the attorney exclaimed.
Lindell turned her head very slowly, as if her neck were hydraulically controlled and the oil very cold and turgid, fixing her eyes on Oswaldsson, before she again turned to Andreas’s mother, and continued.
“And through your lies you are letting him down. It’s that simple. He’s made himself guilty of a crime, you are protecting him, or you think you’re supporting him, but in reality it’s the exact opposite: You are shoving him away.”
She waved her hand and realized to her surprise that her strategy was holding up. Oswaldsson was grimacing, but remained silent.
“He has no one but you. Your lies are transmitted through him. Give up while there is still time.”
“What constitutes the crime?” the attorney asked.
“Obstruction of a murder investigation and in the worst case manslaughter, perhaps homicide,” said Lindell calmly, as if she were discussing something very ordinary, without taking her eyes off the woman.
Magdalena Davidsson flinched as if she had been hit when she heard the word “homicide.”
“Yes, it’s that bad,” said Lindell. “And you are the only one who can fix that. Andreas will not manage this on his own.”
“What do you mean ‘fix’?” Andreas’s mother said hoarsely.
Lindell took a photo of Klara Lovisa from the folder before her, and set it on the table. The attorney stared at the picture of the young, smiling girl.
“If it is the case, and there is a lot that suggests it, that your son is involved in Klara Lovisa’s death, he must have support to manage. He’s only fifteen. His whole life is waiting. Right now he is suffering terribly, and he will be for a long time, if you don’t help out. He will never really be free from anxiety, because he is not a hardened criminal who lacks empathy, but he must be able to go on.”
“What should I do?” Magdalena Davidsson whispered.
“Talk with him! Now, right here, the rescue of your son’s mental health and life begins. Let him understand that he has your support, no matter what happened, and that for his own sake, and for Klara Lovisa’s and her parents’ sake, he must be honest.”
Lindell let the words sink in. It was not surprising that she was broken down; what was surprising on the other hand was Oswaldsson’s passivity. She gave him a quick look and did not know what to believe. Either he was unusually dense or he agreed with her, whatever he thought about her emotional overacting.
“You lied about his alibi the day Klara Lovisa disappeared,” Lindell resumed. “I think he’s lying when he says he didn’t see her that day. It was her birthday, and he gave her a present, a necklace.”
Lindell recounted her theory of how Klara Lovisa phoned Andreas and how he went to Skärfälten on his moped, and how they quarreled, a dispute that ended in violence.
The woman listened with bowed head, and when Lindell stopped talking she had nothing to say. Nor did attorney Oswaldsson, who put his notes in his briefcase and thanked her for an interesting lecture.
Lindell felt a twinge of desperation. She had hoped that Magdalena Davidsson would break down and that a story would gush out of her that would be the beginning of the end of the drawn-out investigation.
None of this happened. The woman’s silence and Oswaldsson’s only slightly camouflaged scorn made her depressed, and she concluded by saying that Magdalena Davidsson could either stay there, sit in, and listen during the questioning of Andreas, or go home.
Both of them knew that Andreas would not want his mother to be there, he had made that clear, but Lindell could not refrain from mentioning that alternative, with the dim thought that in some way she wanted to get back for the woman’s compact silence, by pointing out how Andreas distanced himself in this way from his own mother. Cheap revenge, and it bothered Lindell that she treated the poor woman so basely.
“I think Magdalena can wait here in the building,” said the attorney. “Then I’ll drive her home later.”
Lindell wondered whether it was Oswaldsson who had encouraged the mother to keep quiet, which obviously was her right, and whether he had advised the boy to do the same. That would soon be seen.
It was a given that Oswaldsson would sit in and assist Andreas. If the outcome of that interview was the same, they would be forced to release Andreas, which the attorney very nicely pointed out.
Thirty-three
The afternoon meeting, called by Ottosson and the prosecutors Fritzén and Hällström to summarize the investigation of the murder of Bo Gränsberg and subsequent events, Ingegerd Melander’s death, and the murder of Jeremias Kumlin, was a long, trying sitting. It was Friday and everyone had been working intensively the whole week, the majority with hours of overtime. The force was decimated by illness and vacation, and the investigation had swelled out to almost unsurveyable proportions. So despite the widespread fatigue, a summary was needed.
Ottosson had Sammy Nilsson make a chart on the whiteboard, with photos of those involved and brief information below each. Arrows ran across the board in an intricate system, not entirely clear to everyone, pointing to connections between those involved, established links indicated with solid lines, and others with dotted lines. Question marks, written in red, were abundant.
The given question was: Were they dealing with the same murderer where Gränsberg and Kumlin were concerned?
It was not obvious. The only known link that existed between them was a twenty-year-old photo. Henrietta Kumlin had never heard the name Bo Gränsberg. When she and Jeremias met, he had just finished his bandy career. She said that later they went to a few Sirius parties, including an anniversary dinner, but could not recall more than a handful of names, and Gränsberg was not one of them.
She could not identify him on a photo either, either in the group photo or pictures taken later.
“So did she recognize the journalist, that Brant?” Riis asked.
Sammy Nilsson shook his head.
“Where the hell is he?”
Sammy Nilsson looked at Riis, who had a talent for letting every question sound like an insult or an accusation.
“In Brazil,” he said, smiling.
“A fucking Nazi,” Riis exclaimed, whose line of thought was not always easy to follow, but Sammy Nilsson and most of the others understood that he was thinking of the many Nazis who fled to South America in the final stages of or after the Second World War. “What the hell is he doing there?“
“That’s less interesting,” said Sammy. “I think we can remove him from the investigation. He met Bo Gränsberg in his work. Brant is writing a book about homeless people in different countries, and it was in that connection he visited Gränsberg. They knew each other from before. The notebook we found in Gränsberg’s shed that he got from Brant was to write down some of his experiences.”
“How the hell do you know that? Have you talked with Brant?”
“No,” said Sammy Nilsson.
“You, Haver?” Riis continued, turning around.
Ola Haver, whose task had been to trace Anders Brant and who to the surprise of everyone except Ottosson had returned to work that morning, shook his head.
He looked so miserable that even Riis thought it a good idea to leave him alone.
Sammy Nilsson seized the opportunity, giving Ottosson a quick glance before continuing, hoping that Riis would let go of Brant.
“Then we have the question of Henrietta’s absolutely certain assertion that the ‘fence man’ was Russian.”
“Do we know what her husband was working on right now?” asked the prosecutor, Fritzén.
“Not entirely, and perhaps we’ll never know,” Fredriksson interjected.
He was the one, along with Olof Myhre at the financial crimes unit, who had taken on Kumlin’s business activities.
“Jeremias Kumlin owned several companies, some on his own, some with Russian partners, among them this Oleg Fedotov, and almost all of them concerned gas and oil. There are a few exceptions and those involve surveillance systems and alarms. It’s impossible to speculate about what was worrying Kumlin. It’s a tangle of companies, and for that reason there are any number of conceivable explanations,” Fredriksson summarized his and Myhre’s impressions.