“It was here,” said Yngve Sandman, pointing. “I was on my moped and they were walking there, on the other side of the road.”
Lindell looked at him.
“So they were walking on the wrong side,” Lindell observed, as if that were significant. “You were on a moped?”
“Yes, I collect mopeds and was out test-driving an old Puch. It’s older than me. It doesn’t go fast and I was able to get a good look at them.”
“Tell me how they were walking, what they looked like and that.”
“She was walking closest to the road. They weren’t walking particularly fast, didn’t look stressed. But they didn’t seem to be talking with each other, not right when I encountered them anyway.”
“How did the girl seem?”
Yngve Sandman shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, what should I say? I thought she was pretty, if you know what I mean.”
Lindell nodded.
“Did you get the impression that they knew each other? She didn’t look scared or anything?”
“Well, two friends out walking, that’s what it looked like. But actually you can be afraid of a friend too.”
“How were they dressed?”
“I’ve told you that, first in April and then yesterday to you.”
“Tell me again.”
“She had dark-green pants, almost looked military with a couple of pockets in front on the hip, and a light-blue jacket. Pretty short, I thought, it was cold that day. I didn’t think about her shoes, if I had to guess they were black, some kind of boots.”
Mr. Sandman guesses right, thought Lindell. Klara Lovisa had on a pair of short, black boots the day she disappeared.
“And him?”
“Blue jeans and a jacket with a hood, which he had pulled up. It was dark, maybe blue. Workout clothes, I think.”
“What did he look like?”
Suddenly the sky darkened and they looked up. A dark cloud passed quickly and the sun was hidden for a few moments.
“Around twenty-five, maybe younger,” said Sandman, as the sun returned. “Light hair, but the hood concealed most of his head.”
“Glasses?”
The man shook his head. He looked away along the road.
“I got the sense that he was walking a little funny, but that may be because he was walking halfway in the ditch, if you know what I mean?”
“Was he limping?”
“No, not exactly, but in some way…”
They stood quietly a moment.
“I have a daughter myself,” he said. “If she disappeared, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Lindell. “It’s too awful.”
“Does she have any siblings?”
“No.”
He shook his head and stood quietly a moment.
“Looks like rain,” he said, as another threatening black cloud drew past.
“Did you drive back the same way?”
“Yes, I turned up at Route 72. Although I stopped there awhile and adjusted the moped. It was running a little shaky and I had to tighten a brake wire.”
“How long did it take before you came past here again?”
“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”
“And then the two of them were gone?”
“Yes, not a soul on the road.”
“What time of day did you see them?”
“Around eleven thirty.”
Klara Lovisa had left home on Saturday the twenty-eighth of April one hour earlier. Lindell looked around. Fields, a few houses, a narrow country road that made its way down toward the valley. She had driven this way perhaps a dozen times. What was Klara Lovisa doing here? What was the likelihood that she was the one Yngve Sandman had seen? And who was the young man?
Klara Lovisa did not have a boyfriend, not officially anyway. Her girlfriends had spoken about an Andreas, whom she had dated since seventh grade, but he had been removed from the investigation long ago. The day of her disappearance he had been in Gävle with his mother.
Could the young man by her side be an unknown admirer, someone she was acquainted with, or in any event recognized? It seemed as if she had been walking on the road voluntarily. If this was even Klara Lovisa.
Sandman was her last straw. He seemed lucid and not someone who was only trying to get attention. She cursed the unknown associate who had neglected the early information. Then the observation was close to fresh, now almost two months had passed.
Ann Lindell decided to use the folder she had already put in order during the first week of the investigation.
“I want you to look at some photographs of young girls.”
“I see,” he said, not seeming particularly engaged.
Lindell browsed a little back and forth, held out the first photo. He shook his head. There was a similar reaction to photos number two, three, and four. At the fifth photo he lingered a little before shaking his head. He firmly rejected girls six, seven, and eight, and all the others that followed.
“Then we have the nineteenth and final picture,” said Lindell.
“It looks like a parade of Lucia candidates,” he said. “But I didn’t see any of them here.”
“Certain?”
Sandman nodded immediately. Lindell took out the twentieth picture, which she had left sitting in the folder.
“That’s her,” he said immediately.
He did not need to say anything because as he was looking at Klara Lovisa he took a deep breath and made a gesture with his hand as if to illustrate that it was here on the road he had seen her.
“It’s her,” he repeated. “Poor girl.”
Lindell was not convinced. Sandman may very well have recognized the picture from the newspaper, but it reinforced her impression that he was not a crackpot. All too often the “customer” was so eager to please that he, for some reason less often she, would do everything at a confrontation to “recognize” someone, perhaps not point out anyone definitively but still show some hesitation, as if it were impolite to consistently be a naysayer. He had denied any recognition, including the one he believed was the last picture.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’ve been a very big help.”
Yngve Sandman looked almost helpless.
They walked back toward the parked cars. There they remained standing awhile in silence. The sun once again broke through the clouds. It was like a staged alternation between shadow and sun, which in turns let the landscape, the stony meadowland up toward the forest, and the fields with the spiky corn on the other side of the road, bathe in light, and then be swept into a slightly mysterious darkness.
“The human factor,” he said at last.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not allowed to happen in my work. I mean, when I called you the first time someone dropped the ball, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
Lindell could not help but nod.
“Then perhaps she was still alive?”
“Yes, that’s how it is,” Lindell admitted. “Then we would have been in a better situation.”
“And her parents too, even if…”
Yngve Sandman looked down at the roadside. By his feet a dandelion was growing. He kicked at it so that the yellow flower was separated from the stalk.
“I live up there on the rise,” he said without prompting, and pointed. “You don’t see the house but it’s behind there. It’s a nice house, paid for. I live almost for free. The children have moved out. I get by. I tinker with my mopeds. The woods are full of berries and mushrooms.”
Lindell looked in the direction he was pointing. An area as good as any, she thought. She had a vague memory that once she had picked mushrooms in the vicinity, but maybe it was on the other side of Route 72.
“Stina left a few years ago.”
He said it without bitterness, just a statement. And he smiled.
“How many kids do you have?”
“Two. And you?”
“A boy,” said Lindell. “He’ll start school in the fall.”
“I was early,” he said. “I have a windmill on the lot,” he said with unexpected eagerness. “It’s really ugly but it was my dad who built it. I mean, if you were to come by, you’ll see the windmill.”