Fifty-five years, she thought, leaned her head back, and fell asleep at once with the glass in her hand.
Fourteen
If he let go of the tabletop he would fall. He ought to open his eyes, that would alleviate it, but it was as if such a simple thing, raising two eyelids, was associated with a kind of uncertainty, perhaps fear. There was a pressure over his body, his legs felt like poles, his head was heavy as lead, and fear was coiling like snakes around his body.
I’ll have to stand here until the end of time, he thought. Once he had seen a petrified human. The man’s joints were stiff, the face immobile as a wooden mask, and the body cold and shiny like the belly of an oribi, the fish that played in the river below his house every spring. The man’s wife said that at night he talked in words that no one understood. A strange language had crept into him and that was what frightened the villagers most. She left the village shortly after and went to live with one of her brothers. She did not want to be infected, and that was an argument that most understood and accepted. The man died after a few months. Later he became a story that made its way through the valley, in which his nighttime talk took on a different meaning, that it was God who was speaking through him. His wife was depicted as an evil woman who had abandoned her husband in a difficult time.
So fall or become petrified? That was his choice. He chose to fall. He let go and collapsed like a high-rise that had been primed with dynamite and then exploded.
A wave of relief washed away the fear. His one shoulder took a blow when it hit the floor but it did not hurt especially. Maybe the pain would come later. But the fear was gone, that was the main thing.
He dragged himself up onto all fours. He was thoroughly intoxicated, as drunk as he had been in decades. Yet his thoughts came to him as clear as crystal. He thought about how the associate professor had scolded him, and what shame he felt. He had abused the hospitality by trying to make himself important. A dreadful failure.
He tipped over and remained sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him. All in all, I’m a failed character, he thought, and at the same moment he became angry at himself for his self-pity.
He tried to think about the planting he had to complete. A few white azaleas were not to be found so late in the season, so instead he would have to be content with the rhododendron, three Cunningham’s White, which he got for half price. But it was a vain attempt. The thoughts of Ohler constantly returned.
He wanted to throw one more stone, and another. His joking mention of a catapult was not just loose talk. He wanted to besiege the big house, drive the professor out into the light, exposed, ridiculed.
“Get up!”
The words were intended to be forceful but were heard mostly as an exhausted sigh, and he sneered.
He had seen the professor on the TV news and that had triggered the reaction to mix a toddy, something he seldom did. Unaccustomed as he was, a few glasses of the rum he had bought during his most recent visit in Germany had been enough to get him thoroughly intoxicated.
I’ll kill the bastard, was his last thought before he tipped over and remained lying there.
Fifteen
“Death threats?” Ottosson exclaimed. “That’s going a bit far.”
“That’s how he understands it all,” said Allan Fredriksson, scratching the back of his head for the third time.
“Do you have lice?” asked Sammy Nilsson.
Ann Lindell grinned and scratched herself in a motion that was supposed to resemble a monkey. This happened behind Fredriksson’s back but he whirled around, as if he sensed that some mischief was going on.
“Nice, very entertaining,” he said sarcastically.
Lindell gave him a nudge in the side.
“Okay,” she said, “a skull in the mailbox.”
“Plus a stone thrown the other day,” said Fredriksson, waving a piece of paper. “And then quite a few articles in the newspaper. Today the Uppsala paper had something and evidently Aktuellt ran a feature yesterday.”
“But death threats?” said Ottosson again.
It was noticeable that he wanted to set the whole thing aside, send the case right back to the uniformed police.
“Wohlin is very definite,” Fredriksson continued. “This is still a Nobel Prize winner, an aristocratic professor we’re dealing with.”
Agne Wohlin had the title of superintendent and was a new star at the Uppsala Police Department. No one liked him, as you instinctively disliked newcomers, superintendents, and people from Dalsland. This last item Sammy Nilsson had added, no one really understood why. He had never spoken badly about Dalslanders before. There were no doubt few at Homicide who knew anyone from Dalsland, or could even point out the province on a map.
“This is a case for the uniformed police,” said Sammy. “They can post a couple of bluecoats there, then it will be calm.”
“Wohlin wants us to investigate the threat pattern.”
“Something for SePo,” Sammy attempted.
“Us,” Fredriksson repeated.
Not me, thought Lindell, but that was exactly what Ottosson decided.
“Ann, you can handle the poor folks in Kåbo, drive out there and talk with the old man.”
“But don’t go down in the cellar,” said Fredriksson.
A number of years earlier Ann Lindell had investigated a series of murders in the countryside outside Uppsala and then had reason to visit a villa in Kåbo, a visit that almost cost her her life. Since then she had not set foot in the area.
“I suppose it’s the same block?”
“Don’t think so,” said Fredriksson, “although it is the same street.”
Both of them seemed strangely unaware of the effect the talk about Kåbo had on her. Perhaps they thought she had left it behind her, but sometimes she still woke up at night, drenched in sweat, in her dreams transported back to a burning inferno.
Sammy put an arm around her shoulders.
“I’ll go along,” he said, pulling her away from a nodding Ottosson and a wildly scratching Fredriksson.
“What the hell can it be?” was the last thing Lindell heard Fredriksson say.
“Something is rotten in Denmark,” Sammy observed in the elevator going down.
Lindell did not bother to ask what he meant. The whole morning had been slightly absurd. If she was to ask about everything she thought was strange she would not get anything else done.
Lindell assumed that the professor did not want uniformed police officers running around in his home, but still! It would be enough if Superintendent Wohlin went there himself, presented all his credentials in his most charming Dalarna dialect, and calmed the old man down, then everything would work out for the best.
“Was it Dalarna?”
“Dalsland,” said Sammy.
As they drove out of the garage and up onto the Råby highway she told about her nightmare, which included everything from scratching rats and rotting corpses to smoke and consuming fire. She had not even talked about this with Brant, even though he was the one who was occasionally subjected to her nocturnal anxiety.
She realized while she was talking that she was being subjected to Ottosson’s solicitude; for therapeutic reasons he simply wanted her to be confronted with the sight of the imposing villas and relive the events from that time, thinking that this would get her started, get her to talk. And it had succeeded beyond all expectations. She unburdened her mind, put words to the torments even before they arrived in Kåbo.