“Have there been threatening phone calls too?”
“Not that I know,” said Agnes, and for the first time during the conversation she looked a trifle uncertain.
“You haven’t noticed anything unusual recently?”
Agnes shook her head. Just then it occurred to her what made Agnes Andersson so familiar. It was the dialect she didn’t really manage to conceal. Fifty-five years in Uppsala had rubbed off most of it but like a shadow from the past the Gräsö dialect was there.
“You weren’t born in Uppsala, were you?”
“Gräsö,” said Agnes.
Lindell wanted to ask if she knew Viola, but refrained. Obviously she knew Viola, probably everyone did on Gräsö, just like everyone knew, or knew of, Munkargrundarn and other features on the island.
Viola, whom she had gotten to know through Edvard Risberg, the man she met during a murder investigation ten years ago. He had gotten a divorce, moved to Gräsö, rented the top floor of Viola’s old archipelago homestead, and he and Ann had started a relationship. Later, when she got pregnant with another man, the relationship fell apart. The biggest mistake of her life, she might think, always with a bad conscience, as her son Erik was her great joy. But Erik would have been Edvard’s too, that was a thought Ann could not let go of and suffered from. One night’s lack of judgment and she was punished by losing the man she loved so deeply.
She knew that she would never experience that passion again. Edvard was there like a thorn in her heart. She had talked with Anders Brant about him, but always in that relaxed way you are expected to do where old relationships are concerned. Perhaps he understood anyway that he could never fully replace Edvard?
Reminded about Viola by Agnes’s dialect, however faint, was to travel along a painful path. It was like looking out through a train window and reliving a beautiful, familiar landscape but not being given the opportunity to stop and get out and experience it close up once again. She would never be able to sleep with Edvard again. Never feel him cuddle up next to her. Never hear Viola rummaging in the kitchen on the ground floor, making morning coffee and sandwiches for her and Edvard.
Agnes was observing her. Ann felt caught and made an effort to come back to the present.
“Can you imagine anyone who wishes the professor harm?”
“That would be Bunde then, the neighbor,” said Agnes, tossing her head. “He’s the one who has an article in Upsala Nya today. The associate professor, he lives one house over, is probably not too pleased with the professor, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s a man of peace. He’s the one who has the high tower you see. He grows olives and a lot of other things.”
Ann turned her head and through the window she glimpsed a glass cupola. She knew that the associate professor had been a colleague of Bertram von Ohler. The professor had pointed out the associate professor as the instigator of the article in the newspaper, and that although Torben Bunde wrote it, that did not affect the matter. The associate professor was surely behind the skull in the mailbox too, Ohler thought.
Lindell had not read the article that Agnes was talking about, not even noticed it when she quickly leafed through the newspaper that morning. It was Göte Bengtsson who mentioned it and said that it actually did not add anything new, and was more an account of what was being said in Germany and other places. Bunde was well informed according to Bengtsson and unusually temperate, but could not keep from slipping in a few spiteful remarks in the last paragraph about what a duck pond Sweden was, and in an ingenious way Bunde made Professor von Ohler a victim of provincial narrow-mindedness. Being known at a regional hospital in Sweden does not necessarily mean that you should be rewarded with the Nobel Prize, he had concluded.
Bengtsson had pointed out where the author of the article lived and Ann Lindell had on several occasions seen a face visible in the windows.
“A real wasp’s nest,” she let out.
Agnes smiled carefully.
“And then we have the Germans,” she continued, and Lindell saw how the old woman was becoming increasingly exhilarated, her eyes glistened, her hands came up from the table and she underscored each word with cautious gestures.
“The Germans have never liked the professor. And vice versa.”
She told about the article that had been published in some German magazine and how the professor had become hopping mad, first carrying on “like a brigand,” then collapsing on the library couch, stunned and silent, barely responsive.
“I was worried for a while, thought about calling his daughter. He is an old man after all and his heart can give out at any time.”
Lindell nodded as if she completely understood Agnes’s analysis.
“But perhaps Birgitta would make everything worse,” said Agnes in a gruff voice.
There was something of Viola in the woman. Perhaps some kind of female Gräsö gene? The thought amused Lindell and she smiled carefully.
“There are two sons too, I’ve understood.”
Agnes smacked her lips.
“Abraham and Carl,” she said. “I watched them grow up. I shined their shoes.”
Lindell let the words sink in before she continued.
“Perhaps you’ll think I’m impertinent, but what is he like as an employer?”
“I take care of myself,” said Agnes.
“But the professor too, right?”
“That may be,” Agnes replied, and Lindell did not know what she should believe, whether the gruffness was directed at her or at the professor.
She heard voices from the yard and thought she could identify Sammy’s, but was not sure.
“I should thank you,” she said.
“It was nothing,” said Agnes, getting up.
Lindell did the same. They remained standing a moment on each side of the table.
“I’ll use the kitchen exit, like my associate. Maybe I can take a few apples?”
Agnes rounded the table, opened a drawer, and took out a plastic bag which she gave to Lindell.
“You probably know that Viola is not well,” Agnes said suddenly, when Lindell was standing with her hand on the doorknob.
She stared at Agnes.
“How did you know-”
“My sister Greta keeps track of everything,” Agnes explained.
“You knew that I-”
“You’re the police officer from Uppsala who associated with Edvard, yes. I recognized your name. I’ve known Viola my whole life. I’ve met Edvard too. A good person.”
Lindell bowed her head and got an impulse to hide her face with the plastic bag.
“She’s very weak,” said Agnes. “Greta went to see her yesterday. Viola doesn’t want to go to the hospital. Edvard will be with her. He’s like a son.”
Lindell nodded, incapable of saying anything.
“I’ll call Greta and tell her that you send greetings to Viola,” Agnes decided.
“Thanks,” whispered Lindell. “I didn’t know.”
She opened the door and stepped out into the garden. The wind took hold of the plastic bag and it fluttered away before it got stuck on a branch.
Lindell saw Sammy Nilsson standing by the boundary of the lot talking with a man in the neighboring yard. Laughter was heard. It was Sammy’s specialty, easy talk while at the same time taking in a little information.
Ann pulled down the bag, hesitated before the various apples. There were yellow-green oblong ones, another variety was bright red, while a third was blotchy and vaguely conical. She was enticed by the red ones, reached out and picked a few.
She filled the whole bag with a mixture of each variety, before she stopped. She was actually at work and was surely being observed by the neighbors. She set down the bag, leaning it against a trunk, and went over to Sammy.
The man he was conversing with was red-cheeked and actually somewhat red-eyed too. Lindell suspected that it was because the wind on this side of the house was blowing firmly.