She pushed her hand against her crotch as if to get in touch with herself, her body, and her desires.
Nine
Two words. No more. She sat up in bed. The blanket slid down and bared her shoulders and breasts. She looked around the dark room, for a few moments unusure of where she was.
Two words had been whispered by a familiar voice.
She listened but the house was completely quiet.
“You must.” The words uttered with determination, sternly commanding, but also in some way quite mild. She recalled that she, just before the rude awakening, had responded to the gentle, almost sensual undertone and that she had smiled in her dream. Had she not stretched out after him, been happy for his visit, whoever he was?
For a split second she had felt a great satisfaction. It was a promise. She let out a sob in bed. Sure, it was a promise of something, she sensed, was almost completely convinced of, something that would grant her the greatest happiness.
Thereafter came the threat for her. Behind the illusory tender atmosphere conjured by the voice there was the hard, on the verge of physically painful. “You must.” The voice contained no mercy.
Laura Hindersten pulled the blanket to her, slid out of the bed, and snuck over to the window, pulling the thick curtain to the side. It was still dark out there. The garden brooding as sorrowfully as ever.
Was he still in the house? The uncertainty made her take a couple of cautious steps, lean her ear toward the closed door, and breathlessly listen for the nighttime intruder.
Who was he? She tried to remember the details but the image of his face fluttered away like a veil of mist, dissolved, and disappeared. A warm smell came toward her, not at all unpleasant. It was the breath of the person who had stood leaning over her and who had pronounced the words with such authority and weight, certain that Laura would obey.
In vain she fished for signs of recognition in the muddy waters of her memory but the only thing she found was the feeling of a forceful power over her. And her own powerlessness.
She pushed the door open. Barefoot she fumbled her way over the cold wooden floor in the dim hall. She bumped against the telephone table, stopped, and listened. She thought she heard a car drive by on the street. I have nowhere to run to, she thought at once and the image of the little harbor restaurant from her daydream of the warm, foreign country appeared before her eyes. I have no valid passport to get me out of here. No ticket anywhere. Only a worn suitcase, with a sticker from Firenze, down in the basement.
A breeze swept up from the basement, a smell of raw clay and mold. She closed the protesting cellar door with care and turned the key.
With one hand clenching the blanket around her chest and the other trying to find a hold along the walls Laura felt her way around the large house. In the living room she saw herself for a moment in the large gold-framed mirror, like a shadow that flitted by in a landscape of giant bookcases, full of dust and tomes with texts that few knew or wanted to decipher, and thick draperies that closed around oak furniture, the chiffonier, the lead-heavy chairs with false decor and the pedestal table in the same grotesque style, cluttered with decades of withered knowledge.
In the kitchen she sat down on a chair. There was a knife on the table, a bag of grapes, and a chipped glass in the bottom of which some wine had dried into a dark spot.
She didn’t dare turn on the light. In the dirt-brown blanket that she had decided to throw away but that was her only protection right now, she had decided to await the sunrise.
She curled up, pulled the blanket more tightly around her, pulled her feet up on the chair and pressed her limbs against each other, let her hair become an extension of the blanket, closed her eyes, and stone by stone she reconstructed her inner being.
That which was true, the multitude of the Botanical Garden and the laughter that rose up from the uncountable grass blades, the raspy tongues of the cows and the butterfly in the panting flame of the hurricane lamp, she put aside in a safe place, out of reach of the world.
Laura Hindersten’s inner being was becoming petrified at the same pace as the day was dawning. Everything artificial pulverized and melted together into a massive piece of black shimmering diabase. For this, one needed a superhuman strength that was only possible under immense pressure and a minimal amount of oxygen.
To think a person can be this still, she thought. One doesn’t need to breathe in order to live.
Ten
The blows were delivered by a person in an uncontrollable rage.”
And what would you know about that, Ola Haver thought.
“At least that’s what I think,” the medical examiner added.
“Were there many blows?”
“Perhaps a half dozen or so. Clearly in excess of the situation. One, at most two would have been sufficient.”
Petrus Blomgren’s pale body lay on the examiner’s table like a shriveled radish. Göran Finn carefully peeled off his gloves. Haver stared at Petrus’s feet. It was obvious that they had been put to good use. They were crooked, with thick callouses and several deformed toenails on the right foot.
“Apart from that the old man was in perfect health,” Göran Finn said. “He could have lived twenty more years.”
Haver looked at the murdered man’s hands. They were of the same caliber as the feet.
“We believe he died almost at once, at about nine o’clock. He was bludgeoned in the back of the head, fell headlong, and as a bonus received several more blows. Traces of brain tissue were found on his neck, on his shirt, and even on his back. Fury, in other words.”
I wonder where he comes from, with that dialect, Haver thought.
“Was the killer…”
“… yes, he was probably right-handed, if that’s what you were wondering. That’s always the first question you ask,” the pathologist said with something that was supposed to pass for a smile.
“Are you from Skåne?”
The doctor did not reply, simply removed his coat, grabbed the tape recorder, and walked away from Haver.
“You’ll be receiving my report,” he said and disappeared out the door.
Haver was left with a corpse on a stainless steel counter. He looked at Petrus Blomgren again. In many ways he reminded Haver of his father, or what his father would have looked like if he had been allowed to live as long as Blomgren.
The investigation into the small-time farmer and carpenter Petrus Blomgren’s life had not yielded a single significant result, not even a detail that could stir up speculation or ideas.
Ola Haver walked once around the dead man. Seventy years of hard work, that’s how one could summarize his life. Raised in Jumkil, with “diligent” parents according to those in the area who remembered them, he had worked on the farm, at the mill, and in his final employed years as a carpenter and a kind of handyman on construction sites. The most recent employment could be traced to a couple of years at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties at a company called Nylander’s Construction and Cleaning, a modest operation whose owner had died about six years ago. Sigvard Nylander’s only child, a son about fifty years of age who lived in Uddevalla, couldn’t even remember Petrus Blomgren but in a phone conversation with Berglund he had said that there were usually three or four men hired on with his father’s firm at any one time and that in general they worked on renovations and other smaller projects.
After his years as a carpenter, Blomgren had jumped in as a seasonal worker during planting and harvesting, worked in the forest, thinning and felling trees, mostly on jobs close to home. Here it was even harder to get any details. Some of the forest owners-all farmers-had been vague. Some of them said they had used Blomgren’s help, others had denied it. Berglund thought they were afraid of the Tax Authorities. Blomgren had most likely been paid under the table.