It was handwritten and lacked a signature, but Lindell immediately had the impression it was written by a man. She read it. Bea appeared behind her.
“What does it say?”
“It is basically a threat,” Lindell said. “Some unresolved affair that needs to be corrected, according to the writer.”
“No envelope?” she called out to Morgansson.
“Not yet,” he called back from the room next to the kitchen.
“We don’t know who wrote it, not even if Andersson was the recipient.”
“He may be the person who wrote it,” Bea said.
“That’s easy to check,” Lindell said. “What do you think?”
“ ‘Make sure you pay up otherwise you’ll be sorry,’” Bea read again.
Lindell sighed.
“You pay,” she mumbled.
“The writer of the letter has apparently been waiting a few years,” Bea said, “and now he wants to be paid for something.”
“No dates, nothing really,” Lindell said, disappointed. “It can have been in the drawer for the past ten years.”
“Then why save the letter?”
“You know how people are.”
Bea read the letter again.
“What about this,” she said and read out loud:“ ‘When I heard that you sold I thought you were finally going to pay me.’ What was it he sold?”
“The farm, maybe,” Lindell threw out, “or the land. It has to be some bigger thing, it can hardly be a tractor or such like.”
“Can Andersson have written this to Petrus Blomgren? Didn’t he sell his land? And then it wasn’t recorded?”
“Far-fetched,” Lindell said.
“But we’re looking for connections,” Bea said eagerly. “Think about it, an older farmer doesn’t have so many dealings, it’s normally about farms and land, leases and the like.”
“Our farming expert has just left,” Lindell said.
“Blomgren owes money to Andersson, who doesn’t get paid. Anders-son kills Blomgren and then…”
“And then… Blomgren hits back,” Lindell said. “The problem is that he’s dead.”
“That suicide letter, that could have had something to do with this. He wrote something about not doing things as he should have.”
“We’ll have to check the handwriting first,” Lindell decided, “and check with the relative that’s supposed to exist. The neighbor said something about there being a niece who sometimes visits. She may know what this is all about. Maybe it’s an old story that we’ll be able to rule out.”
It had gotten dark by the time they were ready to leave Jan-Elis Andersson’s farm. Everyone was taciturn and in the faint light from the outside lamp Lindell saw how exhausted everyone was.
She took a last swing around the house, like she usually did.
Fredriksson and Bea drove away. They had loaded up the car with boxes of old papers and letters, tax returns, insurance papers, and bookkeeping from the time that Andersson had been an active farmer.
Berglund, who had come out during the course of the afternoon, hung around. He had, together with a few others from the patrol squad, gone over the various sheds and outhouses with a fine-toothed comb. The old police officer stood thoughtfully by the freestanding garage. He pulled the door shut behind him, looked at Lindell, and walked over to her.
“I’m not crazy about the dark,” he said.
Lindell nodded. They stood side by side and summed up their observations in silence. Or that was what Lindell thought Berglund was doing. She herself was thinking of Erik, who had been picked up at day care by the parents of his best friend. It was a solution that worked. Erik did not object, but Ann felt guilty. She wasn’t like the other mothers.
“Should we mosey along?”
“You’re the only one I know who says that,” Lindell said.
“It’s from my grandfather,” Berglund said. “He lived like this, exactly like Andersson, though he wasn’t really a farmer. He didn’t get around much but he was a devil with horses. Have you seen that movie about the guy who could talk to horses?”
“No, I missed that one. I rarely go to the movies.”
“Is that so?” Berglund said with a mocking smile. “In any case, we went to that one. I thought it was going to be something, but it was shit.”
“It’s often that way with films,” Lindell said.
“Granddad would have done it better.”
“How did you know I went to the movies last night?”
“Hultgren saw you,” Berglund said, “and you know how he is.”
Lindell went to pick up Erik. It still felt strange to leave her colleagues in the middle of a murder investigation. She knew that the others would stay down at the station in order to organize the material, look up databases, contact people, and do everything else that was part of the inner investigation.
She wanted to be there too, in the middle of the activity. Ottosson had brought it up as soon as she returned from maternity leave, that he didn’t want her turning up at the station at all hours, that he wanted her to focus properly on herself and Erik. Ann Lindell had tried to joke it away but Ottosson had been firm. She sensed, from the way he formulated it that he didn’t want her to repeat his own mistakes.
She played with the thought of letting Erik stay at his friend’s place for a few hours-after all, this was a murder and it was only the shame of calling and asking the parents that prevented her from going back to Salagatan.
When Erik had fallen asleep Ann Lindell turned off all the electric lights in the apartment and lit a couple of candles that she put out on the table in the living room. A glass of Portuguese wine was already out there, half empty.
A cozy evening at home, she thought, chuckled, and pulled her legs up under her. The silence was deafening. Sund, one of the few neighbors that Ann Lindell had a fairly regular contact with, had popped in with a construction set for Erik. He had bought it on sale, or so he claimed. Ann had the feeling it had not been inexpensive. It was an airplane. As usual, the neighbor had overestimated Erik’s abilities. He was simply too young for Sund’s gifts but Ann was touched by his thoughtfulness.
They sat at the kitchen table for a while and talked. Sund’s car, a more than forty-year-old Ford Anglia, was completely worn out. Sund was of two minds about what to do. Ann Lindell advised him to have the car repaired. The neighborhood would not be the same if the “Black Pearl” disappeared from the parking lot.
After about an hour, when it was Erik’s bedtime, Sund had reluctantly said good-bye and gone home. The faint smell of pomade lingered in the apartment. She had come to realize there was some talk in the building regarding Sund’s old-fashioned attentions toward Ann, an older man’s concern for the single woman some thirty years his junior, and some had taken to calling him Sick-a play on Sund, which means healthy-but for her it was a source of joy. She had never noticed anything unhealthy in her neighbor. Quite the opposite. He was just thoughtful and a little lonely.
She thought about Sund and from there it was not far to Petrus Blomgren and Jan-Elis Andersson. Men, lonely men around seventy. Those times she had visited her neighbor she had been struck by how the loneliness shone in the orderly home. Everything was clean and nice, everything in its place, perhaps a touch pedantic. The coffee cup always in the same place on the counter, placed on a small crocheted pad, ready to be used, carefully washed and returned to the cloth after the coffee break was over.
Well-ordered but very lonely. This was also true of the two retired farmers. What had Sund worked with? Ann recalled that he had talked about office work, maybe at the mustard factory, since Sund had talked a lot about the “pickle plant,” as it was called. Had he been married? There was so little she knew of his life. Sund talked mainly about the here and now and his plans for the short term.
Had Blomgren and Andersson had any relationships? This did not immediately communicate itself from their homes and none of those who had been questioned so far had said anything. But back in the day there must have been some love in both of the farmers’ lives. Somewhere perhaps there was a woman who remembered her love for Petrus Blomgren. Maybe there would be someone who would shed a tear when she opened the newspaper tomorrow morning and read that Jan-Elis Andersson had been murdered in his home in Norr-Ededy village, Alsike.