“A creature of habit.”
“A man of order,” Haver said.
“Who couldn’t get his life in order,” Lindell said and walked over to the window. “How old is the tree?”
“At least a hundred years,” Haver said, a bit impatient with Lindell’s reflective mood, but well aware of the fact that there was no sense in hurrying her. It wouldn’t make any difference to Blomgren anyway.
“Do you think it’s a robbery-homicide?” Lindell asked suddenly. “Was he one of those old men with his dresser drawer full of cash?”
“In that case the thief knew where to look,” Haver said. “The technicians say that nothing appears to be disturbed.”
“Did he know that Blomgren was on his way to the barn? That’s a barn, isn’t it?”
Haver nodded.
“Or was he hiding in there and taken by surprise when the old man walked in with a rope in his hand?”
“We’ll have to check with the neighbor,” Haver said. “She seems to be the kind who keeps tabs.”
They both knew that Beatrice Andersson was the most suited to handle the questioning of the neighbor. If there was anything Bea excelled at, it was talking to older women.
“Who stands to inherit?”
Sammy Nilsson’s question broke the silence that had settled in the kitchen. He had come creeping in without either Haver or Lindell noticing.
Haver didn’t say anything but gave him a look that was difficult to interpret.
“Am I interrupting?” Sammy asked.
“Not at all,” Lindell said.
“Let’s hope for a dead broke, desperate nephew,” Sammy continued. Lindell tried to smile.
“Look over by the bread box,” she said.
Sammy walked over to the kitchen counter and read the good-bye letter in a low mumble.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
A gust of wind underscored his words. Their gazes turned to the window. Outside a rain of leaves whirled from the tree to the ground. Lindell had the impression that the maple tree had decided to shake off all its leaves on this day.
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Sammy Nilsson said.
“I wonder how his thought process went last night,” Haver said.
“We’ll never know,” Sammy said and read the letter one more time.
Lindell slipped away, entering the small room off the kitchen. If she had been forced to guess what it would look like she would have scored a nine out of ten. There was an old sleeper couch with dingy red upholstery, most likely from the thirties, and an armchair of the same color, a TV on a table with a marble top, a couple of chairs surrounding a small pillar table, and a bookcase. On the small sofa in front of the TV there was nothing except the remote control.
It was a very personal room in spite of its predictability. It gave Lindell the feeling of intimacy, perhaps because she sensed that Petrus Blomgren spent his evenings here alone. He must have favored the armchair; it was extremely worn and had threads coming out of the armrests.
She walked over to the bookcase, which was filled mainly with older books. She recognized a few of the titles from her parents’ house. They had a coating of dust. No one had touched these books in a long time.
The left part of the bookshelf had a small cabinet. The key was in the keyhole. She pulled the door open with a pen and on the two shelves inside she saw what she thought was a photo album and a book entitled The Uppland Horse Breeder’s Association.
Everything looked untouched. If this was a burglary-assault the perpetrator had been exceedingly careful.
“Allan will have to take a look at this,” she said, and turned in the direction of the kitchen. She got up and looked around but could not spot anything out of the ordinary.
“He’ll be here soon,” Sammy Nilsson said.
Haver had left the kitchen. Nilsson was staring out of the window. Lin-dell looked at him from her position diagonally behind him and discovered that he was starting to go bald on the back of the head. He looked unusually thoughtful. Half of his face was illuminated by the soft morning light and Lindell wished she had had a camera. She was gripped by a sudden feeling of tenderness for her colleague.
“What do you think about the new guy, Morgansson?”
“He seems all right,” Lindell said.
Charles Morgansson had been working in Forensics for a couple of weeks. He had joined them from Umeå, where he had been for the past few years. Eskil Ryde, the head of the Forensics Department, had installed Morgansson in the empty cubicle in their division and the northener had made a comment about it being like a row of boxes in the stables and had said little else since then. His reticence had irritated some, aroused the curiosity of others, but all in all the new recruit had acclimated well. This was his first homicide case in Uppsala.
“Have you heard anything of Ryde’s plans?”
“No,” Lindell said, who as recently as the other day had talked to Ryde about his plans of quitting the force and taking early retirement, but this was nothing she wanted to discuss with Sammy Nilsson.
“Anita thought his buns were cute,” Nilsson said.
“Whose buns?”
“Morgansson’s”
“Forget about his buns a while,” Lindell said flatly, “we have an investigation under way.”
“I was just trying to…”
“Forget it. Can you take the upstairs? I want to take a look around out there. Tell Allan to go over the TV room.”
The technicians Jönsson and Mårtensson had spent almost two hours going through the home. Now it was the detectives’ turn but Lin-dell was finding it hard to remain in Petrus Blomgren’s house. She couldn’t exactly put her finger on it but it was something more than the usual oppressiveness she felt in the homes of those who had fallen victim to deadly violence. Perhaps a little fresh air will help, she thought and walked out into the yard again.
The mercury strip had indicated negative five degrees Celsius this morning but now there was milder weather approaching. The period of unusual cold would be followed by a warm front and the end of October would be marked by more normal temperatures.
She turned the corner and came out of the wind. A couple of black currant bushes, with withered leaves and the occasional, dangling dried berry, reminded her of a time gone by. It was always this way when she came out to the countryside. All the little cabins, woodsheds, and woodpiles with bunched-up twigs and grass took her thoughts back to Gräsö Island. This was her punishment, or so she felt. She had to live with it; she knew that. Everyone carried some painful memories. This was hers.
She sighed heavily, plucked a berry that she popped in her mouth, and looked around. There was nothing of note to see: a handful of old apple trees, a bed of wilted flowers, and a rusty ladder hanging on the wall. She took a closer look at it and the mounting hardware. The ladder did not look as if it had been moved in years.
Behind the house there was a pile of rocks that stirred the imagination. Large stone blocks pushed up against each other as if engaged in a wrestling match. From having been enemies once upon a time they had now made their peace and-weighed down with age, covered with moss and lichen-had stiffened, exhausted in their struggle, leaning heavily against each other.
Petrus Blomgren had planted a tree near this rock pile. Lindell rubbed its smooth, striated trunk. A single chair had been left out under its thin crown. Lindell pictured him sitting there in the coolness of the rocks, pondering the decisions he had to make on his own. Wasn’t that what he had written, that he had to make all his decisions alone?
Where was the motive for killing an old man? Lindell stopped, took a deep breath, and drew out her newly acquired notebook. She was a little embarrassed about it. She had read a mystery novel over the summer, the first she had read in a number of years, and in it the protagonist had a notebook where he wrote down everything of interest. At first Lindell had thought it seemed silly, but after she finished reading she kept thinking about that notebook and so when it happened that she passed by a bookstore she had slunk in and bought a pad for thirty-two kronor. She always carried it with her now and she thought it had sharpened her thought processes, ennobled her as a police officer. Perhaps she was simply going with her gut here, but then, wasn’t that a part of police work? At any rate, the notebook had not made things go any worse.