“The car, what color?” Lindell shouted and Berglund realized the man was hard of hearing.
“Red, I think or… maybe… a little thing in any case…”
Berglund walked out. The man was still hesitating. Lindell was patiently waiting for a continuation but instead it was the woman who spoke.
“It was blue,” she said firmly. “One of those that Agnes has.”
“No, no!” the man yelled. “They have one of those Japanese.”
Berglund turned away, walked around the corner, and kept going aimlessly. He heard the waffling continue. He knew he would be getting a report on this before long.
All at once Berglund was gripped by an anger that almost made him return to the woolly-headed witness, take hold of him, and shake him until he could at the very least decide what color the car was. “The color, for the love of God! Is it so damn hard to remember a color!” he wanted to scream so even a person hard of hearing could understand.
It was a surprising, unfamiliar feeling for Berglund, who was otherwise quite timid in his interactions with others.
I need a holiday, he thought, and remembered, not without some bitterness, how he had bumped into a smiling Riis in the city the other week. Riis was on sick leave because of vague abdominal pains. A load of shit, Berglund had thought uncharitably when he heard the colleague’s friendly chatter about a boat he had bought for a good price and was renovating. That bastard is healthy as a horse.
Now the thoughts of Riis returned. A boat. Sure, don’t we all have something we would like to buy cheap and fix up?
But what would he do with a holiday? What would he do?
A car came down the small road to the stables. It was Sammy Nilsson. Berglund raised his hand in greeting, walked with rapid steps even farther away from the crime scene, and sat down on a rock at the edge of the forest. He knew that a few minutes alone could cure him-at least temporarily-of the paralysis of hopelessness.
Twenty-three
She couldn’t stop shaking. Never had she experienced such inner fire, it was as if her blood were heated to its boiling point and ran through frozen veins to muscle tissue of ice. The pain pulsated through arms and legs, creating an almost freezing chill that resisted all willful movement.
The blankets and covers didn’t help. Laura tensed her body in an arc in order to force away the evil that had possessed her but her body did not obey, only curling up and transforming her into a shivering bundle.
In her distress she let everything be, let go, and sank into a river of confused images and memories. The fever chills ebbed away and she could passively float along. Then she was caught up in a whirling anxiety, was washed up on rocks whose sharp edges razed her limbs.
Under half shut lids she glimpsed a shoreline of moss-covered stones, a clump of reeds here and there, and small, rickety docks, sunk down in the mud, that looked as if they had been abandoned for a long time.
She passed a deserted country without human life. She was caught in a river that rushed by more strongly. In the distance she heard a waterfall. The water became rapidly more shallow, there were more rocks on the bottom, and she was helplessly bumped between the white cliffs that now replaced the bands of reeds and abundant meadows.
The current was stronger than before and the thundering noise was overpowering. She came to her senses and just before the falls she was washed onto, or rather thrown onto, a cobblestone beach. She was blinded by a strong light, realized the stones were made of pure gold, and caught sight of a plaque with an ornately inscribed text in Latin. Before she sank into unconsciousness she read the inscription aloud to herself but could not make any sense of the words.
Laura Hindersten woke up with the taste of blood in her mouth. Her lips were chewed up and her thighs scratched by nails.
A thick layer of dried sweat covered her thin body and she was cold, but now in a more human way than before. The blankets were on the ground and she reached down and pulled them up again.
The fever dreams lingered in her consciousness like a veil of mist over a deserted landscape. In her memory she looked for the source of her nightmare, because it was certainly somewhere in the literature. She was, after all, Ulrik Hindersten’s daughter. But she found nothing. This was her own river journey.
Ulrik would have loved the story and would have encouraged her to write it down, but she only wanted to bury the nightmare in forgetfulness.
After an hour she got up and, wrapped in a blanket, walked to the bathroom on unsteady legs. She knew what had to be done. The visit of the woman from the police had shaken her more than she first had realized. There was something in Ann Lindell’s gaze that bothered her, as if she had grasped more than she had let show.
But mostly it was Lindell’s ease that worried Laura, who had found herself during the conversation enjoying her time with the policewoman. She liked her voice, her slightly careful movements, and the little smile that was so well suited to self-irony.
Laura did not want to be disarmed by conversation. She feared the friendly words that could at any moment be transformed into their opposite.
She had been deceived so many times, had paid friendship premiums which, when the insurance policy matured, turned out to contain nothing but unpaid deductibles. Now was another time-the time of freedom- and no police officer in the world, however well-meaning she seemed, was going to be allowed to alter Laura’s plans.
A couple of days, then she would conquer that little restaurant by the sea. A small pub, whose crooked doors never closed properly, with one table that leaned worryingly and where the staff never asked if you wanted the check. An establishment that at the next severe fall storm risked being pulled out to sea and churned into firewood.
This pub existed. Laura knew it. She had seen it once.
Twenty-four
Gusten Ander had no blood ties to the infamous murderer, the one who was the last man to be executed in Sweden. The fact that they shared the same name was something that Ander had had pointed out to him many times, but more so before. Now it was rare that anyone joked about his name. It was because of the worsening school system, he believed, or because oral storytelling traditions had changed. One hundred years ago the hunt for Alfred Ander and the dramatic execution was the climax of a thrilling tale. Now it was everyday fare. Who reacted if someone was executed? That happened on TV every day.
Therefore he was amazed when his young opponent, after some hesitation, posed the question. Gusten Ander smiled enigmatically and continued setting up his pieces.
“Could be,” he said after a while.
The young man, Tobias Sandström, who Ander judged to be about nineteen years, gave him a quick glance, dropped the black queen on the floor, and blushed.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“I’m amazed you’ve heard the story.”
“We read about it at school and of course it’s a pretty exciting thing,” Tobias said and overturned both of Ander’s theories in one blow.
“White or black, that is the question,” he said and held out both hands.
Tobias pointed to the right one and got black. Ander made a move immediately and Tobias started by thinking and that made Ander thoughtful in turn. Is it really so much to think about? he thought irritably.
Then Tobias made his move and Ander countered at once.
“Are you new to the club?” Ander asked and broke one of his own principles: never to begin a personal conversation during a game.
Tobias nodded and moved.
“Recently moved,” he said curtly, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes.
Ander smiled quietly to himself and made his move.
The unexpected attack came at the eleventh move. But perhaps it wasn’t so unexpected, Ander had seen almost everything, but the way in which the young player proceeded bewildered Ander for several moments.