Dorotea Svahn sighed.
“I’m afraid of getting old,” she said. “What will happen if my legs don’t carry me? I’m afraid of the silence. It will be…”
She looked down at the table.
“What a pity for such a fine man, to end like this.”
Dorotea wept silently. Beatrice held out her hand and placed it on top of the older woman’s. She looked up.
“It’s strange that something so terrible is needed to stir things up,” she said.
“Your son, where is he?”
“In town, but he travels a lot. Sometimes internationally.”
“When was he here last?”
“It was a while ago.”
“What kind of work does he do?”
“To be quite honest I don’t really know what it is. Something with medical technology. Or that’s what it was before.”
“Is he married?”
“Divorced. Mona-Lisa, his wife, was… well, she got tired of him.”
“Grandchildren?”
Dorotea shook her head.
“She had a child later. Afterward, I mean, long after. I think she is doing well.”
“Do you like her?”
“I have nothing against Mona-Lisa,” Dorotea said.
“If we might return to Petrus. When did he usually go to bed?”
“After the nine o’clock news, sometimes he sat up later if there was a good movie on. He liked movies.”
“Did you see him yesterday?”
“We didn’t chat or anything, but I saw him as usual. He usually brought in wood in the evenings. Before, when he had a cat then… well,you know. He really loved the cat. A little black one with white paws. She disappeared.”
“So you saw him fetch firewood last night?”
“No, I don’t think so. I must have sat here,” Dorotea said thoughtfully, “with the crossword puzzle. And then I wrote the grocery list. Petrus was going to look in on me today. He did some shopping for me. There’s always something you need.”
Beatrice nodded and scrutinized Dorotea.
“You are the first Dorotea I’ve met.”
“Is that so? Beautiful it’s not, but you get used to it. The worst was when they called me Dorran, but that was a long time ago.”
“Did you think it was strange when you didn’t see Petrus last night?”
“No, not really. I saw that his lights were on. Then when I got up this morning I saw that the lights were still on, and that the gate was open. I mean the big gate. At first I thought an ambulance must have been here. Petrus always kept it closed. And then the door to the old barn was open.”
“You were up early.”
“It’s my bladder,” Dorotea said.
“You didn’t see a car here last night?”
“No, I would have noticed something like that,” she said firmly.
Beatrice looked down at her notes, a couple of lines, a few names, not much more. Just as she was about to end the conversation her cell phone rang. She saw that it was Ann and answered immediately.
She listened and then turned off the phone without having said a word. Dorotea looked at her with curiosity.
“I’ve just been informed that Petrus wrote a good-bye letter.”
“A good-bye letter, what do you mean?”
“He was planning to take his own life,” Beatrice said.
Dorotea stared at her.
“That’s impossible,” she said finally. “Petrus would never do anything like that.”
“My colleagues believe he wrote the letter,” Beatrice said. “I’m sorry.”
“So you mean to say-”
“-that Petrus had made up his mind to commit suicide. Yes, that’s how it appears.”
“The poor man. If only I had known.”
“It was nothing that you thought might happen?” “Never! He was a little down sometimes but not in that way.” “I’m very sorry,” Beatrice repeated and Dorotea looked at her as if she took her words to heart.
After a few additional minutes of conversation Beatrice Andersson left the house. At the gate she turned and waved. She couldn’t see her but assumed Dorotea was standing at the window.
It’s strange, she thought, that in Dorotea’s eyes it would have been better if her neighbor had been killed without the complicating factor that he had already decided to commit suicide. On top of the tragic news that Petrus Blomgren was dead she now had to bear this extra burden, the knowledge that he was tired of life and perhaps above all that on his final evening he had not sought her support.
Lindell, Nilsson, Haver, and Andersson were standing in the yard. Lindell took the fact that she could hear the technicians talking as a sign that they were wrapping up their work in the barn. In her experience the forensics team often worked in silence.
“It’s strange,” she said, “how a place changes after something like this happens.”
Perhaps this did not strike anyone as a particularly sensational or original observation and Haver was the only one who took the trouble to grunt in response. The rest were looking around. Beatrice looked back at Dorotea’s house. She was probably bustling around the kitchen or sitting at the kitchen table. Beatrice wished she had been able to spend a little more time with the old woman.
“Yes,” Sammy Nilsson said with unexpected engagement, “now it is the scene of a murder. People will talk about this house as the one where Blomgren was murdered for a long time. They’ll walk past, slow down, maybe stop and point.”
“Not a lot of people walk past,” Beatrice said.
Allan Fredriksson joined the group.
“What a wonderful place,” he said. “Have you noticed what a complex biological habitat the place is? It has everything: spruce forest, deciduous groves, open meadows and fields, dry hills, and even a little wetlands.”
Lindell smiled to herself.
Fredriksson pointed to the other side of the road where a large ditch ran down to a marsh. The green moss glowed in the morning sun. Tufts of sedge grass looked like small rounded buns and a clump of reedy marsh grass swayed in the wind.
“I wonder if Petrus was interested in birds?”
“Petrus didn’t have many friends,” Beatrice said, “and he does not appear to have been a rich man who hoarded cash or valuables.”
“The only thing I found was a letter from the Föreningsspar Bank,” Fredriksson said. “There was not a single account book or any withdrawal slips, but perhaps he kept the papers hidden. We’ll have to go over the place with a fine-toothed comb.”
Neither the forensics team nor the criminal investigators had found the least trace of burglary or disturbance. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the house in Vilsne except for the fact that its owner lay murdered in the barn.
“Will you check the bank, Allan?” Lindell asked.
Lindell looked at their new forensics team member, how he carefully packed away his equipment. Anita’s comment came to mind.
“Nice buns,” she said.
“What?”
“Morgansson’s,” Lindell said and nodded in the direction of the barn.
Haver turned his head. It looked like he was about to say something, but he held back. Everyone was watching the technician.
A door opened and a light reflection from the glass in Dorotea Svahn’s front door swept over the hill where the police officers were assembled, then disappeared into the thicket of alder and willow. The old woman looked out at her neighbor’s house, took a slow step onto her porch, and gently closed the door behind her.
She stood there with a cane in one hand and the other on the wrought-iron railing. She walked down the stairs with an effort and moved toward the police. One of her legs didn’t seem to want to come along.
She was wearing a gray coat and a dark hat. Beatrice had the impression that it was not Dorotea’s everyday outfit.
“Is she on her way over here? Maybe she needs help,” Haver said and took a step toward the gate.
She was not fast but she did seem to have developed a technique to compensate for her bad leg. A car approached. At first there was only a faint rumble behind the forest that surrounded Blomgren’s property. Dorotea must not have noticed the engine sound that increased in volume and when she was halfway across the road the van from the Medical Examiner’s Office rounded the corner. Fridh was driving. Dorotea stopped and lifted the cane over her head as a signal.