“Yes,” Berit said.
“I think he was murdered for money, and I think you’re sitting on that money right now.”
“Me, sitting on the money?”
Berit shook her head. There were too many questions, impressions. First Lennart, then Justus, and now this off-duty officer.
“It means you may be in danger,” Lindell said.
Berit looked at her and tried to understand the full implication of her words.
“Quite honestly I don’t care about the money,” Lindell said. “It was John’s and now it’s yours, but a lot of money always brings risk with it.”
It was a stab in the dark from Lindell’s side. She didn’t know for sure if the motive was money or if Berit knew where it was. She wasn’t able to judge Berit’s expression to determine if she had known about John’s poker winnings or not.
“If we assume he won all this money, did he have some friend that he would tell?”
“No,” Berit said immediately. She thought about Micke, and Lennart’s words came back to her.
“What about Micke?” Lindell said, as if she had been reading her thoughts.
“What do you want?” Berit asked. “It’s late, you have a baby with you, you ask a lot of questions but you’re not on duty. Who do you think you are?”
Lindell shook her head and glanced at Erik, who was sleeping peacefully.
“I just had an idea,” she said. “I was talking with a colleague of mine today and I had the idea to…well, I don’t know exactly.”
She looked at Berit. She had heard her described as beautiful and Lindell could see her beauty, though most of it was gone. The fatigue, grief, and tension had carved into her skin like knives, and her carriage bore witness to enormous emotional and physical exhaustion.
“How is your son?” Lindell asked.
Berit heaved a sob. She stood in front of Lindell with no pretense, looked her in the eyes, and cried. Lindell had seen a great deal, but Berit expressed the deepest despair she had ever seen. Perhaps it was the quiet way in which she was crying that amplified it? A scream of pain, grief, and a collapsed life would have been easier to take, but Berit’s steady gaze and quiet tears touched Lindell deeply. Erik shifted uneasily and Lindell felt close to tears herself.
“I think I should go,” she said and rubbed her cheek. “It was silly of me to come here. I just had a strange feeling, almost a physical compunction to come by.”
Berit nodded. Lindell picked up the baby.
“You can stay longer if you want,” Berit said.
“I can’t,” Lindell said.
Erik’s warmth and his tiny movements inside the snowsuit made her determined to leave Berit and the whole case behind. It wasn’t her investigation. She was on maternity leave and in a few days her parents would be coming up from Ödeshög.
“Yes, you can,” Berit said, and Lindell marveled at her metamorphosis. “I don’t know what made you come here, but whatever it was it must have been important.”
“I don’t know,” Lindell said. “It was pretty dumb and unprofessional, actually.”
Berit made a gesture as if to say it didn’t matter, unprofessional or not, she was here now.
“I’ll stay a little longer if I can have something to drink. I’m so thirsty.”
While Berit went to get a bottle of Christmas mead, Lindell laid Erik down again, unzipping his snowsuit and pushing his pacifier back in. He slept. She turned to the aquarium. It was certainly enormous. She followed the movement of the fish with fascination.
“They have their own territories,” Berit said when she came back. “John was so proud of that. He had created an African lake in miniature.”
“Did he ever visit Africa?”
“No, how would we have been able to afford that? We dreamed of it, or rather, John was in charge of the dream department; I made sure everything kept working.”
Berit looked away from the fish tank.
“He got to dream,” she said, “and he pulled Justus with him. Do you know how it is to be poor?” she asked and looked at Lindell. “It’s living on the margins, but still wanting to enjoy things. We spent everything on Justus. We wanted him to have nice clothes. John bought a computer this fall. Sometimes we bought good food for a special occasion. You can’t feel poor all the time.”
The words fell like gray stones from her mouth. There was no pride in her voice, simply a factual statement that the Jonsson family had tried to create a sphere where they felt real, part of something bigger and more attractive.
“We sometimes played with the idea that we were rich, not outrageously rich, but that we would be able to fly somewhere sometimes, take a plane and see something new. I would like to go to Portugal. I don’t know why Portugal exactly, but a long time ago I heard some music from there and it expressed what I felt inside.”
She looked around the room as if to size up what she and John had built up over the years. Lindell followed her gaze.
“I think your home is nice,” she said.
“Thanks,” Berit said flatly.
Lindell stepped out into the wintry landscape an hour later, that familiar sense of weakness in her body. The only sounds were from cars driving by on Vaksalagatan and the hum of a streetlamp. People were inside their homes, boiling hams and wrapping presents. She thought about calling Haver but realized it was too late now. How would he take the fact that she had just blundered into his investigation? What would his wife say about the fact that she had called?
She decided to wait until tomorrow before contacting Haver. Deep inside her mind she was harboring a thought that maybe they could see each other. They had hardly twenty-four hours before her parents came into town. See each other, she snorted. It’s his embrace you want. If all you want to do is see him you can walk into his office whenever you want. No, you want him in your home, at the kitchen table as a very intimate friend, one who could give you a hug and maybe a kiss. That’s how deprived you are of human closeness.
She wasn’t looking forward to her parents’ visit. In fact, she feared it. Right now she couldn’t handle her mother’s attentions. Her dad would sit quietly in front of the TV, and that was fine, but her mother’s well-intentioned expressions of concern about Ann’s future would drive her insane. And this time she wouldn’t be able to get away, not like her increasingly rare visits to her childhood home.
On top of it all, her mother had started to talk about moving to Uppsala. The house in Ödeshög was becoming too much for them, she said. The ideal scenario according to her mother would be a little apartment close to Ann and Erik.
Had talking to Lennart and Berit been the right thing to do? Lindell stopped in the snow. She didn’t know if it was to rest her arms-it was hard work pushing the stroller over the unplowed sidewalk-or because she was struck by the unprofessional nature of her actions, but it didn’t matter which. She simply stood there. Snow fell all around her in generous, beautiful, and somehow reassuring proportions.
“I’m certainly not sophisticated,” she said quietly to herself. “Not like detectives on TV, the ones who listen to opera, know Greek mythology, and know if a wine is right for fish or a white meat. I just am. A normal gal who happened to become a police officer, the way other people become chefs, gardeners, or bus drivers. I want there to be justice, and I want it so much I forget to live my life.”
None of my colleagues are sophisticated either, she thought. Some of them don’t even know what that word means. They just work. What do they talk about? Definitely not about different years of wines from a fantastic vineyard in some unknown part of the world. At most they compare box wines from the state liquor store.
Sammy Nilsson had subscribed for many years to Illustrated Science magazine and regularly-with childish enthusiasm-volunteered small anecdotes from new developments in astronomy, or medical research, delivering these pop-science facts with the authority of a Nobel Prize winner. Fredriksson would fill in with wonderful facts such as the one that the mountain egret spends the winter in Alunda, or explain why wolves don’t cross railway tracks. This is our version of educated culture, she thought.