He stepped out onto the snowy street, sober as a god and cleansed from his past life. He felt a great calm and strangely enough thought of his father. Was it the short interlude of working with Micke that had brought back these more frequent thoughts of his father? Albin had been good, not only as a welder but as a father. This conviction had grown in Lennart over the years, not least when he saw John with Justus.
He sighed heavily. He was back on Brantings square again. No tractor, no noisy teenagers, just mounds of snow and him. His need for alcohol made his innards contract as if he had a steel wire rigged up inside, a steel wire that was slowly being turned tighter, a fragile center of despair. It could break at any moment. He could run home and have a swig of something, but that would essentially mean giving up on the search for John’s killer forever.
He tramped on with gritted teeth. Christmas stars and blinking colored lights on the balconies lit up his way over Skomakar hill. “Albin and John,” he mumbled quietly. He felt as if Albin were with him, as if his father had stepped down from his roof and his heaven in order to support him. His father walked beside him in wordless sympathy. Occasionally he pointed up and Lennart understood that Albin had once been up there on those rooftops.
Forty-one
Lindell drove slowly, in part because she was not used to the car, in part because the driving conditions were less than ideal. The wind had driven snow from the fields into tightly packed drifts, and when she made it into the forest the road was deceptively slippery underneath this white cover.
When she spotted the bell tower of Bälinge church she knew that she had made it. She had marked on Haver’s map the street where Erki Karjalainen lived. After winding her way down small roads in the densely built suburb she eventually came to a dead end. She had to turn the car around and realized that despite the map she had taken a wrong turn.
A rising sense of irritation increased her nervousness. She recognized these symptoms. It was the feeling of creeping danger. Admittedly Justus was in safety, but something else was casting a dark shadow over her. She guessed it was the fact that a murderer was on the loose. It suddenly hit her that it was her concern for her colleagues that made her extra jumpy. Ruben Sagander could be out there somewhere in the dark December night. He had borrowed ammunition from Agne and perhaps he was still armed. Haver and Berglund would wait until their backup arrived, then they would put on bulletproof vests and approach Sagander’s house with the greatest care. She knew all this, but she also knew that violence and perpetrators of violence had their own logic.
When she finally arrived at Karjalainen’s house and stepped out of the car she paused and pricked up her ears, as if she would have been able to hear any resulting noise from the Börje area, over ten kilometers away. Haver hated weapons, not least after the events at Biskops Arnö when he-without acceptable provocation-had opened fire against a serial killer whom he erroneously believed to be threatening Lindell with a pistol. Lindell had reacted by also opening fire and the man had died.
Haver and Lindell had never talked seriously about that event. Now Haver found himself in the presence of another assumed murderer. Before she left the house, Lindell had asked Haver if he had his gun. He had nodded but not said anything. Lindell was certain that he was thinking of the fateful chain of events at the hut that summer night not so long ago but shoved away into a distant corner in both their minds.
She took out her cell phone and called home. This time her father answered, which surprised but pleased her. Erik had been up for an hour and his grandmother was with him.
“He’s a plucky little boy,” her father said.
Lindell smiled and they ended the conversation soon after.
Erki Karjalainen opened the door, a slight smile on his face. He let her in without a word, something she appreciated. She didn’t have the stomach for empty Christmas phrases.
Justus was in the kitchen. A woman was at the stove stirring something in a pot. She looked up and smiled. There was a sweet scent in the air. The boy gave her a quick look, then cast down his eyes. On the table in front of him there was a plate and a glass of milk. Lindell sat down across from him. Erki lingered in the doorway for a moment before he also sat down at the table. The woman pulled the pot to one side, turned the heat off, and left the kitchen. Erki followed her with his gaze.
“My sister,” he said.
Lindell nodded and looked at Justus, who met her eyes.
“How is it going?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“I’m glad you’re all right. We’ve been worried about you.”
“I just went out for a while,” Justus said defiantly.
“Your mother didn’t know where you were.”
Lindell found it hard to talk to teenagers. They were neither children nor adults. She always had the feeling that she was pitching her words at the wrong level, either too childish or too advanced. She needed Sammy’s innate ability to reason with them.
Justus scratched the plate with a knife. He looked absentminded but Lindell sensed he was boiling inside.
“Did you hear that Sagander’s workshop burned down?” she asked quietly and leaned closer to him.
He shook his head.
“You know,” Erki said.
Justus looked at him hastily and for a moment Lindell saw the terror in his eyes, as if he was afraid of Erki but conscious of the folly of denying what he had probably just confided to him. Justus nodded.
“Tell me about it,” Lindell said.
Justus began awkwardly, but after a while his words started to flow. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked at Lindell.
“Sagge is an idiot,” he said.
“He has only praise for your father.”
“He fired him,” Justus said. “What good is his praise?”
“You have a point there, Justus,” Lindell said with a smile.
When Justus had finished his story he appeared to realize for the first time that the fire had cost Erki his job. The terror returned to his eyes and he sucked in his breath.
“Take it easy,” Erki said, as if he had read the boy’s mind.
“What do you want to do now?” Lindell asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Shouldn’t you call Berit and tell her where you are?”
“Am I going to jail?”
“You’re under fifteen,” Lindell said. “You can’t be tried as an adult. There will be consequences, of course, but we’ll keep in mind that your father has just died and that you’ve been extremely upset.”
“One more thing,” Erki said calmly, and Lindell’s appreciation of him grew even more. “Justus has some money. Do you want me to tell her?”
The boy said nothing. Erki waited, then started to talk.
“He came here by taxi and I wondered where he got the money,” Erki said and stretched his hand out for a backpack leaning against the wall. Lindell sensed what it contained but drew her breath when Erki unzipped it and revealed thick wads of five-hundred-kronor notes.
“How much is it?”
“I don’t know,” Erki said and put the backpack down. “I haven’t counted it, but it must be a couple of thousand.”
“I didn’t take it all,” Justus said almost inaudibly.
“Where did the money come from?” Lindell asked.
“It was Dad’s.”
“From the start?”
“We were planning to go to Africa,” Justus said defiantly. “He had saved it up so we could start a fish farm. Maybe in Burundi.”
“Do you know where the money came from?”
The boy shook his head.
“I know,” Erki said. “It came from the shop.”
“Tell me,” Lindell said.
Erki and Justus looked at each other. Justus’s expression changed. The mixture of aggression and passivity slowly gave way to a gentler expression and Lindell saw that Justus had inherited Little John’s delicate features. The inner defenses gave way. He looked pleadingly at Erki, who took the boy’s hand in his, enveloping it completely. Half a finger was missing from Erki’s hand. Lindell and Erki exchanged a look. Lindell saw that he was touched.