Frozen Moment (2 page)

    The
bitterly cold morning was hardly conducive to the idea of pulling over and
waiting for the next bus. It wouldn't be daylight for a long time yet. Åke
decided to chance it, hoping the car would make it as far as work,
then
he would drive straight to the garage in Lerum at the
end of the day. He could ask Christer to take a look at it.

    Happy
with his decision he increased his speed as much as he dared on the twisting,
icy road. The sparse street lights showed the way over the hills to Olofstorp
like a string of beads. In a way it felt good to have something specific to do
when he left the factory for the last time, with his personal effects in a
cardboard box on the seat beside him. Like a kind of assurance that life didn't
end there, that there were still things that wouldn't be done if you didn't
exist.

    Kristina's
prediction of bad weather came to nothing when the snow stopped falling just as
suddenly as it had started. He switched off the windscreen wipers and turned on
the radio so that he wouldn't have to listen to the banging from underneath the
car.
Bloody old heap.
He was now passing
through Olofstorp: the school, the nursery, shops, the folk museum, and then
the street lights came to an end and he was once again on a deserted road. He
was trying to get rid of the mist on the windscreen while simultaneously
struggling to find a frequency on the radio when suddenly the car decided
enough was enough. A deafening clatter made him swear out loud. He managed to
manoeuvre off the road at the petrol station, which was closed, rolling the
Astra under the roof, which seemed to float freely above the self-service
pumps. With one more curse, he breathed out. He was grateful that the exhaust
pipe - it had to be the exhaust pipe - had fallen off
here,
and not on one of the pitch-black stretches of road between the villages.

    He
took out his mobile and weighed it in his hand for a moment. The thought of ringing
Kristina and asking her to find the number for a breakdown truck or for
Christer, then spending another half-hour calming her down, wasn't exactly
appealing. He would have to find another solution.

    In
the boot he discovered an oily piece of rope with which he was able to do a
reasonable job of tying up the exhaust pipe - that should enable him to drive
to the nearest garage. Buoyed up by having coped with the challenge so far, he
acted on impulse and drove along the gravel track into the countryside instead
of carrying on towards (the town. The track crossed the river Lärje over a
narrow stone bridge,
then
continued to slice its way
among the hills. Åke was taking a chance. A few years ago he had driven their
grandchild out to a friend's house somewhere around here and he had a vague
memory of a garage by one of the farms a short distance past the bridge.

    Perhaps
his memory wasn't quite as reliable as it had been. Each curve revealed only
fresh stretches of road running between deserted fields and meadows. He was
glad that dawn was beginning to break. There was no guarantee the garage would
still be there, of course, he thought, regretting his impulse just as the car
rounded a bend and the full beam of the headlights illuminated a dilapidated
old barn. The house opposite wasn't exactly in tip-top condition either, but in
the yard in between stood a considerable number of dead cars. The place was
run-down, that was obvious, but the iron sign proclaiming THOMAS EDELL -
VEHICLE REPAIRS AND SCRAPYARD
was still
there.

    It
was a relief to park the rattling car in the yard between two scruffy pickup
trucks. The silence that followed felt almost sacred. He got out and stretched
his legs, took a couple of deep breaths, inhaling the bitterly cold morning air,
and gazed up at the greyish-white wooden house. There were no lights in any of
the windows. However, bright light was pouring out from a metal annexe attached
to the barn - a garage, with its doors wide open.

    It
was gone seven o'clock by now, and he wasn't surprised to see that someone was
already busy in the workshop. Real grafters make an early start, that's what he
had always believed, although it was a little odd that no one seemed to have
noticed his noisy arrival. Everything was as silent as the grave. He cleared
his throat and shouted a greeting as he walked across the grass.

    The
floor of the workshop was covered in tools, but there wasn't a soul in sight. A
Nissan Micra up on the ramp was obscuring his view, so he took a few steps
further inside.

    'Hello
there!'

    Where
the annexe joined the old barn there was a chaotic office made of white plywood
screens; that was empty too, but a radio was playing away to itself almost
inaudibly. He stood there nonplussed for a moment,
then
managed to make out the sound of
Soothing Favourites.
Then he realised
he was late for work, late for his own leaving party, and this place was
obviously not manned, despite all the indications to the contrary. He stepped
outside again and decided to walk around the house just to make sure there was
no one there who might help him. He didn't really want to drive that rattling
heap much further.

    Afterwards
he would recall that a feeling of unease gradually crept over him. Perhaps it
was the thought of the director and being late for work, but there was
something else as well, something indefinable. He almost had a heart attack
when a black and white cat shot out of an open cellar window, yowling loudly.
The next moment he saw the man, lying spreadeagled on the ground where the
gravel path continued around the back of the barn. He didn't need to go any
closer to see that the man had been run over, probably several times. The whole
of the lower half of his body had been more or less… destroyed.

    He's
only half a man, thought Åke Melkersson, a hysterical, terrified giggle rising
in his chest. He's flat, half of him smeared over the gravel. He thought back
to the cartoons of his childhood, in which characters were always getting run
over by steamrollers, ending up as flat as pancakes. There was never any blood
in the cartoons, but there was blood here, collected in a hollow in the gravel
around the man's head, like a gory halo.

    Then
Åke did what the characters in the cartoons never did: he walked backwards and
threw up. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket,
then
he threw up again all over his trousers.
I can't go to work like this,
he thought irrationally before he stumbled back to the car and reversed out at
high speed, making the exhaust pipe come crashing down again; it dragged along
the ground all the way back to the main road.

    When
he finally reached something that could with a little goodwill be classed as
civilisation, he pulled over at a bus stop. With trembling hands he keyed in
the emergency number.

    Afterwards
he sat for a while in the car with the window down, hoping that the cold air
pouring in would stop him from fainting. The
policewoman's
voice had been matter-of-fact, gathering information. This had helped him to
calm down, and to come to his senses sufficiently to offer to drive back to the
scene of the crime; he could wait there to be interviewed by the police,
instead of giving his home address and telephone number. He didn't want to worry
Kristina unnecessarily, least of all in a situation like this.

    The
traffic, increasing as usual as the time approached eight o'clock, also had a
calming effect on his nerves. He turned the heater up to maximum and picked up
his mobile once again.

    Andreas
Karlberg was sitting at his desk in the police station watching a magpie that
had obviously taken a wrong turning and ended up on his windowsill. Its feet
made a muted tapping sound as it moved across the metal ledge. The small
coal-black eyes stared straight into his,
then
the
bird seemed to take fright and flew away.

    Karlberg
had other things on his mind. He was pondering whether he was a man of
integrity, a man who knew how to draw suitable boundaries around himself, or
whether he was just using this as an excuse for behaving like an egotistical
pig. In the top drawer of his desk lay a popular psychology book entitled
Energy Thieves.
He had found the book
lying
on his
doormat in a padded envelope on his birthday a couple of weeks ago. It had
turned out to be from his ex, whom he hadn't seen for months.
On your 34th birthday.
To someone who ought to learn how to
say no. Good luck, love from Marie.

    His
first impulse had been to ring her up and ask her what she meant, but he
realised there was a risk that she would immediately see this as an opportunity
to explain at length why she had left him six months ago and he wasn't sure he
wanted to know. Not any more, not when the wound left by the broken
relationship had started to heal.

    Presumably
it had something to do with his job. He worked too many hours, too many
evenings, was too preoccupied with the job. But he couldn't agree that he had a
problem when it came to putting her before other people. If you had the chance
to be there for a friend, he still thought you ought to do so. Even if it meant
you often found your weekends taken up with helping someone to move house,
giving someone a lift to the airport at some ridiculous hour or lending money
to someone in a tight spot.

    
Good
luck,
Marie had written. He presumed she was encouraging him to practise
the art of saying no, and he had actually taken her seriously. Not that he had
since become notorious for saying no, but he had started by carefully
evaluating every situation where he would previously have said yes without a
second's hesitation. Like yesterday evening, when he had stood in the queue at
the supermarket checkout watching the woman in front of him puffing and blowing
as she unpacked a mountain of food from her trolley. She had suddenly turned to
him and asked, somewhat apologetically, if he would mind loading her shopping
on to the conveyor belt while she went to the other end and started packing it
into bags. It would speed things up, she said. And she might well be right, he
had thought, glancing in confusion from his prawn baguette to her enquiring
expression, and back to his baguette.

    'No,
I'd rather not do that,' he heard himself say.

    'No?'
said the woman, surprised, as if he'd had THE GUY WHO ALWAYS HELPS OUT tattooed
on his forehead.

    'No,'
he said firmly, running a hand nervously through his light blonde hair. The
woman's face turned dark red. Now he suddenly saw with painful clarity the
checkout assistant's
embarrassed
smile, the woman's
crushed expression; in the end she had managed to pack away all her Christmas
food shopping and had lumbered off with her bags. To catch the tram, no doubt -
she wouldn't have a car. She was probably a single mother with several
children.

    He
ought to ring Marie and boast about what he'd achieved. And he might have done
if he hadn't heard on the grapevine that she'd started dating again.
A market analyst, whatever the hell that was.

    He
was brought back to reality when Inspector Christian Tell stuck his head round
the office door.

    'You're
here, great. We've got a body in the Gunnilse area. He's been run over, but the
old
guy
who rang in thought he'd been shot as well.
In the head.'

    A
short while later they had passed the county governor's pastel- coloured house
in the old town and put the grey concrete buildings of the northern suburbs
behind them. One outlying district of semidetached houses and rows of terraces
had given way to the next, finally tapering out into the smaller communities:
Knipared, Bingared,
Linnarhult
. Between these lay
undulating grazing land. It always surprised Tell that the city was actually so
small - it only took half an hour to get out into the countryside.

    After
a drive at breakneck speed along a bumpy gravel track they finally pulled into
a farmyard. A police van was parked by the entrance, and representatives from
the local force seemed to have already made themselves at home. Tell growled
something inaudible.

    Karlberg
took a deep breath and cleared his throat.

    'So
where's the old guy who called in?'

    'I
suppose he's on his way back.'

    Tell
lit a cigarette and opened the car door.

    'Apparently
he panicked and took off, not surprisingly. Then his car packed up and he got
stuck on the main road. He knows we want to talk to him.'

    Karlberg
took several deep breaths to slow down his pulse after their high-speed drive.
The feeling was always the same when you went out on a case: you wanted to get
on with it, and yet you also didn't. Open that door, walk round the corner of
that house. Violent deaths were not unusual in his job but outright executions
like this one, at least according to the emergency call, were not exactly
something they came across every day. They had discussed in the car whether it
might be the result of some kind of gang warfare, but it didn't fit the
context. Not here, on a farm, in the middle of nowhere.
A
drunken brawl perhaps, one neighbour losing it with another.
Although
there was no sign of any neighbours out here, just fields and forest.