The Hand that Trembles (35 page)

‘You were a man in the midst of a career. How did you reach your position? Through empty chatter, as you call it, or were you unique?’

‘Not unique, perhaps unusual, but I was on my way to becoming a biddy. But we can forget all that now. This isn’t a political seminar. I went to India to get away from all this loose talk.’

‘So you didn’t leave because you had committed a murder?’

‘For both those reasons.’

‘Were you afraid of being found out?’

‘No, not really. You didn’t seem to be getting anywhere in the investigation. I had some contacts and kept myself abreast of your progress. Don’t take it personally. It was a difficult case, I know.’

‘Your flight must have been painstakingly planned. You had arranged for a false passport, put away large sums of money, and even prepared a disguise so that you could leave City Hall without being recognised.’

‘It amused me.’

‘To plan this?’

Persson nodded.

‘Do you know how you seem to me?’ Sammy Nilsson broke in. He had been listening to this dialogue without speaking. ‘You seem like a cold, calculating guy, who wants to pose as a defender of the weak, the only honest politician, but in reality he is a remorseless killer who disappears after his deed for his own amusement, not only fleeing from justice and civic responsibilities, but even from his own family.’

‘I had a wife, not a family.’

‘In short,’ Sammy Nilsson said, ignoring Persson’s comment, ‘you’re a bastard who hides behind pseudo-arguments about “old biddies”. You leave your wife and your friends to their worries and complete ignorance and you even seem to like it.’

‘That is probably an accurate description,’ Persson answered. ‘I’m not going to argue against your image of me.’

‘So the question is why you return all these years later. You do not seem particularly remorseful.’

‘I got tired of India. I imagined spending my last remaining years in an institution.’

‘Bullshit,’ Sammy Nilsson said.

Fredriksson coughed and leant forward, as if he wanted to push his colleague aside.

‘If we come back to a thread from yesterday,’ he said, and smiled at Persson, ‘your uncle Ante. First you told us that you were alone in Kungsgärdet but you later changed your story to say he was waiting in the car. Do you hold firm to this?’

‘Yes, he stayed in the car. I took one of his crutches, so he couldn’t leave the car.’

‘Why did he even come along?’

‘We were out for a ride. That was something we did sometimes, went on small excursions.’

‘Small excursions,’ Fredriksson repeated. ‘Did he know where this one was headed? Who you were going to see?’

‘No. I said I was running an errand.’

‘Why did you choose an excursion?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you had been planning to murder Nils Dufva, wouldn’t it have been better to go there alone?’

‘Maybe I didn’t want to kill him.’

‘The crutches.’

‘I brought them for self-defence. I was led to believe that Dufva was a violent man.’

‘Bound to a wheelchair?’

‘What can one know?’

‘Can you precisely describe your exchange of words when you were face-to-face with him?’

‘We didn’t say much.’

‘Did he recognise you?’

‘I think so.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘I guess he wondered what I was doing walking into his house. I can’t remember exactly. It was a number of years ago. And there was such a racket in his place I couldn’t hear properly.’

‘What kind of racket?’

‘The old man had both his television and radio turned on, and on the highest setting. As I said, it was an infernal racket.’

‘You didn’t turn off the appliances?’

‘No, why would I have done so?’

‘You weren’t there to talk?’

Sven-Arne did not reply. Fredriksson made a notation in his notebook.

‘And what did you say when he wondered why you had walked into his house?’ he said after a brief, somewhat ominous pause.

‘I asked him if he was Nils Dufva.’

‘You did not recognise him from before?’

‘I wanted to be sure.’

‘You wanted to be sure that you were going to kill the right man?’

Persson did not answer, and to all extents and purposes that was where the session ended. Sven-Arne Persson was unwilling to say anything else. He skirted their attempts to clarify what had happened that fateful autumn day of 1993 and above all why he became a killer. He became bantering in his tone and thereafter more brief in his answers, only to finally lapse into silence. He was escorted back to his cell.

Sven-Arne Persson was in no way pleased with his performance, but he did not know how he could have approached it in any other way. He regretted his outburst over his political colleagues. It was meaningless to waste energy on such things.

He knew that the policemen were dissatisfied, and he had registered Nilsson’s obvious irritation, not to say exasperation. The other one, Fredriksson, appeared to take the whole thing more calmly. Perhaps they were playing two different roles in order to get him to talk. Not that he really cared; it did not change anything.

Despite the stomach pains that had come and gone all night, he felt in fine form. The most freeing thing was that he did not need to make any weighty decisions. He existed in a pleasant vacuum. His cell was small and spartan but he was accustomed to modest surroundings from his time in India. So all in all he found it congenial. The only thing he missed was books, but he had been promised a couple of novels. Newspapers he did not want. He was indifferent to television. He vegetated, but somewhere in his consciousness there was a question about how long this situation would last, and above all how he would stand it. Perhaps he would wake up one morning and feel prison for what it was: a cage.

But right now he felt no great concern. He lay down on the camp bed, closed his eyes, and fell asleep after several minutes.

‘This is a good book,’ Bosse Marksson said, holding up a slender volume.

‘Oh?’ Lindell said, perplexed over this start to the conversation. ‘What is it about?’

She was late. She had pulled up in front of the little police station in Östhammar at exactly a quarter to nine. Angelina was at the reception desk. Lindell had talked to her before, about travel. There was a globe on the counter and when Lindell complained about stress Angelina had spun it and urged Lindell to stop it with her finger. She had landed in South America. In Paraguay.

‘Go there,’ Angelina said. ‘I’m sure it will be relaxing.’

And this morning as she had hurried into the police station, Angelina had simply pointed to the globe and grinned.

‘It’s about a man who takes the train north in order to attend the funeral of an elderly relative.’

‘Sounds fascinating,’ Lindell said.

‘Listen to this,’ Marksson said, and opened the book. ‘“Someone who doesn’t love us is in the process of changing our land”,’ he read in an authoritative voice.  

He lowered the text and looked at Lindell, whose gaze was fixed on a framed photograph on the window sill. It showed a woman, whom Lindell assumed was Marksson’s wife.

‘That sounds about right,’ Lindell said, suddenly unsure as to what was expected of her.

Marksson had talked about books before. She had understood that he was a bookworm and perhaps also something of an amateur philosopher. For her part, she did not read much. Perhaps a dozen books a year.

Marksson read the sentence again, now without looking at it.

‘And the bit before it isn’t bad either: “If I am going to participate in bringing change to my country I want to do so because someone I love will later be able to live here.”’

He shut the book.

‘But you aren’t here for a reading. I’m returning this to the library today, that’s why I brought it in. It’s a Stig Claesson, one of my favourites.’

‘I thought it sounded good,’ Lindell said.

‘Someone is changing this land – we see that, don’t we?’

Lindell nodded. She wanted to say something insightful, building on this, but the stressful drive and her thoughts, miserable and ranting, had made her slow.

‘Someone who doesn’t love us.’

‘The National Police Committee,’ Lindell said, and Marksson looked at her with an expression that was difficult to interpret.

‘You seem tired.’

‘I’m wiped out,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s not that bad, but you know how—’

‘Something
is
wrong,’ Marksson interrupted.

Lindell drew a deep breath and sat up in her chair.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ she picked up, ‘but something in this story doesn’t sit well with me. Maybe it’s the picture of Tobias Frisk. You knew him and probably know better, but for me he doesn’t seem like a murderer. I know it is a silly objection, killers can be a million different ways, but this thought didn’t just come out of nowhere. This uncertainty doesn’t come from my impression of Frisk, whom I know so little about, but it has come from the outside. Do you know what I’m getting at? I mean …’

Lindell leant over the desk and caught the hint of a smile that swiftly came and went in Marksson’s face.

‘There is something out there that I have seen or heard, something that has led me to the conviction that Frisk is not a killer. He is no longer self-evident.’

Marksson nodded.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘A visual impression,’ Lindell said, and told him about her experience on Ringgatan after she had left Café Savoy. How she had a sudden thought and stopped in her tracks.

‘At a café? Frisk was a baker – could that be the connection?’

‘That was what I was thinking, but you are the one who has been to his workplace. I’ve only talked to Ahlén on the phone. I know from previous experience that it is often images that I respond to. I can read for hours and talk to a bunch of people without anything being set off in my mind, but then I catch sight of a single detail – it can look completely insignificant and ordinary from the outside but it makes everything become clear for me.’

They discussed what it could have been at the café. Lindell re-created the picture of the busy eatery, even pulled over a sheet of paper and started to sketch it out to jog her memory.

‘Coffee, children, retirees, Christmas cakes …’ Marksson rattled off. ‘There’s no space and perhaps stale air … there’s the sound of children crying, mothers, pushchairs … a couple of teenagers … a child that doesn’t want to take its coat off … maybe Christmas decorations on the table …’

‘Hold it!’

Lindell held her hand up in a theatrical gesture but lowered it after a couple of seconds.

‘No,’ she said.

She knew she had been close, but the image that had flickered in front of her was only exposed in pieces, and quickly faded away.

‘That’s okay,’ Marksson said after a brief pause, ‘I’m sure it’ll come back. We’ll have to start somewhere else. If Frisk wasn’t the killer, why would he commit suicide?’

‘Shame,’ Lindell said. ‘He knew that I was on my way and he wasn’t a particularly good liar. He knew he was partially responsible for Patima’s death since he had brought her to Bultudden, and he knew he would not be able to bluff.’

‘Too complicated,’ Marksson said. ‘It’s one thing to import a woman from Asia and quite another to kill her. A lot of men would—’

‘I know, but maybe Frisk agonised over it. He may also have known something about how and why she died.’

Marksson stared at her.

‘Implicated, and yet not,’ he said finally.

‘Shame,’ Lindell repeated.

‘But then all men would be taking their own lives.’

‘He was an unhappy man,’ Lindell said. ‘My investigations in the area brought everything to a head for him.’

‘A skilled baker, a fly fisherman. The Frisk I knew was a pretty considerate man.’

‘The considerate murderer,’ Lindell mused.

‘We won’t get much farther now,’ Marksson said, confirming her own conclusion.

‘Is that your wife?’ Lindell asked, and pointed to the photograph in the window.

‘Yes, that is Inga-Marie. It was taken a couple of years ago. We were at Lofoten.’

‘Was it fun?’

Marksson looked at her and smiled.

‘What you are really asking is this: Are you happy?’

‘Maybe,’ Lindell said, returning his smile. ‘Am I so easy to read?’

‘You are an open book,’ Marksson said. ‘I think these visits to Roslagen have caused a bit of inner turmoil for you, haven’t they?’

‘Maybe,’ Lindell repeated.

The tension between them broke when Marksson stood up from his chair.

‘Should we go for a spin?’

Lindell sensed what he meant by ‘spin.’ Drive around on the gravel roads outside Östhammar, and Marksson would talk about his youth, point out various houses and tell her about the people who lived there. After a while they would end up at Bultudden.

‘Is there anything in particular?’

‘No,’ Marksson said, but she heard something else in his tone. She did not know what was going on in his head but had no intention of asking. She realised he was as much a searcher as she was, but as opposed to her, he did not air his doubts.

Just as the last time things had heated up, when they had been outside Lasse Malm’s shed, he left. He grabbed the car keys on his desk and walked out of the room.

‘Let’s scram,’ she heard him say from the corridor, and when she found her way to the reception area, he was already standing next to his car.

‘Men,’ Angelina said, reading Lindell’s expression.

That’s right, Lindell thought. Wouldn’t be so bad.

Once they were at Bultudden, Marksson stepped out at Torsten Andersson’s house. They had caught a glimpse of him at the kitchen window. Lindell took over the wheel and continued down the Avenue.

Marksson had not asked what Lindell was planning to do on the point, but she thought he had an inkling. They were going to keep in touch by mobile phone.

Lisen Morell’s car was parked up between a clump of bushes and a couple of enormously tall pine trees, just like last time. Lindell could not tell if it had even been moved since then. She looked around.