The princess of Burundi (23 page)

Silence.

“Who is this?”

“Thank you, I’ll call back,” Lindell said and hung up.
You idiot,
she thought to herself.
They must have caller ID.

She was overcome with shame and she cursed her clumsiness. He was at work. She could reach him there but now it felt as if it would simply compound her mistake.

The phone rang and Berit lifted the receiver as if she was expecting news of another death. But the caller was a woman she had read about in the paper and heard John talk about: Ann Lindell, with the police. What surprised Berit was that she sounded so tired, and that even though it was late she wanted to come by and have a few words with her.

Ann Lindell came in a few minutes later. She was carrying a little baby in her arms.

“This is Erik,” she said.

“You bring your children to work with you?”

“I’m not officially on duty right now,” Lindell said. “But I’m still helping out a little.”

“Helping out a little,” Berit repeated. “And there’s no one else to look after the baby?”

“I’m a single mom,” Lindell said and carefully laid Erik on the sofa. He had woken up as soon as they entered Berit’s building but fallen asleep again when she took him out of the stroller and carried him up the stairs in her arms. Berit turned off one of the lamps so that it wouldn’t shine in his eyes. The two women quietly watched the sleeping baby for a while.

“What do you want?”

There was a note of impatience in her voice, as well as something that Lindell judged to be fear.

“I’m genuinely sorry for what has happened,” Lindell said. “John was a good man.” She unconsciously used Ottosson’s words.

“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.

Ottosson often appeared absentminded and a little lost. Most likely he would have preferred to be out at his cabin, chopping wood and working in his vegetable garden. Berglund was a reassuring uncle, with a large store of knowledge about the human race and the ability to win people’s trust.

Fredriksson was the nature lover who found it hard to keep up with the increasing tempo and the stress of everyday life. He could also offer up evidence of hostility to foreigners, not in conscious harangues about the superiority of the white race—nothing like that—more like an expression of confusion about the state of things, uncomprehending in the face of the rootless kids with immigrant backgrounds that figured more and more often in their cases. Sammy could become furious when Fredriksson made some sweeping generalization, short arguments that always ended with Fredriksson saying, “That wasn’t what I meant, you know that.”

That’s why we’re good,
Lindell thought and pushed the stroller a few more meters.
If we were cultured in that lofty way, our jobs would suffer
. Maybe that kind of police officer existed in other districts, but in Uppsala, the seat of higher learning, the police were regular people.

Sammy could understand teenagers, not because he was deep—most of the time he wasn’t even particularly methodical or sharp-witted—but because he represented something the kids on the street had been looking for. No flakiness, no meaningless social chatter, just the real thing. They could have used him, and a dozen others like him, full-time on the beat in Gottsunda, Uppsala’s most populated suburb, where the powers that be had taken the inspired step of shutting down the local police branch. “I guess it’s a natural development to increase police visibility by turning us out onto the street,” one colleague had commented at the morning meeting. If only they could place Sammy there, all the vandalism, graffiti, theft, fear, and threats to personal security would fall off drastically.

Lindell smiled. She knew that this self-satisfied argumentation was motivated by a desire to justify her current independent police venture. She tried to convince herself that her colleagues would have done the same thing in her stead.

But of course that wasn’t true. Her independent investigating was not consistent with good ethics. Ottosson would be deeply concerned about her actions and most of her colleagues would shake their heads. But what should she have done? Lennart wanted to talk to her, and her alone, and wasn’t it therefore her duty as a citizen to talk to him? And once she had talked to Lennart, what was the difference in talking with Berit?

Lindell didn’t know what she thought about Berit. It was possible that she was concealing something behind the surprised expression in her beautiful but harrowed face. Information she would keep from the police, however intimate the girl talk became. Her priority was to protect her son, then John’s memory, two sides of the same coin. Did she know where John had stashed the poker winnings? Had she had an affair with another man? Was there jealousy as well as money at the root of the murderer’s motive? Lindell had trouble imagining Berit cooperating in the murder, or even that a rejected lover lay behind the murder. Lindell believed in Berit’s fidelity. She wanted to believe in it and she toyed with the idea that they would have occasion to chat again in the future. Berit seemed wise, had a direct way of talking and probably also a good sense of humor.