Black Lies, Red Blood

Ten

The police work puzzles, Sammy Nilsson thought as he observed his associates in front of the whiteboard. Maybe he picked up that phrase from some book or comic he read in his youth, he didn’t know.

On the whiteboard were a dozen names, two of which were women, Gunilla Lange and Ingegerd Melander.

The strange thing was that all of them, with the exception of Anders Brant who had moved there with his family as a ten year old, were born and grew up in the city, a fact that Berglund pointed out. Uppsala was a city people moved to; many came to study or teach at the two universities or got jobs in industry or healthcare. A service city, which at one time had been just as much an industrial city. Berglund mentioned once how few students there had been well into the sixties, before the education explosion started. How then there were brick factories, shoe and coat factories, Uppsala Ekeby with its ceramics, a wire-mesh mill that then transitioned to making synthetic wires for the paper industry, a silk-weaving mill, as well as soap factory, breweries, chocolate factory, and bicycle manufacturing.

The university had expanded and now there were tens of thousands of students, while the industrial epoch was only a memory. Replacement in the form of a pharmaceutical industry and high-tech laboratories could not compare with the time when the streets and residential neighborhoods of Uppsala were filled with regular folks, as Berglund put it.

Typical for the new era was that the two areas that were most talked about, where the jobs of the future were concerned, were production of antiwrinkle compounds and development of computer games.

But everyone on the whiteboard, except Brant, was a native and stemmed from the other, for the most part vanished, Uppsala.

They were all acquainted with the murdered man. One of the two women, Gunilla, had been married to him, and the other, Ingegerd, had a relationship with him until quite recently.

One of them, Göran Bergman, had worked with Gränsberg. The others had been drinking with him, except for Bernt Friberg, who lived with Gunilla Lange. None of those questioned had any idea what connection Brant had with Gränsberg, but his work as a journalist was the only reasonable explanation.

There were ten names in all. One of them perhaps was the murderer. Purely instinctively they ruled out Göran Bergman, whose grief seemed to be genuine. Nine remained.

Which of them could conceivably have a motive? All of them, the three investigators decided.

Berglund thought it was a drinking thing.

“There was a spat in Gränsberg’s trailer that went downhill,” he thought. “It started as an argument about something trivial, then out came an iron pipe and suddenly one of the combatants was lying there.”

Beatrice believed it might be Bernt Friberg and the motive would be jealousy.

“He was opposed to Gunilla’s loan of a hundred thousand to her ex-husband,” Beatrice asserted. “She told me she hadn’t talked about her plans, but that Friberg found out by accident and then went completely nuts.”

“Did it come to fisticuffs?” Berglund asked, and Sammy Nilsson smiled at his word choice.

“Not that I know, but Friberg seems to be a hot-tempered type, who easily boils over,” said Beatrice. “When I questioned him he sat with his fists clenched the whole time, his face was bright red and when I brought up the subject of Gränsberg and his good relationship with Gunilla, Friberg spit out his words. He was really furious, even though he ought to be a little calmer with Gränsberg out of the game.”

“He didn’t even try to keep a straight face?” Sammy Nilsson asked. “Now he could sit there and pretend to grieve and talk nicely.”

Beatrice shook her head.

“I believe in Brant,” said Sammy Nilsson, “and that is for a single reason: He was demonstrably there.”

“It’s not established,” Beatrice objected.

“The gravel that was in the tire on his Toyota comes from the road up to the trailer, I’m dead sure of that. We have his prints there, and then he leaves.”

“The trip was planned before the murder,” said Berglund. “It was booked a few days before.”

“Perhaps the murder was planned,” said Sammy Nilsson.

“Why?”

“That’s our job to figure out,” said Sammy Nilsson and smiled.

“The brothers in misfortune, then, as you call them,” said Beatrice, turning to Berglund. “Do you have any favorites?”

Berglund shook his head. Beatrice had hoped he would come out with a name, because they all had great respect for the older officer’s intuition. He had hit it right many times, above all in the cases where the victim’s and murderer’s background was like his, that is, what he always summarized as “east of the Fyris River.”

“Brant and Gränsberg are the same age,” Sammy Nilsson said suddenly. “Can that be something?”

Berglund understood immediately what he meant.

“You mean they were in school together?”

“I’ll check on that,” said Sammy Nilsson.

Beatrice continued the brainstorming. “If we don’t believe it’s a drinking thing or jealousy, what motive is there? What can Gränsberg know or have that is so valuable that it motivates violence? He was not a rich man, owned no property, and actually had nothing anyone else could conceivably be after.”

“An old grudge, perhaps?” Sammy Nilsson tossed out. “Something that happened many years ago. Maybe Gränsberg cheated the murderer out of money, didn’t pay back a loan, or whatever.”

“And now the rumor got out that Gränsberg was going to invest a lot of dough to start up a company with Bergman,” said Berglund, picking up the thread. “Then the murderer saw his chance to collect the old debt. Gränsberg obviously refused and the result was a few blows to the head.”

“We’ll have to question Bergman and Gunilla Lange again,” said Beatrice. “Maybe they have some idea.”

“What about the alibis for his buddies?” Beatrice asked.

“Tolerable,” said Berglund, consulting his notes, which was a change from before.

Since Berglund’s operation, when a tumor was removed from his brain, his memory had gotten worse, that was apparent to everyone at Homicide. Before, he could reel off names and connections like running water. On the other hand this might be a completely normal sign of age. Berglund only had a few months left until retirement.

“Manfred Kvist we can probably count out completely,” said Berglund. “In the morning he actually had a foot care appointment, he showed me his feet, and if there’s someone who needs foot care it’s dear Manfred. From there he went straight to the Mill and met some buddies. They had a little aquavit, Manfred was going to arrange something to go with it and went into Torgkassen. When he came up to the register he didn’t have enough money and there was a little kerfuffle. That’s confirmed by two employees. Then he and his buddies went out on the square to have lunch, that is, a seventy-centiliter bottle of aquavit and a lukewarm hot dog. A guy who sells flowers at the square thought they were yelling too much and told them so. He knows Manfred from before and was quite certain he was part of that merry troupe. Mustafa, or whoever it was, had been to buy flowers that morning and was quite sure it was on Monday.”

Berglund read from his notes and started up again.

“In the afternoon he was at ‘The Grotto,’ that’s quite clear and then-”

“We can probably remove him, in other words,” said Sammy Nilsson. “The others?”

“Two of them, Johnny Andersson and one Molle Franzén, you surely recognize them,” said Berglund, looking up, but both Beatrice and Sammy shook their heads. “They’re a little unclear about what they were doing on Tuesday. Both had been drinking pretty heavily the whole weekend and probably on Monday as well and don’t remember too much.

“Johnny maintains in any event that he visited his aged mother at a home for the elderly in Svartbäcken, he does that every Monday afternoon, but when I spoke with her she remembers even less than her son. She’s obviously senile. A woman on the staff claims to maybe remember Johnny, but she also said that she may have been mistaken about the day, it might have been Tuesday.”

“I saw Johnny Andersson at Ingegerd Melander’s, it seems like he’s taken her over after Gränsberg,” Beatrice interjected.

“We actually do have one thing on him,” said Berglund. “A break-in and assault three years ago. He got one year, tried to escape, and got an extended sentence.”

“What was that about?” Sammy Nilsson asked.

“The usual, he and a buddy broke into a car repair shop, took a little money and some tools. Then they didn’t agree on how they should divide the spoils and Johnny knocked his buddy down.”

“Cozy,” said Sammy Nilsson.

“And then Molle Franzén,” Berglund resumed. “He says he was at ‘The Grotto’ although no one there remembers him. But most of these guys have a tendency to get the days mixed up. And why shouldn’t they?”

“Camilla, the manager,” asked Beatrice. “Doesn’t she remember?”

“Same thing for her, the guys come and go. If it’s not something special, it’s impossible for her to keep track of who is there on a particular day.”

“Are there more?” asked Sammy.

“Victor Skam, who is known as Victor the Looker, because he’s so monstrously ugly, barely remembers that he’s ugly, much less what he did last Monday. He seems weak, to say the least, it’s a question of whether he would have the strength to kill anyone.”

“Is his name really Skam?”

“Yes, I think it’s a Norwegian name.”

“Thought so,” said Sammy.

“Olle Olsson,” said Berglund. “A little crazy and brooding, always carries a Bible with him. A plague according to many, when he gets going with his verses. Once he was a locomotive engineer and cracked up when he ran over a teenage girl at the crossing in Bergsbrunna. If you ask me we can rule him out, even if he can’t say what he was doing on Monday.”

Berglund took a breath.

“Nice work,” said Sammy.

“There are a few more,” said Berglund. “There are quite a few in town, I mean in those circles where Gränsberg was found. Some are full-time homeless, others come and go, maybe get a temporary nest for a while and then are out on the street again, or they crash with a friend for a month or two, then the buddy gets tired of it.”

“But these are the ones he hung out with?”

“The chief mourners,” Berglund confirmed.

“An odd little group, I mean Gränsberg seemed to be one with ambitions,” said Beatrice. “Why would he associate with these particular guys?”

“An odd group,” Berglund agreed, “and they all have ambitions, but the level changes.”

“Like at Homicide,” said Sammy, and was rewarded with a grin from Beatrice.

“It might very well be someone outside of this quartet. There are so many sketchy characters,” said Beatrice, unconsciously giving her interjection that lecturing tone that had irritated so many in the building over the years.

Berglund observed her in silence.

“He’s out there, that much we know,” he said, closing his folder. “Sit down for a day at ‘The Grotto’ and look at the old guys, those ‘sketchy characters.’ Among others you’ll meet a cousin of mine, a genuine Berglund. It might be him. Sure. It might be Sundin, once upon a time Uppsala’s most skillful carpet layer, or Foot-Nils, an incorrigible wife-beater who got run over by the Route 6 bus ten years ago, or in any case his right foot did, it might be him. Roger Gustavsson, raised on amphetamines since his first drop of breast milk, is crazy enough to kill half the city. It might even be a woman, Bella, who was raped as a seventeen year old and got epilepsy to boot, and over the years became a worthy heir to Knife-Emmy, who wreaked havoc in the city in the sixties. Do you want more names? Bertil Wall, known as the ‘Finance King,’ worked at a bank at one time. Now he collects cans. Kurt Johansson, who I played soccer with three decades ago, whose old lady ran off with the mailman of all people, went straight to the dogs. An incredibly nice guy, he was sentimental even as a teenager, but it’s obvious, one day maybe he’ll club someone down. We don’t know.”

This time Berglund didn’t need the support of notes. Sammy and Beatrice were convinced that he could continue his recital for a very long time. There was an unusual sharpness in his voice, but Beatrice was wise enough not to take all the blame for the verbal attack, but also wise enough to realize that she was the one who triggered it.

“Excuse me,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be impudent.”

“But you were,” said Berglund calmly, but unexpectedly.

He got up slowly.

“I’m tired,” he said.

Sammy gave Beatrice a quick look.

“Go home,” he said. “You’ve been slaving away with those old guys.”

He sensed that Berglund had run into his cousin at “The Grotto.”

“You’re only working part-time,” he added.

Berglund thoughtfully gathered up his papers. Sammy and Beatrice waited for some words of wisdom from the veteran who knew Uppsala inside and out, but the old man remained reserved, as if the long lecture on “brothers in misfortune” was his description of the situation in the investigation and perhaps not only that.

“See you,” he said, giving Beatrice a nod and Sammy a look, before leaving the room without further ado.

As Sammy Nilsson went past Lindell’s office the door was open, which was unusual enough that he noticed it. She was talking on the phone, but signaled with her hand that he should wait.

He leaned against the doorpost. He was still feeling the gloom that Berglund’s words, and above all attitude, summoned. The old man is starting to get up in years and they aren’t hatching that kind of cop anymore, he thought.

Lindell was talking away. She unconsciously stroked her hand over her hair where a few strands of gray were showing, but that in particular was not a good lead-in to a conversation with her, Sammy Nilsson assumed.

She was talking somewhat surprisingly about soccer and when she hung up, that was exactly what she wanted to talk about with him.

“Listen, Sammy, you coach young boys and that sort of thing, do you know a team called ‘The Best’?”

“Yes, maybe. Wasn’t that the team that allowed over a hundred goals last season? I think it was in the paper. A girl’s team. They’ve renamed the team ‘The Worst,’ I heard.”

“Klara Lovisa played with them until some time last fall,” said Lindell.

“Was that why she disappeared?”

“Stop your joking now. A dumb question: Is it common for guys to coach girls soccer?”

“Yes, it happens. Pretty often actually, maybe in the majority of clubs. There’s a shortage of female coaches. Do you have something going?”

Sammy Nilsson sensed what Lindell was looking for.

“Maybe,” she said. “Now I’ve talked with three of her teammates. They had a party on New Year’s Eve. A group of girls decided to celebrate the arrival of the new year-and then she just leaves, at eleven thirty after receiving an SMS. Strange, huh?”

“Well,” said Sammy, “not so strange perhaps.”

“On New Year’s Day she breaks up with her boyfriend, who she’s been with since seventh grade, a really sweet, nice guy.”

“And?”

“Lay off, you get it! She got an SMS from a guy and left. The thing is that none of her friends understands why she broke up with Andreas and no new guy showed up during the winter or spring. ‘She just got secretive,’ as one of her friends said.”

“You think she was dating someone in secret?”

Sammy Nilsson suddenly saw Lindell and Haver in his mind and could not keep from smiling.

“What are you laughing at? What is it that’s so incredibly entertaining?”

Nilsson’s smile got even broader when he heard how irritated she was and saw her cheeks turn red.

“Sneaking around,” he said. “That’s exciting.”

“Lay off!”

Nilsson put his hands up in a defensive gesture, but so high that it looked like he was protecting himself against a blow. Lindell observed him and shook her head before continuing.

“I also think that this is an older guy with a driver’s license. And I think that on April twenty-eighth he took Klara Lovisa on a trip to the country and that was the last thing she experienced in life.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Sammy Nilsson.

“And where does a fifteen-year-old girl meet an older guy? Not at school, but-”

“In so-called club activities,” Sammy Nilsson filled in. “You think it’s that young man who was seen in Skärfälten?”

“Yes, pretty much dead certain in fact,” said Lindell. “Now it’s just a matter of finding him.”

“And the ex-boyfriend?”

She shook her head.

“He was in Gävle visiting his grandmother at a home.”

“Who says so?”

“His mother.”

“Have you checked with the old lady at the home?”

“Yes, one of our colleagues up there visited her. The fact is that the grandfather was a superintendent on the detective squad. He’s dead now but the colleague had met the woman previously, at a party.”

“A confused police widow,” said Sammy Nilsson. “They’re reliable.”

“Who said she’s confused?”

“She can’t be that old, but lives in a home.”

“Around seventy, if I remember right.”

“You see.”

“You mean that-”

“The mom wants to protect her son, Andreas is keeping a straight face, and the old lady is confused and confirms what her daughter tells her to confirm. She is questioned by a colleague who is sympathetically inclined, because he happened to work with her husband. Just like that the boy has an alibi.”

Lindell sat quietly a while.

“You really stir things up,” she said at last.

“That’s my job,” said Sammy Nilsson.

It can’t be wrong, was a sentence that came back in her head again and again, after Sammy had left her.

Now there was quite a lot that was wrong. Klara Lovisa was missing and probably dead. That was just so very wrong. Her own theory, about a young man with a driver’s license, rested on shifting sand and would easily collapse. How wrong can you be! If Sammy Nilsson was right after all, that Andreas’s alibi was constructed within the family, then that was wrong too. Sinking her teeth in the poor boy again simply felt rotten.

And Anders Brant was wrong! She checked her e-mail repeatedly; not a word from him. Just a lot of drivel that didn’t mean a thing, either personally or professionally. Within the corps there seemed to be a whole cadre of salaried bullshitters who did nothing other than produce completely meaningless messages.

The latest however was from her mother, who with the help of the neighbor lady Olofsson’s computer and willing assistance for a while now had been sending e-mails almost every day.

This time it was about her father and his “depression.” He was asking about her! Lindell did not believe that for a moment. Vacation was approaching and Mom wanted Ann to come to Ödeshög. “Dad wants you to.” So wrong! Feeling that way about your parents created a bad conscience, that was a given, but Lindell had learned to live with it. Nowadays she accepted that she found no joy in returning to her childhood Ödeshög. Am I a worse person for that, she would ask herself. On one level she obviously liked her parents, they had given birth to her and raised her, gave her a secure upbringing, she had never wanted for anything, the ties to the person she had been and had become were with them.

Gratitude, that was how she might summarize the feeling she had, but there was no affection any longer. When they met there was a brief period of the joy of recognition, exchange of the mandatory gossip, but then only silence and embarrassment. Having arrived at that stage her mother became sharp and impudent, made comments and demands that Ann perceived as pinpricks and intrusions on her own life, a life far from Ödeshög and the stuffiness of her girl’s room.

Her father looked at her with an expression of doubt and admiration, as if he was asking himself: Is this Ann, my daughter? Then indifference took over and he showed no real interest in her life and doings, and the two slowly glided into a kind of anonymity with each other, a mood that suited her better than her mother’s meddling.

For many years she had tried to mobilize some form of enthusiasm, convince herself that love for your parents is something you feel automatically, anything else is unnatural and a sign of baseness. But Ödeshög and even the briefest coexistence with her parents seemed like pure exile, a feeling that was reinforced leading up to this summer.

In her mind she had planned to spend the major part of her vacation with Brant. Then he and Erik could also start getting to know each other. How that would turn out no one could predict.

But Ödeshög, sitting with a cup of coffee on the increasingly neglected terrace, staring at the hedge of bridal wreath and plastic flowerpots planted with dispirited marigolds and bright violet petunias and listening to her mother’s increasingly macabre rigmarole about the neighbors’ lives and supposed ill will-never!

Sports Club The Best’s coach for the women’s team was named Håkan Malmberg, Lindell figured out after speaking with one of Klara Lovisa’s soccer buddies, Elina Strindberg. He was single, but had “a really cute son,” according to Elina. She thought the coach was on vacation. He often rode his motorcycle through Sweden and sometimes down on the continent. So too this summer. Elina Strindberg could also tell that for a short period Malmberg had an assistant coach, “Freddy something,” who was “like, twenty-two” years old.

Lindell had cautiously inquired about Freddy under the pretext that perhaps he knew where Malmberg was to be found on his motorcycle odyssey.

Elina did not think so at all; the reason that Freddy’s sojourn on the team was only a couple of months was that Malmberg did not like the “snob,” as he called his coaching assistant.

Lindell asked Elina to think about whether she could ferret out Freddy’s surname, perhaps she could look in some old papers or call around to her friends, and then possibly also check whether anyone had Malmberg’s cell phone number. Of course she could. Lindell sensed a certain excitement in the girl’s voice; it was not every day you were asked to help out in a police investigation, and Lindell poured it on by saying something to the effect that the general public was the police department’s best friend, a cliché she hoped did not sound like one in Elina’s ears. Lindell gave the girl her cell phone number and encouraged her to call whenever she wanted, even in the evening.

Elina called after only half an hour. Freddy’s last name was Johansson and coach Malmberg was quite rightly on a motorcycle vacation. Lindell got cell numbers for both of them.

“Think if everyone worked that efficiently,” said Lindell, and praised Elina for her quickness.

The girl sounded charmed when she explained that she was happy to help find Klara Lovisa, but then asked carefully whether Freddy and Håkan were “suspects.”

“No, not at all,” Lindell reassured her. “We’re just trying to map out everything and everyone around Klara Lovisa.”

Elina, who to that point sounded eager, seemed to hesitate a moment.

“Freddy’s a little untethered,” she said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, a little strange, like that.”

“That he’s a snob, you mean?”

Lindell understood that that was not what made Elina want to talk about the assistant coach, but wanted to get her started. No doubt she and her friends had aired Freddy’s “strangeness.”

“He doesn’t say much,” Elina said at last.

“Maybe he’s shy?”

“No,” said Elina hesitantly. “Well, maybe,” she quickly changed her mind, “but he looked so strangely at… he seemed…”

“He looked strangely at the girls on the team?”

“Uh-huh.”

“At you?”

“Yes. He is cute and that, and-”

“So in the beginning you were a little interested?”

“Not exactly. Maybe.”

“Was he interested in more than one? Klara Lovisa or another?”

“Klovisa thought he was really super.”

“You call her Klovisa?”

“Yeah, didn’t you know that?”

“No,” said Lindell, writing down the nickname on the pad in front of her.

She thought it was strange she hadn’t heard that nickname before, but there was a lot that was strange with this investigation. That some dumbass had lost track of Yngve Sandman’s call was unforgivable, and that Klara Lovisa played soccer had escaped them. She had missed that!

“Was that why he had to quit as coach? I mean that he was taking liberties.”

“No, no, he never did anything. It was just Håkan who got mad at him, a few times.”

“Did he have different ideas about coaching?”

“No, it was something else, I think. Håkan just didn’t like him.”

“But the girls liked him?”

“Some,” said Elina, and now her voice had lost all its previous certainty and eagerness.

“Thanks, Elina, you have been super nice for letting me take up your time.”

“It’s just cool,” said the girl.

So cool it is, Lindell thought, when they ended the call.

In between checking her e-mail, if Brant were to decide to respond, she called the two numbers she got from Elina, with meager result. Håkan Malmberg had voicemail anyway and Lindell left a message.

Where Freddy Johansson was concerned, the answer signal sounded like that number was no longer current or that Elina had given her a wrong number.

She also searched on their names and did not find a single notation. Pure as snow.

Suddenly the cell phone beeped. She grabbed it and stared at the display: Message received. It was Charles Morgansson reporting that fingerprints from the murdered Bo Gränsberg had been found in Anders Brant’s Toyota.

Lindell knew she had to do something. And Klara Lovisa’s disappearance was something. Otherwise she would only obsess about Brant.

She left the police station, got in the car, and drove north on Svartbäcksgatan. An hour later she was there.