Black Lies, Red Blood

Twenty-one

The door-to-door questioning in the apartment building where Ingegerd Melander broke her neck produced a unison response: On Sunday evening there had been noisy partying and quarreling in Melander’s apartment. Several neighbors could testify to loud music, people coming and going, someone had urinated in the bushes in the yard.

“We’ve complained so many times, you just don’t have the energy anymore,” said the closest neighbor, Anja Wilson, a woman in her thirties. “Nothing happens.”

At eleven thirty things calmed down considerably. Several of the partiers noisily left the apartment. But the music continued until midnight. Soon after that a violent tumult arose.

“It sounded like they were smashing apart the furniture,” said the neighbor directly below Melander’s apartment.

The police had found a battered chair in Ingegerd’s bedroom, that was all. But a chair in the hands of the wrong person can produce a lot of noise, as Beatrice put it.

Then it was quiet.

“Johnny Andersson fell asleep,” Sammy Nilsson speculated.

No one heard when Ingegerd fell down the stairs.

“She died immediately in any event.”

Beatrice looked at him. They were sitting in the police station cafeteria, discussing Melander’s case.

“She didn’t have that much alcohol in her body,” said Bea.

“Enough for a stumble.”

Sammy Nilsson did not want to think about the unfortunate woman. While they waited for the medical examiner’s report and the autopsy, Beatrice organized the door-knocking and compiled biographical facts about Ingegerd Melander. There was a sister in Norrköping who had now been informed. She questioned Johnny Andersson again, and in the meantime Sammy had devoted several hours to the thirteen names from the bandy team. During the afternoon the list had expanded to fifteen, when the restaurateur Svensson called and added the remaining two players on the photo.

So far Sammy had not found any sensational information. Five of the bandy players were in the crime registry for minor offences, just as many in the enforcement office’s files, one of them was in hospice, dying of cancer, and two had been living abroad for a long time. They had the same address at a resort in the Philippines. Sammy immediately drew the conclusion that they were pedophiles.

The list had been reduced to twelve names. Sammy had managed to contact seven of them. All of them knew that their old teammate had met a violent death. None of them had been in contact with Gränsberg in recent years, in principle since he put his ice skates on the shelf. Sammy fished cautiously about Anders Brant, but had not produced anything substantial.

Now he did not want to sit and speculate about an alcoholic woman’s unlucky fall and death, but instead get hold of the remaining five individuals.

“It’s typical,” Beatrice continued. “The woman dies while she’s cleaning house and the man is sleeping off his bender.”

Sammy Nilsson sighed.

“What did Johnny say?”

Beatrice reported that he confirmed that they had quarreled, nothing serious according to him, as he had been too drunk. Drunk talk, he called their exchange of words, no physical violence had occurred. The broken chair he explained by saying that Ingegerd barricaded herself in the bedroom and placed the chair against the door to keep Johnny from coming in. “I wanted to cuddle a little,” he explained. When he tried to force the door the chair fell into the room and when he entered he stumbled on it, took hold of it in fury and threw it against the wall. There was also a mark on the bedroom wall, approximately at chest height.

“Breaking apart a chair is physical violence, wouldn’t you say?” Sammy objected.

He could picture the scene in his mind.

“Yes, but he didn’t hit her, just the wall.”

“She had a really nasty bruise on her arm and shoulder,” said Sammy.

“From the fall on the stairs, Amrén thought.”

Jonas Amrén was the medical examiner, whom Sammy had christened “Loose Lips” because he was so uncommunicative.

“It will probably turn out that we put Melander in the files,” said Sammy.

“We can’t prove a crime was committed,” said Beatrice, with a bitter tinge to her voice.

Sammy Nilsson sensed that she suspected that Johnny Andersson assaulted Melander and perhaps flat out pushed her down the stairs, but both knew that at the present time there was nothing that supported such a scenario. There was nothing to run to the prosecutor with.

“When we released Johnny this morning he only talked about Ingegerd Melander’s apartment, whether he had a chance to take it over.”

“It’s a municipal rental unit, isn’t it?”

“Of course, Uppsalahem has its own waiting list, but he was carrying on about buying it under the table somehow. Not a word that he was sorry she’d broken her neck.”

“He wants to move on with his life,” Sammy said casually and got up. “And I have to attend to the teammates.”