Black Lies, Red Blood

Twenty-six

Four digging tools of various types, snow shovels included, were the average holdings of the five properties that Fredriksson and Nyman visited.

The first question they asked was whether any of the property owners thought they were missing any tools. Everyone understood the seriousness of the question. The news had quickly spread that the young girl who had been written about so much in the papers during the spring had been found in the area.

Sheds and outbuildings were inspected, all unlocked, the police noted, but no one thought they were missing anything.

While Nyman labeled and packed the tools in garbage bags they had brought along, a task that he performed with great zeal and with an enthusiasm that only a trainee can demonstrate, Fredriksson questioned the residents.

They reminded him of the three monkeys, Fredriksson said later, none of them had seen or heard anything, and none of them was particularly communicative. All of them were obviously sorry about the young girl’s tragic fate, but it was as though they thought it was a bad thing that the murder took place within their own domain.

“Did it really have to happen right here?” was an opinion that one of the villa owners expressed.

Another thought that now property prices would surely go down.

“Who wants to live where there’s been a murder?”

“The rate isn’t all that high,” Fredriksson objected, but the woman he was speaking with maintained with emphasis that “one thing leads to another.”

Nyman, who overheard the conversation, snorted and got a sharp look from the woman.

“You don’t know anything about the real world,” she said, turning her back to the two policemen.

The forensic investigation of the tools produced nothing. True, there was organic material on several of the spades, but nothing that could be directly linked to the discovery site. A concrete shovel had dark stains on the blade, but that turned out to be paint.

“If the murderer were so ice cold that he stole a spade and then returned it, he was certainly careful to remove all traces,” Nyman said sententiously, when together with Fredriksson he visited the tech squad. Eskil Ryde reported on the lack of anything substantial, and Nyman added something about waste of work time.

Fredriksson recalled a different tune when they were collecting the tools, but chose not to comment, aware that the old technician would surely take care of that.

“You don’t know squat, not about police work anyway,” said Ryde with such sharpness in his voice that Nyman thought better about making a reply.

Instead, his face turning beet red, he turned and left.

“Which fucking quota did he come in on?” Ryde asked.

Fredriksson shrugged his shoulders.

“We had a Nyman before, and he didn’t last long, do you remember?”

Fredriksson remembered. Through his work on the vice squad, Nyman the First had come in contact with an escort service that supplied young women as dinner companions as well as for more physical activities. That Nyman chose to close his eyes, and for his silence was offered services that he eagerly took advantage of. This went on for a few years before the whole thing was uncovered. Nyman was encouraged to resign, but the case was kept quiet, even though a young journalist at Upsala Nya Tidning was on the trail of the “prostitution affair.”

There was whispering that the whole thing was too sensitive, as several bigwigs within the academic administration also made use of the services, not personally, but by supplying suitable telephone numbers to foreign guest lecturers, among others, in one case to a Nobel Prize winner unusually active for his age.

Whether all this was true neither Ryde nor Fredriksson knew, but they devoted a minute or two to it.

“But we have found something else,” said Ryde. “As you recall, there was a chair in the hut. The veneer on the back of the chair was cracked and there was a red thread stuck to it. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the case, but it’s the only foreign thing we’ve been able to find. Do you want to see it?”

Ryde took Fredriksson to Johannesson’s office, picked up a plastic bag from the desk, and held it out. Fredriksson viewed the thin thread.

“Cotton,” said Ryde. “Seven centimeters long. And it doesn’t come from the girl’s clothing.”

Fredriksson sighed. He realized that a thin thread was not much to go on, but did not want to disappoint Ryde. Because even though the technician was an experienced policeman, he often showed unbridled enthusiasm where the possibility of moving forward in an investigation was concerned, primarily if the basis was a detail that the tech squad had fished up.

“Nice,” said Fredriksson. “Now it’s just a matter of finding the rest of the garment.”

Ryde carelessly tossed the bag back on the desk.

“Of course you will,” he said and smiled.

“Okay, Eskil, I’ll send Nyman up. He gets to escort the spades back.” Fredriksson concluded his visit to the tech squad and left a contented Ryde.

Fredriksson returned to his office. Despite the light tone in the gossip with Ryde, when he experienced how much the grumpy old technician really meant to the squad, he was depressed. He felt worn out and confused. He took the resolution of the mystery of Klara Lovisa’s disappearance very much to heart.

She had probably been raped. The autopsy could not provide any unambiguous answer but the doctor had expressed it in terms such as “this mostly indicates that” and “one could probably consider.” The body had shown injuries that “with great probability” could not be explained other than by assault, but such weak statements could not be used in a possible future trial.

It was bad enough that Klara Lovisa had been found murdered, but the results of the autopsy further darkened the mood.

Fredriksson longed to go home, or rather to the forest. Almost every day he took a long walk along an old logging area, which had good prerequisites for developing into a first-class raspberry patch, followed a ditch toward a marsh, rounded the wet hollows, and then returned home. It usually took half an hour. He noted the daily changes in nature, let himself be intoxicated by the aroma of myrtle. He talked to himself, because his wife was completely uninterested in trudging around in the woods and deep down Fredriksson was happy about that. Here he could be in peace and feel calm.

But the past few weeks it was becoming harder and harder to find that calm. He experienced what all the others also expressed in various ways: It was too much.

He forced himself to focus for a while on the two investigations in which he was involved, Gränsberg and Klara Lovisa. Simply the fact of needing to divide himself was depressing, but with the current personnel situation it was necessary.

It went fine for a few minutes.

Then he chose the forest.