Black Lies, Red Blood

Twenty-seven

“You were looking for me?”

The voice was nasal and light, in contrast to the intense background noise on the phone, like a massive carpet of sound from a busy highway or perhaps a noisy industrial environment.

“And who is this?”

“Håkan Malmberg.”

She searched her memory and remembered before the pause was too long. Malmberg was Klara Lovisa’s coach. She had tried to find him for a few days, but since then had not given it much thought.

“Exactly. Thanks for returning my call.”

“I’m on vacation and don’t check my messages very often,” said Malmberg, as if to forestall her question of why he had waited to get in touch with her.

“It’s okay,” said Lindell. “Where are you now?”

“Värmland. What’s this about?”

“Klara Lovisa. You were her soccer coach.”

“I know that,” said Malmberg. “Who have you arrested?”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw on Text-TV that you found the murderer.”

“We have arrested someone, yes,” Lindell answered evasively.

“So who is it?”

Lindell did not reply; he ought to realize that she couldn’t mention any names. She was the one who was asking a few questions instead.

Håkan Malmberg maintained that he had not seen Klara Lovisa since her departure from the team, only caught sight of her in town on a few occasions. His statements were careful, but below the doctored summary Lindell could detect his irritation, or how he, in September the year before, had become really indignant.

“It was in the middle of tournament play, and Klovisa was a real cog,” the coach asserted. “It didn’t feel right at all that she just packed up and left.”

He could not give any reasonable explanation for her unexpected defection, but was not particularly surprised. At that age many players suddenly gave up sports.

At last Lindell asked the question about what relationship Fredrik Johansson and Klara Lovisa had.

“Is it him? The hell you say! That fucking weasel.”

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t deal with him, he was sick in the head, and not especially good either. And then his godawful staring at the girls on the team. He was…”

The continuation drowned in the noise that surrounded Malmberg. Lindell thought it sounded like a whole convoy of trucks passing. She suggested that he should move to a quieter place.

“My battery is low,” Malmberg asserted.

“When are you coming to Uppsala?” Lindell shouted.

“In a few days,” came the garbled response.

“Call me then!”

“Okay,” said Malmberg and ended the call.

Lindell set her phone down on the shelf next to the window. When the call from Malmberg came she had been staring out the window. The heat of the past few days had built up for a proper discharge and now it was pouring down with tropical intensity. The heavy raindrops pattered against the window and the rumbling from the thunderstorm that was first visible as a dark front toward the west was coming closer and closer.

The rain transported her in time and space, to the backyard in the house in Ödeshög, with the rain pouring over her naked body. Her mother stood in the patio door yelling that she would catch pneumonia but Ann could not hear in the thunder, or did not want to hear. She turned her back, shut her eyes and ears, closed everything out, and extended her arms to the sky.

She was seven years old. In the fall she would be starting school. It was a trivial memory, but her earliest one. Many people could recount experiences at an early age in detail, but this storm, the feeling of the rain that whipped her goose-pimply skin and how she felt herself being transformed, was her first real recollection from childhood.

There were other fragments, but the storm of that summer day was her first coherent memory, where she could recall that she had a thought of her own. There was also defiance. Her mother was powerless, she did not want to go out in the pouring rain. Ann was only five meters away, but inaccessible.

She sensed that the talk about pneumonia, which she understood was a disease, was just talk. She did not think she would get sick. On the contrary, the rain would make her healthier.

But if she were to go out naked now and stand in the inner courtyard of the police building and defy both weather and convention, she was not sure the same feeling of purity and liberation would come over her. The innocence of childhood was gone.

It felt like a weight, this experience of being someone else, no longer Ann, the girl in the rain. She was Lindell, a cop; at times very effective, sometimes less so. She was the mother of Erik, age seven, present, needed, and loved by him. She was a woman who loved nakedness and touch, from words, rain, and from another person’s warmth and hands.

To what extent and in what order she was all of this, police officer, mother, and woman, shifted of course. Combining it was often the most intricate puzzle of life.

Right then by the window she experienced for a few moments that she was not anything at all. She saw only the girl in the rain before her.

The past few days she had lived as if in a vacuum, her body a walking shell, mechanically performing movements and gestures-speaking, functioning, interacting with others. She functioned in triple roles, but without any meaning or goal.

It ached like mental whiplash. Someone, or something, had hit her hard in the back to make her move forward, and sure enough she took stumbling steps in the direction that was pointed out as the right one. But it ached so much.

She turned around. The rain had eased up somewhat, the storm appeared to be taking a northerly course, would probably pass over Bälinge and Björklinge. On her desk was a plastic bag. It had been there since the morning, but she had not really thought much about the contents, and this lack of involvement, a both unexpected and unwelcome preoccupation, was due to one thing: The sign of life she received from Anders Brant, he who in the past few days had somehow come to incarnate Ann Lindell’s three different roles.

What did he have to do with Gränsberg’s death? Who was he? Where was he? And on the personal level, did they have a future together at all? Would Erik accept him?

It was as if she couldn’t bear to deal with any of the questions and preferred to regress to the first memory of childhood where the girl Ann, in a feeling of bodily freedom, with the rain pounding, in her undeveloped slenderness, took the first careful, unconscious steps toward becoming the woman Ann Lindell. And beyond the purely physical, in the conscious, euphoric defiance of her mother there was a longing for freedom that made her long from that moment to be away, and as soon as it was possible, flee Ödeshög and train to be a police officer, all the time with the goal of becoming a very competent one.

Now she was submerged in melancholy. Extremely absentmindedly she had poked in her investigation of Klara Lovisa and out of pure habit maintained a kind of minimal dialogue with her colleagues, a back-burner Lindell.

She realized that it was Brant’s unbelievably brief, almost aggressive message that created this gloom, reinforced by the rain and the recollection of that early childhood memory. It all flowed together-mother, woman, and police officer Ann Lindell. And the result was a melancholy passivity. If anyone were to say anything that might be perceived as the least bit critical of her, she would burst into tears, and if someone were to say that she was a good person, a good police officer, or a good mother, the result would be the same.

She took a deep breath, forced herself away from the window, and over to the desk.

The plastic bag was an ordinary confiscation bag and contained a necklace, consisting of a thin chain and two small silver disks. Each disk had a word engraved on it. Ann read Carpe Diem, capture the day. Pathetic and trite to say the least, so that it had lost its significance, she thought, but realized that for a sixteen year old it might be perceived differently.

Klara Lovisa had been wearing the chain. Her parents had not recognized it and maintained that they had never seen it before, which Lindell had no reason to doubt.

So Klara Lovisa received it on the day of the murder, her birthday. From who? Probably not from the murderer, who cleaned out her pockets, took her cell phone, and wallet. Why then leave a necklace behind that perhaps he had given her a few hours earlier?

Lindell’s conclusion was that Klara Lovisa received the chain on the morning from someone other than the one who a few hours later would strangle her.

Who was this someone? The one that Lindell immediately thought of was Andreas Davidsson. Wouldn’t a silver necklace be a suitable present from an infatuated teenager trying to win his girlfriend back? But he had maintained that he had not seen Klara Lovisa on the morning she disappeared, and why should he lie about that?

Silly question, Lindell muttered immediately, people lie all the time. Sometimes out of habit, many times without realizing that unnecessary lies only hurt their own cause, sometimes instinctively because they believe the truth is dangerous, as if it would be easier to consistently stick to the untruth. Deny everything and you become inaccessible, they seem to think. One untruth leads to another, and then they are sitting helplessly stuck in a tangle of lies. To then get loose, sort out the lies from truth after the fact, becomes a nearly impossible task.

Anders Brant was cheating! The insight came so suddenly that it felt as if she was having a stroke. There was a stabbing pain around her temples as if knives were being driven into her head. She took hold of her head. The pain was indescribable.

He’s lying to me, she thought. The pain, which did not last more than a second, was replaced by a massive headache, and for a moment she thought something really had burst, a winding artery that had given up from the pressure.

Lindell took this as a sign, not based on any of the superstitious comments, often ominous, that her mother loved to strew around her, but that this was her subconscious mind’s way of sounding an alarm. She concluded that her brain had registered something she was not consciously able to perceive, and was now warning her, trying to get her to understand and formulate.

Duplicity. She pushed the chair back from the desk, and with her elbows on her knees she leaned her head into her hands. She drew on all her strength to read signals that until how had been hidden from her. What had he really said about their relationship? Nothing really. He had a way of expressing himself, in a superficial way clear and lucid, but on closer inspection vague and possible to interpret in various ways. She could now remember several occasions when she experienced just such uncertainty about his words.

On those few occasions they talked about the future, it was as if he either joked it off, or put several layers of information on each other, relativizing what he had just said by adding something new.

She had enjoyed listening to him and took it as a part of his style of reasoning, as if his journalistic activity unconsciously forced him into ambiguities and reservations, like an attorney who talks and talks in long twists and turns, considering all aspects. An occupational injury.

But were the ambiguities perhaps just an expression of duplicity? Had he simply played with her? The idea was completely inconceivable. It couldn’t be that way, mustn’t be that way.

That man had taken a real hold on her, and if he were now to be torn out of her, the damage would be extensive. Her body, which functioned better than the deficient judgment of passion, signaled betrayal. It ached.

Lindell got up quickly, the desk whirled around before her and she reached for the chair behind her for support.

Ann Lindell went to Ottosson to tell him. She wanted him to listen to her without showing any agitation or even surprise. It struck her that perhaps Ottosson knew about her relationship with Brant and was only waiting for her to tell him what was going on of her own accord.

Ottosson was on the phone, but waved her in. The call was personal, planning a children’s party, from what Ann could make out. Ottosson was smiling the whole time and the call dragged on.

Ann made a sign to Ottosson that could be interpreted any number of ways and slipped out the door, relieved that her execution had been postponed, but also with a dawning hatred of the man who had sneaked into her life and crumbled her awkward defenses, brought her down like a hunted animal, and then disappeared with her ridiculous hope as a trophy.

He had also interfered in her professional life in a completely unforeseen and drastic manner. She had become so distorted that through her silence, her duplicity, she had jeopardized her good relationship with Ottosson and her position at the unit.

In the corridor she met Beatrice, who hurried past, clearly on her way in to see Ottosson.

“Everything all right?” said Beatrice in passing, not expecting an answer.

Lindell was prepared to run after her colleague and give her a kick in the rear. She sensed how in the future Beatrice would exploit the Brant affair in veiled comments, peevish stabs that would never be completely understood by the others, and for that reason could not be parried factually. In the unspoken measure of strength between the two women on the squad, the weapons were not fair. And Lindell perceived that she was almost always at a disadvantage. Now it would be even worse.

Back in her office she sank down in the chair, shaken and sweaty. A week ago she was sore and happy.

Hate and love, so close to each other. In her mind Nina Simone was singing “Don’t Explain,” about a desperate woman’s self-degrading appeal to the man to come back: You don’t need to explain anything. Just come back!

It was a long time since she played it. She got the CD as a Christmas present from Rolf, long after they separated. He was like that, Rolf, eager to foist his taste in music off on her, and in this case he hit the mark. She liked the record and during long, wine-soaked evenings, while Edvard Risberg was disappearing from her life, she listened to it over and over again, engulfed by Simone’s mournful voice, until she learned the lyrics by heart.

Now Simone came back. Don’t explain. “You are my joy, you are my pain.”

I’m so pathetic, she thought, like a line in a sentimental pop song, like a schoolgirl in love, without any distance, middle-aged but still so immature, easy prey for a man who simply by talking a little, touching a little, cleared away all resistance, to suck on her like candy for a little while, and just as nonchalantly spit her out when the taste got too monotonous, taking away her self-respect and crushing her.

But even so she wanted him to come back! Anything else was too sad, too heavy to bear, in any event at the moment. A respite, that was all. Then, when the worst pains had subsided, perhaps she might take his betrayal and start properly hating him. But now she simply wanted to rest together with him, without explanations, without promises. She wanted to be loved, even if not for real.

That’s how bad things were for homicide investigator Ann Lindell.