Black Lies, Red Blood

Thirty

She remembered how he brushed a strand of hair away from her face and then leaned over to give her a kiss on the forehead. And the aftershave, that he got from the children on his birthday.

That was the last thing, the touch and the smell. She could not remember whether he said anything; sometimes he did, before anyway, a few words to the effect that she could sleep awhile longer, that he would be back soon, or something more affectionate.

That was what she told the police too, that she was barely awake, but realized that he was leaving. It sounded so paltry. She would have preferred saying something else, above all more, a more rounded recollection, that they had made love, had breakfast together, that he was happy his trip would be short, perhaps something about the future, who they really were, what they could have been.

Then she took them out to the street, to the fence, and pointed at the knothole.

“This is how tall he is!”

They did not understand.

“The Russian!” she screamed. “He’s Russian! I know he’s a Russian. The whole thing is Oleg’s fault! The gas, that damn gas!”

Her voice was cutting. She struck the fence with her clenched fists as if to eradicate the figure who had been standing there twelve hours earlier. Beatrice put her hand on her shoulder.

Suddenly Henrietta caught a glimpse of Malin in the kitchen window. A rational thought broke through her confusion for a moment-thank the good Lord I did not tell her yesterday evening-and she freed herself from the female police officer who was trying to calm her, and ran into the house.

“That’s the daughter, we’ll give them a couple minutes,” said Beatrice. “And Fredriksson is in there.”

“Who is it that’s this tall?”

Sammy Nilsson did not like this. Standing on a street and not understanding a thing. They would soon have an answer to the question of who Henrietta Kumlin meant as she desperately struck her hand against the fence, he was sure of that. But all the other questions?

“It’s vacation time, damn it!” he exclaimed.

He would be spending a week kayaking with his crazy sister, who had barricaded herself in a little village in the inland of Västerbotten. No one understood why, but that’s where she wanted to live. The only way to see her was to go up there. And sitting in the isolated cabin, with barely enough space for one person, was inconceivable to Sammy; he got cabin fever at the mere thought of it. So they, or rather Sammy, decided they would spend a few days in a canoe, and his sister had unwillingly gone along with the arrangement.

“Do you have any idea how awkward it will be?”

Beatrice Andersson had been listening to his complaints without comment. In principle she was grateful that he was not taking advantage of the fact that his survey of the so-called bandy gang would now perhaps prove meaningful. There was probably a connection between Gränsberg, Brant, and now Jeremias Kumlin, not only as a lineup of team members on a twenty-year-old photo. It would be strange if this were only a coincidence.

“We don’t know yet,” she said anyway.

Sammy Nilsson stared at her uncomprehendingly, shook his head, and then stomped back to the garage, where Eskil Ryde and Johannesson had just stepped in.

Beatrice Andersson understood that her colleague was tired, worn out; he really needed a week in the wilderness. She also understood what he meant by “awkward.” It would be complicated. Vacations would be lost, plans would have to be rearranged. Her own vacation was not planned to start for a month, but yet another case, with a probable connection to a previous homicide, an unfortunate ride down a staircase, and a journalist’s mysterious disappearance, all that combined would create chaos in the schedule.

Her own fatigue also made it hard to think, but there was no turning back because she understood that Henrietta Kumlin would be her assignment. This talk about Russians-and gas-was confusing to say the least, and she returned to the house to start unraveling.

Jeremias Kumlin was lying flat on his face, with his arms stretched out over the hood of his BMW, as if during the final seconds of his life he wanted to embrace the symbol of his success.

Sammy was standing in the half-open garage doorway. Two patrol officers had just finished cordoning off the lot and street, and Sammy and the field commander, Simlund, were discussing how they should arrange the door-to-door operation on the normally quiet street.

Ryde and Johannesson were working in silence. Sammy thought it was strange to see the “old man” at work once again, as if nothing would ever change. That thing about Ryde’s retirement was a joke, he had simply fooled them, and would outlive them all.

“How’s it look?”

Ryde looked up.

“He’s dead,” he said.

Sammy Nilsson nodded.

“Head bashed in.”

“I know, I saw him. Come on now!”

“You need to calm down.”

Sammy Nilsson knew that too.

“Don’t stand there stomping your feet!”

Sammy Nilsson left the garage door. A few neighbors farther down on the street were standing and talking, one of them in a bathrobe, although it was almost nine o’clock. A uniformed officer was on his way toward them and when they noticed the policeman they pulled back.

“Don’t let us disturb you,” Sammy Nilsson mumbled.

He walked restlessly down the street, a little fragment of an Uppsala he seldom or never visited. The well-adjusted, successful types lived here. So was there a connection between Gränsberg and Kumlin, more than the fact that both suffered a fatal skull fracture? He tried to recall what had been said during his and Kumlin’s brief phone conversation a few days ago. Nothing strange or startling he had thought then and could not, in light of what had now happened, come to any other conclusion. Kumlin had been surprised to be asked about an old photo, perhaps also a little irritated, but said nothing that aroused Sammy’s interest in the slightest and definitely nothing that would make anyone suspect that the businessman would meet such a fate.

Did the call trigger some activity on Kumlin’s part, perhaps a telephone call to someone else on the bandy team, which in turn led to his being murdered? Sammy Nilsson realized that he must have another discussion with the former teammates.

He stopped abruptly and raised one arm as if to keep a train of thought from disappearing. Had someone decided for some unfathomable reason to eradicate the whole bandy team, player by player? Was that why Anders Brant took off so hastily, that he realized he was in danger and fled the country? Or was it the case that Brant had returned from Madrid and was the one who bashed a pipe wrench into the back of Jeremias’s head?

Sammy Nilsson looked around as if the answers to his questions were to be found in the well-tended gardens in Sunnersta.

Suddenly a figure emerged from a bush only a few meters away and Sammy Nilsson instinctively reached for his gun which he wore in a shoulder holster-for once he was armed-but calmed himself immediately. A man stepped up to the fence toward the street.

“Birger Luthander,” he said.

They shook hands, Sammy Nilsson introduced himself and inspected the man. He was in his sixties, dressed only in a pair of Bermuda shorts; his upper body was bare and he had no shoes on.

“Something has happened, I understand. Is it the Kumlins?”

Sammy Nilsson hummed. He was a little irritated that his train of thought had been interrupted, perhaps a little embarrassed by his reaction.

“You looked so thoughtful, almost sad, if I may say so. Something terrible has happened, I thought right away. And I’m not surprised, I might add.”

“I see, what do you mean by that?”

“There’s been a little traffic on the street of a somewhat different nature than usual. Nothing good can come of this, I remember thinking.”

Do they have to talk like that, wondered Sammy.

“Traffic?”

“Yes, but I’m not referring to motor vehicles. I couldn’t help noticing, and I want to emphasize that I haven’t made any exertions. I’m not a curious person,” he quickly added. “But on several occasions, three to be exact, individuals have appeared on the street, individuals who do not belong to the customary picture of life in the area.”

“In brief: You’ve seen people who don’t live on the street.”

“Correct. The first occasion was maybe two weeks ago, and he also returned a few days later. And then yesterday, another visitor, this time it was a different man, but with an equally unfavorable appearance; I can’t say anything about his inner qualities. The fact was that it was my wife who brought my attention to the man; personally I was watching one of the many sports channels. Completely uninteresting. I definitely think it was some ball sport, you have no idea how quick Asians can be on their feet when it counts. I dismissed him as a peddler, mostly to calm my wife, who sometimes has a tendency to overreact, but the strange thing was that he stayed by Rosén’s fence-a not particularly esthetically pleasing construction, in my opinion-for at least two hours, without moving a muscle, in principle completely still, that alone a minor achievement. He was not Asian.”

“So what was he?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did he look like?”

“He might very well have been Swedish, but it would not surprise me if he had some foreign background. He was not dark-haired, but not blond either. I guess it’s called ash-blond. He was not wearing glasses.”

“Clothing?”

“Everyday, but to get details you’ll have to ask my wife. That’s her specialty.”

“Age?”

“Hard to determine, between forty and fifty.”

“Yes, that’s what we’re dealing with,” Sammy Nilsson murmured, thinking of the bandy team.

“Excuse me?”

“It was nothing. What makes you think that he might possibly come from abroad?”

“The whole impression,” said Birger firmly. “There was something vague about him, something old-fashioned, well, maybe it was the clothes? To the degree he moved it was also with a kind of uncertainty, maybe because he felt he didn’t belong here, which was also apparent.”

Birger Luthander, who behind all the verbosity proved to be an attentive and clear-sighted witness, except where clothing was concerned, could put words on the unknown man’s appearance and to some degree conduct. These were speculations, Sammy Nilsson realized, but it still gave him a good picture of the man who so stubbornly lingered by Rosén’s fence.

“If you want to speak with my wife, it’s fine to call her cell phone.”

Sammy Nilsson took out his phone. Luthander very slowly repeated the number digit by digit.

Mrs. Luthander, who introduced herself as Anita, could quite rightly account for the man’s dress: gym shoes, brown pants, and a green jacket that reached to his waist, and under that a dark shirt.

She added something too that Sammy Nilsson found interesting. Right before eight thirty the man disappeared, but Anita Luthander never saw him pass by their house. She thought that was peculiar as it was a dead-end street.

Otherwise she confirmed her husband’s understanding. A foreigner, she summarized her impression.

Sammy thanked her for her help and they ended the conversation. In the meantime Birger Luthander had retrieved his business card, which he handed to Sammy.

Publisher Birger Luthander, PhD, he read on the card.

“What do you publish?”

“Mostly bridge books. Do you play bridge? And then a few odds and ends about scientists who have been wrong but right anyway.”

“That’s an area I’m very familiar with,” said Sammy Nilsson, amused at having met this curious character, partly for the testimony, but also because he helped change his own state of mind for the better.

“That was a thought,” said Birger Luthander and nodded, obviously content, as if he’d gotten an impulse for new writings.

It was four thirty before an initial summary could be made. A group of noticeably restless, tired police officers had gathered. There was starting to be a shortage of prosecutors too, because even if the prosecutor’s office had been spared the stubborn summertime flu that struck the police, several were on vacation and those who were left in the building were all loaded with cases. It was the sanguine Åke Hällström who was assigned the Kumlin murder. And this balanced the gloomy atmosphere somewhat, because even though he too had a heavy workload and was a little confused at the moment, he was endowed with an unusually easygoing temperament for the building.

“Go over that again,” said Hällström. “Kumlin’s wife maintains that it was a Russian, but has nothing to back that up?”

“No,” said Beatrice Andersson. “She explains it by her husband’s business deals in Russia, that he might have felt threatened.”

“Was there an explicit threat?”

“Not that she knew of.”

“Strange,” said Hällström.

But Beatrice Andersson did not think so at all. She had listened to Henrietta Kumlin’s story, about the constant trips to Moscow and some place farther east, the name of which she could not remember, and about Jeremias’s worry, which had increased recently. And then this Oleg Fedotov, who to Henrietta was clearly the image of evil incarnate.

“His business seems to have moved in the well-known gray zone,” Beatrice continued. “There are, as we know, less conventional methods for getting your way.”

“Even murder?”

“Yes, that had occurred to Henrietta.”

Hällström nodded.

“But she knows this Fedotov?”

“They’ve met, but he was not the one watching their house. According to her, Fedotov prefers not to travel abroad. On the other hand his sons have visited Sweden and Uppsala, even stayed with the Kumlins.”

“But we don’t know if it was the fence man who murdered Kumlin,” Sammy interjected. “He evidently went up in smoke at eight thirty. Either he left the area or else he went into the garage, waited there all night, and went to work in the morning when Kumlin was going to take his car and drive to Arlanda. That could mean he knew that Kumlin would be leaving the house in the morning.”

“He didn’t leave a trace,” Beatrice Andersson observed in the antiphony that arose between her and Sammy Nilsson.

“A pro,” said Hällström, and Beatrice gave him a tired look that showed what she thought about that comment.

“Then we have Luthander’s information that there have been several unexpected visitors on the street recently,” Sammy resumed. “On two occasions he saw what he characterized as a stranger on the street. If that person was on his way to Kumlin we don’t know, no one else on the street noticed the man, and no one has expected or received a visit either. If we rely on Luthander’s information that this wasn’t the ‘Russian,’ if we’re calling him that, then who was he?”

“It may be someone who tried to visit someone on the street two times, but this someone was not at home,” said Beatrice Andersson.

“Someone doing reconnaissance,” Fredriksson tossed out.

“What bothers me, seriously,” Beatrice resumed, “is that the ‘Russian’ hangs around so long, completely visible. We have three witnesses, besides your buddy Luthander, who saw him standing there by the fence. Why? If the idea was to kill Kumlin that was unusually stupid.”

“It went wrong,” said Sammy. “The mission was to frighten, then it went overboard.”

“Did he stay in the garage the whole night?” Hällström asked. “I have a hard time believing that.”

For an hour they argued back and forth, until they started repeating themselves. It was the prosecutor who proposed a break, and it was as if that suggestion let the air out of the gathering.

The group broke up, but Sammy Nilsson stayed behind. He could not settle down. He was thinking about the Gränsberg-Brant-Kumlin connection. It had barely been discussed but it was arguably the most interesting.

If they could establish and understand such a connection, everything would be resolved, that was his firm conviction.

He left the meeting room and went to his own office, where he sank down in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. He ought to go home, but was unable to relax. He took out the photo that he had taken from Brant’s apartment and studied the team members.

Brant, the joker in the deck, Lindell’s lover, the Spanish traveler Brant, whom Ola Haver had all the trouble in the world locating. Sammy Nilsson guessed that Haver was not making any great efforts, he probably had his hands full working things out on the home front. Probably he had just dutifully sent a few e-mails to the Spanish police with questions that were now floating around in the virtual world of cyberspace.

Why did Brant take off? Why do people leave the country anyway? To get away, to work, or simply to go on vacation. At the start of the investigation Sammy had been convinced that Brant was hiding; now he was no longer so sure, perhaps due to what Lindell had told him. Would she have dated a murderer?

Suddenly it occurred to him that among all the piles of papers on the journalist’s desk there was a folder marked Putin.

He looked at the clock-six thirty-reached for the phone and called Lindell at home, who answered after the first ring.

“Hello!”

There was suppressed tension in her voice.

“How’s it going?”

“Huh? Is that you, Sammy? With what?”

Lindell’s voice seemed to be coming on scratchy connections from the other side of the globe.

“Life. Have you talked with Ottosson?”

She had not. An e-mail from Brant had changed the picture, as she said, but did not want to tell what it was about. This irritated Sammy Nilsson, and he let her know it too.

“But he’s clean,” said Lindell. “In any event where Gränsberg is concerned, I mean.”

“Where is he?”

“Brazil, in a city. In the atlas… I looked it up. It’s called Bahia. Or Salvador actually.”

“The atlas,” said Sammy Nilsson, as if he found it unbelievable that people looked things up in something as old-fashioned as an atlas.

“He knew Gränsberg but has nothing to do with the murder. It was a different murder.”

“What do you mean, different?”

“In Salvador, of a homeless person,” said Lindell tiredly. “He witnessed it.”

“Unbelievable,” said Sammy Nilsson. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen. Would-”

“One moment!”

Sammy heard Lindell set down the receiver. In the background bizarrely loud sounds from a TV were heard and he understood that she was yelling at Erik. The volume was lowered somewhat and Lindell returned.

“What did you say?”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Well, I, no, no,” Lindell protested. “Erik is just a little-”

“Are you depressed?”

Lindell did not answer. He could picture her, even if he hadn’t seen her new apartment, which she claimed to feel so at home in, but it was not comfort and coziness that Sammy Nilsson associated with Ann Lindell at just that moment. He knew she’d been drinking, he recognized the signs, the slightly elevated pitch in her voice and the bad syntax.

“Ann, listen to me! I’m coming over, so we can talk.”

The only thing he heard was Erik singing along with a song that boomed from the TV.

“Ann, are you there?”

Was she crying?

“Sure, a while longer anyway, but it’s a little heavy right now,” she said at last.

“Is 4B your apartment number?”

She hummed in reply.

“No entry code?”

“Three-eight-three-eight,” said Ann Lindell. “My shoe size times two. I do have two feet.”

But not particularly steady ones, thought Sammy Nilsson.

“Don’t drink any more! I’ll be there in half an hour, maybe an hour, just have to swing by home. Put on some coffee. Sit down with Erik on the couch, talk with him.”

“Okay,” said Lindell. “I’ll…”

She fell silent, Sammy Nilsson waited for a continuation, and when it came it was suddenly a sober Lindell who was talking.

“I think I know who murdered Klara Lovisa.”

Sammy Nilsson parked on Österplan, a short distance from Lindell’s residence, and remained standing a moment. It was a lovely evening, the air was warm and trailing from a grill on one of the courtyards was the aroma of meat cooking.

A freight train lumbering north made the ground vibrate. The heavy train creaked and lurched. He counted the cars, forty-eight of them, and it occurred to him that he had wanted to be an engineer when he grew up. Imagine sticking to a track and never leaving it.

Höganäs was an area he seldom if ever visited, either personally or on the job. In statistical terms it was a peaceful part of Uppsala. He had had one assault there, and as he walked past the building where the wife of a glazier had been severely beaten, he peeked into the yard, and stopped in amazement. The glazier’s wife was sitting in a lawn chair, reading. Sammy Nilsson could see that it was the same novel, by the most recent Nobel Prize winner, that he himself was trying to read in the evenings. The glazier himself was in front of a grill with a spray can in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. He said something, the woman looked up and smiled, but immediately went back to her reading.

Sammy Nilsson hurried on before they caught sight of him. He would surely be recognized and he felt embarrassed, as if he was guilty of something indecent.

Ann had freshened up both the apartment and herself in the hour that had passed since they talked. There was a scent of cleanser, mixed with coffee, and she had showered.

“Erik just fell asleep,” she said.

Sammy carefully closed the door. The evening sun was shining in through the windows in the living room, capturing the swirling dust and giving the apartment a strangely suggestive, opaque character, a romantic but at the same time ominous introduction to a French noir film from the fifties, with a woman placed like a fragile, dreamlike detail at the outer edge of the picture who would slowly back into the room and disappear.

“I made coffee,” she said barely audibly, as if she was testing whether her voice would hold, while Sammy kicked off his shoes and curiously looked around in the dark hallway.

He still had the feeling from his encounter with the glazier and his wife that he was intruding, peeking into something extremely private. He did not socialize with his colleagues; the barbecue every summer at Haver’s was actually the only occasion they got together in an organized way. He might have a beer sometimes with Morgansson in tech, in any case before Morgansson met the woman he had now moved in with, but he was the only one.

The impression of intruding was unexpectedly mixed with a feeling of tenderness for Ann Lindell. She was sitting on the couch, her hair wet, straight-backed, ready to pour coffee. A plate of cookies was set out, as well as a jug of milk.

“You have a really nice place,” he said. He was seized by an impulse to take hold of her, pat her on the cheek, or something physically tangible, but realized that would be idiotic. She was on tenterhooks and was doing everything not to show her emotions. A pat might make her fall apart, he knew her that well.

Once before, a few years ago, he had picked up the pieces after her. That time she was sitting alone at a bar, drinking. A patrol officer, who was there to have a bite to eat and dance, phoned Sammy and told him that his colleague probably needed to go home and go to bed, otherwise things might go very wrong.

Sammy had gone there immediately, found her blind drunk, and carted her home. That time he stayed with her the whole night, slept on the couch they were now sitting on, and the next morning had a long chat with a hungover, regretful Lindell. A chat that sank in, he realized afterward, even though they never brought up the incident later and what had been discussed that morning at her kitchen table.

He had asked her where Erik was and she said he was staying with his “relief family,” and explained that occasionally it felt so heavy that she did not know whether she could manage bringing up her son, and that he was really the one who needed to be relieved from her, not the other way around.

He called the patrol officer and asked him to keep quiet about what happened, and as far as Sammy could tell he had done that, he had never heard any comments or gibes at work anyway.

After that she pulled herself together and from what Sammy had heard Erik stood out as a well-adjusted boy. It seemed as if that morning Ann definitively decided to put her love and longing for Edvard Risberg on the shelf, even if she later admitted to Sammy that for long periods it still hurt a lot. As recently as last year, in connection with her investigating a murder in the archipelago, and in doing so came geographically very close to Edvard, the misspent love story put her out of balance for several weeks.

He sat down alongside her. The living room was, if not boring, conventionally furnished. He understood that Ann had not spent any time looking through home decor magazines. It was dutiful and functional. The only thing that deviated was a large oil painting on the opposite wall.

She noticed his interest and told about an artist, now a very old man, who had painted a single motif his entire life, Lake Vättern, on whose shore he was born and had always lived.

“I bought it twenty years ago, I actually borrowed money from my parents to get it, and I don’t regret it. It goes with me. It’s the only advantage with Ödeshög, being close to Vättern, or ‘the sea,’ as Dad called it.”

“He’s succeeded,” said Sammy.

“Lovely but cold,” said Lindell, lost in thought.

“Klara Lovisa,” said Sammy, who wanted to break the slightly ominous mood, at the same time pouring milk in his coffee mug.

“The last Mohican,” she said, and dismissed Sammy’s perplexed expression with a hand gesture. She then told about the necklace they had found on Klara Lovisa and that no one, not even her parents, recognized. She had drawn the conclusion that it was the murderer who had given her the jewelry.

“Nice,” said Sammy. “First a chain around the neck and then a chokehold.”

“I asked a teenage girl here in the building, she takes care of Erik sometimes, where she bought her jewelry and whether this particular type was popular. She listed a number of stores and today I’ve been making the rounds. Got a bite at the first one, Silver and Such, on Drottninggatan. The clerk recognized the necklace immediately and said they had sold a lot in the past six months, with the exact inscription Carpe Diem.”

“That doesn’t sound like much,” said Sammy. “I mean, that’s a lot of customers. It would be better if it were something unusual.”

“I was prepared,” Ann resumed, and now she smiled for the first time. “The clerk pointed out my candidate right away.”

“What the hell?”

“I’d gone around to three schools and picked up yearbooks, you know, with photos of everyone in class. I let her browse and speak up if she recognized a customer. In the third yearbook I showed her she put her finger on a face without hesitating: It was the last Mohican. She was dead certain of it.”

“He had a Mohawk haircut, in other words.”

Lindell nodded.

“I thought like this: If and when Fredrik Johansson left Klara Lovisa alone in the forest hut, what did she do then?”

“Tried to get away from there,” said Sammy, happy at the change in Lindell, from slurring to lucid, but he was also listening to her with a feeling of unease. He had seen something similar before, when she stubbornly shifted into higher gear on the last drops of fuel like a gasoline engine before it finally coughs and falls silent.

“It was her birthday, she wanted to go to town, she was angry besides and maybe shocked at Freddy’s attempt, but she could not readily call her parents and ask them to come and get her.”

“She called the last Mohican,” Sammy interjected.

Lindell nodded again.

“Andreas Davidsson. He has such an unusual hairstyle that you remember him, and that was what I was hoping for. Like I said, the clerk was quite certain about it. My theory is that Andreas got on his moped right away and took off. In the morning he had sent her an SMS, Klara Lovisa knew he would show up, and that he would certainly not tattle, the boy was deathly in love with her. This would put her in his debt, so of course he showed up. Then it goes wrong. She gets her present and hangs it around her neck, but when Andreas wants to screw her, it goes wrong. Perhaps she lets something slip, tired of all the horny boys, and Andreas suddenly understands that he is never going to have a chance.”

“A lot of assumptions,” Sammy Nilsson objected. “Does he have a moped, for example?”

Lindell nodded and continued.

“She leaves home without jewelry, afterward murdered with jewelry. Anders bought just such a necklace a few days before. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

Sammy sighed. He realized that Klara Lovisa and Andreas might just as well have met earlier in the day, and that she then received the chain as a present. On the other hand, why would the boy lie about such a thing?

“And one more thing,” Lindell resumed. “But this is just a feeling. I think his mother knows something. She seemed more than allowably confused and nervous. If I bring in mother and son and put pressure on them separately, then someone will break down, sooner or later. I actually think sooner.”

Sammy Nilsson had great respect for Lindell’s “feeling.” It didn’t always lead right, but often enough that you could take it seriously. She seemed to have recourse to a kind of inner direction finder, an instrument that made her the capable police officer she was.

“Have you talked with Ottosson?”

Lindell looked at Sammy Nilsson in confusion.

“About what?”

“This?”

“Yes, we’re bringing in Andreas and his mom early tomorrow, early as hell.”

Sammy Nilsson nodded, drank the last of his coffee, which had gotten cold.

“Then you’re not allowed to drink anymore this evening,” he said, fixing his eyes on hers. She returned the look a few seconds before she lowered her head like a penitent.

“Do you know what I did after we talked?”

“Showered.”

“Yes, but first I stuck my fingers down my throat and vomited. Erik didn’t hear anything, he has his own karaoke club right now. He’s been at it constantly for a couple weeks now, he sings along with every single TV program and video, sweet but tiresome after a while. I had just had two glasses of wine and you know I don’t need much, even more so when I haven’t been eating right. Then I drank a liter of milk and showered. I didn’t want to be drunk when you came.”

“Anders Brant,” said Sammy.

She nodded.

“What’s happened?” he continued.

“Do you really want to hear? It’s a depressing fucking mess, filled with stupid love, a lot of hope, but just as much disappointment and anguish, dreary to listen to if you’re not involved.”

“Tell me,” Sammy encouraged her, knowing that it would sound just as drearily predictable as Ann foretold.

“I think he has a woman in Brazil,” she said. “He didn’t say that flat out in his e-mail, but between the lines it was clear enough. Maybe she’s the one who was here and visited. And now he’s there.”

The tears welled up and made their way down her cheeks.

“And when you read his e-mail, you opened a bottle of vino,” Sammy observed.

“It’s so petty,” said Lindell. “I feel so deceived, as if someone holds out a bag of candy and then pulls it back right when you’re about to feast on it. The senseless thing is that I think he was in love too. We had a good thing!”

Sammy Nilsson wondered whether he should tell what he had found in Brant’s bedroom, but not everything needed to be told. She had drawn the right conclusion on her own, so why sprinkle more salt in her wounds by giving her the details?

She seemed to have shrunk on the couch, her voice had also gotten smaller. How long could she bear to be alone? How long would she manage to control her emotions? When would the wine drinking take over? In silence he cursed Brant, who had unleashed this.

“He’s coming back,” he said instead.

“Can you love two at the same time?” she asked no one in particular.

“I don’t know, I have my hands full with one,” said Sammy Nilsson.

“I can’t take it,” she said, her voice cracking. “The loneliness. I have Erik and he’s everything, everything! I like my job, I don’t have many friends, but I have you and a few others. But I want someone close. Is that so strange?”

“No, not at all,” said Sammy, taking her hand.

“It’s as if this life is not for me. That sounds like a bad soap opera, but that’s really how it is. I had Edvard, and say what you will about him, he was a man with substance, maybe not always fun, but solid. I lost him by getting knocked up. Should I have kept my mouth shut and had an abortion? Do you think I’ve wondered about that, wondered what my life would have been like then. But then I look at Erik and I don’t understand how I could even think that.”

“He’s a great kid,” said Sammy.

“I’m really lousy at living,” said Lindell. “I get jealous of all the others, who are living as couples or single and happy with that. How the hell do they do it?”

“It’s not a given that they’re happy,” Sammy Nilsson objected. “Look at Ola.”

“I know, but they have the tools, the recipes for it. I’m completely lost, confused when it counts, like a social caricature. If there’s a pill that makes you numb I should take it, go ahead like a mechanical apparatus.”

“I don’t believe that at all,” said Sammy, who was starting to get tired of the self-pity.

“No, me neither,” said Lindell downheartedly. “But the thoughts are there, that’s bad enough.”

“He’s coming back,” Sammy repeated. “If it’s as you said, that he was in love too, it may turn out that way. He’s just indecisive.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t believe anything,” said Sammy Nilsson. “But it may be that way, you know that too. Don’t kick out like a terrified horse, just wait until he comes home. Sit down here on the couch together and talk about everything. You’re not very good at talking about what you’re thinking and feeling. Isn’t that right? You don’t believe anyone can like you.”

“It’s not like that,” Lindell protested.

“Yes, it is like that, Ann. It’s the same at work. You’re one of the best we have, but you diss yourself all the time.”

Lindell burst into tears. Sammy Nilsson pulled the sobbing body next to him. It occurred to him that he had never hugged her before. It was possible that she had awkwardly tried to imitate the lives she observed around her, but she had never adopted the weakness for hugging at all times.

She freed herself, straightened up, drew her hand over her face, sniffed, and tried to arrange her facial features.

“My life is filled with lies and a whole lot of blood,” she said. “That’s what I get.”

She got up and went over to the window next to the balcony. On the table was a chipped saucer. One of his cigarette butts was still there. The sun had gone down and the yard was slowly settling down into darkness. One of the neighbors was sitting by the mock orange, smoking a pipe. His wife, a woman Lindell had seen in line at Torgkassen, was gathering up the remains of a meal. They were talking.

“A little love wouldn’t be bad,” she said, with her back to him.

“You have Erik, he’s an exceptional boy,” said Sammy Nilsson, realizing how paltry that sounded.

Ann tossed her head as if to show what she thought about that comment.