Black Lies, Red Blood

Three

She suddenly remembered the sting. Did he spank her? Shamelessly she had thrust up her buttocks. It was as if his hands were still resting heavily around her hips.

She drew in air, deeply, and breathed out, lowered her gaze and let it rest, carefully turned her head, and sniffed. He had licked her armpit. To start with it felt strange, bordering on unpleasant, but suddenly well-being took over. That was how it started, with his tongue.

“… two blows to the head… the injuries…”

Allan Fredriksson’s voice in the background broke through her hazy thoughts for a moment and she raised her head and observed her colleague on the other side of the table. He met her eyes and the flow of words ceased for a moment before he continued.

“… the place where the discovery was made is probably identical with the scene of the murder.”

Ottosson sniffled and took out a gigantic handkerchief. The violent nose-blowing made Fredriksson look up from his notes.

“Try echinacea,” he said.

Ottosson shook his head while he carefully folded up the handkerchief.

“Rövballar.” Why had he used that dialect word? Was he from Skåne? Probably not. She seemed to recall him saying disparaging things about people from Skåne, that they were provincial and lethargic, which no one could accuse Anders Brant of.

Anders was smart. She realized that right away, and he quickly understood connections. But now it was his penis she was thinking about. Smart or not, he was the most all-around best lover she had encountered. He made her feel beautiful and desirable. He saw lines in her body like no one before. I’m over forty, she protested, but he just smiled, and caressed her across her back and down over the rounding of her rear. “Dead man’s curve,” he said, letting his hand continue toward her womb and she had lightheartedly parted her legs, but his hand made its way across her thigh toward the hollow of her knee.

He was slow but sometimes heated as well, and he sometimes talked about Tantric sex, which she’d never heard of. Always attentive to her mood and desires, he was, in short, a “keeper” as Görel would put it.

For three weeks they had been seeing each other, but only at her place. It was the most practical, he thought, saying that his place was cramped and that he didn’t like to clean. She thought it was a good arrangement, as she avoided having to get a babysitter. Erik had not taken any great notice of the man who came and went. Anders was always gone before Erik woke up in the morning, and Ann was not sure whether he knew that Anders slept over. One evening they played computer games together, and the next morning Erik asked where the “old man” had gone.

They had made love three times in the past twelve hours-that was more than she had done the last two years before meeting Anders. She glanced at the clock; it was only an hour since he had slipped out of her.

She felt her belly contract. He had licked her like no one else, along her spine down toward the tailbone, and further, parted her cheeks and let his warm tongue run. Carefully he had drawn patterns with the tip of his tongue.

“… that’s what I think.”

Fredriksson fell silent.

Lindell reached for the pen that was on the table in front of her.

“Do you have a fever too?” asked Fredriksson.

“No,” Lindell assured him.

“You look a little warm.”

She laughed. She heard how wrong it sounded, girlish and nervous. Her colleagues around the table observed her: Haver with a look of admiration, Beatrice mildly indulgent, and Ottosson with that unbelievable furrow between his eyes. Fredriksson looked completely uncomprehending while Sammy Nilsson smiled and made the V sign.

“I’m just a little-”

“A little what?” said Ola Haver.

He knows, thought Lindell. Their eyes met before she looked away. With a mental exertion of will she tried to gather her freely floating limbs and thoughts, and return them to her body.

It only struck her now that she had declined an invitation from Ola Haver and his wife Rebecka the evening before. Every summer they organized a barbecue. She had been there the past few years but this year she stayed away. No doubt they had discussed her absence.

Ann Lindell looked at Fredriksson.

“What do we know about his circle of acquaintances?”

“Have you had a stroke, Ann? Allan was just telling us that we don’t have an identity.”

Sammy Nilsson’s words made her look down at the table top.

“I was somewhere else for a while,” she said quietly.

“Where were you?” asked Beatrice Andersson.

He licked my armpit, she thought, and smiled and raised her eyes.

“I was in a place you’ve never been, Beatrice,” she answered after a few seconds, still smiling. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to make an urgent call.”

She got up and grabbed the notebook and pen. It shows, she thought as she left the room, well aware of their looks.

“Urgent,” she mumbled quietly to herself outside the door, and grinned.

After her panicky flight from the morning meeting, Ann Lindell barricaded herself in her office, unplugged the phone, and sat down, not at her desk, but in the visitor’s chair that was pushed up against the wall between a pair of gigantic file cabinets. The office was so small that the chair was always in the way when it was in front of the desk. If anyone were to crack open the door and look in, they would think she was out. She also felt like she needed to be somewhere else.

Little by little the satisfaction of the early morning had turned into a feeling of vague worry.

She was sore, but above all confused. She had to stick to what had happened. It had been a long time since she needed to handle emotions like passion and hope. Regret and longing she had been able to parry with pretty good success. But this? Should she make a comparison to Rolf or Edvard, two past lives? Can you start from zero, she asked herself, and immediately knew the answer.

They had met a couple of months ago at Görel’s and sure, she had been interested even then, and she sensed it had also been Görel’s intention to bring them together. She had tried earlier without any results and jokingly complained about Ann’s lack of involvement.

He had an open face and she liked that, got the idea that it corresponded to what was inside him. She needed a man like that, a man who talked about what he liked and thought, without reservation. She longed for painful honesty. No obstacles, no unspoken reservations, no point-taking.

Then she had not heard a word from him, even though he had said something about calling, but as the days and weeks passed she had resigned herself.

A month later he called. They decided to have dinner, the most civilized act two people can do together, as he put it. He suggested an Italian restaurant far up on S:t Olofsgatan and she said yes. She arranged for Erik to sleep over with a playmate from preschool. Anders Brant would pick her up and arrived half an hour early. She was still in her underwear, peeked through the peephole in the door, wrapped a stained bathrobe around herself, and opened the door.

They never made it to the restaurant. Ten minutes after he had stepped into her apartment they were in her bed.

This had been going on for three weeks. Violent fucking, there was no other word for it. He was loving. Unaccustomed to all this attention, these hands and this tongue, this cock, made her confused to start with, and sometimes she thought it was too good, too much of a good thing.

This morning he got out of bed, drew his hand over his sex, which in all likelihood was sore too, and said that he had to go away for a week, maybe two. She asked where he was going but did not get a reasonable answer. That’s how much of an investigator she was! I got caught with my pants down, she thought gloomily, still intoxicated and tired.

A shiver of fear passed through her. Would he come back? She tried to calm herself by thinking: Why wouldn’t he come back? He seemed happy with her. He came of his own free will, seemingly gladly and often to her home and bed.

After an hour there was a careful knock on the door. She knew it was Ottosson. The door was opened slowly by the unit chief who peeked in, and discovered Lindell between the massive cabinets.

“How are you? You look a bit tired out,” he began unusually directly, without commenting on her placement in the office.

She could tell that Ottosson was exerting himself to sound relaxed, despite the furrow between his eyebrows.

Lindell pulled the chair out into the office, patted him on the arm, and sat down behind the desk. Ottosson took a seat in the visitor’s chair.

“Warmed up,” he said, and it took a second before Lindell understood that he meant the chair.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” she said. “Ask around at ‘The Grotto,’ they might have some idea who he is.”

“Ola and Beatrice are on their way there,” he said with a smile.

“The Grotto” was the fixed point in existence for many of the homeless. The operation was run as a non-profit by a few activists and got some municipal backing and private sponsorship. There the mournful existences that no one really wanted to take responsibility for or even know about, could get a meal, some clothes, and consideration.

Lindell nodded and smiled back. Ottosson’s wrinkle smoothed out somewhat.

“How was the barbecue last night?” she asked.

“Ola postponed it, so you’ll get another chance.”

She realized he was wondering what she’d been doing the night before, what was so important that she chose it over the traditional barbecue. Perhaps he thought it was a demonstration on her part, a way of communicating that she was not in sync with the others at the unit.

“That’s nice,” she said without any great enthusiasm.

Ottosson was drumming his fingers on the armrest.

“So, what do you think?” she asked.

Ottosson leaned back in the chair. His fingers became quiet.

“The usual,” he said. “A wino has too much to drink and kills another wino.”

“But there was no alcohol in his body, was there?”

Lindell’s face suddenly turned red. What if I misunderstood that too?

“No, but maybe the murderer had a little under his belt.”

“And the phone number on the scrap of paper?”

“No one answers. Berglund is checking on that.”

“Whose account is it?”

“His name is Anders Brant, some kind of journalist.”

Ann Lindell stared at Ottosson. Her mouth opened, but not a word came across her lips. Unconsciously she raised one hand as if to say: Hold up, repeat that!

“You know him?”

In the midst of her confusion she marveled at how easily her boss read her.

“Tell me,” Ottosson continued. “Has he interviewed you?”

Lindell shook her head.

“No, we’ve just met casually,” she said.

“What’s he like?”

“I don’t really know,” she said.

Ottosson observed her.

“What connection do you think there is between the murdered man and Brant?”

“Not a clue,” said Lindell.

“But if you know him.”

“I don’t know him.”

“But something-”

“Don’t you hear what I’m saying? I don’t know him!”

She braced her feet in the chair as if to get up but sank back with a sigh.

Ottosson put his hands up in a defensive gesture. This had happened before, these moments of collapse in their otherwise familiar relationship. No powerful collisions, and their quarrels never dragged on and seriously poisoned their collaboration. It would not happen this time either, Lindell was clear about that.

Ottosson smiled at her. The wrinkle of worry was gone. It was as if he strove to lure her over a boundary, to get her to expose herself, say something that might explain. He knew her so well. Ottosson was conflict averse but also wise enough to understand that out of anger something might come loose from his otherwise reserved colleague. The iceberg Lindell might calve a piece out into the sea, a frozen clump that would drift away leisurely and slowly melt. She knew his tactics and her own weakness with respect to him.

This time you won’t get any confidences, she thought gloomily, but she braced herself and let out a short laugh, a gesture and a grimace that might indicate resignation, not due to Ottosson, but rather a kind of excuse, evidence of self-insight: Yes, this is me, Otto, and you’ll have to put up with it.

“I do have my cold case,” she said, and he took her hint.

“Okay,” said Ottosson. “You don’t know him, but soon enough we will. Sammy’s going to check up on this Brant. And how’s it going with the girl?”

“I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

In April a sixteen-year-old girl had disappeared from her home in Berthåga. Lindell had expended considerable effort trying to figure out what happened, but had not found anything, or anyone, who could explain why Klara Lovisa Bolinder was as if swallowed up by the earth.

Every year a number of Swedes disappeared from their homes; the majority ran away of their own free will from their everyday lives, their jobs, and their families. For understandable reasons, the investigating police occasionally thought.

Klara Lovisa’s disappearance on the other hand was a mystery. Lindell had stared at photographs of the young girl, the best one taken only a week or so before she disappeared. It depicted a blonde, laughing girl, with long, straight hair parted in the middle, blue eyes, and a classical nose that hinted at Roman blood in her veins. She was smiling into the camera. Her eyes were confident, she trusted the photographer.

It was a girl you noticed. Lindell sensed that from the first moment, which was also confirmed by her family and friends. Even more peculiar was that absolutely no one had noticed Klara Lovisa after she left home on April 28, 2007, to go into the city and shop for a spring jacket.

“I want to find her,” said Lindell quietly.

Ottosson nodded. He leaned forward and placed his hand on Lindell’s. They both knew that in principle the odds of finding Klara Lovisa alive were equal to zero.