Black Lies, Red Blood

Forty-three

“I saw Bosse the day he died.”

Gunilla Lange looked up. The information came unannounced, spoken in a casual tone of voice, as if he were telling something very ordinary.

“What are you saying? You were at work, weren’t you?”

“That day I was in town,” said Bernt Friberg. “I was helping Gurra with a leak.”

“And you’re just telling me now?”

He nodded in response.

“Where?”

She feared the worst and did not want to hear. She was afraid that the relative calm of the past few days, when she fought her way back to some kind of normalcy, would now be over. Was this the start of a confession? Was her husband a murderer?

“I saw him walking along the road, so I stopped and picked him up. He was going to the trailer.”

“Why was that?”

Gunilla’s voice was shrill and challenging.

Talking was not easy for Bernt, the words often sat deep inside, but this time it seemed as if he wanted to get rid of a burden. That was how Gunilla understood his unusual talkativeness.

He told her that right before the nine o’clock break he was on his way to Spikgatan, where the company had its storeroom and office, to have a bite to eat and pick up a few spare couplings and bends for the job he and Gunnar Melin were working on. He went on in great detail about the difficulties they had with the leak outside an apartment building in Gunsta. It was an emergency call. The foreman called in the morning and told him to skip Stockholm and instead join up with Melin who was already on the scene with a backhoe. Unfortunately first thing in the morning they had severed an electrical cable, which admittedly was completely outside the cable plan, but that obviously created even more problems.

Gunilla let him go on with his exhaustive account, afraid of what was to come. As long as he was talking pits and backhoes everything was calm.

According to Bernt, Bosse Gränsberg had been radiantly happy that morning. There was no sign of the usual slightly bitter, careworn air that was his trademark, an attitude Bernt always had a hard time with. During the short car ride Bosse had chatted. He was sober and reasonably well-dressed. He explained that he had been forced to look for a phone booth as his cell phone had disappeared.

Bernt drove him all the way up to the trailer. An impulse made him get out of the car. They chatted awhile about old times.

“I really had nothing against Bosse,” Bernt explained. “You may not know it, but we worked together many years ago. We got along fine then.”

Gunilla Lange became more and more surprised. Never before had Bernt spoken so calmly about her former husband. Neither of the two had mentioned that they had worked together before either. But was the reason for the admission was that Bosse no longer constituted a threat?

“Who did he call from the phone booth?”

“He didn’t say, other than that it was important as hell. But before I left he said something strange. He said something like ‘Now Ivan would get a good thrashing.’”

“Who’s Ivan?”

“No idea,” said Bernt. “And then he added that he was ‘going to make big money.’”

“He said nothing else about Ivan?”

“No, nothing except that he would get a beating. Actually there is an Ivan, a pipefitter from Gamlis, who I worked with a long time ago, and who Bosse knew too, but he must be retired now. I have a hard time believing that’s the Ivan Bosse meant. And then there’s a paver named Ivan, who worked at BPA a long time ago, but-”

“And then you left?”

“Then I left.”

He looked at her with a steady gaze. I have to believe him, she thought. He can’t lie, he mustn’t lie.

“I felt a little uneasy,” Bernt continued. “I mean, Bosse was happy and all, but that talk didn’t sound pleasant. And it wasn’t either. He died a few hours later.”

“Why haven’t you told this to the police?”

Bernt looked at her a few moments before he answered.

“What would they think? And what would you think?”

“But now you’re telling me.”

He nodded.

“I wanted you to know. If it should come out, I mean. If anyone saw us.”

Bernt suddenly got up from the table. After every meal he usually cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, but now he left the kitchen and disappeared into the living room. Gunilla heard the lid of the old secretary desk being lowered. Bernt returned with an envelope in his hand.

“Here,” he said, handing over the envelope. “We’re going to take a trip.”

“Trip?”

“In August.”

“We’re taking a trip? Where to?”

For several years she had nagged that they should travel abroad and suggested different destinations, but Bernt had always resisted.

“Cape Verde,” he said.

She stared at him incredulously.

“Not that many people go there. I thought it would be nice to avoid the crowds.”

“Where is it?”

“In the middle of the Atlantic,” said Bernt. “It’s an island.”

She could not keep from laughing.

“Of course it’s an island,” she exclaimed, “if it’s in the middle of the Atlantic. You’re completely out of your mind!”

He nodded and smiled for the first time since he came home from work.

Gunilla took the travel documents out of the envelope. Two weeks on Cape Verde with departure on the fourth of August. That was when her vacation began.

“But you-”

“I’ve moved up my vacation,” he said.

She browsed through the travel documents, but did not really understand anything other than that the hotel was called something with Vista.

“I think it will be fine,” he said.

She pushed the papers to the side.

“You have to tell the police that you met Bosse,” she said.

“They’re going to think it was me.”

For a moment it struck Gunilla that perhaps it was Bernt who had killed her ex-husband. She looked at the colorful brochure about the Atlantic island group, read a line about a music festival on one of the islands, raised her eyes and looked at Bernt, who had started clearing away dinner. He could have done it. He was overcome by anger sometimes. Then he was changed beyond recognition. Once he hit her. Then she was prepared to leave, but he asked for forgiveness, and she stayed.

Was the talk that he and Bosse had a friendly chat about old times a lie? Had they quarreled? About her, about the money that she might conceivably loan out?

She dared not ask, afraid to trigger his anger.

“You have to talk with them,” she said.

He turned and looked at her, but she dared not meet his eyes. In one hand he was holding a plate, the other was holding hard onto the edge of the counter.

It was here in the kitchen that he hit her. That time his anger was triggered by what she considered a trifle. One of her coworkers had unexpectedly called and asked whether they could go out. Bernt was working late and Gunilla thought she could take advantage of that, she seldom went out, and left a note on the kitchen table.

They went to Hijazz, had something to eat, and listened to a blues band. When Gunilla came home she found Bernt drunk at the kitchen table. She had had wine and stumbled a little when she went up to give him a kiss on the cheek. She was met by accusations of infidelity and a hit across the mouth.

“Cape Verde is beautiful,” he said.

Gunilla Lange did not want to go to an island in the Atlantic. She wanted to get rid of the growing sense that something was wrong, shake off the feeling of worry and fear. She wanted to grieve alone, it occurred to her.

After the murder of Bosse at first she only felt a great sorrow and loss. Bosse had been the love of her life, and now he was gone forever.

Then when she found Bernt at the kitchen table early that morning, the fear had come. There was something in his behavior that she did not understand. And now this, that Bernt had encountered Bosse perhaps only an hour or two before the murder. Was he concealing anything else? What had they really talked about? The feeling of not being able to trust the man she lived with made her uneasy.

And Cape Verde of all places! Was the trip only a way to confuse the issue, get her to think about something else?