The Cruel Stars of the Night

Twelve

Later on, when they laid the investigation about the murder in Jumkil next to the investigation concerning the murder of Jan-Elis Andersson in Norr-Ededy village in Alsike, they appeared almost identical.

Both of them were elderly men living alone in the countryside, who had been farmers in the past. Andersson, just as Blomgren before him, had suffered brutal blows to the head with a murder weapon that the police had not yet found.

In the search for a possible motive the results were the same: nothing. Both men had lived a retiring, peaceful life, they lacked the ready assets attractive to a murderer, and they appeared to be without enemies, at least of the order to lead to a murder.

There was one difference: Jan-Elis Andersson had resisted. To what extent this was so it was not possible to determine but the evidence in his kitchen spoke for itself: three chairs had been knocked over, and the tablecloth had been pulled to the floor, taking a bowl of oatmeal, a spoon, and a jar of lingonberry jam with it.

“There’s someone out there who doesn’t like old men who eat lingonberries,” Beatrice said, remembering Dorotea Svahn’s words about Blomgren being a champion berry picker.

Most likely the killer had crept up on Andersson from behind. The neighbor had said he had severely impaired hearing.

Lindell could guess how it had happened. Andersson had been struck hard on the back of the head, had been thrown forward, pulled the cloth with him down onto the floor but had managed to get up and grab a chair for protection. One of the chairs had two broken legs. Ryde, the forensics specialist who was not supposed to be working but who had jumped in, was firm on that point: the chair had been used in an attempt at self-defense.

But Jan-Elis Andersson had failed in his attempts and now he lay facedown in a mess of lingonberries and blood.

Ann Lindell stood with her head bent. The technicians had- grudgingly-cleared a thin corridor of floor space in the kitchen so that she and Beatrice could come in and take a look. Morgansson sat in a crouch next to the counter, trying to secure some fingerprints. He looked up at Ann.

“Same guy?” he asked.

Ryde muttered something. He hated speculation during the work process.

“It could be a coincidence,” she said and looked out the window.

Out in the yard, Sammy Nilsson was questioning the nearest neighbor, a man of about fifty who looked noticeably upset. He paced around and Lindell saw Sammy try to calm the shocked man, who was the one who had found the body.

Lindell called Sammy and watched him reach irritably for his cell phone.

“Check out any potential connection to Petrus,” she said and Sammy groaned.

“What do you think I’m doing?”

“I was thinking of farmer associations and such,” Ann said in a docile voice. “There are things like that, aren’t there? Blomgren and Andersson may have met at some point.”

“I’m a country boy, if you recall. I’ve got this covered.”

The people gathered in the yard gave Lindell the same déjà vu feeling she had had in the kitchen.

“The question of whether or not we believe there is a real connection between the murders is crucial,” Lindell said. “If we do then what we have to set our sights on right now is to turn up everything that potentially connects these two farmers.”

She stared out over the landscape. A police officer in uniform was climbing over a barbed wire fence a couple of hundred meters away. He looked clumsy and out of place in the terrain.

The fields that bordered the farm lay fallow. Or at least that was what Lindell thought. She compared them to the Östgöta area where she came from with its wide expanses of fields and sturdy farm buildings. Here things looked paltry by comparison, thin strips of cultivated land between swathes of dark forest. The cottages that were dotted about were small, as dictated by the landscape.

“The neighbor hasn’t seen anything.” Sammy Nilsson interrupted her thought process.

“Can he see this house from his?”

“No. He lives behind that clump of trees up there. You can see the roof,” Nilsson said and pointed.

“What was he doing here?”

“Nothing in particular. He would sometimes walk over and have a little coffee and a chat with Jan-Elis. The neighbor is on disability.”

“At least we have a clue as to when the murder took place,” Bea said. “Around breakfast time.”

Lindell walked off to the side. Was it the same perpetrator? In that case what was the connection?

Again she let her gaze sweep over the area, as if the answer was to be found out there. Not a puff of wind, not a sign of life or movement. A static place, maintained by a retired farmer and a man on disability. A region that had sunk down into its own wasted and worn sparseness. Who would want to or even have the energy to think of killing someone here? Everything already seemed dead.

Why kill two seventy-year-old farmers?

Just as in Blomgren’s home, nothing here was touched. Straight into the house, bash the old man’s head in, and then leave just as fast. That’s how the whole thing must have happened.

She caught sight of Morgansson through the kitchen window. His wide back looked monumental in the tiny window. The night before she had toyed with the idea of going home with him, only for a night, in order to feel the warmth of another human being. Now that thought seemed somehow absurd.

They had said good-bye and good night and then left, each in their own direction. As she was walking down East Ågatan she had the feeling of being in a foreign city, a foreign country, as if she were on holiday, on her way to the hotel.

Pleased with the evening, she had crawled into bed and decided she would like to see him again, if for no other reason than to see another movie and have another beer.

Today is another life, she thought, not without bitterness. It was as if two consecutive days of happiness were not possible. She watched Morgansson move around inside. Then something in her changed, she felt a welling up of pride. She was standing in the yard involved in a murder investigation, yet again. She didn’t need to denigrate herself. First, she was a competent police officer and second, a pretty good mother to Erik. Her contract with life had been signed and she was going to make the best of the situation. She didn’t need to apologize for the fact that she wanted to live, wanted to laugh or go to the movies with a handsome man, who also happened to be nice and had awakened something slumbering within her.

But for now she would have to put all thoughts of movies aside. Two murders. She would not be able to relax even for a second. She turned to Sammy Nilsson.

“You’ll be responsible for charting these two farmers-you said yourself you’re a country boy. I want the minutest detail. Not a single item can go unchecked. They’re around seventy and have a past. Somewhere their lives run together. Find that point.”

Sammy looked at her and smiled.

“Full steam ahead,” he said, turned, and left.

Just then Morgansson stepped out onto the stoop.

“I think we have something,” he said and went back into the house.

Of course, Lindell thought, you have something. She followed him in. When she was in the hall Morgansson pointed to the little table right inside the door.

“A letter,” he said. “I found it in the drawer under the telephone. You don’t have to pick it up.”

It was handwritten and lacked a signature, but Lindell immediately had the impression it was written by a man. She read it. Bea appeared behind her.

“What does it say?”

“It is basically a threat,” Lindell said. “Some unresolved affair that needs to be corrected, according to the writer.”

“No envelope?” she called out to Morgansson.

“Not yet,” he called back from the room next to the kitchen.

“We don’t know who wrote it, not even if Andersson was the recipient.”

“He may be the person who wrote it,” Bea said.

“That’s easy to check,” Lindell said. “What do you think?”

“ ‘Make sure you pay up otherwise you’ll be sorry,’” Bea read again.

Lindell sighed.

“You pay,” she mumbled.

“The writer of the letter has apparently been waiting a few years,” Bea said, “and now he wants to be paid for something.”

“No dates, nothing really,” Lindell said, disappointed. “It can have been in the drawer for the past ten years.”

“Then why save the letter?”

“You know how people are.”

Bea read the letter again.

“What about this,” she said and read out loud:“ ‘When I heard that you sold I thought you were finally going to pay me.’ What was it he sold?”

“The farm, maybe,” Lindell threw out, “or the land. It has to be some bigger thing, it can hardly be a tractor or such like.”

“Can Andersson have written this to Petrus Blomgren? Didn’t he sell his land? And then it wasn’t recorded?”

“Far-fetched,” Lindell said.

“But we’re looking for connections,” Bea said eagerly. “Think about it, an older farmer doesn’t have so many dealings, it’s normally about farms and land, leases and the like.”

“Our farming expert has just left,” Lindell said.

“Blomgren owes money to Andersson, who doesn’t get paid. Anders-son kills Blomgren and then…”

“And then… Blomgren hits back,” Lindell said. “The problem is that he’s dead.”

“That suicide letter, that could have had something to do with this. He wrote something about not doing things as he should have.”

“We’ll have to check the handwriting first,” Lindell decided, “and check with the relative that’s supposed to exist. The neighbor said something about there being a niece who sometimes visits. She may know what this is all about. Maybe it’s an old story that we’ll be able to rule out.”

It had gotten dark by the time they were ready to leave Jan-Elis Andersson’s farm. Everyone was taciturn and in the faint light from the outside lamp Lindell saw how exhausted everyone was.

She took a last swing around the house, like she usually did.

Fredriksson and Bea drove away. They had loaded up the car with boxes of old papers and letters, tax returns, insurance papers, and bookkeeping from the time that Andersson had been an active farmer.

Berglund, who had come out during the course of the afternoon, hung around. He had, together with a few others from the patrol squad, gone over the various sheds and outhouses with a fine-toothed comb. The old police officer stood thoughtfully by the freestanding garage. He pulled the door shut behind him, looked at Lindell, and walked over to her.

“I’m not crazy about the dark,” he said.

Lindell nodded. They stood side by side and summed up their observations in silence. Or that was what Lindell thought Berglund was doing. She herself was thinking of Erik, who had been picked up at day care by the parents of his best friend. It was a solution that worked. Erik did not object, but Ann felt guilty. She wasn’t like the other mothers.

“Should we mosey along?”

“You’re the only one I know who says that,” Lindell said.

“It’s from my grandfather,” Berglund said. “He lived like this, exactly like Andersson, though he wasn’t really a farmer. He didn’t get around much but he was a devil with horses. Have you seen that movie about the guy who could talk to horses?”

“No, I missed that one. I rarely go to the movies.”

“Is that so?” Berglund said with a mocking smile. “In any case, we went to that one. I thought it was going to be something, but it was shit.”

“It’s often that way with films,” Lindell said.

“Granddad would have done it better.”

“How did you know I went to the movies last night?”

“Hultgren saw you,” Berglund said, “and you know how he is.”

Lindell went to pick up Erik. It still felt strange to leave her colleagues in the middle of a murder investigation. She knew that the others would stay down at the station in order to organize the material, look up databases, contact people, and do everything else that was part of the inner investigation.

She wanted to be there too, in the middle of the activity. Ottosson had brought it up as soon as she returned from maternity leave, that he didn’t want her turning up at the station at all hours, that he wanted her to focus properly on herself and Erik. Ann Lindell had tried to joke it away but Ottosson had been firm. She sensed, from the way he formulated it that he didn’t want her to repeat his own mistakes.

She played with the thought of letting Erik stay at his friend’s place for a few hours-after all, this was a murder and it was only the shame of calling and asking the parents that prevented her from going back to Salagatan.

When Erik had fallen asleep Ann Lindell turned off all the electric lights in the apartment and lit a couple of candles that she put out on the table in the living room. A glass of Portuguese wine was already out there, half empty.

A cozy evening at home, she thought, chuckled, and pulled her legs up under her. The silence was deafening. Sund, one of the few neighbors that Ann Lindell had a fairly regular contact with, had popped in with a construction set for Erik. He had bought it on sale, or so he claimed. Ann had the feeling it had not been inexpensive. It was an airplane. As usual, the neighbor had overestimated Erik’s abilities. He was simply too young for Sund’s gifts but Ann was touched by his thoughtfulness.

They sat at the kitchen table for a while and talked. Sund’s car, a more than forty-year-old Ford Anglia, was completely worn out. Sund was of two minds about what to do. Ann Lindell advised him to have the car repaired. The neighborhood would not be the same if the “Black Pearl” disappeared from the parking lot.

After about an hour, when it was Erik’s bedtime, Sund had reluctantly said good-bye and gone home. The faint smell of pomade lingered in the apartment. She had come to realize there was some talk in the building regarding Sund’s old-fashioned attentions toward Ann, an older man’s concern for the single woman some thirty years his junior, and some had taken to calling him Sick-a play on Sund, which means healthy-but for her it was a source of joy. She had never noticed anything unhealthy in her neighbor. Quite the opposite. He was just thoughtful and a little lonely.

She thought about Sund and from there it was not far to Petrus Blomgren and Jan-Elis Andersson. Men, lonely men around seventy. Those times she had visited her neighbor she had been struck by how the loneliness shone in the orderly home. Everything was clean and nice, everything in its place, perhaps a touch pedantic. The coffee cup always in the same place on the counter, placed on a small crocheted pad, ready to be used, carefully washed and returned to the cloth after the coffee break was over.

Well-ordered but very lonely. This was also true of the two retired farmers. What had Sund worked with? Ann recalled that he had talked about office work, maybe at the mustard factory, since Sund had talked a lot about the “pickle plant,” as it was called. Had he been married? There was so little she knew of his life. Sund talked mainly about the here and now and his plans for the short term.

Had Blomgren and Andersson had any relationships? This did not immediately communicate itself from their homes and none of those who had been questioned so far had said anything. But back in the day there must have been some love in both of the farmers’ lives. Somewhere perhaps there was a woman who remembered her love for Petrus Blomgren. Maybe there would be someone who would shed a tear when she opened the newspaper tomorrow morning and read that Jan-Elis Andersson had been murdered in his home in Norr-Ededy village, Alsike.

Women were good at keeping track of the dead as well as the living and there was always the chance that someone would turn up when the two murder victims were buried. Ann decided to attend the funeral services. She did not expect they would be very large.

If there was a connection between the two murders she was not yet able to see it. But she was convinced the connection lay in their lives, perhaps far back in time. Two farmers are not murdered by accident within two days of each other, not in Ann Lindell’s book.

She did not feel optimistic but still more confident than before. Perhaps it was the chat with Sund or the fact that she had now poured herself her second glass of wine that meant the outlook appeared brighter.

She studied the bottle’s label that showed a hilly landscape dotted with grapevines snaking up the slopes. In the background there was a castle with turrets and spires.

“From shed to castle,” she muttered.

When Ann Lindell crawled into bed she was slightly dizzy. Two glasses of wine were enough. The pillow felt like a dear friend and the warm blanket like a desired lover.