The Hand that Trembles

FIFTEEN

They walked through the forest. Bosse Marksson had told her that the original owners of the land – an older couple with no children – had subdivided the property bit by bit to make way for half a dozen holiday home lots, and sold the remaining acres to a retired executive director ten years ago.

‘They had a small farm, which is common around these parts. A free life, but a slog, you could summarise it,’ he went on once they had reached the beach.

They looked around. The sun reflected in the water and created a play of sparkles when the occasional breeze ruffled the surface.

‘Can you see the sheep fence?’

Lindell nodded.

‘The new owner, the General as he was called, got himself four sheep and fenced off the whole lot, stopped people from using the docking places they had used for a couple of generations, and put up signs saying it was private property. He even pulled the fence right through a lilac bower. It hadn’t mattered before, if a couple of lilac bushes had ended up in the wrong spot by a couple of metres, but the General corrected all that. It was like the Berlin Wall through a coffee table.’

‘What had he been the executive director of?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

They walked a while before Marksson suddenly stopped.

‘Here it was,’ he said, pointing. ‘You’ve seen the photos.’

They remained standing at the spot. Nothing about the little stretch of beach was out of the ordinary: some exposed rock face, stretches of nothing but round stones sanded by the water, occasional juniper bushes and unruly mops of brown-yellow grasses. A few metres from the shoreline there was a tall pine tree, at least seventy centimetres in diameter at the base, which supported a rough trunk and a sprawling crown in which half of the branches were dried up.

‘You searched…’

‘Yes, all of the forest up to the gravel road, about a kilometre in each direction, but probably more carefully to the south. We found nothing. At least no matching right foot.’

‘Why more carefully to the south?’

‘As I wrote in the report, we thought a fox had dragged the foot here, and it couldn’t have got through the fence to the north. We had snow a couple of days ago and I saw fox tracks myself not far from here.’

‘So you think it came from the south? If it was a fox.’

Marksson nodded.

‘You wrote that there are thirty-eight properties in a radius of a thousand metres. You have of course visited all of them?’

‘Yes, we’ve gone door-to-door in a much bigger area than that. All the way to Näsviken and along the road to Almbäck.’

The place-names did not mean anything to Lindell, but she was convinced her colleagues had put in a considerable amount of work. She looked out over the bay, which was more like a gulf carved into the land. On the other side of the water, about eight hundred metres away, there was a low wooded ridge, connected with the mainland by a thin strip of land. The open sea lay to the south. Smoke from what she guessed were chimneys rose up from the point. She glimpsed a couple of houses but the shoreline was completely undeveloped. It had surprised her earlier that such large areas were untouched, although development on the coast had been significant, with the construction of holiday homes for residents of both Uppsala and Stockholm. The legal protection of the coastline had worked more or less as intended.

‘It’s sheltered in here,’ she said, indicating the bay.

‘Yes, Bultudden Point acts as a wave breaker towards the north and east,’ Marksson replied, after a long silence.

She had grown used to his voice. The fact was that he was indeed a ‘good sort,’ as Ottosson had claimed, not particularly chatty but communicative and open. Lindell guessed that it had mainly been her prejudices coming into play – assuming that a policeman from the most remote part of the county would be dismissive and patronising toward a female colleague from the big city.

‘What do you think? You have far greater experience,’ he said, as if to confirm his unusually enlightened attitude.

‘I don’t know. You’ve done a good job so far, but I see nothing in this material that gets me to think-’

‘We have one observation that seems more exciting,’ Marksson interrupted. ‘About a week ago a car came down into this area, past the General’s place, and it returned after half an hour. The General’s wife keeps an eye on everyone who comes by.’

‘And she didn’t recognise it?’

‘No, nor could she say what kind it was, other than it was small and red.’

‘Then we have a couple of kinds to choose from,’ Lindell said.

‘At this time of year most of the summer cottages are closed up. People may come out on the weekends, but other than that it’s quiet.’

‘But there are full-time residents farther down the road?’

‘Four of them, but none of them have or have had visits from any red cars, as far as they say, at least.’

‘Too late for mushroom pickers,’ Lindell said, mainly to herself. ‘Is there any hunting at the moment?’

‘No.’ Marksson chuckled. ‘Not legal, anyways.’

‘You think the foot belongs to a foreigner.’

‘I don’t know about foreign.’

Lindell smiled to herself. ‘Blackfoot Indian’ and ‘charred’ was what Marksson had said on the phone.

‘Size five,’ she went on. ‘Can it be from a child, or a teenager?’

‘I don’t think so. It looks well used, as it were. We have combed through all the missing-persons reports from a couple of years back and there is no one who matches this foot.’

‘Can it have washed ashore?’

‘It’s possible, but the doctor didn’t think so. No, I believe in the fox. There were also marks of what I think are teeth. They can run quite a ways with a tasty foot in their mouth.’

The conversation came to a halt there. The offshore wind had increased somewhat but they could still cling to the illusion that they were on the beach on a summer’s day as long as they kept their gazes fixed on the sea and disregarded the patches of snow that remained in the shadowy areas below the thickets of alder behind them.

Lindell closed her eyes and let the sun warm her face. She felt Marksson stealing glances at her but did not care. She felt a stillness that was the first she had had in a long while. The surge of the waves and the occasional cry of a gull only underscored the compact silence that reigned.

God only knows how long she would have stood cemented in this way if her colleague had not coughed discreetly.

‘The kind of place that’s hard to forget,’ Marksson said.

She smiled at him and nodded, grateful that he did not mention Edvard in so many words. Edvard, who was possibly as little as twenty or so kilometres away as the crow flies. Nonetheless his words let her understand that he sensed what might be stirring in her mind.

They walked back to his car. The path they followed was trampled by animals, and snaked through the sparse deciduous forest. Marksson went before her and Lindell followed him with her eyes, his back and shoulders. Along the way she grabbed some alder cones, smelt them, and let them rest in her hand before she forcefully tossed them back into the thickets, unexpectedly near to tears. Not on account of the woman who had so violently lost her left foot but because she felt she had walked along this kind of path so many times before.

Back in Östhammar they had coffee at the police station. Marksson was more than willing to admit that they had hit a wall. This had been evident to Lindell the day before when she had read his report. She had the feeling that he did not want to proceed, that he had simply given up all attempts to find the owner of the foot. He never said as much and would never have admitted it. After having stated that all avenues, all reasonable and unreasonable hypotheses, had been aired and examined, it was easy to lose focus and unconsciously grow comfortable with the idea that the investigation had come to an end. This gave way to a period of doubt in one’s own abilities, mixed with anger over the fact that no one else appeared to have come up with something conclusive. Finally it gave way to a creeping feeling that one was wasting all one’s time, while at the same time other, newer cases made claims on one’s attention.

She recognised this from her own investigations. Her role was to breathe life into this ice-cold thing.

They were on to their second cup. Until now there had only been small talk.

‘I have to head back to Uppsala now, but I think it’s good I got to see the place,’ Lindell said. ‘I’m going to think about it. As I said, you seem to have done everything-’

‘Not well enough,’ Marksson interrupted, ‘or the whole thing would be wrapped up by now.’

‘It’s a bit hard with only one foot,’ Lindell said, and he smiled.

‘I heard you have a little one,’ he said.

Lindell nodded and pushed the coffee cup across the table.

‘It’s hard to drive back and forth,’ she said. ‘It may be a colleague of mine who takes over. Then you’ll have to take that walk all over again.’

Marksson shrugged.

‘A little legwork never killed anyone,’ he said.

Lindell raised her eyebrows at his word play. Typical male pig of a policeman, she thought, but couldn’t help smiling when she saw his mischievous look.