The Hand that Trembles

THIRTY

‘It took you a while,’ commented Bosse Marksson, who was sitting at Frisk’s kitchen table, a stainless steel thermos in front of him.

‘She wanted to talk,’ Lindell said, ‘and I didn’t have the heart to leave.’

She told him what Lisen Morell had said about her neighbour, but mentioned nothing of the rest of the conversation, nothing of Watanabe, pistils, and loneliness.

‘Want some coffee?’

He poured a cup without waiting for an answer.

‘Complicated,’ Marksson said. ‘I can’t get my head around Frisk. I thought I knew him.’

Lindell drank the coffee, which was strong and good.

‘There are cinnamon buns,’ he said, but Lindell thought they might be from the bakery where Frisk had worked and declined the offer.

‘I’ll bet a lot of people have had the wrong idea. Remember what Ahlén said: He’s never had a better person on his staff.’

‘He probably meant as a baker,’ Lindell said.

‘No, the way he said it, it included the whole personality.’

‘People have been wrong before. The fact is that Tobias Frisk had a woman living with him, a woman of foreign extraction that no one says they had any knowledge of, a woman that he most likely murdered and hacked into pieces. And then when you are going to drop in, decides to shoot himself in the head in his best TV couch.’

‘But-’ they both said, and broke into laughter.

‘You start,’ Marksson said with a gesture of invitation.

‘Morell’s story,’ Lindell said. ‘The woman’s foot appears at the end of November while – if we are to believe Morell – Frisk changed back into his old ways and started to smell like a drooling male already at the start of September.’

‘Maybe she stopped putting out, like that woman from ancient history. Finally Frisk got tired of it and cut her to pieces.’

‘It’s possible,’ Lindell said.

‘Three things,’ Marksson said. ‘First: Why does he take his own life? Fear of being discovered, that he can’t stand the shame of being accused of murder. But he must have realised that we didn’t have anything on him with regard to the killing and mutilation?’

‘But the chainsaw?’ Lindell interjected.

‘Yes, that’s the second thing. If he had got rid of it, he would have been scot-free, even if we would have been able to place the woman in his house. All he would have to do would be to claim that she up and left. He didn’t even know you were collecting chainsaws, did he? If we can assume he was so stupid he didn’t think of the saw, that there were remains of the woman on it, then he wouldn’t need to get so nervous that he would have to kill himself, at least not because of your visit. And if he was a smart guy, well, he would have dumped the saw into the Baltic and everything would have been roses. Then he would have been able to offer you cake and take it easy.’

‘What is the third thing?’

‘The gun,’ Marksson said. ‘No one out here claims to recognise it, which is fucking unbelievable. Out here you know what kind of microwave oven your neighbour has, what kind of fishing rod, lawnmower, and definitely the contents of the gun rack. You hunt together, get to talking about hunting and fishing, you discuss guns, you brag.’

‘The gun was unregistered,’ Lindell said. ‘Is that normal “out here”, as you put it?’

‘There are probably old rifles tucked away, but not more out here than in other places. Lasse Malm’s father killed himself with an unregistered weapon, an army gun that no one knew the origins of. Or so they said.’

‘I thought you didn’t know he had committed suicide?’

‘No, but Dad did. I called him. As usual he had a bunch of good advice for me.’

‘I don’t think I got a single piece of good advice from my dad,’ Lindell said. ‘The ones he gave me I didn’t take, thank God. He wanted me to become a hairdresser. When I was around nineteen or twenty they closed up three hair salons in Ödeshög, so he saw potential.’

‘Smart guy,’ Marksson said with a smile. ‘He was thinking of your future.’

‘I know, but what a future, to stay out there. I would have died of boredom.’

‘Like on this point. How long would you last out here?’

Lindell hesitated. Her colleague was born in this area, had his friends here, this was where he hunted and fished, and she didn’t want to put down his home. She also thought, for a single brief moment, of Edvard and Gräsö Island.

‘It would depend on the context,’ she said.

‘Everything depends on the context,’ he said, smiling.

‘Once upon a time I was planning to move out here. We would have been colleagues.’

‘To Gräsö,’ Marksson said.

Lindell nodded.

‘You know,’ she said.

‘Dad,’ Marksson said.

Lindell looked quizzically at him.

‘He saw you on the Gräsö ferry with a man.’

‘He recognised me?’

‘You’ve been in the papers a couple of times and Dad is the kind of guy who keeps track of things, colleagues above all. I think he’s a good man,’ Marksson said, and Lindell guessed who he was referring to but had to ask, perhaps in order to hear someone say his name.

‘Edvard.’

‘It didn’t work out,’ Lindell said.

‘The context,’ Marksson said.

She wanted to hear him tell her a little about Edvard, but Marksson appeared to have dropped the subject. Was it out of consideration for her? Was Edvard living with another woman? She swallowed hard, audibly. She wanted to tell, she wanted Marksson to understand what even she herself didn’t understand. She wanted to talk about things she had never before mentioned to anyone.

Where did this sudden desire for openness come from? And why now in the presence of a man whom she had known all of a week, and who to top it off had a central communications centre of a father. Was it Lisen Morell’s words about how she smelt of jasmine but also ‘loneliness’?

She was sitting in the killer and suicide victim’s kitchen waiting for something, a word, an insight, or perhaps intimacy. She didn’t know which and did not dare to take a risk.

‘Maybe it’s not too late,’ Marksson said suddenly, and stood up in the same breath. The chair was sent backward but he stopped it from tipping over with a swift hand. ‘Shouldn’t we get going? There’ll be no babies made this way. Time to show a little nerve.’

He rattled off encouraging stock phrases one after the other as he screwed on the thermos stopper and replaced the cap that also functioned as a mug.

‘I’m headed to the big village to pick up some stuff for the wife. She must have sent away for something new.’

Lindell got up from the table. Edvard doesn’t have another, she thought jubilantly. As if it made any difference. She would never see him again, she knew that. Maybe see him by chance, but never touch.

When she had dropped off Marksson at his car she ended up sitting for a while. She counted the mailboxes at the side of the road. Seven in all, arranged in order from north to south. Andersson came first, Frisk was the last in the row. Lisen Morell had none. She must get her mail in Uppsala.

Why do I expose myself to this, this masochism? Why air this old story, over and over again? There were no obvious answers. She had accepted the job on the coast even though she was aware that the old thoughts would come up.

She sighed heavily, longing for her flat, Erik’s chatter, the sofa, a glass of wine. This isn’t normal, she said to herself. You aren’t normal. Something went wrong.