The Princess of Burundi

Twenty-seven

Ola Haver studied the knife. It was roughly twenty centimeters long with a black shaft and a sharp edge. Who used a knife like this? Haver had checked with a few officers who liked to hunt and they had judged the knife too cumbersome for hunting and fishing. The same verdict had been issued by the riffraff in town: the knife was too big to be easily concealed in clothing. It might be a knife some teenager would use to impress his friends, but it would never become something you carried habitually. Berglund had proposed the idea that it was a weapon someone had bought as a tourist. Maybe the sheath, which they had not recovered, was finely decorated and that was what had tempted the owner to buy it in the first place.

Haver turned it this way and that. He had questioned the young man again, the one who claimed to have stolen it from a pickup truck parked in the hospital garage. Haver was inclined to believe him, because he had seen fear and not lies in his eyes. Mattias was no killer, even if he was a small-time thief and troublemaker. You could only hope he would have second thoughts about the way his life was headed after finding himself dragged into a murder case.

Haver had asked Lundin to check who normally parked in the garage, which turned out to yield a daunting number. Hospital employees parked in a reserved area, and the rest was open to patients, friends, and relatives. Hundreds of people parked in the garage every day. Haver remembered that he himself had parked there one day a few years ago when he had seen the orthopedic surgeon.

They had talked about trying to compile a list of all the people who would have had reason to park there on that day, but finally decided it would take too long. The only thing they had to go on was Mattias’s vague recollection of a pickup, maybe red and white. When they had taken him to the parking garage to point out the place where the car had been parked, he had started wavering about whether or not the truck had had a hard or soft tonneau cover. In other words, they were talking about a dozen different possible makes and models. The only thing Mattias had been really sure about was the color red.

Had the killer been wounded and had to go to the hospital? They had checked with the ER and surgery, but that had yielded nothing.

Finding the murder weapon often gave way to more leads, but in this case it seemed like a dead end. The knife would become important only if they fixed on a suspect and could tie the person to the weapon.

Haver put the knife back in the plastic bag and leaned back in his chair, letting his thoughts move alternately from the investigation to Ann Lindell. Their kiss had ballooned into a cloud over his head. A gnawing feeling of uncertainty gripped him. For the first time in his marriage with Rebecka there was real doubt. The squabbles and conflicts of the fall, punctuated by equally wearying periods of silence and unasked questions, had escalated to the level of warfare. Rebecka hadn’t said anything else about his visit to Ann Lindell or the flour on his clothes. She had simply given him a cold look, moved quickly and nonchalantly around the house, avoiding him mainly. She had spent most of the morning in the bathroom, showering for an unusually long time, and in the bedroom. They had not had breakfast at the same time, which Haver was grateful for. At least he didn’t have to face the reproachful looks.

Now he was dreading going home. Should he tell her the truth? She would be furious. She was the jealous type, he knew that from before, not least when it came to Ann. Haver tried not to mention her at home since he knew that Rebecka was threatened by the fact that they were so close. Up till now there had been no grounds for her jealousy, but if he told her about the kiss, all hell would break loose. Even if she accepted his explanation and tried to erase the whole thing from her mind, the underlying suspicion would always be there.

He decided not to tell. It would stop at a sprinkling of flour on his chest, an embrace, and a kiss, but he could not deny the curious mixture of pride and shame he felt at betraying Rebecka. A soft voice inside encouraged him to get in touch with Ann again, to continue the foray into explosive, dangerous territory.

It had been a long time since he had felt attractive. And now someone had wanted to touch him. He wasn’t the one who had taken all the initiative. Ann was just as guilty, if one could call it guilt. Even though they had stopped at an embrace and a single kiss, Haver sensed that Ann would have considered going further, and when he thought about this he was suddenly angry at her. She had tempted him, damn it. She knew very well how jealous Rebecka was-she had used him, his vulnerability had been written in his face. No, that wasn’t how it was, he told himself and couldn’t maintain the anger. They were two adults, both in need of human warmth. Ann was the woman, besides Rebecka, whom he felt closest to. They had been brought close through their work, and apart from their mutual respect for each other’s abilities there had always been an undercurrent of sexual attraction.

Now the foundation was trembling. The underground channels were quaking and their hot inner lakes threatened to spill over. Was it love or more a desire for warmth, an expression of friendship where the boundaries had simply become blurred?

So much was broken in his relationship with Rebecka, he could see that now. The passion in Ann’s embrace and in the answer of his body was not only a rush of lust but a yearning for intimacy, evidence of the emotional poverty of his life. Rebecka and he were unhappy together, it was that simple, and Haver had needed only one single kiss to see this clearly.

Could he continue to live with Rebecka? He had to. They had two children together and still loved each other. At least he thought they did.