Unspoken

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19

The next morning the investigative team gathered at police headquarters on Norra Hansegatan. An expensive remodeling had just been completed, and the criminal division had been assigned new offices. The meeting room was bright with a high ceiling, and it was twice as large as the old one.

Most of the decor was of simple Scandinavian design in gray and white, with birch furniture. In the middle of the room stood a long, wide table with room for ten on each side. At one end was a big whiteboard and a projector screen. Everything smelled new. The light-colored paint on the walls was barely dry.

Both sides of the room were lined with windows. One row of windows looked out on the street, the parking lot at Obs supermarket, and the eastern side of the ring wall. Beyond the wall the sea was visible. The other windows faced the corridor so that it was possible to see who was walking past. The thin cotton curtains could be closed for more privacy-the old yellow curtains had been replaced with white ones in a discreet pattern.

For once Knutas was several minutes late for the morning meeting. An amicable murmuring was going on as he stepped into the room with a coffee mug in one hand and a folder of papers in the other. It was past eight o’clock, and everyone was present. He removed his jacket, hung it over the back of his chair, and took his usual place at one end of the table. Taking a gulp of the bitter coffee from the office coffee machine, he studied his colleagues as they chatted with each other.

On his right sat Karin Jacobsson: thirty-seven years old, petite, with dark hair and brown eyes. On the job she was persistent and fearless, and she could be as irascible as a terrier. She was open and outgoing, but he knew very little about her personal life, even though they had been working together for fifteen years. She lived alone and had no children. Knutas didn’t know whether she had a boyfriend or not.

He had spent all autumn without her working beside him, and he had missed her terribly. In connection with the homicides of the past summer, Karin Jacobsson had become the subject of an internal investigation regarding possible misconduct. The investigation was dropped, but the whole thing had taken its toll on her. She had been placed on leave while the investigation was ongoing, and then she had taken a vacation right afterward. He had no idea what she had done while she was away.

Right now she was immersed in a quiet conversation with Detective Inspector Thomas Wittberg. He looked more like a surfer than a police officer, with his thick blond hair and trim body. He was a twenty-seven-year-old playboy who constantly had new girlfriends, but his attention to his job was irreproachable. His talent for making contact with people had been of great use-as the head of an interrogation he was unbeatable.

Lars Norrby, on the other side of the table, was the direct opposite of Wittberg: tall, dark, and meticulous to the point of being long-winded. He could drive Knutas crazy with his fussing over details. At work they knew each other’s habits inside out. They had joined the police force at the same time, and for a period they had patrolled together. Now they were both approaching fifty and were as familiar with the criminals on Gotland as they were with each other.

Detective Inspector Norrby was the police spokesman, as well as the assistant head of the criminal investigation unit-a situation that did not always please Knutas.

The technician of the group, Erik Sohlman, was intense, temperamental, and as zealous as a bloodhound; at the same time, he was incredibly methodical.

Birger Smittenberg, the chief prosecutor, was also sitting at the table. He was originally from Stockholm, but he had married a woman from Gotland. Knutas valued his knowledge and his strong sense of involvement.

Knutas began the meeting.

“The victim is Henry ‘Flash’ Dahlstrom, born in 1943. He was found dead just after six p.m. yesterday, in a basement room that he used as a darkroom. If you haven’t all heard it already, he’s the alcoholic who was once a photographer. He used to hang out down on Oster, and the most distinctive thing about him was the camera that he always wore around his neck.”

No one at the table said a word. Everyone was listening intently.

“Dahlstrom was found with extensive contusions on the back of his head. There’s no doubt that he was murdered. His body will be transported to the forensic medicine lab in Solna sometime today.”

“Did you find the murder weapon?” asked Norrby.

“Not yet. We’ve searched both the darkroom and his apartment. Those are the only areas that we’ve cordoned off. Anything else would be pointless since the body has been lying there for a week, and Lord knows how many people have gone up and down the stairs during that time. Dahlstrom lived on the ground floor in a corner apartment. Right outside is the public passageway to Terra Nova. The whole area has been searched. The dark made our work more difficult, but the search was resumed as soon as it was daylight. Which was just a short time ago.”

He looked at his watch.

“Who called it in?” asked the prosecutor.

“The body was discovered by one of the building superintendents. Apparently there are four of them. This one lives in the building across the way. His name is Ove Andersson. He said that a man claiming to be a good friend of the victim rang his doorbell around six p.m. yesterday. The man said that he hadn’t seen Dahlstrom for several days and he wondered where he might be. They found him in the basement, but when the superintendent went up to his place to call the police, the friend took the opportunity to disappear.”

“It seems fishy that he ran off. Maybe he was the murderer,” Wittberg suggested.

“But if so, why would he contact the super?” objected Norrby.

“Maybe he wanted to get back inside the apartment to get something that he left behind, but he didn’t dare break in again,” Jacobsson piped in.

“Well, we can’t rule that out, even though it doesn’t sound very plausible,” countered Norrby. “But why would he wait a whole week? There was always a risk that the body would be discovered.”

Knutas frowned. “One alternative is that he disappeared because he was afraid of being a suspect. Maybe he was at the party, because it’s obvious that a party took place in that apartment. No matter what, we need to get hold of him as soon as possible.”

“Have we got a description?” asked Wittberg.

Knutas looked down at his papers. “Middle-aged, about fifty, according to the super. Tall and heavy. He has a mustache, and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. Dark shirt, dark pants. He didn’t notice the man’s shoes. I think it sounds like Bengt Johnsson. He’s probably the only one of the local winos who fits the description.”

“It’s got to be Bengan. Those two were always hanging out together,” said Wittberg.

Knutas turned to the crime tech. “Erik, you can give us the technical details now.”

Sohlman nodded. “We’ve gone over the apartment and darkroom, but we’re far from done. If we start with the victim and his wounds, we need to look at the photos. I should warn you that they’re rather nasty.”

Sohlman switched off the lights and, using a computer, clicked the digital pictures onto the screen at the front of the room.

“Henry Dahlstrom was lying prone on the floor with extensive contusions to the back of his head. The perpetrator used a blunt instrument of some kind. My guess is a hammer, but the ME will eventually be able to tell us more. Dahlstrom was struck repeatedly on the head. The large amount of blood spatter resulted because the perpetrator first knocked a hole in the victim’s skull and then continued to strike the bloody surface. Each time he delivered another blow, blood sprayed all over.”

Sohlman used a pointer to show spatter that was visible on the floor, the walls, and the ceiling.

“The killer probably knocked Dahlstrom to the ground and then stood over him and kept striking as he lay there. As far as determining the time of death, I would estimate that the murder took place five or six days ago.”

The victim’s face was a blotchy yellowish gray shifting to green. His eyes had a dark, brownishred color, and his lips were black and parched.

“The process of decomposition had begun,” Sohlman went on impassively. “You can see the little brown blisters on the body and the corpse fluid that has started to seep out. The same substance is coming out of his mouth and nostrils.”

His colleagues around the table grimaced. Jacobsson wondered how Sohlman could always manage to talk about bloody victims, rigor mortis, and decomposing bodies as if he were discussing the weather or his annual income tax returns.

“Everything in the place had been tossed, and the cupboards and boxes containing photos had been searched. The murderer was apparently looking for something. The victim also has defensive wounds on his arms. Here we can see bruises and scratches. So he attempted to resist. The bruise on his collarbone may have been made by a blow that missed its mark. We’ve taken blood samples, of course. We also found a cigarette butt in the basement hallway, and hairs that don’t seem to have come from the victim. Everything has been sent to SCL but, as you know, it will take a while before we get any answers.”

He took a sip of coffee and sighed. The response from SCL, the Swedish Crime Laboratory in Linkoping, usually took at least a week, more often three.

Sohlman went on. “As far as evidence goes, we’ve found footprints in the flower bed outside the basement window. Unfortunately, the rain made them impossible to identify. On the other hand, we did get some footprints in the hallway outside the darkroom, and in the bestcase scenario they should tell us something. The same footprints were in the apartment-which, by the way, was filled with bottles, ashtrays, beer cans, and a lot of other junk. We’ve secured quite a few fingerprints, as well as the footprints of four or five different individuals. We also searched the apartment.”

The photos of the mess in Dahlstrom’s place sent a clear message: The apartment had been completely turned upside down.

“Dahlstrom must have had something valuable at home, but I wonder what it might be,” said Knutas. “An alcoholic living on welfare doesn’t usually have assets of any great value. Did you find his camera?”

“No.”

Sohlman cast another glance at his watch. He seemed eager to get away.

“You said that you found a cigarette butt in the basement. Could the murderer have waited outside the darkroom for Dahlstrom to come out?” asked Jacobsson.

“Quite possibly.”

Sohlman then excused himself and left the room.

“In that case, the perp knew that Dahlstrom was inside the darkroom,” Jacobsson went on. “He may have stood in the entryway for hours. What do the neighbors say?”

Knutas leafed through the investigative report.

“We kept knocking on doors until late last night. We haven’t got all the reports in yet, but the neighbors in that stairwell confirm, as I mentioned, that there was a party at the apartment last Sunday. A bunch of people came staggering through the front door around nine p.m. A neighbor who encountered them in the entryway guessed that they had been to the racetrack because he heard some remarks about various horses.”

“Oh, that’s right, Sunday was the last race day of the season,” Jacobsson reminded herself.

Knutas looked up from his papers. “Is that right? Well, the track isn’t very far away, so they could have easily walked or bicycled home afterward. At any rate, there was a big racket in the apartment, according to the neighbors. A lot of noise and partying, with both male and female voices.

“The woman next door reported that the man who is probably Bengt Johnsson rang her doorbell first, to ask her whether she had seen Dahlstrom. She referred him to the building superintendent.”

“Does her description of him match what the super told us?” asked Norrby.

“Yes, for the most part. An overweight man, younger than Dahlstrom, about fifty, she thought. Mustache and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail-a biker-type hairstyle, as she expressed it. Wearing shabby clothes, she also said.”

Knutas gave a little smile.

“He had on dirty, loose-fitting jeans, with his stomach hanging out. A blue flannel shirt, and he was smoking. She recognized the man because she had seen him with Dahlstrom several times.”

“Everybody knows who Henry Dahlstrom is, but what do we actually know about him?” asked Wittberg.

“He’s been an alcoholic for years,” replied Jacobsson. “He usually hung out at Ostercentrum or at the bus station with his buddies. Or at Ostergravar in the summer, of course. Divorced, unemployed. He had been living on a disability pension for over fifteen years even though he didn’t seem completely destitute. He paid his rent and bills on time, and he kept mostly to himself, according to the neighbors, aside from the occasional party. His friends say that he was utterly harmless, never got into fights or committed any sort of crime. He apparently kept up his interest in photography. This summer I ran into him one day as I was biking to work. He was in the process of photographing a flower near Gutavallen.”

“What else do we know about his background?” Wittberg cast a glance at Jacobsson’s papers lying on the table.

“He was born in 1943 in Visby Hospital,” Jacobsson continued. “Grew up in Visby. In 1965 he married a woman from Visby, Ann-Sofie Nilsson. They had a

child in 1967, a girl named Pia. Divorced in 1986.”

“Okay, we’ll find out more about him today,” said Knutas. “And we’ve got to locate Bengt Johnsson.”

He looked out the window.

“Since it’s raining, the winos are probably sitting outside the Domus department store, in the mall. That would be the best place to start. Wittberg?”

“Karin and I can go.”

Knutas nodded.

“I’ve started to collate the interviews with his neighbors, and I’d like to keep working on that,” said Norrby. “And there are a couple of people I’d like to talk to again.”

“That sounds fine,” said Knutas, and then he turned to the prosecutor. “Birger, do you have anything to add?”

“No. Just keep me informed and I’ll be happy.”

“Okay. We’ll stop here. But we’ll meet again this afternoon. Shall we say three o’clock?”

After the meeting Knutas retreated to his office. His new office was twice as big as the old one. Embarrassingly big, he might say. The walls were painted a light color that reminded him of the sand at Tofta beach on a sunny day in July.

The view was the same as from their conference room next door: the parking lot at Ostercentrum and in the distance, the ring wall and the sea.

On the windowsill stood a healthy-looking white geranium that had only recently stopped blooming in anticipation of winter. Jacobsson had given it to him for his birthday several years earlier. He had brought the potted plant with him from his old office, along with his beloved old desk chair made of oak with a soft leather seat. It spun nicely, and he often made use of that feature.

He filled his pipe, taking great care. His thoughts were on Henry Dahlstrom’s darkroom and what he had seen there. When he thought about the man’s crushed skull, he shuddered.

Everything pointed to a drunken brawl that got out of hand and came to an unusually brutal end. Dahlstrom had presumably taken a buddy down to the basement to show him some photographs, and they started arguing about something. Most cases of assault and battery started out that way, and every year some drunk or addict on Gotland was murdered.

In his mind he thought back, trying to summon up a picture of Henry Dahlstrom.

When Knutas had joined the police force twenty-five years earlier, Dahlstrom was a respected photographer. He worked for the newspaper Gotlands Tidningar and was one of the most prominent photographers on the island. At the time Knutas was a cop on the beat, patrolling the streets. Whenever big news events occurred, Dahlstrom was always the first on the scene with his camera. If Knutas met him at private functions, they would usually have a chat. Dahlstrom was a pleasant man with a good sense of humor, although he had a tendency to drink too much. Knutas would sometimes meet him heading home from a pub, drunk as a skunk. Occasionally he would give him a ride because the man was too drunk to get home on his own. Back then Dahlstrom was married. Later on he quit his job with the newspaper and started his own company. At the same time, his alcohol consumption seemed to increase.

Dahlstrom was once found passed out inside the thirteenth-century ruin of Saint Karin’s church in the middle of Stora Torget, the central marketplace in Visby. He was lying on a narrow stairway, asleep, when he was discovered by a startled guide and his group of American tourists.

Another time he walked boldly into the Lindgard restaurant on Strandgatan and ordered a real feast consisting of five courses with wine, strongbeer, aquavit, and cognac. Afterward he asked for a cigar imported directly from Havana, which he puffed on as he enjoyed yet another liqueur. When the bill was presented, he openly admitted that, unfortunately, he was unable to pay due to a shortage of funds. The police were called. They took the sated and tipsy man down to the police station, but he was released a few hours later. Dahlstrom probably thought all the trouble was worth it.

Knutas hadn’t seen Dahlstrom’s wife in years. She had been notified about the death of her exhusband. Knutas hadn’t yet spoken to her, but she was scheduled to be interviewed later in the day.

He sucked on his unlit pipe and leafed through Dahlstrom’s file. A few minor misdemeanors, but nothing serious. His friend Bengt Johnsson, on the other hand, had been convicted twenty or more times, mostly on burglary and minor assault charges.

It was strange that they hadn’t heard from him.

Emma Winarve sat down on the worn sofa in the teachers’ lounge. She was holding her mug of coffee in both hands to warm them. It was drafty in the old wooden building housing the Kyrk School in Roma. Her mug was inscribed with the words: “World’s Best Mom.” How ridiculous. A mother who had cheated on her husband and who, for the past six months, had also neglected her children because her mind was always on something else. She was fast approaching forty, and also fast losing all control.

The clock on the wall told her that it was nine thirty in the morning. Her colleagues were already crowding around the table, chatting congenially. The smell of coffee had permanently seeped into the curtains, books, papers, file folders, and the dirty-yellow wallpaper. Emma didn’t feel like taking part in the conversation. Instead, she looked out the window. The leaves on the oak trees hadn’t yet fallen. They were in constant motion, sensitive to the slightest gust of wind. In the yard next to the school, shaggy gray sheep stood huddled together, grazing. Their jaws were grinding as they ceaselessly chewed their cud. Roma’s stone church with eight hundred years of history behind it stood there as steadfast as always.

Everything was going on as usual, no matter what storms might be raging inside of someone. It was incomprehensible that she could sit here, seemingly unperturbed, sipping endless cups of coffee, and no one even noticed a thing. Such as the fact that her mind was in the grip of a psychological battle. Or that her whole life was in the process of going to hell. But her colleagues merely sat around her, carrying on subdued conversations. As if nothing were happening.

In her mind’s eye, video clips were playing in rapid succession: her daughter Sara’s birthday when all Emma could do was cry; she and Johan rolling around in a hotel bed; her mother-in-law’s searching eyes; Filip’s cello concert, which had totally slipped her mind; her husband Olle’s face when she once again rejected him.

She had gotten herself into an impossible situation.

Six months earlier she had met a man who had ended up changing everything. They got to know each other in connection with last summer’s police hunt, when Emma’s best friend became one of the killer’s victims, and she herself came very close to meeting the same fate.

Johan had stepped into her path, and she couldn’t just walk by him. He was so unlike everyone else she had ever known; so alive and intense about everything he did. She had never laughed so much with anyone else or felt so calm, almost spiritual. He made her discover sides of herself that she didn’t even know existed.

She quickly fell madly in love with him, and before she knew it, he had totally invaded her life. When they made love she was filled with a sensuality that she had never experienced before. He made her relax. For the first time she didn’t give a thought to how she looked or how he might judge her expertise in bed.

To be one hundred percent in the moment was something that she had known only from giving birth to her children.

Yet eventually she chose to break it off with him. For the children’s sake, she decided to stay with Olle. When the drama of the serial murders was over and she woke up in the hospital with her family around her, she realized that she lacked the will to go through with a divorce, even though she felt that Johan was the great love of her life. Security counted more, at least at the time. With much anguish she put an end to their affair.

The whole family went to Greece on vacation because she needed to get away and have some distance from everything. But it hadn’t turned out to be that simple.

When they were back home, Johan had written to her. At first she considered throwing out the letter, unread. But her curiosity got the better of her. Afterward she regretted it.

It would have been best for all parties concerned if she hadn’t read even one line of that letter.

Karin Jacobsson and Thomas Wittberg walked down to Ostercentrum as soon as the investigative meeting was over. The pedestrian street between the shops was almost deserted. The wind and rain were having their effect. They hurried into the mall at Obs supermarket and shook off the worst of the rain as they stood inside the glass doors.

The shopping center was quite modest: H amp;M, Guldfynd, a couple of beauty parlors, a health food store, a bulletin board. Obs with its rows of cashiers, then the bakery and pastry shop, the customer service counter, the Tips amp; Tobak betting parlor and tobacco shop. Restrooms in the back, a recycling station for bottles, and the exit leading to the parking lot. Along with weary retirees and the parents of small children, needing to rest their feet, drunks occupied the benches in the mall whenever the weather was bad.

Most of them kept a hip flask in a bag or pocket, but as long as they didn’t do any drinking inside, the security guards left them in peace.

Jacobsson recognized two local winos sitting on the bench nearest the exit. They were filthy and unshaven, dressed in worn-out clothes. The younger man was leaning his head against the wall behind him and staring indifferently at the people walking past. He wore a black leather jacket and tattered running shoes. The older man had on a blue down jacket and knit cap. He was leaning forward with his head in his hands. Greasy locks of hair had crept out from under his cap.

Jacobsson introduced herself and Wittberg, even though she was fully aware that the two men knew who they were.

“We haven’t done anything. We’re just sitting here.”

The man in the cap glanced up, his eyes crossed. And it’s not even eleven o’clock in the morning, thought Jacobsson.

“Take it easy,” Wittberg told them. “We just want to ask you a few questions.”

He pulled a photo out of his pocket.

“Do you recognize this man?”

The younger drunk kept on staring straight ahead. He refused to give either of the police officers even a glance. The other man stared at the picture.

“Hell yes. That’s Flash, of course.”

“How well do you know him?”

“He’s one of the gang, you know. Usually hangs out around here, or at the bus station. He’s been doing that for twenty years. Of course I know Flash, everybody does. Hey, Jonas, you know who Flash is, don’t you?”

He poked his pal in the side and handed him the photo.

“What a fucking stupid question. Everybody knows him.”

The man named Jonas had pupils the size of peppercorns. Jacobsson wondered what he was high on.

“When did you last see him?” asked Wittberg.

“What did he do?”

“Nothing. We just want to know when you last saw him.”

“Hmm, when the hell was it? What day is today? Monday?”

Jacobsson nodded. The man stroked his chin with fingers that had been stained dirty yellow from nicotine.

“I haven’t seen him in several days, but sometimes he just takes off, you know.”

Jacobsson turned to the other man.

“What about you?”

He was still staring straight ahead. His face is actually quite handsome, underneath all the dirt and stubble, she thought. His expression was defiant, showing a strong unwillingness to cooperate. She restrained a desire to stand right in front of him and wave her arms to force him to react.

“Can’t remember.”

Wittberg was starting to get annoyed.

“What did you say?”

“Why do you want to know? What did he do?” asked the older man in the cap.

“He’s dead. Someone killed him.”

“What the hell? Is that true?”

Now both men looked up.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. He was found dead last night.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“What we need to do now is try to find the person who did it.”

“Sure, that’s obvious. Come to think of it, I think the last time I saw him was at the bus station about a week ago.”

“Was he alone?” “He was there with his buddies-Kjelle and Bengan, I think.”

“How did he seem?”

“What do you mean by ‘seem’?”

“How did he act? Did he seem sick, or was he nervous in any way?”

“No, he was the same as usual. He never really says much. He was a little drunk, of course.”

“Do you remember what day that was?”

“It was probably Saturday because there were a lot of people downtown. I think it was Saturday.”

“A week ago?”

“That’s right. But I haven’t seen him since then.”

Jacobsson turned to the other man.

“What about you? Have you seen him since then?”

“Nope.”

Jacobsson suppressed the annoyed feeling that had begun to prickle at her throat.

“Okay. Do either of you know whether he’d spent time with any strangers lately?”

“No idea.”

“Is there anyone who might want to harm him?”

“Not Flash, no. He never got into fights with anybody. He kept a low profile, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure, I understand,” said Jacobsson. “So do you happen to know where his pal Bengan might be? Bengt Johnsson?”

“Is he the one who did it?”

Behind the alcoholic fog, the older man looked genuinely surprised.

“No, no. We just want to talk to him.”

“Haven’t seen him in a while, have you?”

“Nope,” said Jonas.

He was chewing gum so hard that his jaws made a cracking sound.

“The last time I saw him he was with that new guy from the mainland,” the older man said. “The guy named Orjan.”

“What’s his last name?”

“I don’t know because he hasn’t lived here on Gotland for very long. He was in the slammer on the mainland.”

“Do you know where we can find Bengt Johnsson?”

“He lives on Stenkumlavag with his mother. Maybe that’s where he is.”

“Do you know the address?”

“Nope.”

“All right then. Thanks for your help. If you see or hear anything that has to do with Flash, you should contact the police immediately.”

“Sure,” said the man with the cap, and then he, too, leaned back against the wall.

Johan Berg opened the morning paper as he sat at the kitchen table in his apartment on Heleneborgsgatan in Stockholm. The apartment was on the ground floor facing the courtyard, but that didn’t bother him. The Sodermalm district was the very heart of the city, and in his eyes there was no better place to live. One side of the building faced the waters of Riddarfjarden and the old prison island of Langholm with its bathing rocks and wooded walking paths. On the other side the shops, pubs, cafes, and subway were all within easy reach. The red subway line went directly to Karlaplan, and from there it was only a five-minute walk to the editorial headquarters of Swedish TV.

He subscribed to several daily newspapers: Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, and Dagens Industri. Currently Gotlands Tidningar was also in the stack that he plowed through each morning. After the events of the summer, his interest in Gotland had been given a boost. For more reasons than one.

He scanned the headlines: “Crisis in Housing for Elderly,” “Police on Gotland Earn Less Than Officers on the Mainland,” “Farmer Risks Losing EU Subsidies.”

Then he noticed a news item: “Man Found Dead in Grabo. Police Suspect Foul Play.”

As he cleared away the breakfast dishes he thought about the article. Of course it sounded like an ordinary drunken fight, but his curiosity was aroused. He took a quick look at himself in the mirror and put a little gel on his dark curly hair. He was actually in need of a shave, but there was no time for that. His dark stubble would just have to grow out a bit. He was thirty-seven but looked younger. Tall and well built, with regular features and brown eyes. Women were always falling for him-and he’d taken advantage of that fact many times in the past. But not anymore. Ever since six months ago, only one woman existed for him: Emma Winarve of Roma on the island of Gotland. They had met when he was covering the hunt for a serial killer last summer.

She had turned his life upside down. He had never met a woman who moved him so deeply; she challenged him and made him think along whole new lines. He liked himself better when he was with her. When his friends asked him what was so special about Emma, he had a hard time explaining. Everything was just so obvious. And he knew that his feelings were reciprocated.

Things had gone so far that he thought she was actually considering leaving her husband, that it was just a matter of time. He had started fantasizing about moving to Gotland and working for one of the newspapers or for the local radio station. They would move in together, and he would be a stepfather for her two children.

Instead, just the opposite had happened. After the murderer was caught and the case was closed, she called it off. He was completely taken by surprise. His life fell apart. He was forced to take sick leave for several weeks, and when he recovered enough that he could take a vacation, she never left his thoughts for a moment.

When he came home he wrote her a letter. Quite unexpectedly, she answered, and then they started seeing each other again. They mostly met whenever Johan went to Gotland on a story. Occasionally she managed to get away to meet him in Stockholm. But he could tell that she wasn’t comfortable with all the lying and that she was struggling with terrible feelings of guilt. Finally she asked for a two-month break. October and November. She explained that she needed some distance and time to think.

Suddenly they had no communication at all. No text messages, no e-mails, no phone calls.

But she had relented once. He was on Gotland on assignment and called her up. She happened to be feeling unhappy just then, and weak, so they met. A quick meeting that merely confirmed how strong their feelings were for each other, at least that’s what he thought.

After that, nothing. He had made a couple of awkward attempts, but in vain. She was intractable.

At the same time, he understood. It was difficult for her, since she was married and had young children.

But weeks of restless nights, chain-smoking, and a constant, overwhelming longing for her had taken their toll on him, to put it mildly.

On his way to the subway station, he called Anders Knutas in Visby.

The police superintendent answered at once.

“Knutas.”

“Hi. Johan Berg from Regional News here. How are things?”

“Fine, thanks. And you? It’s been a while.”

“Things are good. I saw an article in the paper about a possible homicide in Grabo. Is it true?”

“We don’t know much at this point.”

“What happened?”

A brief pause. Johan could picture Knutas leaning back in his desk chair, filling his pipe. They’d had a great deal to do with each other when Johan reported on the murders from Gotland and then took an active role in solving the case.

“Last night a man was found dead in a basement on Jungmansgatan, in Grabo.”

“Of course.”

“His injuries were such that we suspect he was murdered.”

“How old was he?”

“Born in 1943.”

“Known by the police?”

“Yes, but not because he had committed any crimes to speak of, although he was quite an inveterate alcoholic. He used to hang out downtown, drinking. A so-called local wino.”

“Does it have to do with a drunken brawl?”

“It seems so.”

“How was he killed?”

“I can’t discuss that.”

“When was the murder committed?”

“He’d been dead for several days. Maybe as long as a week.”

“How could he be dead for so long if he was found in a basement?”

“He was inside a locked room.”

“A basement storage room?”

“You could say that.”

“Who found him?”

“The building superintendent.”

“Had anyone reported him missing?”

“No, but a friend of his contacted the superintendent.”

Knutas was starting to sound impatient.

“I see. Who was it?”

“Listen, I can’t tell you that. I have to go now. You’ll have to make do with what I’ve said, for the time being.”

“Okay. When do you think you might have more to tell me?”

“I have no idea. Bye.”

Johan switched off his cell phone, thinking that the murder didn’t sound like something that Regional News would report on. Probably just an ordinary drunken fight that got out of hand. The story would be relegated to a few lines.

The Stockholm subway system on a Monday morning in November must be one of the most depressing places in the world, thought Johan as he leaned against the window with the black wall of the tunnel whizzing past an arm’s length away.

The car was filled with sallow-faced people, weighed down by worries and the daily grind. No one was talking; the only sounds were the usual clanking and rattling of the subway. A few coughs and some sleepy rustling of giveaway newspapers. People stared at the ceiling, at the ad placards, at the floor, out the window, or at some indefinite point in midair. Everywhere but at each other.

The smell of wet clothing was mixed with perfume, sweat, and the dust burning on the heaters. Jackets were pressed next to coats, scarves next to caps, bodies against bodies, shoes against shoes, faces close to other faces, but without any sort of contact.

How can so many people be gathered in one place without making a sound? thought Johan. There’s something sick about the whole thing.

It was mornings like this that could really make him long to get away.

When he emerged from the subway at Karlaplan he felt liberated. At least here he could breathe. The people around him were marching like tin soldiers toward buses, offices, schools, shops, the welfare center, a lawyer’s office, or wherever they happened to be going.

He set off across the park near the church, Gustav Adolfskyrkan. The kids in the day-care center were outside, playing on the swing set in the biting wind. Their cheeks were as bright as ripe apples.

The huge edifice of TV headquarters loomed in the November fog. He waved hello to the statue of TV star Lennart Hyland before he stepped through the front door.

Up in the newsroom everyone was bustling around. The national morning news program was under way. At the elevators guests were hurrying past, along with anchormen, meteorologists, makeup artists, reporters, and editors-exiting the studios, or going to the bathrooms, or heading for the breakfast table. The row of picture windows offered a view of Gardet, the big park in Ostermalm, swathed in gray fog and swarming with lively dogs from the doggy day care on Grev Magnigatan. Brown, black, and spotted canines galloped around, playing on the big field and unaffected by the fact that it was a dreary Monday in November.

Almost everyone was present for the morning meeting of Regional News: several cameramen, an early-morning editor, reporters, producers, and program planners. It was crowded in the lounge area of the newsroom. After they had discussed the latest broadcast, criticizing some parts and praising others, the editor Max Grenfors presented the day’s roster of news stories. The assignments might very well change during the course of the meeting. Some reporter might have his own idea, or the objections to a story proposal might be so strong that it ended up in the wastebasket, or the discussion might take a new direction and lead to a reworking of all their plans. That’s exactly the way things needed to function in a newsroom, thought Johan, who enjoyed the morning gatherings.

He briefly recounted to the others what he knew about the murder on Gotland. Everyone agreed that it sounded like a drunken fight. Johan was assigned to keep an eye on the situation since he was going to Gotland the next day anyway, to do a report on the controversy regarding a campground that was threatened with closure.

The Regional News editorial offices operated under high-pressure deadlines. Each day they produced a twenty-minute program, basically from scratch. A story that aired for two minutes usually took several hours to film and another two hours to edit. Johan was always nagging his bosses about giving the reporters more time.

He was not in favor of the changes that had been implemented since he had started out as a TV reporter ten years earlier. Nowadays the reporters hardly had time to look over their material before they had to submit it to the editor. This had a disastrous effect on quality. Good images that the cameraman had taken a lot of trouble to capture risked being lost because no one discovered them in all the rush. The cameramen were often disappointed when they saw the final story. As soon as management started taking shortcuts in the use of visual images, which were the real strength of TV, then things were really going downhill. Johan refused to write up his reports or do any editing until he had gone through all the material himself.

Of course there were exceptions. When time was tight and the story was thrown into editing twenty minutes before the broadcast, they still succeeded in putting it together.

Unpredictability was the real draw in terms of working in a newsroom. In the morning he never knew how the day was going to go. Johan worked mostly as a crime reporter, and the contacts that he had established over the years were invaluable for the newsroom. He also had primary responsibility for covering Gotland, which had been placed under the domain of Regional News a little over a year ago. Swedish TV’s large deficit meant that they had closed the local office on Gotland and moved the crew from Norrkoping back to Stockholm. Johan was happy to take on Gotland, a place that had delighted him since he was a child. And now it was no longer just the island that attracted him.

Spot tugged at his leash. To think he’s never learned to heel, thought Fanny angrily, but she didn’t feel like yelling at him. The streets were deserted in the residential neighborhood where she was walking. A dark mist had settled over Visby, and the asphalt was shiny from the gentle rain. An inviting glow came from the curtain-framed windows of all the houses. How orderly everything was. Flowers on the windowsills, gleaming cars in the driveways, and charming mailboxes. Here and there a well-tended compost pile.

She had a good view inside the homes at this time of the evening, after dark. In one, copper utensils hung on the wall in the kitchen; another had a brightly painted, rustic grandfather clock. In a living room a little girl was jumping up and down on the sofa, talking to someone that Fanny couldn’t see. Over there was a man holding a dustpan in one hand. A few crumbs must have landed on the rug, she thought and pressed her lips together. A man and woman were standing in another kitchen window; they seemed to be cooking together.

Suddenly the door to a big house opened. An elderly couple came out and went over to a waiting taxi as they chatted merrily. They were well dressed, and Fanny smelled the strong scent of the woman’s perfume as they passed quite close to her. They didn’t notice that she had stopped to watch them.

She was freezing in her thin jacket. Back home her mother was waiting in the silent and dark apartment. She worked the night shift at Flextronics. Fanny had met her father only a few times in her life, the last time when she was five years old. His band had been playing a gig in Visby, and he dropped by for a brief visit. The only thing she remembered about him was his big, dry hand holding hers, and his brown eyes. Her father was as black as night. He was a Rastafarian and came from Jamaica. In the photos she had seen, he had long tangled locks of hair. They call them dreadlocks, her mother had told her.

He lived in Stockholm, where he played drums in a band, and he had a wife and three kids in Farsta. That was all she knew.

She never heard from him, not even on her birthday. Sometimes she tried to imagine what it would be like if he and her mother had lived together. Maybe her mother wouldn’t drink as much. Maybe she would be happier. Maybe Fanny wouldn’t have to take care of everything: the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, taking Spot for a walk and doing the grocery shopping. Maybe she wouldn’t have a guilty conscience about going out to the stables if her father was around. She wondered what he would say if he knew how things were for her. But he probably didn’t care; she meant nothing to him.

She was simply the product of his love affair with her mother.

The first thing Jacobsson and Wittberg noticed was the group of sculptures. Almost two meters tall, made of concrete, and gathered in one place on the property. One depicted a rearing horse that was desperately whinnying at the clouds, another looked like a deer, a third was a moose with a disproportionately large head. Grotesque and phantomlike, they stood there in the pouring rain on the flat expanse of lawn.

They dashed from the car to the house, whose roof extended over the simple porch, offering some protection. A typical one-story building from the fifties with a basement and dirty gray stucco facade. The steps were rotting, and there seemed to be an imminent risk that they might put a foot right through them. The doorbell was almost inaudible. After a minute a tall, stout woman in her seventies opened the door. She was wearing a cardigan and a floral-patterned dress. Her hair was thick and white.

“We’re from the police,” Wittberg explained. “We want to ask you some questions. Are you Doris Johnsson, the mother of Bengt Johnsson?”

“That’s right. Has he gotten mixed up in something again? Come in. You’re getting soaked.”

They sat down on the leather sofa in the living room. The room was cluttered with things. In addition to the sofa group, there were three armchairs, a rustic chiffonier, a TV, pedestals for flowers, and a bookshelf. The windowsills were crowded with potted plants, and every available space in the room held glass figurines in various designs. They all had one thing in common: they depicted animals. Dogs, cats, hedgehogs, squirrels, cows, horses, pigs, camels, and birds. In various sizes, colors, and poses, they were enthroned on tables and benches, in windows, and on shelves.

“You collect these things?” asked Jacobsson, rather foolishly.

The woman’s lined face brightened. “Yes, I’ve been doing it for years. I have six hundred and twenty-seven pieces,” she told them proudly. “So what was it you wanted?”

“Well, I’m sorry to say that we’ve brought some bad news,” said Wittberg, leaning forward. “One of your son’s friends has been found dead, and we suspect that someone killed him. His name is Henry Dahlstrom.”

“Good gracious! Henry?” Her face turned pale. “He was murdered?”

“Unfortunately, that’s probably what happened. We haven’t caught the perpetrator, and that’s why we’re interested in talking to anyone who knew Henry. Do you know where Bengt is?”

“No, he didn’t sleep here last night.”

“Where was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“When did you last see him?” asked Jacobsson.

“Yesterday evening. He dropped by for only a minute. I was down in the basement, hanging up the laundry, so I didn’t actually see him. He just called down the stairs to me. This morning he phoned to say that he was going to stay with a friend for a few days.”

“I see. Who’s the friend?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Did he give you a phone number?”

“No. He’s a grown man, you know. I had the impression that he was staying with a woman.”

“Why is that?”

“Because he was so secretive. Otherwise he usually tells me where he is.”

“Did he call you on your home phone or on a cell?”

“The home phone.”

“Do you have caller ID?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

She got up and went out to the hall. After a minute she came back.

“No, it doesn’t show anything. It must have been an unlisted number.”

“Does he have a cell phone?”

Doris Johnsson stood in the doorway and gave the officers sitting on the sofa a defiant look.

“Before I answer any more questions, I want to know what happened. I knew Henry, too. You’ll have to tell me what this is all about.”

“Yes, of course,” muttered Wittberg, who seemed to be quite affected by the domineering tone of the stout woman. Jacobsson noted that he used the formal means of address with her.

“Last night Henry was found by Bengt and the building superintendent. He was in his darkroom in the basement of the building where he lives. Someone had murdered him, but I can’t go into the details. When the superintendent left to call the police, Bengt took off, and no one has heard from him since. It’s urgent that we get in touch with him as soon as we can.”

“He got scared, of course.”

“That’s very possible. But if we’re going to catch the perpetrator, we need to talk to everyone who might have seen anything or who can tell us about Henry’s actions during the days before the murder. Do you have any idea where Bengt might be, Mrs Johnsson?”

“Hmm… He knows so many people. I suppose I could call around and ask.”

“When did you last hear from Bengt, or rather when did you actually see him last?” Jacobsson interjected.

“Now let me see… Aside from yesterday evening… It must have been yesterday morning. He slept late, as usual. Didn’t get up until eleven and then had his breakfast while I was eating lunch. Then he went out. He didn’t say where he was going.”

“How did he seem?”

“The same as always. He wasn’t acting strange or anything like that.”

“Do you know if anything unusual had happened lately?”

Doris Johnsson plucked at her clothing.

“No…” she said hesitantly.

Suddenly she threw out her hands.

“Well, yes. Henry won at the harness-racing track. He won the five-race jackpot, and he was the only winner, so it was a lot of money. Eighty thousand kronor, I think. Bengt told me about it the other day.”

Jacobsson and Wittberg looked at her in astonishment.

“When did this happen?”

“It wasn’t this past Sunday, so it must have been the previous Sunday. Yes, that’s when it was, because they were at the track.”

“And Henry won eighty thousand kronor? Do you know what he did with the money?”

“Bought booze, I assume. Part of it went straight to alcohol. As soon as they have a little cash, they start buying rounds for everybody.”

“Who else belongs to his circle of friends?”

“There’s a man named Kjelle that he hangs out with a lot, along with a couple of girls. Monica and Gunsan. Though I suppose her real name is Gun.”

“Last names?”

She shook her head.

“Where do they live?”

“I don’t know that, either, but somewhere here in town. Also a man named Orjan, by the way. I think he just moved here recently. Bengt has been talking about him lately. I think he lives on Styrmansgatan.”

They said good-bye to Doris Johnsson, who promised to call as soon as she heard anything from her son.

With the information about the track winnings, they now had a clear motive for the murder.

Knutas had brought along a packet of Danish open-faced sandwiches for lunch. His father-in-law had recently paid them a visit and delighted the whole family with the delicacies he had brought from Denmark. The three slices of dark rye bread each had a different kind of lunch meat: liver sausage topped with a piece of pickled squash; sliced meatballs with pickled beets; and his favorite, Danish sausage roll. And an ice-cold beer to go with this glorious repast.

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Norrby stuck his head inside.

“Do you have a minute?”

“Of course.”

Norrby folded his nearly six-foot-two frame into one of the visitor chairs in Knutas’s office.

“I’ve been talking to one of the neighbors, who had something interesting to say.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Anna Larsson is an elderly woman who lives in the apartment above Dahlstrom’s. On Monday night around ten thirty she heard Flash go out. He was wearing his old slippers, which made a special sound when he walked.”

Knutas frowned. “How could she hear that from inside her apartment?”

“I know, that’s something you might well ask, but it so happened that her cat was suffering from diarrhea.”

“So?”

“Anna Larsson lives alone, and she doesn’t have a balcony. She was just about to go to bed when her cat shit on the floor. It smelled so bad that she didn’t want to have the garbage bag containing the shit in her apartment. She had already put on her nightgown and didn’t want to go downstairs to the trash cans, for fear of running into one of her neighbors. So she put the bag on the landing outside her door for the time being. She thought that nobody would notice if she tossed it out first thing in the morning.”

“Get to the point,” said Knutas impatiently. Norrby’s tendency to present too many details was sometimes annoying.

“Well, at the very moment that she opens her door, she hears Dahlstrom coming out wearing his slippers. He locks his door and goes downstairs to the basement.”

“Okay,” said Knutas, tapping his pipe on the table.

“Mrs Larsson doesn’t think any more about it. She goes to bed and falls asleep. In the middle of the night she’s awakened by her cat meowing. This time the cat has made a mess on the floor of her bedroom. That animal had a really bad stomachache.”

“Hmm.”

“She gets out of bed and cleans up everything. She now has another bag of cat shit that has to be put outside on the landing. When she opens the door, someone comes in the entrance one floor down and stops at Dahlstrom’s door. But this time she doesn’t hear Dahlstrom’s shuffling slippers; this person is wearing real shoes. She’s curious, so she stands there listening. The stranger doesn’t ring the doorbell but the door opens and the person goes inside, and she doesn’t hear any voices.”

Now Knutas’s interest was aroused. His pipe froze in midair.

“Then what happened?”

“Then everything was quiet. Not a sound.”

“Did she have the impression that someone had opened Dahlstrom’s door from the inside? Or did the person outside open it?”

“She thinks that the person outside opened it.”

“Why didn’t she tell us about this earlier?”

“She was interviewed on the evening when Dahlstrom’s body was found. She says that she felt stressed and upset, so she mentioned only that she had heard him go down to the basement. Afterward I got to wondering how she could be so sure about it. That’s why I went back to talk to her again.”

“Good job,” Knutas said. “It might have been the killer that she heard, but it could just as well have been Dahlstrom coming in from somewhere. This was several hours later, wasn’t it?”

“Definitely, but it seems quite unlikely that he would have gone out, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. Did the woman notice anything else after the person went inside?”

“No, she went back to bed and fell asleep.”

“Okay. The question is whether the person had a key-assuming that it wasn’t Dahlstrom, that is.”

“There’s no sign that the lock was forced.”

“Maybe it was someone he knew.”

“That seems most plausible.”

When the investigative team met again that afternoon, Jacobsson and Wittberg started off by reporting on their encounter with Doris Johnsson and what she had told them about the winnings at the racetrack.

“Now at least we have a motive,” said Jacobsson, concluding her report.

“That explains why the apartment was ransacked,” said Knutas. “The murderer apparently knew that Dahlstrom had won big at the track.”

“The money still hasn’t turned up,” added Sohlman, “so presumably the perpetrator found it.”

“Bengt Johnsson comes immediately to mind,” said Jacobsson. “I think we need to put out an APB on him.”

“Considering that this involves a homicide, I have to agree.” Knutas turned to Norrby. “We’ve obtained some new information from a witness.”

His colleague told everyone about Anna Larsson and her sick cat in the apartment above.

“Damn,” said Wittberg. “That indicates that the perp had a key. Which reinforces our suspicions about Johnsson.”

“Why is that?” Jacobsson objected. “The perp could just as easily have killed Dahlstrom, then stolen his keys and gone up to his apartment.”

“Or he might have just picked the lock,” Sohlman interjected. “Dahlstrom had a regular cylinder lock on his door. A skilled burglar could have gotten it open without leaving any sign of forced entry. We didn’t find any damage on first examination, but we’ll take another look at the lock.”

“I agree with Wittberg,” said Norrby. “I think it was Bengt Johnsson. He was Dahlstrom’s closest friend and it’s likely that he had a spare key. Unless it was Dahlstrom himself who had decided to go out again in the middle of the night. Wearing real shoes this time.”

“Sure, that’s possible. But if it was Bengan, why would he then contact the super?” said Jacobsson, sounding skeptical.

“To divert suspicion from himself, of course,” snapped Norrby.

“If the neighbor woman’s testimony is accurate, then Dahlstrom was alive twenty-four hours after he went to the racetrack and had a party in his apartment,” said Knutas. “That means he wasn’t killed in connection with the party. The murder most likely took place late on Monday night or in the early hours of Tuesday morning. We’ll soon have a more precise determination of the time from the medical examiner.”

“By the way, we received another interesting piece of information from a witness,” Norrby went on. “I was out there today, talking with all the neighbors for a second time. One of them who wasn’t home gave me a call later on.”

“Yes?”

Knutas leaned his head on his hands, preparing for another lengthy report.

“It’s a girl who goes to Save High School. She also heard someone in the stairwell late Monday night. She said it was Arne Haukas, the man who lives across from her on the floor below, meaning the same floor where Dahlstrom lived. Haukas is a PE teacher, and he usually goes out jogging in the evening. Normally he goes out around eight, but on Monday she heard him leave his apartment around eleven p.m. She also saw him from her window.”

“Is that so? How can she be so sure of the time and day?”

“Her older sister from Alva was visiting. They were up late, talking, and they both saw him. This girl has been keeping an eye on him ever since she discovered that he’s a bit of a Peeping Tom. He always looks in her window whenever he runs past. She thinks he goes jogging in the evening as a pretext for peering in people’s windows.”

“Does she have any proof for her allegations?”

“No. She actually sounded a little doubtful herself. She said that she wasn’t sure about it, that it was just a feeling she had.”

“Is this Haukas married?”

“No, he lives alone. And there could be some basis for the girl’s uneasiness. I’ve only managed to make one phone call about the man so far, and that was to Solberga School, where he works. The principal, whom I happen to know personally, told me that several years ago Arne Haukas was accused of spying on the girls when they changed their clothes. The students claimed that he would barge into the locker room to tell them about something trivial. Four of them thought it was so unpleasant that they filed a complaint with the principal.”

“What happened?”

“The principal had a talk with Haukas, who denied the allegations, and that was the end of the matter. It apparently never happened again. No other students have complained.”

“There seem to be a lot of sleazy individuals living in that building,” Wittberg interjected. “Alcoholics, sick cats, Peeping Toms… It makes you wonder what kind of madhouse that place is.”

His comments prompted some merriment around the table. Knutas raised his hand in admonishment.

“In any event, we’re not looking for a sex offender; we’re looking for a murderer. But this PE teacher might have seen something since he was out running on the night of the murder. Has he been interviewed?”

“No, apparently not,” replied Norrby.

“Then we need to do that today.”

He turned to Jacobsson. “Anything new on Dahlstrom?”

“We know that he was employed as a photographer at Gotlands Tidningar. He worked there until 1980, when he resigned and started his own company, called Master Pictures. The business did well for the first few years, but in 1987 it went into bankruptcy, with major debts. After that, there’s no information that Dahlstrom had any sort of job. He lived on welfare until he started receiving a disability pension in 1990.”

“Where are his wife and daughter now?” asked Knutas.

“His ex-wife still lives in their old apartment on Signalgatan. His daughter lives in Malmo. Single, with no children. Or at least she’s the only person listed at that address. Ann-Sofie Dahlstrom, his ex-wife, was on the mainland, but she’ll be back home later this afternoon. She promised to come straight here from the airport.”

“That’s good,” said Knutas. “We need to get in touch with the daughter, too. I want to put out an internal APB on Bengt Johnsson immediately. We need to ask everyone in his circle of acquaintances where they think he might be staying. Sohlman, you’re in charge of examining the apartment door lock one more time. The question is: How many people knew about the money Dahlstrom won at the track? Everyone who was at the track with him that evening has to be interviewed. But did anyone else know?”

“In those kinds of circles, news like that probably spreads like wildfire,” said Wittberg. “No one that we’ve talked to in town has said a word about the money, but they may have their reasons for not talking.”

“You’ll have to interview them again, along with all the others,” said Knutas. “The money throws a whole new light on the case.”

If there was one thing that Emma detested, it was sewing machines.

To think that anyone should have to bother with this kind of shit work, she thought, her mouth full of pins. Her sense of irritation was fast becoming a headache. She swore silently. Why should it be so damned difficult to make a pair of pants? When other people sewed in a zipper, they made it look ridiculously easy.

She was really trying her best, and she had armed herself with tons of patience before she started, promising herself that this time she wouldn’t give up. She would not surrender to the slightest obstacle, although she had a tendency to do just that. She was certainly well aware of her own weaknesses.

She had been struggling with this sewing project for an hour, and she had already smoked three cigarettes to calm her nerves. Sweat broke out on her forehead as she tried to straighten out the denim fabric under the presser foot. Twice she had been forced to undo the seam when the zipper ended up buckling.

In school she had always hated sewing class. The silence, the sternness of the teacher. The fact that everything had to be so finicky-the seam allowance, the fitting of the pattern, the wrong and right side of the fabric. The only bad grade that she’d ever received on her report card in grade school was in sewing. It was a permanent reminder of her failure to make anything from pot holders to knitted caps.

The ring of her cell phone came like the arrival of a much anticipated guest. When she heard Johan’s voice, fire raced through her breast.

“Hi, it’s me. Am I interrupting anything?”

“No, but you know you’re not supposed to call me.”

“I couldn’t help it. Is he home?”

“No, he plays floorball on Monday nights.”

“Please don’t be mad.”

A brief silence. Then his voice again, low and gentle. Like a caress on her brow.

“How are you?”

“Fine, thanks. But I was just about to have a hysterical fit and throw my sewing machine out the window.”

His soft laugh made her stomach lurch.

“You’re trying to sew something? What happened to that vow you made?”

She was reminded of the time last summer when she had tried to mend a hole in his shirt with a needle and thread from his hotel. Afterward she had vowed never to try sewing anything again.

“It went to hell, just like everything else,” she said without thinking.

“What? What do you mean?”

He was trying to sound neutral, but she could hear the hope in his voice.

“Oh, nothing. What do you want? You know you’re not supposed to call,” she repeated.

“I couldn’t help myself.”

“But if you don’t leave me in peace, I won’t be able to think,” she said gently.

He tried to persuade her to meet him when he arrived in Gotland on the following day.

She refused, even though her body was screaming for him. It was a battle between reason and emotion.

“Don’t keep doing this. It’s hard enough as it is.”

“But what are your feelings for me, Emma? Tell me honestly. I need to know.”

“I think about you, too. All the time. I’m so confused. I don’t know what I should do.”

“Do you sleep with him?”

“You’d better hang up now,” she said, annoyed.

He heard her light a cigarette.

“Come on, tell me. Do you? I want to know if you do.”

She sighed deeply.

“No, I don’t. I don’t have the slightest desire to sleep with him. Are you satisfied?”

“But how long can you keep that up? You’re going to have to make up your mind, Emma. Hasn’t he noticed anything? Is he that insensitive? Doesn’t he wonder why you’re acting this way?”

“Of course he does, but he thinks it’s a reaction to what happened this summer.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“What question?”

“What are your feelings for me?”

Another deep sigh.

“I love you, Johan,” she said quietly. “That’s what makes everything so difficult.”

“But what the hell, Emma. We can’t keep going on like this for much longer. Wouldn’t it be better to make a clean break and tell him how things stand?”

“What the hell do you mean by ‘how things stand’?” she roared. “You have no idea how things stand!”

“Yes, but-”

“But what?”

Her voice was angry now, and she was on the verge of tears.

“You have no fucking idea what it’s like to be responsible for two young children! I can’t sit on the sofa and cry all weekend because I miss you. Or decide to be with you just because I want to. Or need to. Or have to, in order to survive. Because surely you know that my whole life revolves around you, Johan. You’re the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I see in my mind’s eye before I fall asleep. But I can’t let this take over everything. I have to keep functioning. Take care of the house, my job, my family. Above all, I have to think of my children. What would happen to them if I left Olle? You go around over there in Stockholm with only yourself to think about. A good job, your own nice apartment in the center of town, and lots to do. If your longing for me starts to get difficult, there are plenty of things to divert your attention. You can go out to pubs, meet with friends, go to the movies. And if you’re feeling sad and want to cry over me, you can do that, too. But where the hell can I go? Maybe I can sneak into the laundry room and cry. But I can’t just go into town if I’m feeling unhappy and find something else to do. Or meet some new people who are fun? Not likely. Sure, there are plenty of people like that out here!”

She slammed down the phone just as she heard the front door open.

Olle was home.

Ann-Sofie Dahlstrom had the driest hands that Knutas had ever seen. And she kept rubbing them together so that flakes of skin came off and fell onto her lap. She wore her brown hair pulled back and fastened with a plastic barrette at the nape of her neck. Her face was pale and without a trace of makeup. Knutas began by expressing his condolences over the death of her ex-husband.

“We haven’t had any contact for a long time. It’s been years since we last talked…” Her voice trailed away.

“What was Henry like when you were married?”

“He was almost always working. There were plenty of late nights and working weekends. We didn’t have much of a family life. I was the one who mostly took care of our daughter, Pia. Maybe it was partly my fault that things turned out the way they did. I probably shut him out. He started drinking more and more. Finally it got to be intolerable.”

How typical for a woman, thought Knutas. An expert at taking the blame for her husband’s bad habits.

“In what way was it intolerable?”

“He was almost always drunk and started neglecting his work. As long as he had a full-time job at Gotlands Tidningar, he managed well enough. The problems began when he started his own company and didn’t have anyone looking over his shoulder. He started drinking in the middle of the week, didn’t come home at night, and lost customers because he either failed to show up or didn’t bother to deliver the photographs he had promised. I finally had to file for divorce.”

As she talked, her hands continued their bizarre massage, making a faint scraping sound. She noticed Knutas’s glance.

“My hands get like this in the winter, and no lotion does any good. It’s the cold. There’s nothing I can do about it,” she added with a certain sharpness to her voice.

“No, of course not. Forgive me,” Knutas apologized. He took out his pipe in order to focus on something else.

“How did his drinking affect Pia?”

“She became withdrawn and uncommunicative. She spent more and more time away from home. Told me that she was studying with friends, but her grades kept getting worse. She started skipping classes and then developed an eating problem. It took a long time for me to realize that it was serious. During the fall semester of her second year, the teachers concluded that she was suffering from anorexia, and she didn’t get over it until she finished high school.”

“But she stayed in school, in spite of her illness?”

“Yes. I don’t think it was the most severe form of the disease, but there’s no question that she had an eating disorder.”

“What sort of help did you receive?”

“As luck would have it, I knew a doctor at the hospital who had worked at a clinic on the mainland-a clinic for patients with eating disorders. He helped me. I managed to persuade Pia to go over there with me. At the time she weighed only ninety-seven pounds, even though she’s five foot nine inches tall.”

“How did your husband react?”

“He didn’t want to know anything about it. This was toward the end of our marriage.”

“What does your daughter do now?”

“She lives in Malmo. She’s a librarian at the municipal library.”

“Is she married?”

“No.”

“Children?”

“No.”

“So how do you think she’s doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“How is she?”

The woman sitting across from Knutas looked him in the eye without saying a word. Her right eyebrow was twitching. The silence was palpable. Finally it got so oppressive that he was forced to break it.

“How would you describe your contact with each other?”

“Regular.”

“And what form does it take?”

“She calls me once a week. Always on Friday.”

“How often do you see each other?”

“She usually comes to Gotland for a couple of weeks every summer. But she stays with friends.”

“But you see each other?”

“Yes, naturally, we see each other. Of course.”

The APB that was issued for Bengt Johnsson on the police-band radio brought results after a couple of hours. Jacobsson took the call from the local police in Slite. A boy who claimed to have seen Johnsson had come into the station. Jacobsson asked to speak to him.

“I think I know where the man is that you’re looking for,” said a young boy’s voice on the phone.

“Really? Where is he?”

“In Aminne, in a cabin. It’s an area near here, for summer houses.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Yes, he was unloading things from a car outside one of the cabins.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday.”

“Why did you happen to contact the police?”

“My best friend’s father is on the police force in Slite. I told my friend that I’d seen a suspicious-looking guy out by the summer houses, and he told his father.”

“Why did you think the man was suspicious?”

“He was dirty and had on ragged clothes. He seemed nervous and kept looking around, as if he didn’t want anyone to notice him.”

“Did he see you?”

“No, I don’t think so. I was standing behind a tree. I waited to ride my bike past until he went inside the cabin.”

“Was he alone?”

“I think so.”

“Can you tell me anything else about how he looked?”

“Pretty old, maybe fifty or sixty. Very fat.”

“Anything else? What about his hair?”

“He had dark hair, in a ponytail.”

Jacobsson felt a vague lurch in her stomach.

“What was he unloading?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“How did you happen to catch sight of him?”

“We live right next to the summer-house area. I was on my way home from visiting a friend.”

“Could you point out the cabin?”

“Sure.”

“Could I talk to one of your parents?”

“They’re not home right now.”

“Okay. Stay in the house. We’ll be there in half an hour. Where do you live?”

Five minutes later Jacobsson and Knutas were in a car, heading east toward Aminne, a popular seaside vacation spot in the summer, located on the northeast side of the island. The local police were going out to the boy’s home to await their colleagues.

Outside the car windows, the winter darkness was nearly impenetrable. There were no streetlights, and their only guides were the headlights of cars, as well as reflector posts that appeared at regular intervals. They passed an occasional house, a warm glow coming from its windows. A reminder that people lived out here in the countryside.

When they reached the boy’s house, a Slite police car was in the driveway. The boy’s name was Jon, and he looked to be about fifteen. Accompanied by his father, he led the way to the summer-house area. It was hard to see the houses in the dark. Without flashlights they would have been fumbling blindly. When they aimed the beams at the cabins, they saw that all of them were a dark Falun red with white trim. Each of them had a yard surrounded by a decorative fence. On this November evening the deserted area seemed almost ghostly. Jacobsson shivered and zipped up her jacket.

Suddenly they saw a light in one of the cabins at the very edge of the woods. It occurred to Knutas that they should have called for backup. Or dogs. Johnsson might not be alone. Knutas put his hand in the inside pocket of his coat, feeling for his service revolver.

Jacobsson was the only one who didn’t have a weapon, since the investigation into her potential misconduct during the summer’s serial killer case was ongoing, so she had to wait a short distance away. They sent the boy and his father home. The officers stopped before reaching the house and turned off their flashlights so they could discuss how to proceed.

An old Volvo Amazon was parked outside the fence. Knutas crouched down and crept forward, with the other two officers close behind. He paused under a window while the others took up position on either side of the front door.

Not a sound could be heard from inside. Cautiously Knutas stood up enough to peer through the window. In a matter of seconds his brain registered a complete picture of the room: the fireplace with a rocking chair in front of it, the table with four chairs, and an antique lamp hanging from the ceiling. All very cozy. On the table stood several bottles of beer. He signaled to his colleagues. No one there.

At that instant all three of them gave a start as someone moved inside the cabin. Knutas ducked down. The sound of someone clattering and rummaging around penetrated the walls. They waited. Knutas’s legs were aching and his fingers were stiff from the cold. Again silence settled over the cabin. Knutas peeked inside and saw the back of a large man now seated in the rocking chair. The ponytail indicated that it was Bengt Johnsson. He had put more wood on the fire, and the flames were dangerously high. He had also moved the table over next to him. On the table stood a whiskey bottle, which looked as if it had been newly opened. Next to the bottle was a glass and an ashtray. The man was smoking as he stared into the fire. Then he leaned forward to take a gulp from the bottle. It was Johnsson, no doubt about it.

Visible to the right of the room was a hallway and part of the kitchen. Knutas had the feeling that Johnsson was alone, but he couldn’t be absolutely sure. One of the police officers shifted his feet uneasily. It was freezing cold, and none of them was dressed for standing outdoors for any length of time.

Suddenly Johnsson stood up and looked right at the window. Knutas ducked so quickly that he fell over. Whether Johnsson had seen him or not, it was impossible to tell, but it was now or never.

Knutas took up position in front of the door with his weapon drawn and, after a nod of agreement from the other two officers, he kicked in the door with all his might.

They were greeted by Bengt Johnsson’s look of bewilderment. He was obviously drunk, and he was once again sitting in the rocking chair with the glass in his hand.

“What the hell?” was all he managed to say when the three officers stormed in with their guns drawn.

The fire in the fireplace crackled pleasantly, and the kerosene lamps gave off a gentle glow. And there the man sat, peaceful as could be.

The situation was so absurd that Knutas felt an urge to laugh. He lowered his gun and said, “How are things going, Bengt?”

“Fine, thanks,” slurred the man sitting next to the fire. “Nice of you to drop by.”

Several Months Earlier

He made her unsure of herself. Fanny didn’t know how she was supposed to act. He was probably twice her age. She really ought to think of him as a nice old man and nothing more. But there was something about the way he treated her that changed everything. In the beginning, he would grab a lock of her hair and cautiously tug at it, which was both playful and annoying at the same time. She would blush, finding the whole thing embarrassing because she sensed that it meant something more. Sometimes when she met his gaze, he would turn serious, and it felt as if his eyes were stripping her naked. She didn’t find it entirely unpleasant. Sometimes she even thought him attractive when she studied him surreptitiously. He was muscular. He had thick, shiny hair with just a hint of gray at the temples. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth revealed his age. His teeth were slightly yellow and crooked, with multiple fillings.

How could he look at her the way he did when he was so old? she had wondered. If was as if his eyes made her older than she was. Although he didn’t always pay attention to her; sometimes he ignored her completely. Then, to her surprise, she would feel disappointed, as if she actually wanted him to notice her.

One time he had asked her if she wanted a lift. She said yes because it was windy and below freezing. He had a big car, and she got in. He put on some music-Joe Cocker. That was his favorite, he told her with a smile. She had never heard of Joe Cocker. He asked her what she liked to listen to. When she couldn’t think of anything, he just laughed. It was great to sit there in his warm car and listen to his gentle laughter. It felt somehow safe.

The mere fact that she was sitting in that big fancy car made her feel more important.