The Hand that Trembles (23 page)

He was also afraid, or rather terrified, that he would never be able to have intercourse again. This he was unable to acknowledge to anyone else and hardly even to himself, so his fury was unleashed over the disparity of the caves in the mountains and the palaces by the sea.

He was limp. The sliver of a grenade had entered his sack. The pain that first day at the temporary first-aid station had been indescribable. The medics had been able to quell the bleeding but not the pain. He was given some pills, but they hardly made any difference.

In addition to the wound in his groin, his thigh and lower back were perforated with tiny, infernally stinging pieces of metal.

For three days he lay on his side on the stretcher, with a testicular sack that was becoming increasingly infected, before he was transported to the coast. Which in itself was quite a feat.

He was operated on by a Canadian doctor, Norman Bethune, who was assisted by a Swedish nurse from Karlstad. The Canadian, in actuality a lung specialist, was renowned at the front. It was viewed as an honour to be operated on by him. He later died in China, according to the newspaper
Ny Dag.

‘I am only a human being,’ the nurse had laughed when he asked her in his feverish state if she belonged to the party.

Pus oozed from his body, a foul-smelling yellow paste, as they cut into the bulges that had formed.

He was still weak but getting better. Slowly but surely, his young and strong body had fought off the infection.

But would he ever again be able to lie with a woman? He was not sure how everything down there was connected, and did not dare ask, but he was afraid he had become ineffectual. A damned, tiny little sliver.

He had glanced down at the woman at his side. She had smiled back, nodding encouragingly. Nothing, he felt nothing.

* * *

Something about that young policewoman reminded him of Irina. That was her name, the Serbian. Sometimes he forgot names. Was it her smile? Or her straightforward manner, which he was to encounter in due course. Irina was sharp enough behind that smile. She was the one who had brought his desire back to life. She must have sensed his fears.

Later she was to sit in the Yugoslavian parliament. In the early fifties, he received a letter from her. He had not replied; Tito was not in such good standing with the party at that point. He had followed the party line even when it came to Irina.

What was it that police girl had said? ‘My, you’re a grumpy bastard.’ He liked that. Her visit had made him think of Sven-Arne. He had suspected his nephew was sweating it out in India. Now he had finally been outed. What would he do? Ante guessed he would try to make his way somewhere else. There was no way back.

Ante Persson had understood his decision, had secretly admired it, perhaps also been envious. He himself would never have been able to up and leave in that way.

‘Everyone is dead,’ he muttered.

Unease was lodged in his body like the sliver of a grenade. He knew he was unable to work on days like this. The texts rushed at him, images in his interior became too insistent, his buddies – above all those who had remained in Spain – appeared like phantoms and leered at him with their death-distorted faces.

The feeling of failure was never as clear to him as in these days of meaningless revisiting of the past. He knew his time was running out and that the finale was rapidly approaching. He was now as old as his mother Agnes when she slipped into her final slumber.

She had never understood his passion but had also never hesitated to support him, often without words. Perhaps she was afraid of using the wrong word.

Agnes had seen his suffering, understood that every person needed a little pride, a smidgeon of hope. In that way she was like the most persistent fighter, although she never reflected in political terms.

Teruel had made him into a ‘grumpy bastard,’ but also into a failure. He and his buddies had not only lost the battle, but the entire war. As the brigade pulled back, they lost life and hope. No one admitted it, other than perhaps a few, the ones who slunk away to Valencia to find a boat out, but they were few in number. Otherwise they simply kept their spirits up, or rather, appearances.

He flipped through his papers, stared listlessly at the spines of the books, dragged himself over to the window, and saw that the rain would go on all day.

How long can one live in a dream? One’s whole life. If one is a ‘grumpy bastard.’ A failure never gives up, adding defeat to defeat.

He missed Sven-Arne. He wanted to tell him how it had all really happened. He could have done so immediately, or as the years went by, but Ante Persson had wanted to win so badly, for once in his life, one single time he wanted to deal Fascism a fatal blow.

 The forensic investigation of Tobias Frisk’s house was exhaustive, and only completed late Sunday afternoon.

When Ann Lindell read the preliminary report on Monday morning she was convinced that the eagle theory had turned out to be true, or at least led them to the unknown woman’s killer.

They had found a photograph of the woman who presumably was the victim, the owner of the foot. It had been slipped in between two books in the minimal bookcase in Frisk’s TV room, the room in which he had died. The picture showed a woman with Asian ancestry, between twenty and thirty years old. She smiled into the camera, a somewhat hesitant smile. She had long, dark hair tied back with what appeared to be a white bow. Her evident shyness made her seem almost seductive, though surely unconsciously so – Lindell was convinced of this. There was no pretence about her. Sammy Nilsson had studied the picture closely and declared that ‘confident women are rarely beautiful.’

They had samples of strands of hair and skin fragments recovered from Frisk’s house as well as – perhaps the most spectacular find – traces of blood on the chainsaw in the back shed.

There was much that suggested that the DNA they would uncover – according to Morgensson in Forensics it would take a couple of days – would match that of the foot. Lindell thought so, too.

She called Marksson on his mobile phone and told him what Forensics had come up with. He did not sound surprised, just tired. During Saturday and part of Sunday he had been struggling to accept the image of Tobias Frisk as a hatchet killer, but had capitulated under the increasing quantity of forensic evidence.

‘But we still can’t be one hundred per cent sure,’ he said with his familiar hoarseness. ‘I mean, until we have all the answers.’

‘Not completely sure, but confident,’ Lindell said, well aware that her colleague wanted to leave the door to an alternative explanation open as long as possible.

Perhaps it was in part because on Saturday afternoon he had gone to see Frisk’s mother, a woman in her seventies, in order to tell her in person that her son had died by his own hand. She had received the news silently and thereafter collapsed. Marksson had managed to catch her as she fell. Now she was hospitalised, dumb and sedated in a half-daze. Not a word had passed over her lips.

They decided that Marksson and a colleague would continue the rounds of questioning with the remaining inhabitants on the point. It was clear that the woman had lived with Frisk for a considerable time, shared his bed, and moved freely around the house. There were many traces. Someone must surely have heard or seen something. Bultudden was a relatively isolated outpost by the sea where the inhabitants knew each other’s ways and habitual movements very well. A new, unfamiliar element would surely have been noticed.

There was no reason for Lindell to remain engaged, at least not on site. She promised to forward all forensic information.

‘She’s unknown,’ Marksson said. ‘I think that’s shit.’

It was true. They had hair, blood, and skin, even a photograph, but no identity. They had a foot but no name.

She read through Morgansson’s report on the saw one more time. It was in good condition, purchased at Såma in Uppsala, as evidenced by a small sticker. The blade and chain were basically new, the teeth only slightly worn. The oil on the chain was of vegetable origin, probably originating in a twenty-litre container in the tractor garage. Analysis would show if it matched the traces of oil recovered from the foot. There had not been any traces of blood on the blade, but some under the hood where the chain wound around a cog. Lindell had no idea what the interior mechanism of a chainsaw looked like but tried to imagine it.

There was also sawdust inside the hood, most likely from a pine tree. Lindell had immediately been struck by the macabre fact that Frisk had presumably continued to use the saw after he had finished chopping up his girlfriend. Wouldn’t a natural reaction have been to want to get rid of the tool? Morgansson believed that after the deed Frisk had at least changed out the blade and chain. She would check if Frisk had been a customer at Såma recently.

In the southern end of the shed there were large quantities of firewood – some fifteen or twenty cubic metres, Marksson estimated. Frisk had needed his chainsaw.

In the northern end of the shed there was a cordwood saw with a hydrolic piston. Marksson had explained how it worked. Lindell had shiveringly imagined Frisk first cutting the woman in two before he completed his work with the chainsaw.

Tobias Frisk had cleared away all of her belongings. There was not a single feminine item of clothing, no make-up or forgotten tampon in the bathroom, no extra toothbrush, no notes, not even doodles in the pads of paper they found in the bookshelf, no newspapers or books that looked out of place. There were several old scorecards in a Yahtzee box but only two sets of initials: TF and LM. Frisk’s neighbour confirmed that they had had a habit of playing a game of Yahtzee from time to time, most recently a couple of years ago.

There was no computer in the house. Lasse Malm claimed there had never been one. Tobias Frisk hardly even watched television. The only program he tried to catch was the evening news at seven-thirty.

What did the man do all evening, Lindell wondered. He hardly watched any TV, he didn’t surf the Web, his entire book collection consisted of some twenty books, there were no magazines testifying to any special interest, and he did not appear to have had much of a social life. According to one source he visited his mother once a week, always on a Sunday. He had no siblings.

According to the neighbours along the Avenue, he seldom or rarely received any visitors. Lindell’s impression of an exceptionally isolated existence, dominated by routine, was growing ever more vivid.

‘He liked to fish’ and ‘Fishing was his thing’ were the two comments from his neighbours that indicated any interest. They had also uncovered a sizeable collection of fishing tools. Marksson had deemed the collection ‘above average for an amateur’.

They had a photograph. Either he had overlooked it in his sorting or kept it as a memento. One fact that Morgansson had noted in his report was that there was no camera in the house. Had the woman brought the photograph with her?

Frisk’s passport lay in a kitchen drawer along with some insurance documents, old bills, and the latest statement about how much in retirement funds he had managed to accumulate. The passport, which had been issued in April 2002, had two stamps. Frisk had entered Turkey on June 12th of the same year, and left a week later.

On the wall above the telephone in the kitchen, there was a list of telephone numbers. It consisted of thirteen names, of which five were work-related. All six neighbours were represented, as well as ‘Mum’ and ‘Mum’s property manager’. They called the latter. He was a property manager in the area where Frisk’s mother lived and he explained that Frisk had called him a couple of times to do small jobs in Frisk’s mother’s flat.

Thirteen names. Thirteen numbers. Nothing that so much as whispered a way to proceed. Lindell had never seen anything like it.

The wage stubs from Ahlén’s Bakery were neatly filed in a folder, where the past five tax returns appeared in order. He did not make a particularly good salary – barely 250,000 in 2004 – but on the other hand the house was his and very likely paid off. He did not appear to have lived a particularly extravagant life and could probably put away a couple of kronor every month.

Marksson had already called Frisk’s employer on Saturday and told him what happened to Frisk, but had not said anything about him being a suspected killer. Conny Ahlén was quite naturally shocked. The news was completely unexpected. According to Ahlén there was nothing in Frisk’s behaviour to account for suicide. Quite the opposite; Frisk had been in good spirits all autumn. He had not been sick a single day since his holiday in July. He had been given a raise in September, ‘for everyone who works five years.’ Ahlén and Frisk had gone out for a bite to eat together in connection with this event. Everything had been hunky-dory, at least on the surface.

When asked if Frisk had had any girlfriends, Conny Ahlén had at first given a vague answer that there may have been some lady friends in his life a couple of years ago, but then changed his mind and said that he could not recall Frisk ever mentioning women. ‘To be perfectly honest, we actually used to joke about Tobias. We called him “the island hermit”.’

All of the bakery employees had bank accounts at the Föreningssparbanken in Östhammar, and Marksson would check the dead man’s balance and potential debts as soon as the bank opened in the morning.

Lindell and Marksson were naturally focused on the unknown woman. All signs pointed to the fact that Frisk had blown his own brains out. Now what remained was trying to establish if he had also taken another person’s life. They would never be able to charge him, and Lindell felt almost relieved. He had meted out his own punishment and in this he had made the same assessment as Torsten Andersson: the ultimate punishment.

They had blood, hair, and skin, and a Stihl. That was all, and it would probably last them a long time.

Lindell took out a fresh composition book and wrote ‘Bultudden’ in large letters on the front.