The Hand that Trembles (25 page)

The reason for their indifference must stem from the fact that they viewed their prospects of success as minimal. They probably thought that she would get bogged down in the Thai woman’s fate and forget everything else. It had happened before – according to her colleagues – that she had lost her sense of perspective and ended up out of synch with the others in the unit.

She was aware of this undeniable weakness but in this particular case it was a no-brainer. All they had to do was get in touch with a police authority on the other side of the world and let them do the work.

She called Bosse Marksson again and told him she would drive out again the next day. They agreed to meet outside Torsten Andersson’s house at half past nine. 

Of course he had recognised the rifle, but he hadn’t wanted to say anything. Marksson had come by and showed him the antique piece, and asked if he had seen it before. It had to be at least sixty, seventy years old. Why should he say anything? What was done was done. Who could believe that Frisk was man enough to pull the trigger? What he didn’t understand was how Frisk had got hold of the weapon.

Now he was out there again, Marksson. Was he whistling? Looked like it. Cops must get cheered up when there is some devilment under way. They come to life. Whistling.

He recognised his dad too. Birger Marksson. That was not a voice you easily forgot. He was still called ‘the health enthusiast,’ dashing around in tights long before it became fashionable among idiot joggers. Now it seemed almost taunting. Birger Marksson had to use twin walking sticks to get around. Birger’s woman, on the other hand, had never gone for a run her whole life. She was from Snesslinge and there one didn’t exert oneself. These days she dashed around to every sporting event like a mountain goat, took bus tours, and was active in every organisation in Östhammar.

What was he waiting for? He had been standing there for at least ten minutes. Torsten Andersson had heard Marksson pulling up next to the mailboxes and how he, after a couple of minutes, had stepped out of the car, and then like a restless spirit started walking up and down the street, whistling, like some puffed-up small-town policeman. Now he was taking out his phone and making a call. How much did all these mobile phone calls cost? Everything worked just fine before all those things.

Another car came driving around the bend. Torsten Andersson recognised it immediately. It was her, the Uppsala cop, the one who liked the crackle of a fire. The anxiety he had felt started to dissolve. It wasn’t him they were after.

‘Sorry,’ Lindell said. ‘I got hung up at the day care.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve been working a little,’ Marksson said generously. ‘I just called the postman who does this route. His name is Bengtsson, I know him from before.’

Do you all know each other out here, Lindell wondered.

‘I asked him if Frisk ever got international mail but he said no. Bengtsson would remember something like that. I was thinking …’

‘Good thinking,’ Lindell said, realising she was starting to appreciate Marksson more and more.

‘… the woman might have received mail from home.’

‘From Thailand,’ Lindell said, and told him of her discovery.

‘Then we should call Sune Stolt,’ Marksson said immediately. ‘He lives in Thailand and can investigate on location.’

‘Who is Sune Stolt?’ Lindell said, laughing.

‘A colleague of mine who works with prostitution, paedophiles, and the like. There are probably two, three Swedish police officers down there. His brother is also on the force, at the Tierp station, but they were both from here originally. Sune was a speedway driver for Roslagen when he was young. Really promising but then he developed a problem with his sense of balance. Something with his ear. But for a police officer that’s fine, we’re off balance most of the time anyway.’

‘You’re impossible,’ Lindell said.

Marksson smiled, and hissed something imperceptible. Lindell wanted to hug him. The contrast between Beatrice’s superior little smile the day before and Marksson’s delighted grin brought her an immediate and sudden joy at finding herself on this deserted gravel road, together with a colleague from the periphery, a man who did not make things more complicated than they were.

‘I’ll call Tierp right away,’ he said.

They took Lindell’s car. She drove slowly. Marksson was talking with Yngve Stolt and scribbling a mailing address on the back of one of Erik’s drawings.

They passed by Margit and Kalle Paulsson’s house. Lindell recalled Margit’s initial spontaneous outburst when she heard that Tobias Frisk had taken his own life.

‘Never,’ she had said, ‘I can’t believe it! Not him.’

Her husband had not shown the same surprise.

‘He had always been a little peculiar,’ was his quiet reflection.

‘How did Lasse Malm take it?’ Margit asked next.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You don’t know?’

Margit glanced at Kalle.

‘His father committed suicide. That was many years ago now.’

‘Twenty-two,’ Kalle concurred. ‘He put a bullet to his head on the second floor.’

‘Did you know that Lasse Malm’s father shot himself?’

Strangely enough, Marksson shook his head. He had actually never heard it.

‘We should perhaps bring it up gently with Malm and ask him about it.’

‘I doubt there’s any connection. Was it recent?’

‘Twenty-two years ago.’

‘You see,’ Marksson said. ‘If it is an epidemic then the incubation time is long. What kind of weapon did he use?’

‘According to Kalle Paulsson it was an old army revolver.’

Lindell slowed down and turned into Sunesson’s yard for the third time and was taken aback when he emerged on the steps.

‘So you’re home,’ Lindell said.

‘I got called out last night. It was blowing like hell and down in Långalma we had to trim a bunch of trees along a central power corridor.’

‘And you managed without a chainsaw?’

‘Vattenfall supplies us with the tools.’

‘Tired?’

‘No, not too bad. I’m used to it. They call me in a lot because I don’t have a family to take into consideration. I recover on the weekend, sleep like a log.’

‘You’re getting the chainsaw back. I was planning to leave it behind the house.’

She opened the trunk. Sunesson looked in.

‘Whose is that?’ he asked, and pointed to the Jonsered.

‘That’s Lasse Malm’s.’

‘Okay, I get it. You’ve collected every chainsaw.’

‘There weren’t that many,’ Lindell said.

She took out the blade, which was still wrapped in a plastic bag.

‘Sorry for the inconvenience,’ she said. ‘You can put this back on again.’

Sunesson smiled, but it was forced. He had got a remote look on his face. He must be completely spent after all, Lindell thought.

‘Go in and catch up on some sleep,’ she said.

‘Maybe I’ll do that.’

He remained standing with the chainsaw in one hand and the blade in the other as Lindell and Marksson left the property.

They stopped at Lasse Malm’s cottage. Lindell took out his chainsaw, went around the back of the house, and left it in the same place where she had picked it up the Saturday before. She looked around in the dim interior of the shed where a whole heap of items were arranged, or tossed, rather, into a heap. Island folk, she thought. On Gräsö she had been amazed many times at the attitude of the locals toward their possessions. Farming machinery – new as well as old – could stay out all year round, exposed to snow and rain. Private rubbish dumps with decades of waste could litter the forest edge and slopes, often quite close to the house.

In Malm’s shed a rusted barbecue jostled alongside oars; wooden boxes of nets and buoys; a rubbish bag that had fallen over and displayed a mess of old clothes and rags; rusty and relatively new tools; a box of nails, bolts, and screws; a one-bladed plough; and much else.

Time for a garage sale, she thought as Marksson appeared behind her.

‘Bargain basement,’ he said, and tugged on one of the rags in the black rubbish bag.

‘Malm is no neat freak, that much is clear. How can he stand to live like this?’

‘The power of habit. Bachelor. Doesn’t care. Goes out to fish. Watches sports on TV. Eats, drinks, works, and sleeps.’

‘But still,’ Lindell said.

She found herself attracted by the multitude of objects, wanted to start digging through the piles of unsorted junk. Maybe there was a find in there somewhere. She loved flea markets, and Saturday mornings she and Erik often went down to Vaksala Square to stroll past the stands. Sometimes she bought something, a glass, a vase, or something else that they did not really have a burning need for. Once she had found a whole box of Legos for one hundred kronor. After a round in the dishwasher they were as good as new. After that time Erik always accompanied her willingly.

It was one of the few pleasures she allowed herself. She liked the atmosphere there, which was almost continental, and she could convince herself they were many miles away, somewhere in southern Europe.

Erik had never been abroad and she had planned that they should go on holiday before he started school, perhaps to Portugal or Spain, but they never got away. She could afford to; she saved and did not live extravagantly. The flat was paid off and she had no debts.

But to travel as a single mother held no appeal. She felt as if she was unconsciously postponing the trip in the hopes of finding someone to holiday with. Someone who …

‘Should we go down to Frisk’s again?’ Marksson interrupted her train of thought.

He tossed the rag aside.

‘No, I’d rather go to Lisen Morell’s,’ Lindell said. ‘I want to see how she is doing.’

‘Then drop me off at Frisk’s first. You can talk to her for a bit and then pick me up.’

‘You have an idea?’

‘I just want to think a bit,’ Marksson said.

‘Anything in particular?’

Marksson shook his head and headed to the car. Lindell watched him, his lumpy gait and ox-like neck under the short, reddish hair. If it had been Haver, she thought, we could have bounced the ideas back and forth. Marksson has another style, and why not? They worked well together and he appeared effective.

She shot the mess in the shed a last look, then picked up the rag that Marksson had thrown on the ground and deposited it back in the rubbish bag before she pushed the door shut and put the lock back on.

Lisen Morell sat with her back to the old fishing cottage. Her feet rested on a stool. Her clasped hands rested on her emaciated thighs. She was dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing when she had emerged from the forest by Frisk’s house: black jeans and a white jumper, but instead of sandals she was wearing a pair of rubber boots.

She stared out across the sea, which lay almost completely still. When Lindell came closer Morell turned her head and looked at her without showing any surprise or any of the confusion that she had demonstrated earlier. Her gaze was also different. Lindell could establish this when she sat down next to Morell. The wobbly wooden bench let out a groan and dipped.

‘It’ll hold,’ Morell said.

‘How are you?’ Lindell asked. ‘You were a little freaked out when we saw each other last.’

‘I’m still freaked out.’

‘By what?’

Morell smiled and posed a counter-question without lifting her gaze from the sea.

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Getting sick,’ Lindell said. ‘Seriously sick.’

‘You think I’m a wreck, yes, I know.’ She raised a hand to silence Lindell’s protests. ‘Everyone does, not least out here on the point. They call me the Magpie, do you know that? Is there anything else that you’re afraid of?’

Lindell shifted a little. The bench underneath her moaned.

‘Getting sick,’ Morell said slowly and thoughtfully, as if testing the meaning of the words. ‘I am healthy, at least I think so. But to live in this paradise wears on my strength. You see me as a wreck,’ she repeated, ‘and in a way you and everyone out here are right. I am a ship that started to sink out here on the Sea of Åland, drifted into the bay, and was washed up as a wreck. And here I sit.’

Lindell studied her profile. A beautiful face, perhaps a little too thin. Lisen Morell would benefit from putting on a couple of kilos. A few crow’s feet at her eyes and around her mouth indicated that she was not completely young, but otherwise her skin was youthfully smooth. Her hair was gathered in a ponytail. She wet her thin lips with her tongue before she continued.

‘My hand doesn’t obey me any longer,’ she said, and held up her right hand. Long, slender fingers, well-groomed cuticles, and faintly cherry-coloured nails, no ring.

‘It shakes from time to time, just a little, but the most insignificant tremble is enough to crush me. I am an artist. It started a year ago, the trembling. I felt it in my heart first and then the movement spread outward to the tips of my fingers.’

‘What happened a year ago?’

‘Nothing. I came home from New York and was happy, very happy. I had met Watanabe again and I had sold well, was prepared to start saving for a new collection. But I felt at the same time that something was wrong. Not physically – I have always been fit and healthy – but that there was something else that caused my heart to tremble. An arrhythmia of the soul. I practise a method called mezzotint. There are not many of us. It demands years of training, patience, and above all a sure hand. The worst of it is that I don’t know what it can be.’

‘Maybe you have some idea?’

‘I reproduce nature, create small representations of buds, flowers, and animals. I don’t dare try humans. There I can’t measure myself against Watanabe. I do it with love, become drunk with the minute. A pine cone can make me smile.’

Then being out here should have you rolling on the floor, Lindell thought, but said nothing.

‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking, a pine cone, rough against your hand and a little unfriendly, but with thousands of seeds, of future life, a pine cone is far more sensual than most of what we humans produce. That may be the source of my downfall. I creep down beside nature’s miniatures, breathe on them, breathe them in. I don’t touch them, but they touch me. When I stand up and look out over the world – that is when it happens. That’s when I feel the arrhythmia. The trembling. It is hard to explain and I don’t ask that anyone understand what I mean. Watanabe, perhaps.’