The Hand that Trembles (26 page)

‘Who is this Watanabe?’

‘A Japanese artist I met for the first time in France. He is so exquisite. We have also met in New York when he had an exhibition at a gallery in Soho.’

‘What do you see when you look out over the world?’

Lindell sensed what the answer would be. She rarely or never looked at pine cones herself, much less breathed on them. But in a way she could understand the feeling that Morell described. She had Erik, he was her pine cone. To breathe him in was her greatest possible happiness.

‘War,’ Lisen Morell said finally. ‘War against all that is living. If we took as our starting point these pine cones or buds or the sea,’ her hand made an unexpectedly quick sweeping motion, ‘or the desert or glaciers, then we would be in better health. Simply put, if we did that we would feel better.’  

Or Erik, if we took Erik as a point of departure, Lindell thought, unexpectedly moved by Morell’s words, which she in another context in another environment would perhaps have labelled the rantings of a confused person.  

‘I will show you what Watanabe is capable of,’ Lisen Morell said, and stood up.  

Lindell followed her into the cottage, which in contrast to the last time she was here was now clean and tidy. Lisen Morell walked over to the wall they had sat leant up against on the outside of the house and pointed to what Lindell at first took to be a photograph. The picture represented a lizard, so exact and detailed in its representation that it seemed alive.  

On the opposite wall there was a painting that showed a woman’s body in motion, perhaps in water; the movement by the woman’s breast suggested rippling water.  

‘I have many others,’ Lisen Morell said, ‘I change them out from time to time.’  

Lindell looked around. She saw no other art.  

‘What about your things?’  

Perhaps it was the word ‘things’ that caused Lisen Morell to smile.

‘Nothing out here,’ she said. ‘It’s all back in town. Oh, one thing! But it isn’t a mezzotint.’

She walked over to a chest of drawers, pulled out the uppermost drawer, and took out a folder. She opened it and revealed a watercolour painting of a flowering branch.

‘Cherry,’ she said. ‘I love cherries.’

Lindell saw a delicate branch with a dozen flowers, some in full bloom, others still buds. The petals were white with a faint pink tone toward the centre. The insides of the flowers were – as far as Lindell could judge – reproduced to the most minute and exact detail.

‘This is fantastic,’ she said, and meant it. She wanted to touch the flowers, smell them. ‘What are these bits called?’

‘Stamens and pistils,’ said Lisen Morell, and smiled.

She closed the folder and put it back in the chest. Everything was done very quickly, as if she did not want to expose the cherry flowers to either light or eyes.

‘Have you shown your art to your neighbours out here?’

‘No. They think I’m completely batty.’

‘But if they could see …’

‘I don’t talk so much with them. They judged me from the start. Without knowing who I am, what I have done or could do. If you only knew how limited they are.’

‘Did you ever talk to Tobias Frisk?’

‘Sure, he sometimes helped me with the car. It’s as moody as I am. You see, I have to have a car to get here and back, I have to fill up on petrol and blow out a lot of pollution into the air.’

‘Was Frisk as judgmental?’

‘Maybe not. He sometimes dropped by with cinnamon buns. Sometimes I got the impression he was interested.’

‘In you?’

Lisen Morell nodded. ‘But he was shy.’

‘Were you interested?’

‘No, I didn’t encourage it at all. And it got better. At first he looked at me as if I … well, you know.’

‘When did it get better?’

‘Last autumn. It seemed like he relaxed. I thought he realised I wasn’t interested.’

‘Maybe he met someone else?’

‘No, but he smelt differently.’

Lindell laughed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Haven’t you noticed? When they are like males in rut they stink, but when they are satisfied the smell is not as sharp.’

‘Is that because they put more effort into their hygiene when they meet a woman? Wash themselves, put on a little deodorant, and splash on a little of this and that?’

Lisen Morell smiled. Lindell liked her smile, especially since it contrasted so completely with the woman she had met earlier.

‘Okay, when did his smell change?’

‘About a year ago.’

‘And then?’

‘Until early this autumn. Then he went back to his old self, if you can say that. Clumsy in a way I had never noticed before. I almost felt sorry for him, though he stared at my breasts. He also drove into the ditch, I think he was drunk. Not that that is unusual out here. Regular laws don’t apply in Bultudden.’

‘When was that?’

‘Perhaps a month ago.’

‘Was he hurt?’

‘No, I met him shuffling along the road. He was probably on his way to get Lasse Malm or someone else to get help to tow the car. It was stuck in the ditch. But he didn’t want any help from me.’

‘Did you hear the shot?’

‘Probably everyone out here did.’

The fact was that only Lasse Malm and Sunesson had reported that they had heard anything. The others denied hearing the double salvo just before eight o’clock in the evening – that was the time both Malm and Sunesson had given.

‘What did you think?’

‘That someone was shooting a wolf.’

‘Are there wolves here?’

‘There was one a year ago. That was also a lone male.’

‘But hunting a wolf at night,’ Lindell said. ‘Is that sensible?’

‘No, but there’s so much activity around here that is not sensible, day or night.’

Lindell dropped the theme of the wolf and tracked back to the change in Tobias Frisk after the summer.

‘But you never saw a woman arrive or leave?’

‘No.’

‘And the change happened in late summer?’

‘Yes. I remember that he came over the first week of September. I was going to have the car inspected on the tenth and he was going to help me with some small things. And then he smelt like that again, somehow raw. I’m sensitive to smells. You wash with Dove, don’t you?’

Lindell nodded.

‘And there’s jasmine, too.’

‘You’re right,’ Lindell said, and felt a blush spread over her cheeks.

‘So for three months he has smelt of lone male,’ she summed up, as she bent over to fish out a pen and pad from her bag, not wanting Lisen Morell to notice her embarrassment.

‘Like a prowling wolf,’ Lisen Morell said.

‘And it wasn’t the case that a man came into your life last autumn and disappeared in summer? I mean, that Frisk …’

‘I understand what you’re getting at. No, it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t seeing anyone, then or now.’

Morell looked at the floor and drew a breath as if she was bracing herself.

‘I’ve had men,’ she said. ‘Many men. I mean, not like that, that makes it sound worse than it is, but I am not exactly a virgin. But now, the past two, three years – nothing. I can’t bring myself. Even though I love pine cones, which are a result of reproduction, I can’t bring myself to reproduce myself. Even though I love flowers, stamens and pistils, the delicate and beautiful in their construction and whole function, despite this I myself am wilted. Isn’t that ironic? Or sad, perhaps? I don’t know. Perhaps I am a sterile bloom, like the white outer blooms of the Snowball tree. Or a hybrid, a false flower, beautiful and long-flowering but not fertile. A flower for looks but not for seed. Sometimes I long for a child, but I don’t want to bring one into the world. I don’t trust the men who are in power. My stigma will never swell up.’

She finished and stared into the floor again, before she gathered herself and anticipated Lindell.

‘Yes, I know what you want to say, but if you live with a man the question of children always comes up in the end. To deny a man children is to deny him, isn’t it? A man can’t take that. It upsets him. The male wants to reproduce himself, sire offspring. It is the proof of his virility.’

Lindell sensed that she was speaking from her own experiences. There was much to say, but she chose to nod and mumble something about how she understood. Continuing the discussion might cause Lisen Morell to go off-kilter, to revert to the state of mind she had been in the other day, and Lindell wanted to prevent this at all costs.

They said goodbye outside the cottage. Once she reached the car, she opened the door and tossed her bag onto the passenger seat and looked back. Lisen Morell was still standing outside. She was moving her right hand in what looked like a wave.

Lindell hesitated for a second before she quickly walked back over.

‘What do I smell of other than soap and jasmine?’

‘Loneliness,’ Lisen Morell immediately answered.

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

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

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

‘Want some coffee?’

He poured a cup without waiting for an answer.

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

Lindell drank the coffee, which was strong and good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s possible,’ Lindell said.

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

‘But the chainsaw?’ Lindell interjected.

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

‘What is the third thing?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘To Gräsö,’ Marksson said.

Lindell nodded.

‘You know,’ she said.

‘Dad,’ Marksson said.

Lindell looked quizzically at him.

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

‘He recognised me?’

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

‘Edvard.’

‘It didn’t work out,’ Lindell said.

‘The context,’ Marksson said.

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