Sail of Stone (26 page)

“Yes, why not?”

“Or the dad. Sigge Lindsten.”

“Why not both?” said Halders.

“Would he steal from himself?” asked Aneta. “Lindsten?”

“He didn’t steal from himself,” said Halders. “He stole from his daughter.”

Aneta thought of Halders’s words. She watched him drink. Drink coffee and survive.

“What are we really trying to figure out, Fredrik?” she said after a little while.

“Well, not the theft, anyway. Not in my case.”

“You don’t think it has to do with this?”

“If by ‘this’ you mean the assault, then I don’t think so.”

“And what is ‘this’ for you?”

Halders pushed his paper cup away with yet another grimace.

He scratched his chin, which had nearly a day’s stubble.

He was blue under the eyes. The unforgiving light in the break room shone through his crew cut and revealed his scalp. He had called home once to make sure that the babysitter had everything she needed to stay overnight tonight. He scratched his chin again.

“I’ve almost gotten to be like you were about this, Aneta.” He looked at her with tired eyes. “But I’m not sure that Forsblad is really a wife beater. Or that we’re protecting his wife by clamping down on him.” Halders grew quiet. He looked as though he were listening intensively to the hissing air up by the intake behind them. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. He ran his hand over the back of his close-cropped head. “There’s something damn suspicious about all of this. About all of them. Everyone involved.”

Aneta nodded.

“Something more than we know,” said Halders. “Much more.”

“Forsblad?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Lindsten?”

“The dad? Yes, it’s possible.”

“Anette?”

Halders didn’t answer; he seemed to be listening to the rush of the ventilation system again, the tittle-tattle in the corner. He looked at Aneta again.

“We don’t know anything about Anette, do we?”

Forsblad looked like he’d been sleeping when their colleague from the jail brought him into the room again. He still had his jacket on, and his tie, the white shirt, the odd pants, which weren’t particularly wrinkly, the shoes, which were no longer shiny. Forsblad’s thick hair looked recently combed, but in a way that suggested he had just run his hand through his hair and it was done.

“Why were you sitting in your sister’s car outside the house in Kortedala?” asked Halders.

“That’s my right as a citizen,” said Forsblad.

“Why there in particular?”

“I recognized the place.”

Halders looked at the recorder to make sure it was turning. He looked like he wanted to reassure himself that it was working so he could listen to the answer later and analyze it.

“Why then, in particular?”

Forsblad shrugged.

“Was it because my colleague and I were in there?”

“How should I have known that you were there?”

“Where are you living now, Hans?”

“With my sister.”

“She says that you aren’t.”

“I see.”

“Do you have any permanent residence?”

“I’m working on it,” he said.

“Where?”

“It will work out.”

“You know that there’s a restraining order against you?” said Halders. It was a lie, but not for long. “Our short-term decision has been extended by the prosecutor.”

Forsblad looked like he wasn’t listening or didn’t care. As though all
of that had happened a long time ago. He seemed to be listening for other voices inside his head, or to the air-conditioning that was hissing in there.

He looked up. He fixed his eyes on Aneta.

“Maybe I can live with you,” he said.

Aneta didn’t answer. She avoided his gaze. You should never make eye contact. In Africa there were crazy apes that had rabies, and they tried to make eye contact, and when they did it was dangerous; it was very, very dangerous.

“You’ve been clinging to me this whole time, after all,” said Forsblad. “I’m starting to wonder what it is you actually want.”

He was released after midnight. To go home, but in this case that was just an expression. Or else he had a home, or a bed, a sofa, an air mattress.

“In an hour we ought to break down the door in Kortedala and wake him from his beauty sleep,” said Halders.

They were on the way home to Aneta’s place. Halders was driving fast but avoiding the few boozers who stumbled out into the road, on their way home from that evening’s entertainment.

“If we hit someone we’ll pretend it’s a badger,” he said.

“If he’s sleeping in that apartment, then Anette’s dad is in on it,” said Aneta. “We can’t tromp in there again.”

“Of course we can,” said Halders. “But not tonight.”

Aneta looked around when they parked. She couldn’t see the glow of any cigarettes in any front seats, no silhouettes.

“Do you think he was serious?” she said.

“About sleeping at your place?”

“Did you think it was funny?”

“Oh, Aneta, it was just another way to provoke us.”

“You didn’t see his eyes.”

“I did, too.”

“He was trying to make eye contact with me,” she said.

Halders opened the front door.

“He wouldn’t dare come here,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I told him I’d kill him if he did. It was when you were inside and I was outside waving good-bye.”

The morning was light and warm. There were people smiling on Vasagatan. The sun was round and kind. The sky was blue. Birds were singing.

Winter was walking to the Palace. He saw the temperature on the gauge over Heden: sixty degrees. Already. No one was playing soccer on the fields at Heden. A mistake on a morning like this. The air was easy to breathe in and breathe out. He yearned to sacrifice an ankle.

The sun shone in. Ringmar stuck in his head after Winter had sat down and started to go over the cases: thefts, assault, homicide, robberies, threats, more thefts, criminal damage, another homicide, two more robberies. Reports, testimonies, statements. Papers, cassette tapes, videotapes. Many cases, all at once. A suspected murder. A confessed murderer. A drunk dispute in a neighborhood in Gamlestaden. Almost all homicides and almost all murders looked like that. Case open and closed within twenty-four hours.

“Do you have a minute?” said Ringmar.

“No, I have two,” said Winter, putting down a sheet of paper.

Ringmar sat down. His face was sharply lined. He was twelve years older than Winter, which meant that he had some hard years behind him that Winter had in front of him. Maybe the hardest. And Ringmar had twelve years more of duty as ombudsman and protector to the public in front of him. How would the lines in his face look then? And Winter had twenty-four years left, t-w-e-n-t-y-f-o-u-r years in front of him, in the same role. Dear God. A third of a
life
the same way as this. Lift me up, take me away.

At the same time, this
was
his life. He knew this life. He was good. He had knowledge and aggression, maybe not as much aggression as Halders, but more knowledge. He had patience. He could work hard. He could think. That was
that.
One could think here; it was still possible to take time for thoughts. And thinking could lead to results. A person who didn’t think well didn’t get results. Not the big results, the ones you got from thinking outside the routine. Thinking outside the beautiful
melodies. Winter listened to Coltrane when Coltrane was in his most discordant period, and it was a similar atonal platform that he, Winter, started out from. It never worked to think in a straight line. It was possible to follow logic, but it was logic that couldn’t be followed by anyone else. It was his logic, the same way it was Coltrane’s logic, Pharoah Sanders’s logic, or Miles Davis’s logic. He had sent off for a book from Bokus.com and he’d received it yesterday:
Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece,
by Ashley Kahn, and he was going to try to start reading it tonight if he had time to listen first, which he was starting to do now. The Panasonic was on the floor. He was playing
Kind of Blue
for the thousandth time.

“‘So What,’” said Ringmar.

The first song. Ringmar knew
Kind of Blue.
It was simply part of a general education to know that album. Winter didn’t really understand people who didn’t understand it. There was nothing to understand, incidentally. You just had to listen.

“The woman from Donsö called half an hour ago,” said Ringmar. “Möllerström transferred it to me.”

“Good.”

“It was this Johanna, in other words.”

“I understand that, Bertil. What did she want?”

“Just to ask if we’d heard anything.”

“Have we?”

“No.”

“Has Möllerström checked with the national control center?”

“I assume so.”

“How did she sound?” said Winter.

“Calm, I think. But of course he’s been gone a few weeks now, her father.”

“Yes. Something has happened.”

“Must have,” said Ringmar.

The music continued, “Freddie Freeloader.” Winter thought of Johanna Osvald, of her brother, her father, her grandfather. He thought of Scotland, of Steve Macdonald.

Ringmar rubbed his hand over the lines in his face.

“How’s it going, Bertil?”

“Not bad. Moa has a new apartment on the way. Good for her, I
suppose. But for my part, she could have lived at home for a while longer.”

Winter looked at him.

“You’ll understand in twenty years,” said Ringmar.

“Okay, we’ll discuss it then.” Winter fingered for his pack of Corps, but no. He wanted to be strong. There were many years left.

“Where is she moving to?” he asked.

“Kortedala,” said Ringmar.

T
he news came via Interpol before the morning was over. Or maybe it came directly from Inverness to Möllerström. He was the one who came in to Winter with the printout and directed him to the department’s intranet.

“Just tell me,” said Winter.

“He’s dead,” said Möllerström.

Winter tried to call but couldn’t get through. He tried again five minutes later.

The chief inspector’s name was Jamie Craig, from the Northern Constabulary, Inverness Area Command. He didn’t sound like a Scot but like an Englishman like anyone else, a dry accent, clinical, technical.

“He seems to have been wandering around town for a little while,” said Craig.

“You mean Inverness?”

“No. Fort Augustus. It’s on the southern tip of the lake. Just a village, really.”

“The lake? What lake?”

“Loch Ness, of course.”

Of course. The world-famous waterway southwest of Inverness. Nessie. The lake monster. Winter had not visited Loch Ness, hadn’t seen Nessie.

“But they found him a bit up east, in the hills, by a minor road, and by a small artificial lake called Loch Tarff. At least I think it’s artificial.”

“And the car?”

“No car.”

“Where is his rental?” asked Winter.

“We don’t know. He didn’t have a car when we found him, and he didn’t have any clothes on.”

“Come again, please?”

“This looks strange, sure. He seemed confused when he wandered around the town but he was fully dressed and he paid his way in a pub. Bought a pint and a ploughman’s, I think.”

Craig described what he knew.

A man of about sixty had shown up in Fort Augustus and walked around as though he hadn’t been completely right in the head. People in the city were used to eccentrics from all corners of the world coming there to discover the lake monster again, become famous too, but this man hadn’t been crazy that way. He had moved strangely, spoken incoherently to people he ran into. He had gone into the pub next to the gas station and drunk a Scotch ale and left his ploughman’s lunch: bread, cheese, relish.

Someone had seen him wandering off to the east. Then the bulletin about Axel Osvald was released, and this someone called Craig at Longman Road.

After that it was only a question of a little time. They had driven on the old road, B862, east of the lake, back toward Inverness, and had people comb the countryside, and they hadn’t had to climb around in the hills and the rocks for more than half a day, and hardly that.

“He was on the other side of that little lake,” said Craig, “hidden from the road.”

“Without clothes?”

“Not even socks,” said Craig, and Winter wondered to himself if that was an English expression for someone who was truly naked.

“But you think it’s our man, Axel Osvald? Why?”

“This is where it gets even stranger,” said Craig. “Of course I can’t be one hundred percent sure that it’s him, not yet, but the fact is that his clothes are spread out on the ground almost from down by the southern tip of the lake and up to where we found him. It’s a distance of a few miles. You can get the precise distance if you want, naturally.”

Naturally. Pronounced with dry self-certainty. Winter wasn’t sure that Steve Macdonald knew this man, not personally. They seemed to have made opposite journeys. Craig might have been from London, and he was a chief inspector in Inverness. Steve was from Inverness and a chief inspector in London.

“So we find a naked man and in the area we find a whole set of clothes, including shoes and outerwear, and we think, aha, there might be
a connection here,” said Craig. “We gather up the clothes. We find a wallet with a driver’s license in this Osvald guy’s name, and the photograph looks like the dead man.”

“How did he die?” asked Winter. “Your preliminary assessment, I mean. The Interpol message mentioned possible natural causes.”

“His heart,” said Craig. “That’s as preliminary as I can be. Of course, they’re not done in pathology but there’s no outward sign of violence on the body, no wounds or anything. The doctor has bet two pints on a heart attack. It was cold up there. An older man up in the mountains at night, without clothing, possibly confused—well, it probably couldn’t have ended any other way.”

“Heart attack,” repeated Winter.

“I don’t actually think I could survive a night up there naked,” said Craig. “At least not if I was alone,” he repeated in the same expressionless voice.