The princess of Burundi (8 page)

Fredriksson coughed slightly.

“Yes,” said Haver, who knew him well.

“We now know what John did late yesterday afternoon,” Fredriksson said casually. “He was stocking up on booze at the liqour store and then he dropped in on a friend, Mikael Andersson, who lives on Väderkvarnsgatan. He called last night and is coming to the station in half an hour.”

“What time was John there?”

“He dropped in around five and stayed for half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes.” Fredriksson went through the rest of Mikael Andersson’s account.

“Okay,” Haver said. “Now we can start tracing him. Mikael Andersson lives on Väderkvarnsgatan, which is a block or so from the main square. How would he get home?”

“Bus,” Bea said. “You don’t walk all the way up to Gränby when you have two big bags of bottles. I wouldn’t, at any rate.”

“I think the number three goes from Vaksalagatan,” said Lundin, whose contributions at morning meetings were getting increasingly sporadic. Haver sensed that his increasing germophobia and obsession with cleanliness were to blame.

“We’ll have to check in with the appropriate bus drivers,” Haver said.

“Maybe we should post a guy at the bus stop at around the time we think John took the bus and have him show people a picture of John and…”

“Good idea,” Haver said. “A lot of people take the same bus on a regular basis. Lundin?”

Lundin looked up with surprise.

“That time of day is tricky for me,” he said.

“I’ll do it,” Berglund said and gave Haver a dark look. He hated seeing Lundin’s pained and confused expressions.

“The brother—that’s where we should plunge the knife, isn’t it?” said Sammy, who had been quiet until now. He sat at the opposite end of the table, so Haver hadn’t even noticed him.

Ottosson drummed his fingers on the table.

“He is a bottom-feeder,” he said. “A particularly nasty bottom-feeder.”

In Ottosson’s world there were “decent people” and “bottom-feeders.” The latter had lost some of its force since so many bottom-feeders swam around the city. Many in schools, as Sammy pointed out repeatedly through his work on street violence.

Beatrice thought of John’s hobby and imagined his brother, Lennart, swimming around in the fish tank as a “particularly nasty bottom-feeder.”

“Me and Ann were the last ones to take him in,” Sammy said. “I wouldn’t have anything against reeling in this particular barracuda.”

Enough with the metaphors,
Haver thought.

“We’ll have him in for questioning. It sounds reasonable to let you do the first round,” he said, nodding to Sammy Nilsson.

The meeting ended after another fifteen minutes of speculation and planning. Liselotte Rask remained behind with Ottosson and Haver to discuss how much information to release to the public.

Sammy Nilsson thought about Lennart Jonsson and tried to remember how he and Ann Lindell had dealt with him. For the most part it was Ann who had managed to connect with him. Lennart Jonsson was a professional. He didn’t get intimidated or tricked into saying too much. He gave them only the bare minimum. He was helpful when it suited him, and closed as a clam if need be.

Sammy recalled the mixed feelings that this notorious criminal had inspired in him. It had been a mixture of helplessness, anger, and fatigue. He had been forced to realize that while Lennart Jonsson most probably was guilty of everything he stood accused of, they had not been able to pin enough on him to get a conviction. The feeling of helplessness stemmed from knowing they could have broken down his defenses if they had had more time. And if they had managed that, Lennart would have cooperated. He knew enough to know when further resistance was futile. That was part of his professionalism, to acknowledge when the game was up and then be willing to cooperate with the police. Sammy had the feeling that Lennart Jonsson didn’t like to play games. If you got away with it, fine, if not, bad luck.

Sammy decided to drive out to Lennart’s apartment right away. He thought about calling Ann and discussing the situation with her but held off. She was on maternity leave and deserved to be left in peace.

He was relieved to leave the station. The last few incidents of street crime had resulted in a good deal of desk time, with reports to write and all kinds of calls to make to the necessary authorities and school personnel. Teenage criminals were among the most depressing things Sammy knew. Not that he didn’t like teenagers. He coached a soccer team a few nights a week. He knew how fun kids could be despite their rowdy behavior.

He always thought of the boys on his team when he was confronted with trouble on the street, many of those guys only three or so years older than his soccer players. Two different worlds.

The kids on the team were the well-adjusted sort who came from a relatively affluent suburb. These were children whose parents were involved in their lives, driving them to practices and meets, and who knew the other parents, from neighborhood associations and PTA meetings.

The boys Sammy met through his profession were of a whole different category. They came from one of the large housing districts on the outskirts of the city, an area many Uppsala inhabitants had never even seen, existing for the majority only as a name that often figured in headlines.

A few of the boys did sports. Sammy had seen a few of them at the UIF boxing association, boys with talent who had come in from the street and were now directing their energies at the punching bag.

If we just had the time,
he thought, and would often say,
we could manage these kids as well
. All they lacked was time and resources. Sammy Nilsson had not grown cynical, something he saw in several colleagues. He still defended the gang members, upholding the possibility of life without crime and drugs, but it was a position that claimed a high price to maintain, and he wondered how long he would be able to hold out. The year before, it had been even harder for him to hold on to his positive outlook.

It had also become harder to discuss this with his colleagues. All too often Sammy’s speeches about the importance of good neighborhoods and schools were met only with dismissive comments. It was self-evident, it was written on every wall, they seemed to say, but who had time to bike around Stenhagen and Gottsunda, playing the nice police officer, offering the friendly ear?

When he talked to school counselors, curators, preschool teachers, and social workers, they breathed the same air of defeat. Every day the papers announced budget cuts in the public sector: health care, education, and social services.

Sammy Nilsson and his colleagues were forced to take up the slack.

Lennart Jonsson was woken up by someone banging on the door. The ringer had stopped working over half a year ago. He knew what it was all about. In some ways he was surprised that it had taken so long for the police to turn up.

He opened the door, but immediately turned around and walked back into the apartment.

“Just have to take a whiz,” he yelled.

Sammy Nilsson stepped inside. The air was stale, musty. He waited in the hall. He heard the sound of the toilet being flushed. Next to the mirror there were three framed prints by Carl Larsson. Sammy sensed that Lennart had not chosen them himself. Two coats hung on hooks under the hat shelf. If you overlooked the pungent grocery bags filled with empty beer cans by the door, the sparsely furnished entrance hall looked not unlike the waiting room of Sammy’s dentist, which was located in a 1950s downtown apartment building.

Lennart came out of the bathroom, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, half untucked. He was barefoot and his black hair stood on end. Their eyes met. For a moment Sammy felt as if he were visiting an old friend, and he had the impression that Lennart was thinking the same thing.

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

Lennart nodded, breaking eye contact. When he raised his eyes his expression had changed.

“Should we sit down?”

Lennart nodded again and gestured toward the kitchen, letting Sammy go first.

“What do you think?” Sammy said as a way to begin.

Lennart snorted. He removed a beer from the table.

“You were the one who knew him best. Who wanted to see Little John dead?”

“I don’t know,” Lennart said. “What do you know?”

“We’re trying to establish a clear picture of John’s life, what he was doing these past few months, this past week, the day before yesterday. You know the story. We’re still gathering pieces of the puzzle.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Lennart said. “But I haven’t been able to come up with anyone who would’ve wanted to knock off my bro. He was clean—had been for years.”

He gave Sammy a look as if to say:
And don’t you try to pin some shit on him now.

Sammy Nilsson went through the usual questions. Lennart gave short answers. Once, he interrupted himself, walked over to the kitchen counter to get a banana, and consumed it in seconds. He then offered a banana to Sammy, who took one but set it down on the table.

“There’s one guy who spent a lot of time with John. Micke Andersson,” Lennart said. “Have you talked to him?”

“We have,” Sammy said, but without mentioning that Micke had contacted the police the night before.

“There aren’t a lot of us,” Lennart said, and Sammy assumed he was talking about John’s limited circle of friends.

He fetched another banana and ate it just as quickly.

“Some kind of banana diet?” Sammy asked.

Lennart shook his head. He looked thoughtful. Sammy restrained himself from asking further questions.

“The way I live, the people who are closest to you are the most important. Others can rat on you, betray you, but not a brother. Not John. We’ve always helped each other out.”

“For better and for worse, perhaps?”

Lennart snorted again.

“There are some things you’ll never get,” he said. “Why would I trust anyone else?”

No; why would he?
Sammy thought.

“Sometimes you have to,” he said.

Lennart smiled faintly.

“Who’s the ‘you’ of ‘there are some things you’ll never get’?” Sammy asked.

“All of you,” Lennart said.

Sammy looked at him. He had heard enough. He knew what would follow—a harangue about the downtrodden members of society.

“When I played Ping-Pong in high school and won a match against the teacher he threw his racket at me. He had just hit a worthless serve, and when I bent over to pick up the ball he threw his racket at me with full force. It caught me behind the ear. Do you want to see the scar?”

Sammy shook his head.

“I was in a remedial class and Ping-Pong was the only thing I was good at. We used to play two, three hours a day.”

“Getting back to John for a moment,” Sammy said. “How were things at home?”

“What?”

“For him, I mean. With Berit.”

“Berit’s all right.”

“I’m sure she is, but how were things between the two of them?”

“Who’s been saying stuff?”

“No one.”

“Glad to hear it,” Lennart said.

The way Sammy saw it, Lennart had armed himself with nonchalance and arrogance. Sammy Nilsson knew he was likely to collapse without it, but nonetheless it irritated him.

“I’m trying to solve your brother’s murder,” he said.

“No shit.”

Sammy left the apartment, hurried down the stairs, and just outside the front door happened to kick an empty can into a flower bed. It landed in a heap of paper trash.

He called Ottosson from the car in order to see if anything new had turned up, but the chief didn’t have much to report. Sixten Wende had started charting movements at the snow dump in Libro. Now they had a preliminary list of all the drivers who usually trucked snow in. More names would probably be added. Wende had taken on the task of calling every last one of them.

Peter Lundin had checked into the tire-track patterns that had been recovered in Libro. So far they had not matched them to a car belonging to a county official. Andreas Lundemark, the only official who had any business at the dump, drove a Volvo with completely different tire prints.

“But it could be anybody, for that matter,” Ottosson said. “Someone out with their dog or on a romantic assignation.”

Sammy heard someone talking to Ottosson in the background.

“I’ll give you a call later,” Sammy said hastily. “I need to check into a few things.”

Haver stood by the car. He decided not to think about all the interrogations and background checks that had to be done, but to concentrate on the matter at hand. He had felt this before, the sense that the quantity of things to be done overshadowed the most obvious.

Take a systematic approach
, he told himself, but immediately became unsure about how he should proceed.

Sagander’s Mechanical Workshop was located between a tire company and a business specializing in the installation of aluminum doors. It was the kind of building you didn’t notice unless you worked in the area.

A fence about two meters in height ran the perimeter of the yard, in which Haver picked out a couple of containers, a few pallets filled with metal scraps, and a flatbed truck piled high with scrapped pipes. A couple of bathtubs were propped up against the wall.

Haver noted that there were three cars parked in front of the building: a Mazda, an old rusty VW Golf, and a fairly new Volvo.

As he walked into the yard the clouds parted and the sun peeked out unexpectedly. Haver looked up. A crane on a nearby lot swung around and lowered its load. The crane operator paused and watched the men working below. One of them used his arm to signal to the operator, who was barely visible in the small cabin about ten meters off the ground. The crane swung around a few meters. The man made a new sign and shouted something to his colleague, who laughed and shouted something in return.

Haver’s father had been a construction worker and sometimes as a boy Haver had accompanied his father to work. This was most often on small jobs, but sometimes it had been on big residential sites swarming with people, materials, machines, and sounds.

He watched the construction workers and carpenters at work with a tug of longing, envy, even. But above all he felt a warmth well up inside him, both from the sun and from watching the workers in their coordinated efforts. Even their work clothes—jackets lined in loud colors—brought a silly smile to his face.

One of the workers caught sight of him and Haver raised his hand. The man copied his movement and continued to work.

A screeching noise from inside the workshop broke the spell. Haver returned to reality—the black asphalt breaking through the dirty snow, a mess of scrap, wood shavings, rust, loose pieces of cardboard, and the depressing aluminum facade with its windows completely covered in dust.

He sighed heavily and avoided the muckiest areas of the yard. The metal door was unlocked. Haver stepped inside and was greeted by the sound of metal, sparks from a welder, and welding smoke. An older man was carefully polishing a large stainless steel drum with an angle grinder. He took half a step back, pushed the safety glasses onto his forehead, and scrutinized his work.

He must have seen Haver out of the corner of his eye, but took no notice of him. A somewhat younger man, also dressed in blue overalls, looked up from his welding. The man with the angle grinder continued his work. Haver waited some three or four meters away, looking around and trying to imagine Little John at work.

Then he caught sight of a third figure in the dim, far end of the shop, where a man threw a metal pipe onto a workbench, pulled out a measuring stick, and somewhat carelessly measured the end of the pipe, shaking his head and finally tossing it aside. He was about fifty years of age, his hair gathered into a ponytail. He looked up, taking stock of Haver, then disappeared behind a pipe-storage unit.

In a small office tucked into one side of the room Haver saw an older man bent over a folder. Haver sensed that it was Sagander himself. He made his way over to the office, nodding to the angle grinder, meeting the young welder’s gaze, and then knocking on the glass door.

The man, who was not dressed in work clothes, pushed his glasses up onto his head and indicated for him to step inside, which Haver did. The office smelled of sweat. He introduced himself and made to take out his identification, but the man waved it away.

“I thought you’d come,” he said in a voice hoarse from whiskey. He pushed against the desk and rolled his chair out onto the floor.

“We read about Little John. Please have a seat.”

He was in his sixties, fairly short, perhaps 175 centimeters tall, with graying hair and ruddy skin. His eyes were spaced far apart and he had a big nose. Haver thought people with big noses looked strong-willed, and in Sagander’s case this was supported by his manner of speaking to and looking at his visitor.

He gave the impression of being a person who wanted results, fast.

“I understand John used to work here,” Haver said. “It must be terrible to read about it in the papers.”

“Not as terrible as it must have been for John,” the man said.

“Are you the boss?”

The man nodded.

“Agne Sagander,” he said quickly.

“How long did John work here?”

“Almost all his working life, short as it was. He wasn’t more than a boy when he started.”

“Why did he stop working here?”

“There wasn’t enough work to go around, that’s all.”

Haver sensed a streak of irritation, as if Haver wasn’t quick enough for him.

“Was he good at his job?”

“Yes, very.”

“But you let him go?”

“As I said, we have no control over the market.”

“Looks like it’s full steam ahead out there,” Haver said.

“Now is now. That’s not how things were back then.”

Haver was quiet. Sagander waited, but after a few seconds he rolled his chair over to the desk and closed the folder that lay open. Haver decided to plunge ahead.

“Who killed him?”

Sagander froze with his enormous hand suspended above the folder.

“How the hell would I know something like that?” he said. “Ask his good-for-nothing brother.”

“You know Lennart?”

Sagander made a noise that Haver interpreted as yes, but that also gave an idea of what he thought of John’s brother.

“Maybe he also worked for you?”

“Oh no,” Sagander said, and rolled out across the floor again.

“When did you last see John?”

Sagander put his hand up to his nose.
He can’t keep still for a second,
Haver thought.

“It’s been a while. Sometime last summer.”

“Did he come here?”

“Yes.”

“What did he want?”

“To talk, to visit.”

“Was there anything in particular?”

Sagander shook his head.

“Is there anything else you could say about John, apart from work? If you know anyone who knew him…” Haver didn’t know how he should put the question.

“Anyone who might have wanted to kill him, you mean?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“No. Can’t think of anyone. This is a workplace.”

“Can you think of anything that happened that might appear in a different light, in hindsight? Something you might connect with the crime?”

“No.”

“Did he ever ask for an advance on his salary?”

“There’s a question for you. It happened, not very often. Now and then.”

“Was he irresponsible with money?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Drugs?”

“No luck there. A little vodka from time to time but nothing that interfered with his work. Maybe when he was younger, but that’s a common story.”

Sagander looked searchingly at Haver.

“You don’t have much, do you?”

“Would you mind if I talked with your men? They’ve probably worked with John.”

“All three, in fact. Of course. Talk as much as you’d like.”

Sagander had returned to his desk and reopened the folder by the time it took Haver to get up and leave the stuffy office. As Haver was closing the door the phone rang and Sagander grabbed the receiver with irritation.

“The shop,” Haver heard him say, as if there were only one metalwork shop in the whole town.

Erki Karjalainen, the man with the angle grinder, looked as if he had been waiting for Haver, because as soon as Haver stepped out of the office he signaled that he wanted to speak with him. Haver walked over to him.

“You’re from the police, aren’t you?” the man asked in a Swedish-Finnish dialect.

“That’s right. It must be written on my forehead.”

The Finn smiled.

“It’s a terrible thing,” he said, and Haver saw that he meant it. He discerned a mere suggestion of shakiness in the man’s face that betrayed his emotion.

“John was a good guy,” he continued, and his accent became more distinct. “A devil of a welder.”

These were the kind of men who beat the Russians
, Haver thought.

“And nice.”

He looked over at the office.

“A good friend.”

Haver was touched by his simple words. He nodded. Karjalainen turned his head and looked at the welder.
Is he as good as Little John was?
Haver wondered.

“Kurre is good but John was better,” the Finn said, as if he had read Haver’s mind. “It’s a disgrace that he had to quit. There were still a few jobs and we knew things were going to get better.”

“Did they get along?”

A thoughtful expression came over Erki Karjalainen’s face, and when he spoke, his words no longer had the succinct assurance of his earlier answers.

“There was something that wasn’t right between them,” he said. “I think Sagge used the lack of work as an excuse to get rid of John.”

“What was wrong?”

Erki took out a pack of cigarettes. He smoked Chesterfields, something that surprised Haver. He thought they had gone out of business.

“Let’s step out,” Erki said. “Do you smoke?”

Haver shook his head and followed him out into the yard. The clouds had filled the patch of blue sky and the construction workers were taking a break.

“They’re building offices,” Erki said.

He inhaled a few times. Haver studied his face in the daylight. He had a narrow, lined face that was marked by hard work. His dark hair was slicked back. Bushy eyebrows and thin lips. Nicotine-stained teeth in poor condition. He reminded Haver of an out-of-work Italian actor from the 1950s. He sucked deeply on the cigarette and spoke with puffs of smoke punctuating his speech.

“Sagge’s a good guy, but sometimes he can be a hard-ass too. We have to put in a lot of overtime and John didn’t like that. He had a family, and the older his boy got, the less John liked to work late.”

“And Sagge took his revenge by firing him, you mean.”

“Revenge,” Erki repeated, as if testing the word. “Maybe that’s taking it a bit far. Sagge is a stubborn bastard, and stubborn bastards sometimes do crazy things, against their better judgment.”

“Like firing a good welder to make a point?”

“Yup. I think he regrets it, but he’d never say anything like that.”

“Did you ever see John after he stopped working here?”

Erki nodded and lit a new Chesterfield with the remains of the first.

“He came by sometimes but he never talked to Sagge.”

“But with you he did?”

“With me he did.”

The Finn smiled sorrowfully and looked even more like a character in a Fellini film.

Before Haver left the workshop he talked to the other two employees, Kurt Davidsson and Harry Mattzon. Neither of them was particularly talkative, but they strengthened the image of John as a skillful welder and pleasant colleague. They did not, however, appear to take his death as much to heart as Erki did.

The long-haired Mattzon said something that struck Haver as strange.

“I saw John on the street here last summer. It was the last week of my holiday. I was down here getting a car-roof box I keep at work. My brother was going to borrow it. When I swung out onto the street I saw John coming down this way.”

“In a car?”

“Of course.”

“He doesn’t own a car,” Haver said.

“I know. That’s why I remember it. I thought he had bought one.”

“What kind was it?”

“An old white Volvo 242 from the mid-seventies.”

Haver couldn’t help smiling.

“Was he alone?”

“I don’t know.”

“When was this?”

“Must have been the first week of August. Sunday, I think. My brother was going away and I had promised to get him the roof box, but had forgotten to take it home so I had to come down here on a Sunday.”

“Had he been here at the workshop?”

“It’s hard to say,” Mattzon said, taking a few steps to the door and putting his hand on the handle. Haver realized that the man had burned himself. There were bright red blisters on the knuckles of the left hand. A few blisters had burst and revealed the inflamed flesh beneath.

“Maybe he came down to meet someone here?”

“Like who? Everything was closed, shut down for the summer. Sagander was in Africa, on safari,” Mattzon said and opened the door.

“You should see to that hand,” Haver said. “It looks bad.”

Mattzon peeked into the workshop, then looked at Haver. He didn’t bother checking his hand.

“At least I’m alive,” he said and returned to his work.

Haver caught sight of Sagander in his office before the door shut. He took out his cell phone and called Sammy Nilsson but he didn’t answer. Haver looked down at his watch. Lunchtime.