Frozen Moment (13 page)

    The
water was deep there. You couldn't see the bottom; you could only sense it
through the weed that extended slimy tentacles right up to the surface in some
places.

    'We
ought to make our way home from here,' Seja had said. 'I mean, it can't be very
far.'

    Then
she realised it wasn't very clever to leave their clothes and the car on the
other side of the lake and to plough home through rough terrain in their
swimsuits. Besides which, Martin was comfortable. And she never did get him to
go out with the red paint and mark the track, although she had gone on and on
about it. In the end, after he'd left, she did it herself. It took a day to
find her way to the lake, and by the time she did she was covered in scratches
and sweating. September was long gone so she hadn't intended to go for a swim,
but she did. The ice-cold water flicked at her exhausted limbs.

    That
had been her reward, along with the flask of coffee she drank on the hillside
afterwards, wrapped up warmly in her old anorak. For the first time in ages she
had felt a surge of happiness in her chest, like a light but unmistakable
butterfly wing against her heart.
To have the courage to be alone,
she
had thought.
To have the courage.
On the way home she
had marked out her route by dabbing paint on selected tree trunks and rocks
until she could glimpse her cottage through the trees.

    She
started to ride up to the lake almost every day, once she had sawn up and
carried away tree trunks from the buried path. By this stage Lukas knew the way
by heart, and when Seja relaxed the reins and leaned back in the saddle, she
sank into a meditative state she had never experienced before. The track to the
lake became her secret, symbolising her newly discovered and still fragile
inner strength, this contradictory state. And God knows she needed it.

    'You've
changed so much,' Martin had said just before they split up. She knew he was
referring to the fact that she had embraced life in the country and in the
cottage without any hesitation. She had hardly dared to wonder herself what it
was about living here that made her feel as if she had come home; she had lived
in the city all her life. She had felt if not happy,
then
at least disposed towards happiness.

    
Happiness
is possible here,
she had painted, somewhat pretentiously, on the stable
wall just above the saddle hook.

    Only
once had she visited the small village in northern Finland where her mother was
born. She wasn't very old at the time, perhaps five or
six,
and the summer heat had still been embedded in the tarmac as the family climbed
into the scruffy Saab and set off from Gothenburg. Seja was dressed for early
autumn. When they were met by the frosty ground and the bitterly cold air, she
had had to borrow clothes from Grandma Marja-Leena. That was the first and only
time she met her grandmother. At first Seja had not wanted to accept the
borrowed clothes, she had wanted to go around in a work-shirt with the sleeves
rolled up like her father as if they both suspected that making concessions to
the cold was a sign of weakness. Only when they went off into the forest to
help with clearing the ground did he put on Grandpa's warm lined dungarees that
hung on a nail in the barn.

    Grandpa
had died six months earlier. At night her mother talked quietly in the bedroom
about how Grandma was going to manage with the farm and all the heavy work.
And the forest, which would eventually be passed on to her only
daughter.
Much later Seja would come to realise that her mother had
wanted to move back to Finland, but her father had refused. It was something
that remained between them.

    Now
Marja-Leena was dead, and Seja's mother rented out the land. The house itself
was falling into decay. Seja had only fleeting memories of her grandmother and
the farm.
A sinewy woman in an apron, her hair in a bun at
the back of her neck.
A grey house and a huge barn in
the middle of nowhere.
Snow in September.
And the
forest.

    But
she remembered other things. These days she would get a lump in her throat at
the thought of how her mother had instantly changed as soon as her feet touched
the frozen ground. As if the austerity of the earth quickly found its way
through the soles of her shoes and established itself in her body, just as the
cold had settled in Seja's grandmother's bones and become a part of her. It was
obvious in every word, every gesture. Marja-Leena had nodded appreciatively
when Seja was so thrilled at having learned to drive the tractor on her
mother's knee. That was the only time Seja saw her smile.

    Seja
remembered the sudden reverence with which she regarded her mother, the
practised way in which she went about the neglected tasks around the farm. How
she would swing herself up on to the tractor, or drive the animals in front of
her with calm assured calls and slaps. Like a cowgirl, absolutely in her
element.

    Seja's
mother had lived in Sweden for thirty years, but still spoke Swedish as if she
was constantly forcing her way past some obstacle at the front of her mouth.
Weighing every single word so that it would come out right, and yet it was
often wrong, poor and lacking in shades of meaning. You could see it on her
face afterwards. That what she'd said hadn't turned out the way she'd intended.
That she was prepared for misunderstandings.

    Seja
had never returned to Finland as an adult. No, wait, there was one time. A
school trip to Helsinki with her sixth-form class. When Jarmo, the one person
in the class who spoke Finnish better than she did, wasn't around, she had to
translate all the signs and the menus at McDonald's.

    Seja
laughed as Lukas whinnied loudly at the sight of the stable. She let go of the
reins and slipped her boots out of the stirrups. For a short while her heart
felt light.

    Then
she caught sight of the roof. When the trees were bare of leaves and not
weighed down with snow, Åke and Kristina Melkersson's recently completed red
mock-tile roof glowed through the branches. She turned away, as if denying the
uncomfortable feeling would make it disappear. By removing Melkersson from her
mind she could pretend she had never been there on that day

    It
was unfair, but ever since she had seen the dead man sprawled on the gravel,
the unpleasant sensation that had replaced the immediate shock had increased at
the mere thought of her neighbour. All he had done was wake her up and take her
to Thomas Edell's workshop and scrapyard, completely unsuspecting.

    And
there it
was,
the name. It aroused feelings of vulnerability
and a vague guilt that she had never really acknowledged, a guilt that she had
wiped from her mind with the excuse that she had been too young, had been
suffering from a very human uncertainty. In fact, she was still uncertain about
the whole thing. She didn't even recognise that face: scraped along the ground,
distorted by pain and the fear of death.

    And
many years had passed. Many years of letting the past remain where it was, of
rethinking, of tidying away, burying, reconciling, defying the uncomfortable
thoughts and making them bearable. As you do. There was a great deal from those
days that had disappeared - people, memories - rationalised away in the agony
of a hangover.

    Tell
poured himself another cup of coffee from the Thermos Bärneflod had produced
from the depths of the police station. An old-fashioned red candlestick had
been brought back into use for Advent and was burning beneath the fluorescent
lights. Tell closed the window without giving a thought to the fact that
Beckman had opened it five minutes earlier. Outside Ullevi a gang of people had
gathered after a car hit a cyclist travelling in the cycle lane. Karlberg had
established that it was serious; the ambulance and a patrol car had been there
for almost an hour.

    So
far, the morning meeting had mainly been devoted to gathering information. The
various facts that had come to light the previous day had been presented. Tell
had informed them that over the next few days - nobody mentioned the fact that
Christmas was fast approaching - all other ongoing investigations would be put
to one side, and every member of the team would work on the murder in
Björsared. They all knew that the first few days were critical in solving a case
- or not.

    The
technicians had sent in a verbal report with Magnus Johansson, who had
obviously interrupted his holiday to be there. He had informed them that
according to SKL, the national forensic lab, the bullet in the victim came from
a 9mm Browning HP.

    A
call from forensic pathologist Ingemar Stromberg was put on speakerphone.

    'I
don't think I've got anything particularly startling to tell you,' said
Stromberg apologetically once he had got his headset sorted out. 'Lars Waltz
died of a gunshot wound to the head, and death was probably instantaneous. He
collapsed at the moment of death, most likely falling forward and on to one
side, and then someone ran over the body.'

    'When
and in what?' asked Karlberg.

    'Some
time during the evening or early that night.
After seven, but
before midnight.
You'll have to wait for more exact details until after
Christmas. As for your second question, all I can say is that it's a vehicle of
some kind, heavier than an ordinary car.
A four-by-four, for
example.'

    Johansson
nodded in agreement. 'Judging by the tyre tracks…'

    '…
which
crushed the hips and the chest, that would be
about right.' When nobody spoke, Stromberg went on: 'The body fell on to its
back as it was rammed,
then
it was driven over again
as the perpetrator reversed over it. Perhaps in the madness of the moment he
didn't look in the rear-view mirror, but simply slammed the car into reverse
and floored the accelerator, with the result that only the lower parts of the
body were affected: the kneecaps, shins and feet. Well, they were splintered
really…
Hmm.
I'm putting quotation marks around the
word only.'

    He
sounded embarrassed, as if the intellectualised brutality of the job had
suddenly caught up with him.

    'You
mean the main damage happened the first time the vehicle drove over him. When
the perpetrator reversed over the body, he just drove over the feet,' Tell
clarified.

    
'Exactly.
Which might perhaps be regarded
as a very minor mitigating circumstance, bearing in mind that he was already
dead.
'

    Johansson
nodded tentatively.

    'Before
I forget,' said Stromberg. 'There was a small amount of alcohol in the victim's
body, the equivalent of a couple of glasses of wine. Nothing remarkable, but
still…'

    Silence
fell across the room once the pathologist had signed off, as everyone
considered what they had been told. Magnus Johansson returned to his
handwritten crib sheet, which he intended to hand over to
Tell
unofficially before he left.

    'We
found some fresh footprints from the victim's own trainers, size 9. But even if
there had been other prints that were equally clear, they could have come from
just about anybody who had brought in or collected a car over the past few
days.'

    He
scratched his head.

    'No
sign of a struggle between victim and perpetrator, either on the man's clothes
or his body, or in the surrounding area. We did find blue fibres on the gravel
next to the victim, but they turned out to have come from the pullover he was
wearing.'

    
'OK, what else?'

    'Well…
the blood at the scene of the crime came exclusively from the murdered man. A
chewing-gum wrapper in front of the veranda was covered in lots of different
fingerprints, so I don't think we can get anything from that.'

    When
Johansson had left and Tell clapped his hands to quieten the chatter that
arose, Gonzales put forward the theory that the perpetrator hadn't even got out
of his car while carrying out the murder. That he had simply pulled into the
yard,
somehow got Waltz to come over to the car, then shot
him in the head.

    'He's
a cold bastard, in that case,' commented Karlberg, before exploding in a sneeze
that made the glass in the pictures rattle.
'And clever.'

    There
wasn't anything particularly clever about getting a car mechanic to leave his
workshop for a minute. The perpetrator could have sounded his horn and wound
down the window, and Waltz would have assumed he was just an ordinary customer.