Frozen Moment (26 page)

    The
windows of the car were beginning to steam up, and Björkman leaned forward to
clear the windscreen. He turned down the radio and glanced over at Tell.

    'Who's
going to start, you or me?'

    Tell
went over the facts about the murder of Lars Waltz as they gradually left the
main roads behind. Soon they were travelling along the increasingly narrow
gravel tracks in the forests around Viskafors, the larger brick-built houses
being replaced by small wooden cottages. Eventually, the pine forest was the
only thing they could see; the trees were windblown, and looked as if they had
been badly affected by the storms of the past few years.

    'Hurricane
Gudrun wasn't exactly kind to this land,' Björkman confirmed.

    In
certain places trees still lay on top of one another like pick-up sticks. They
passed an area on the left-hand side where trees had been felled. Tell had
stopped talking, and Björkman was thinking things over.

    
'Hmm.
Most things seem to match.
The
method.
The shooting - we've only had a preliminary report from
forensics so far, but in all probability we're dealing with the same kind of
weapon. Deliberately run over several times by a relatively heavy car with
broader tyres than the average.'

    
'And the victim?'

    'Olof
Bart. About the same age as your
guy
.
Lived alone.
A bit of an oddball, apparently. The neighbours
didn't really have much of an impression of him - he kept himself to himself.
Did a bit of everything work-wise, a lot of clearing up after the
storm.
He'd also done some casual work at a workshop in Svaneholm,
repairing forestry machinery and so on. No family.'

    They
drove down a hill to an opening in the forest and a grassy area covered in
brushwood and moss in the middle of which sat a large square wooden house. It
must have been impressive once, but now the red paint was flaking off, exposing
strips of silvery-brown wood. Between the trees at the edge of the plot, they
could just catch a glimpse of a lake.

    Tell,
who had not thought about suitable clothing, felt his shoes sink into the muddy
moss.

    A
separate double garage lay behind the house, and the area between the house and
garage was cordoned off with police tape. The lawn had been torn up where what
was presumed to be a four-by-four had skidded, regained its grip and
accelerated once more to run over the man. Rainwater had gathered in the tyre
tracks, transforming large areas of the plot into a muddy morass. In front of
the garage doors a separate area, a square measuring a couple of metres, had
been cordoned off where Tell assumed the man had been found.

    'We
think he was shot there,' Björkman confirmed. He made a sweeping movement with
his arm. 'After that he managed to stagger a short distance, or possibly he
fell forward against the garage wall here, where he was run over for the first
time.' He pointed at a number of dents in the metal siding. 'You can see where
the vehicle rammed into the wall, but Bart's body was roughly here when it was
found.' He waved his arm again. 'So he must have been dragged along by the car,
or perhaps he got caught on the bumper. Or he crawled, calling on his last
reserves of strength, but that's unlikely. It's more likely that he was already
dead.'

    'Then
he was run over one last time,' said Tell, pointing to the area where the
ground was most badly torn up.

    Björkman
nodded.

    'That
was Nilsson's hypothesis. He's one of our crime scene officers.'

    Tell
moved as carefully as he could over the cordoned-off area, making sure he
didn't destroy any evidence as he checked the whole plot, and ended up
squatting in front of the damaged garage wall. He examined the dents closely,
and could just about make out a darker shade in the buckled metal.

    'Is
that paint from the car?'

    'Presumably,'
replied Björkman. 'And Olof Bart's… well, you know. It's gone for analysis.'

    'We
didn't find anything from the car apart from the tyre tracks,' said Tell
without turning around. 'But I'm sure we'll be able to find out if it was the
same one.'

    He
stood up with a grimace, and both felt and heard his knees crack.

    
'Anything else?
It looks a real mess here, what with the
rain and everything.'

    Björkman
agreed gloomily. 'Yes, it was absolutely pouring down the day before he was
found.'

    'Who
found him?'

    
'A girl and a boy out for a walk.
They thought they'd take a
short cut. Their dog had run on ahead and must have picked up the scent…'

    They
set off slowly back to the car.

    'We
haven't found anything else,' added Björkman.
'Not so far,
anyway.
I'll fax everything over to you as it comes in, and you can do
the same. Then we'll both get on with-'

    
'Door-to-door enquiries first and foremost.'

    'We'll
leave the organisational stuff to our bosses, don't you reckon? If it's the
same killer, that is.'

    Tell
nodded absently. 'Can I borrow an office to go through what you've found out so
far?' he asked. 'I just need to gather my thoughts.'

    Björkman
gave a sigh. 'You can borrow the entire place, Tell. Apart from the duty
officer there's unlikely to be anybody there apart from you.'

    1995

    Solveig
Granith had downsized from a four-bedroom apartment in Rydboholm to a
three-bedroom place in the centre since her daughter had made it perfectly
clear she had no intention of returning home. Now she was sitting at her desk
pressing her cerise silk pyjamas to her breast as the smoke from a menthol cigarette
curled up towards the ceiling. Maya's train was due at the central station at
15.35. Solveig was probably not going to be able to meet her on the platform.
Not today.

    Earlier,
after Maya had moved out but before she changed apartments, Solveig had made a
habit of spending some time each day in her daughter's old room. She would just
sit there on the edge of the bed for a while, perhaps looking at the posters or
smoking a cigarette by the open window.

    She
was finding it hard to get used to the new place. There was so much less space
and nowhere to put anything, but also no trace of a teenage girl - she had had
to put Maya's things up in the loft. She had just one drawer in the desk
containing a few drawings, a couple of well-thumbed books her daughter had
loved as a child, jewellery and clothes she didn't want any more. It was rare
for Solveig to unlock the drawer and leaf through the sketch pad, sniff at the
dress Maya had worn for the school leavers' celebration. But it did happen.
Despite the fact that there were periods when she talked to Maya on the
telephone almost every day, she would catch herself thinking of her daughter as
someone much loved and much missed. As if she
were
dead rather than simply living elsewhere.

    The
first time Maya announced that she was moving out, she was no more than fifteen
years old. Of course she'd had neither a place to live nor any income, but she
was talking about moving in with an older friend who had just got an apartment
in town. The friend had told Maya she could start paying when she got a job; it
didn't really matter because social security was paying the rent anyway.

    Solveig's
whole being had tied itself in a knot. She had wanted to hurl herself at her
rebellious child and hold her fast. Instead she had swallowed hard and sat in
silence in her bedroom as Maya packed her things. The Winnie the Pooh suitcase
left over from childhood was the only one big enough. That night it had stood
in the dark hallway, surrounded by the evil which her daughter had drawn down
over her skin like a suit of armour to protect herself from Solveig's pain.

    She
remembered how she got up in the middle of the night before the move. How she
had found the key to her daughter's room; it was still in the same place where
she had kept it hidden all through Maya's childhood, just in case the door
jammed. The old lock was stiff and she was afraid the noise would wake Maya.
She stood there for a long time with her ear pressed to the gap between the
door and the frame, so close that she could hear her daughter's steady
breathing, that characteristic little whistling sound that was due to narrow
nasal passages, and a pleasant sense of calm had come over her.

    She
had tiptoed over to the sofa. Curled up in one corner she allowed the moon to
shine in between the slats of the blind, creating diagonal stripes across her
turquoise dressing gown. She had experienced a feeling of liberation. The moon
disappeared behind the clouds and first of all it became dark,
then
gradually grew lighter as dawn broke. When she heard
the sound of her neighbour's alarm clock through the living-room wall, she
crept back to Maya's room and unlocked the door.

    Despite
the fact that the next day her head was almost exploding with the monotonous
noise of her tinnitus, the memory of that moon- drenched night gave Solveig a
sense of control that helped her through the few lonely weeks that followed.
She had convinced herself that the only reason the girl had left home was
because she, her mother, had chosen to release her for a short while, to allow
her to try out her fragile wings. She would come back, and Solveig would be
there, her arms open wide, ready to console her. She would let Maya know that
she knew. She actually did know how terrible the world was out there. Solveig
had experienced its cruelty at an early stage. The difference was that she had
been completely alone.

    Maya
would never be alone. Solveig would never let her
down,
she would always be there for her child. She was as firm in her resolve now as
she had been in that midnight hour when her daughter first lay in her arms,
smeared with blood from inside Solveig herself. The girl had seized her heart
in a grip that brought her warmth and caused her pain in equal measure. For the
first time she had experienced fully her value as a human being, a sense of
pride in actually being someone in life: being someone's mother, if nothing
else. And when the midwife had placed Maya at her breast and Solveig, exhausted
after a lengthy labour, had looked down at that little red screwed-up face, the
overwhelming love and inexorable demands had broken her. A doctor had to be
called to give her such strong tranquillisers that Maya had to be bottle-fed
for several days. A couple of years later, when Sebastian came along, Solveig
was
better prepared.

    Sebastian
was small consolation for Maya's absence. Not that there was anything wrong
with him or their relationship. They were very close. But it was different with
a girl, her first-born. She had always been able to see herself in Maya's face.
They were so alike. Ever since Maya had lain there in her cradle, everyone had
mentioned it: like carbon copies of one another.

    After
that first time Maya tried moving out - she was back three weeks later, the
Winnie the Pooh suitcase crammed with dirty washing - mother and daughter had
lived through the trauma over and over again. Each time the agony became a
little easier to endure. That was how it was supposed to be, no doubt. Maya
spent a few weeks living in some sort of commune, then she fell out with someone
and moved back home again. She met a boy with a place of his own and lived with
him until the relationship broke up and she came back to Solveig in tears. She
always came back, and that was probably what made it possible for Solveig to
endure the constant separations. She would grit her teeth and carry on with her
life and her son's life while she waited for Maya to turn up on the doorstep
once more.

    The
evening before Maya took the train to the folk high school, they had had one of
those quarrels that made the neighbours hammer on the walls. Even if Maya had
tried to put right some of her worst remarks in her letters, they were still
etched on Solveig's mind. That depth of humiliation could never be erased.

    To
be honest, the change of apartment had been made not only for practical
reasons. It was true that her sickness benefit was quite meagre, but the old
apartment wasn't particularly expensive, and she could have afforded to stay
there at least until her son was also ready to move out. Instead it was an
irrational desire for revenge that had driven Solveig to make the change as
quickly as possible. Hurt to the very marrow, she had thought that if the girl
found it so unbearable to live with her egocentric, sick, suffocating parasite
of a mother -
You're like a stinking wet blanket over my face; you stop me
from breathing-
then Solveig would make sure it was impossible for her to
change her mind in the future. And when she came back, full of apologies and
with her tail between her legs, it would be too late. She would discover that
her mother was a person with feelings and a life of her own. She would see what
it was like to have to stand on her own two feet.