Frozen Moment (49 page)

    On
the one hand he loathed it all - the diligence, the conceit, the smugness - and
had done so ever since he realised this was a psychological defence mechanism
for his father, who had used it as a point of honour and a reason to criticise
those around them. On the other hand, like most men approaching middle age,
Tell noticed that he was becoming more like his father with every passing day,
and despite the fact that he loathed the lack of spontaneity and creativity
caused by such pedantry, he was also starting to notice that people who lacked
the ability to plan really annoyed him. As a young adult he had convinced
himself that the quality he valued most, and the one he wanted to strive towards,
was tolerance. He hadn't got there yet, and often felt he was moving further
away from his goal.

    When
a murder enquiry wasn't going anywhere it stressed him out; it was always the
same. As time passed, he felt a personal sense of responsibility that the crime
hadn't been cleared up.
Responsibility to the relatives, of
course.
But also to his colleagues and superiors.
He slept without dreaming. He noticed that he was thinking differently. He made
an effort to think in wide circles around the investigation, and often did so
at the expense of other mental activity. He became
more
brusque
in his dealings with people.
Rational.
Emotionally muted, in order to use his energy where it was needed most. What
was left was a fairly isolated individual; he was well aware of that. After
all, nobody said that being aware of your faults meant that you could change
them. And he wasn't even sure he wanted to change. Like his father he had found
a strategy for survival that seemed to work. He had solved a large number of
cases. After many years in the job he knew his own patterns of behaviour very
well, and on one level he accepted them.

    Therefore
he couldn't help noticing that he was now diverging from his routines. Despite
being at a critical stage of the investigation he had acted not only
spontaneously but completely irrationally. He was sitting in a shabby pizzeria
in Olofstorp. It was the best place he could find for thinking things over, or
to put it more accurately, it was the only place that served coffee on the way
out to Stenared and Seja Lundberg. Because of course that was where the car
seemed to be steering itself.

    He
had called in to the police station only briefly that morning. He had made his
apologies for missing the morning briefing on the grounds that he had an urgent
errand, and had got in the car with the vague idea of paying a visit to Maria
Karlsson. Along with her husband Gosta, she had been the first to take in Olof
Bart, or Pilgren, when he was taken into care by social services at the age of
six. According to the information he had been given, Gosta Karlsson had died
unexpectedly four years later, and Maria had decided to give up being a
foster-parent. She was still registered at an address in Ockero, but Tell had
not phoned in advance to prepare her for his arrival. In certain cases it felt
better to turn up unannounced, thus depriving the person to be interviewed of
the opportunity to sift through and pick over their memories in a way that was
often detrimental to a police enquiry.

    Before
deciding to make this unannounced visit to Maria Karlsson, Tell had checked out
the chances of getting hold of Marko Jaakonen, the man with whom Olof's mother
had had a relationship. It turned out that Jaakonen had hanged himself in
prison seven years after Olof was taken into care. Not that Tell imagined these
events were in any way related: Jaakonen had gone down for the premeditated
murder of a known drug pusher, and was clearly unable to live with the guilt.
Or something
like
that. Anyway, that was a dead end.

    On
top of everything else, Ostergren had taken Tell to one side and questioned the
wisdom of undertaking such a detailed investigation of the background of one of
the murder victims. The only answer Tell could give her was that it was down to
intuition.

    The
interview with Thorbjorn Persson, the contact person involved in finding homes
for young people, had told them that Bart had returned to Olofstorp after
serving twelve months in Villa Björkudden and spending three years under a supervision
order in a one-room flat in Hjällbo. Persson remembered it all very clearly.
Since Bart had been a model tenant he was in line for a first lease in his own
name, but he had informed his social worker he had managed to rent a small
cottage somewhere out in the sticks around Olofstorp. The social worker had
tried to persuade him to reconsider, because even in those days it was
difficult to secure a lease if you were an unemployed person with a criminal
record. But Bart had stood firm. He didn't want to live in an apartment. He
wanted to live on his own in the forest. This had made Thorbjorn Persson
uneasy, and despite the fact that his job was officially over as soon as Bart
was signed off, he had kept in touch with him for a couple of years.
Given him a call now and again.
Taken a drive over to
Olofstorp to see how things were going.

    Persson
had shrugged his shoulders when Tell asked what life had really been like for
twenty-year-old Olof Pilgren, as he was still called at the time.

    'Well…
he was a bit different, was Olof. It seemed a bit lonely out there in the
middle of nowhere, but it was OK. He made a couple of friends, I think, a
couple of lads that he used to hang out with all the time.
Sven
and Magnus, Thomas and Magnus.
Or was it Niclas?'

    He
had also forgotten the surnames, if he had ever known them. He didn't know what
had happened after that. After a couple of years Bart had broken off contact
for no real reason; he just thought they didn't need to discuss things any
more. He was doing fine on his own. And it was true, he was. He had worked his
way out of the social care system and Thorbjorn Persson had allowed him his
newly earned freedom.

    Tell
had sent Karlberg to take Persson for a drive around the Olofstorp area to see
if he could find the house Bart had rented when he was twenty. Something told
him they would find the answer to the mystery in Olof Bart's past, which was
colourful to say the least; that there was more chance of coming across
something useful in his history than by putting Waltz under the microscope. Not
that they had forgotten the photographer, but having turned both his team's
brains and their resources inside out, Tell had almost given up hope of finding
a link between the two murder victims.

    But
when it came down to it he hadn't actually driven out to Ockero. He hadn't even
driven in the right direction. Instead he took the Marieholm road out towards
Grabo. However, when he caught sight of the turning for Olofstorp and the road
that carried on out to Stenared, he had got cold feet, and had kept on going
until the speedometer was showing 120 kilometres per hour and he reached
Sjovik.

    He
sat in the car for a good hour, gazing out across Lake Mjorn from a parking
area close to the water. Cracked ice floes lay along the shoreline. In the end
his breath had produced so much condensation on the car windows he could no
longer see the lake. He took this as a sign that it was time to make a move.

    Slowly
he set off in the direction of the city once more. The pizzeria had looked
reassuringly safe, and he convinced himself that he wasn't committing to
anything by driving into the village. The place had just opened; he would sit
down and think through the alternatives, weighing the pluses against the
minuses.

    Drive
over to Seja's place and try to explain. Tell her about the chaos she had
aroused within him and about Ostergren's cancer and his father's agonies, which
seemed well on the way to becoming his own. Or drive back to work and say sod
the lot of it, including the fact that Ostergren was dying.

    Was
it the fear of death that had struck him like a blow to the back of the knees?

    He
had heard that a certain amount of stress sharpened the senses and made it
easier to concentrate. However, too much stress had the opposite effect: you
lost focus and made errors of judgement.
Acted without
thinking things through.
This terrified him: the idea that he might
suddenly find he couldn't rely on his own judgement.

    He
felt the urge to order a beer instead of the coffee that had stopped steaming
in front of him, but he fought the craving. It was still morning. He was on
duty. He called the station to check on the latest news. Nobody answered on
Karlberg's extension, so he tried Beckman instead. She picked up just as he was
about to ring off.

    'I'm
in the middle of something right now, Christian; I'll call you back,' she said,
and rang off.

    
He took a couple of sips of the ghastly coffee. A small pallid
square
of chocolate lay on the saucer, and he ate it out of sheer
restlessness.

    A
few minutes later his mobile vibrated on the blotchy mock-marble table. The
sound reverberated off the walls of the empty cafe.

    'Yes?'

    
'Beckman here.
I was interviewing one of the people whose
fingerprints were in the Cherokee from Ulricehamn when you called.'

    'Have
you spoken to all of them?'

    
'Two of them.
I can't get hold of someone called Bengt Falk.
A couple of prints came from Berit Johansson, the owner. A Sigrid Magnusson and
a Lennart Christiansson have given us prints that match the ones in the car. So
we still haven't identified two of the sets.'

    'They
could belong to Bengt Falk, the false Mark Sjodin, or someone else altogether.
So with a bit of luck we've got the killer's fingerprints. All we have to do
now is find the killer.'

    'Yes…'
Beckman sighed. 'If only we could get together everyone who had featured in the
victims' lives and take their fingerprints. Then we might find the answer.'

    'We'll
find it in time,' said Tell, impressing himself with the reassurance he was
suddenly able to summon up in the face of Beckman's doubts.

    All
at once he was overcome by the almost irresistible urge to talk to Beckman
about his conversation with Ostergren, but he realised he would be breaking a
confidence.

    'What
about Waltz's sons, then?' he said. 'Is Karlberg there?'

    'No.
But I think he's got them coming in this afternoon. Apparently Maria Waltz
started shouting about lawyers.'

    Tell
whistled.
'Interesting.
Well, we'll see what that's
about. I presume she's going to sit in when Karlberg talks to the one who's
still a minor then?'

    'No
idea. I can ask Karlberg to ring you if you're not coming back today.'

    'No,
no,' Tell said quickly. 'There's no need. I'll be in a bit later, I just… I had
a few things to sort out…'

    His
voice gave way.

    'No
problem. See you later.'

    He
made his decision on the spot. It was now or never.

    He
passed the entrance to the crime scene. It only took ten minutes to drive from
there to Seja's house. Once he had finally summoned up the courage to go down
into the hollow, over the footbridge and up the slope to the cottage, it was an
anticlimax to see there were no lights on. He stood there on the lawn, trying
to decide what to do next. Just to be sure, he knocked on the door. It annoyed
him that she wasn't there now, now he was finally ready, especially as he could
see her car parked up the road. At the same time he was relieved that
circumstances had postponed the conversation.

    He
pulled open the stable door and the silence explained everything: she was out
riding. That meant there was still a chance of seeing her.

    He
was gloomily conscious of the fact that he had ignored her messages and kept
her on tenterhooks by making himself unavailable in every way. This was
entirely due to
his own
cowardice and lack of
backbone. He was bright enough to realise that she was probably furious, or
disappointed. And disappointed was worse, without any doubt.

    When
he discovered that the cottage door wasn't locked, it settled the matter. He
went in and sat down in the kitchen to wait, grateful for the initial warmth
but pondering the casual negligence that made a person leave their home without
taking even the most basic security measures. Perhaps she was the kind of
person who thought nothing unpleasant could ever happen in her neighbourhood.
As a police officer he was definitely not prone to that kind of naivety. In
fact, he had reached the point where few examples of people's inventiveness
when it came to damaging and stealing one another's property could surprise
him.

    The
wall clock ticked away. Once he became aware of it, it became impossible to
think of anything else. He tried taking off his coat in order to avoid giving
the impression that he was temporarily visiting her life in more than one
respect, but as the fire was not lit, the house was unpleasantly cold. It was
difficult for him to understand how someone could choose to live like this: far
from the comforts of modern life, entertainment and other people.