The Fire Dance (6 page)

“You didn’t go over there yourself?”

“No, Frej was asleep and I didn’t want to wake him up. I also didn’t want to leave him alone.”

“Weren’t you worried about your brother?”

Ingrid looked at Irene for a long time before she answered. “No, not then. When I was at his place around two, he told me he was planning to go to Göteborg to turn in an article.”

“So you assumed he wasn’t home when the house caught fire.”

Ingrid nodded and looked down. A tear fell on the back of one chapped hand. She rubbed it dry on her pants. Then she took a deep breath and looked directly into Irene’s eyes. “He borrowed some money from me. For the bus. He said he had to get some new clothes, too. It was that article he was going to turn in … he said it was important that he look presentable. He hoped that the newspaper would give him a job.”

“Which newspaper was it?”

“I think he said it was
GT
.”

Irene made a note inside her head to contact
Göteborgs-Tidningen
and see if Magnus Eriksson had an appointment to turn in an article on the same day he died.

“When did you start to worry that he might have been in the house after all?”

Ingrid gazed again at her work-worn hands for a long time before she answered. “The fire trucks and police cars came and went. An ambulance, too. Magnus didn’t show up. As I said, I can see when the buses stop outside the convenience store. Every time a bus stopped, I expected him to storm into my kitchen and demand to know what was going on. Still, as the evening wore on and he didn’t show up, I realized he wasn’t coming. I was still hoping up until the last … but …”

Ingrid couldn’t keep talking. Her despair appeared genuine. Irene got the feeling that Magnus Eriksson’s sister was the only person who was actually grieving the fact that he had passed away. One could only guess what Sophie was thinking. Angelika seemed mostly angry that he hadn’t been insured. She needed money. On the other hand, Angelika did seem to think that Frej missed his father.

“Why didn’t you call the House of Dance and try to reach Angelika?” asked Irene.

Ingrid Hagberg stiffened. “We never talk. I didn’t even think of calling her.”

Ingrid got up and went over to the sink and tore off a huge wad of paper towels. She blew her nose. Her back was to Irene as she suddenly said, “Do you think she did it?”

“Excuse me, who do you mean?” Irene asked, confused.

“That she did it. The girl. Do you think she set fire to the house?” Ingrid said with emotion.

She turned and looked at Irene. Her eyes were now red
from crying. Still, Irene could see something glowing inside them that resembled hate.

“There is nothing to indicate that Sophie caused the fire. Neither on purpose nor by accident,” Irene said as calmly and definitively as she could.

She got up from the table and thanked Ingrid for her time and for the coffee.

As she drove away from Ingrid’s house, she glanced in her rearview mirror. The woman and her German Shepherd stood like unmoving silhouettes in front of the open door and watched her go.

I
RENE AND
T
OMMY
sat with the investigative material from the Guldheden rape cases in front of them, but somehow they’d gotten onto the topic of the Björkil fire. Irene told Tommy about her meeting with Ingrid Hagberg and how she had been unable to get through to Sophie. She was feeling more and more frustrated.

“If only I could figure out what she’s hiding behind that mask of hers! What do you think?” she asked her colleague.

Tommy shrugged slightly.

“No idea. My son screams and the tears flow like a waterfall when there’s something going on he doesn’t like. When he’s happy, he bubbles with laughter. He can’t even try to hide what he thinks. Perhaps when kids get a little bit older, though … maybe if they’re ashamed or if they don’t want to talk about something … or want to protect someone.”

“That’s right. Kids are loyal and they don’t tell. Who do you think Sophie is protecting? Or do you think she’s just trying to protect herself?”

“I believe we should just leave Sophie to Child Protection Services. She’s a hard nut to crack. Maybe she’ll open up to them. Maybe then we’ll have another chance to question her. It was interesting that you got the sister to admit that Eriksson had an alcohol problem. It corroborates what I’ve found out,” Tommy said.

He pulled out his notebook from the top drawer of his desk and began to read out loud.

“Magnus Eriksson was forty-two years old when he died. He’d worked the last ten years as a freelancer because no newspaper would give him a full-time job. For one, he didn’t write well. Two, he wasn’t dependable. Never met his deadlines, according to my source at
GT
.”

“Your source at
GT
?” Irene interrupted. “Who’s that?”

“A guy who went to the same high school as me. Kurt Höök. Nice guy. We’ve never been that close, though we have some friends in common. So that bit he told his sister about
GT
offering him a job was an outright lie. According to Kurt, they hadn’t bought anything Magnus Eriksson wrote in over five years.”

“So he never went to town to turn in an article that Monday.”

“Nope. He probably headed to the state liquor store and straight back home.”

“So it’s likely he was soused already when the fire broke out and didn’t even notice when things started to burn.”

They were actually getting somewhere with setting the last moments of Magnus Eriksson’s life into place. The only missing piece was how the fire broke out and whether or not Sophie had a part in it. Did the fire start after she left the house? Or did she use a bit of blind courage to set the fire herself?

“By the way, what do you know about Ernst Malmborg?” Tommy broke Irene’s revery with his question.

“Ernst who? Oh yes, Sophie’s father. No, I don’t know a thing about him.”

Tommy smiled at her in a teasing way. “You’re probably the only woman I know who isn’t interested in celebrity gossip. As a matter of fact, I remember fairly well what was in the papers twelve years ago. Kurt Höök helped me fill in the blanks. Even though I was only seventeen at the time, I
remember how Angelika looked back then. I thought she was a real fox. I couldn’t see how she could settle down with an old man like that.”

Irene raised her eyebrow in surprise. “Who? What old man?”

“Ernst Malmborg. He was over fifty and she was barely twenty! He was disgusting. And she didn’t even know that I existed!”

He smiled again and gave Irene a swift glance. Irene remembered quite well how electrified the meeting between Tommy and Angelika had been just a few days earlier. Now Angelika certainly knew that Tommy existed.

Irene quickly tried to turn back the conversation to Ernst Malmborg. “So it was a big scandal that a fifty-year-old and a twenty-year-old got together? These things happen. Rich men buy themselves young women who want a father surrogate with money … not that unusual.”

“Well, it was a bit more trashy than that. Ernst was married when he met Angelika. His wife was a famous actress who’d starred in a number of movies. She was more famous than he was. She was older, too. They had no children, but they’d been married a long time. When Ernst met Angelika, she got pregnant right away. His wife fell apart. There were whole columns about it in the papers. On the same day Sophie was born, Ernst’s ex-wife committed suicide.”

As Tommy recited the story, Irene began to remember fragments of it. Wasn’t Ernst’s wife named Anna-Britta or Anna-Lisa or something like that? Irene had a vague memory that the woman had overdosed and had been found dead in her apartment, but since she couldn’t remember for sure, she asked Tommy.

“How did she die?”

“The usual, with some embellishments. She’d taken a huge amount of pills, not so unusual for suicides. The reason most people don’t succeed is that they start to feel nauseous
and throw up. So to be sure that she’d really die, she’d tied a plastic bag around her head, and she suffocated.”

Irene shivered. There’d been a great deal written up about her films after her death. Her work with Ingmar Bergman had been highly praised. Irene had never seen any of his films, but she knew that working with Bergman was one of the highest honors a Swedish actor could receive.

Tommy turned a page in his notebook and continued. “According to Kurt, there was some speculation at the time of her death. Obviously she’d been depressed and bitter, but her doctor had thought she was starting to recover.”

“Isn’t that when the risk is greatest, though? When the depression starts to lift and the patient has enough energy to go through with it? A suicide, I mean.”

“Exactly. And that’s how people reasoned back then. It was headlined as a suicide. The body was found at nine in the morning by her housecleaner. The autopsy revealed that she’d died between nine and eleven the previous evening. At that time, Ernst and Angelika were at the maternity ward.”

“What was her name?”

“Anna-Greta Lidman.”

“So Ernst left Anna-Greta for Angelika?” Irene was honestly curious now.

“Yep, and Ernst Malmborg inherited everything from his ex-wife. They’d not yet filed for divorce. He married Angelika in the spring at the same time they had Sophie baptized. Within a few months, rumors were spreading that the marriage was already headed for the rocks. Angelika supposedly had an affair with a Frenchman: the instructor for the dance group she was in. It was all over the tabloids. Later she met Magnus Eriksson.”

“Was Magnus Eriksson also a dancer?” exclaimed Irene, dumbfounded.

“Of course not. They didn’t meet in the dance world, but
through the tabloids. He’d gotten the assignment to interview her about her first wonderful year with Ernst Malmborg. It all ended when she left Ernst for Magnus.”

Even if Angelika had left her first husband for another man twenty years younger, Magnus was still ten years older than she was. Perhaps Angelika just preferred older men. But didn’t Magnus’s sister just say that Angelika was only out for Magnus’s money?

“Ingrid Hagberg said Magnus Eriksson had a lot of money when he met Angelika. What happened to it? Did he drink it all up?”

“According to Kurt, alcohol had not been Magnus’s greatest problem at first, even if it took over in the end. He was a gambler. He frittered away every cent he had.”

“Didn’t Angelika get any money after the divorce?”

“Nothing. He’d made her sign a prenup.”

“That explains—”

Irene stopped when their office door opened and Superintendent Andersson stuck his balding head inside.

“How’s the questioning going?”

Both Irene and Tommy knew he meant the questioning of the rape victims in the Guldheden case. There were three women, all between eighteen and twenty-five.

Tommy shook his head and said, “We’ll have to question them again. All we know is the perpetrator was young, strong and muscular. Blond. Swedish. But the last victim has a different description. Says he was dark-haired and not all that tall. Just normal sized.”

“Do you think we’re dealing with two different guys?”

“It’s possible.”

“All right. You two keep going on this case. We’ll take it up tomorrow at morning prayer.”

Andersson closed the door behind him. Irene and Tommy returned to the pile of paperwork on their desks.

• • •

T
HE NEXT DAY
, a brutal murder took place in Kortedala, and the case fell to Irene and Tommy. From the beginning, it was suspected that the killing involved the drug cartels. But both the murder case and the rapes at Guldheden proved to be much more difficult than they had first appeared.

Time went by. The fire at Björkil fell further down the scale of important cases. Irene called child services once in the spring and talked to the psychologist who had been with Sophie at the police station. According to the exhausted psychologist, Sophie had never spoken about the fateful day. In fact, she never talked at all. The psychologist’s last words were not at all hope-inspiring.

“You over there in the police department have to understand that Sophie has a handicap. She is different from other people. We have evaluated her and we’re trying to help her, but it can take a long time before she even wants to talk to us. Perhaps she never will. At least about the fire. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Irene sighed and hung up the phone.

Child services never contacted them again, and Irene never called back. The fire at Björkil was eventually registered as accidental due to smoking in bed.

“I
ASSUME THAT
we might have been the last people who saw her. It seems that no one else saw her later that night … or rather, maybe it was already morning …”

“When did you arrive at Park Aveny?”

“Well … around midnight. Or quarter past. I really don’t remember. It was a while back. We were at a publishing house party, and it was really pleasant. Lots of food and drink. Honestly, there was a great deal to drink and that’s probably why I don’t remember the time so well. I usually don’t drink to get drunk, but the Göteborg Book Fair is a special occasion. You can say that it’s the party of the year for the book world. A writer’s life is pretty lonely. No co-workers. No one to have coffee with or to bounce ideas back and forth with. And then it’s like this … this huge party and everybody comes. All kinds of people, other colleagues, publishing houses, media … and as a writer, you’re the center of attention. It’s a huge contrast to sitting in front of the computer all day. Of course, you’re pulled into the flow! It’s only once a year. And we usually go to Park on Thursday evening after the publishing house party. That is, all of us who have our books published at Borgstens. It’s like an after-party where you meet all the people you know. Most of them, anyway. Also a lot of people who …”

“Was Sophie already there when you arrived?”

“No, I’m fairly sure she came later on. It looked like she
knew that dark-haired guy … quite good-looking … Marcelo, that’s his name! If I remember correctly, she was just standing next to him all of a sudden. I was at the table next to theirs—we hadn’t moved to their table yet—but I saw her from where I sat.”