The Viper (11 page)

“You think it could just as well have been a woman, as a man?” she asked.

“Yes. You wouldn’t have to be especially strong to achieve this, but I guess you’d need to be reasonably steady on your feet, and be at least of medium height. So we can start by ruling out any short or feeble people.”

“How about a crazed, absolutely enraged, feeble person?” Eva suggested.

“Possibly. But I doubt it,” said Silkeberg and squinted through her glasses. “The murder weapon must have been relatively heavy. At first I thought a large kitchen knife or some kind of a samurai sword, but when I studied the wounds more closely, I noticed that the bone and cartilage, for example, which offer greater resistance, weren’t just ripped apart, but also had been crushed.”

“So you think it would more likely have been a…?” Eva prompted.

Irma Silkeberg gave a slight smile, which probably meant that she didn’t like being rushed.

“Something sharp, but not razor sharp, and heavy. A sword of some kind, perhaps a machete. Well, I can imagine a whole bunch of potential weapons, but something with a certain amount of weight to it. The man received over thirty wounds, probably all in quick succession. That requires a fair bit of strength and stamina. And the angle of the cuts rule out anyone under five-nine, say five-seven so you’ve got a bit of a safety margin.”

“Thirty wounds,” Eva repeated.

“Give or take,” nodded Silkeberg. “Most of them must have been inflicted when the victim was already lying down, but a few of the wounds that were high up, around the neck and head, were inflicted while he was still standing. They must have been the first ones. The blow to the neck was presumably the immediate cause of death, but easily half of the injuries by themselves would have been enough to kill him within a few minutes.”

15.

Goddamn him!
It was like some kind of disease. He just could not be on time.

Elin had been waiting at the bus station for ten minutes. Everyone else who had gotten off had quickly been picked up by cars or pedaled off on their own bicycles. For a few minutes, the idling bus had kept her company as it waited for the exact departure time, but once it had rounded the corner of the disused train station, she was all on her own. She stood there and stared at the big white ball with the old OK gasoline logo above the Lantmännen silo for about five minutes before she tired of it and sent off a text message. Told him that he could pick her up at Redners.

Now she was sitting in the bar with a glass of red wine in front of her, staring out through the window and crossing her fingers that the three squabbling winos who had sought out the darkest corner at the very back next to the emergency exit, wouldn’t have a serious falling-out.

Her cell phone vibrated loudly against the tabletop.

Redners?! Are you

out of your mind?

On my way.

Thanks for warning me,
she thought,
it would have been even better if it had come before I’d made it over here.
Redners hadn’t exactly been a first-choice hangout even back when Elin left the island over two years ago, but it had still been a potential second choice. Apparently not anymore.

The wine was rough and a little sour, but it was all right. It hadn’t cost much. She took two quick gulps and tried to catch her own reflection in the window.

A man of around thirty came walking along outside. He stopped, leaned his forehead against the window and screened the light with one hand so he could see inside. His eyes moved around, peering into every corner of the place, then he disappeared as quickly as he came.

Elin was sure that it was someone she knew, but she couldn’t come up with a name or a context. And yet he was so familiar.

She jumped up from the table and hurried toward the door. The waitress looked up from behind the counter when she heard the sound of the bell on the door. Elin stuck her head out through the doorway and looked down the street that ran straight through town. He was gone, must have disappeared down one of the side streets.

She walked back to her seat. Caught a whiff of rancid fryer grease from the kitchen. He had seemed so familiar. That long thin face and eyes that were somehow completely … wild.

She pushed her glass slowly back and forth across the laminated table in front of her. For some reason she came to think of Stefania. The last time she had seen her. She was sitting in the car and had raised her hand to wave, and just before the car began to roll, she had flashed a cautious smile.

Elin raised her glass and took a big gulp, tried to think of something else. She was going to take out one of the horses. Tomorrow she would go out for a ride. That was something to look forward to, at least.

Oh, what was she doing here? Dinner with Mom and Dad. Jesus Christ, please let it be bearable, she said to herself in feigned prayer, even though she didn’t believe in anything. At least not in any god. She had rejected that possibility ten years ago. She may not have been one of God’s little angels before, either, but after that day ten years ago she knew that for certain. There was no God. There couldn’t be a God.

Because God doesn’t like the poor. And God doesn’t like blacks. And he sure as hell doesn’t like you … Screw God!
she sang silently in her head.

Where the hell was he? This was getting to be ridiculous.

*   *   *

BY THE TIME
Ricky stepped in through the tinkling door, another fifteen minutes had passed and Elin was on her second glass of cheap red wine. In other words, he hadn’t been on his way at all when he sent off that text message. But she was happy to see him, wasn’t going to chew him out. She got up to give him a hug and accidentally bumped the table spilling some wine out. A bluish-red pool appeared at the foot of the glass.

There was something odd about him. He held her arms for a moment after the hug and looked at her gravely. She laughed and asked if he was okay. Ricky could be a bit sullen sometimes. He had periods like that.

He didn’t answer and Elin sat down. Ricky slowly slid into the chair across from her.

“You want something?” she asked and nodded at the glass.

He shook his head.

“Have you seen him?” she asked.

Ricky looked at her that way again. Gravely, almost solemnly.

“What is it?”

“Something’s happened,” he said.

And when he said it she immediately understood that it certainly had. It knocked the breath out of her. All at once she felt terribly weak and all the sounds around her grew louder while Ricky slid away from her and became the size of an ant, far away at the other end of the table, which must have been at least thirty feet long. Please, could she be spared having to hear anymore, she didn’t want this, please, please. And then she prayed again. How silly she was. A stupid little idiot. There was nobody listening.

And he sure as hell doesn’t like you … Screw God!

“Something terrible has happened,” he said. “I don’t know how to tell you.”

Then the earth split open.

Tuesday, October 31

Karolinska University Hospital, Solna

Fredrik had shut his eyes. Sara was uncertain if this meant that he was sleeping, or if it had something to do with his condition. She was uncertain about almost everything, but deep down she had a hard time believing that he would ever be completely restored. She didn’t want to think that, but it was difficult to come to any other conclusion. The pale skin, the dark rings under his eyes, the blood-red abrasions across his left cheek and temple, and the bloodshot eye, hidden for the moment behind the closed lid, did nothing to contradict her pessimistic prognosis.

She felt that he seemed worse today. He didn’t talk at all. But the doctors had said that you had to be prepared for bad days.
One
bad day was okay. It didn’t affect the diagnosis. But several bad days in a row wasn’t good. But the doctors were optimistic. They really were. Or was that just an act they put on until all hope was gone? The white coats’ fear of “failure”? It must be tough to see death as a defeat when you’re in a line of work where every customer was ultimately doomed to die. It was a fight against time that sooner or later they always lost.

When Sara and her colleagues were given a new case to work on, there was seldom any hope left. Death had already been there and they could do nothing to help the deceased or anyone else. Their work was governed by a completely different set of laws. The Law. They did what had to be done and she often wondered if there was any point to it all, but she knew that it made little difference what she felt about the individual cases, or whether the apprehension of a criminal actually changed anything. It had never been about that. What was important was that they did what had to be done, always, because that’s what had been agreed. Otherwise everything would come crashing down. Like a sand castle in the waves of a beach.

Sara looked at the transparent tube that wound its way down from the IV stand, and without warning a powerful fear dug its claws into her. She wanted to get up and rush out of the room, wanted to run out of the hospital to try and capture something, to start living, because she had become lulled into a prim conviction that such a thing was possible. Only she had no idea what it was she was chasing. Start living … How? What did that even mean? As if there was a life out there waiting for you, a life that you could just climb into like a hot tub full of essential oils.

“Damn it,” she whispered, and got up and walked the short distance to the window. She leaned her head against the glass and looked out over the trees of Haga Park that were swaying in the wind, before she turned back toward Fredrik.

Fredrik’s eyes opened very slowly. The movement was so slow that it almost didn’t seem human. And then his gaze, that made no attempt to focus on her, or even look in her direction, but stared in the direction they had been in when the eyelids slid back, straight up at the ceiling.

She didn’t know what to say any longer. It felt so foreign to her to stand there in front of a partner whom she no longer knew. It made her feel strange.

She breathed deeply.

“I better be going. Ninni will probably be here soon.”

She took her bag.

“I’ll come back.”

Just as she said that, she felt that she couldn’t handle it anymore, but that she would come back anyway. She took her bag.

Now he looked at her.

16.

Elin didn’t remember anything more until they were sitting in the car. The engine was on, but they were still sitting in the parking lot outside the library.

She stared out through the windscreen and the first idiotic thought that went through her head was that you weren’t allowed to park there. Not if you were at Redners drinking wine. Only if you were going to the library or some other municipal institution. Not if you had just found out that your mother was dead.

“Aren’t you going to start driving?” she asked.

“Just calm down,” said Ricky and sounded like he really was trying to calm her down. As if she had been carrying on or had berated him somehow.

Had she? Had she said things she didn’t remember, words that were just as wiped clean from her memory as the steps out from the restaurant, across the street, and into the car?

She reached up and lowered the sun visor, the backside of which she knew had a mirror. She leaned forward, stretched her neck. Her face was flushed and her cheeks streaked with mascara. She must have been crying.

“What are you doing?” asked Ricky and ran his hands down the steering wheel.

She didn’t answer, heard Ricky’s breathing.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She giggled in a way that sounded strange even to herself.

“Of course I’m not okay,” she said.

Her voice failed her and her throat choked up into a painful little knot and she didn’t know for sure if it was the grief or the pain that made her cry again.

“Can we please get the fuck out of here!” she shouted shrilly and kicked and stamped at the floor and around her.

“Okay okay, we’re going,” said Ricky and this time he sounded like he was afraid of her and that made her cry even more.

She wanted him to comfort her, be her big brother and not let his voice waver, but tell her instead that everything was going to be all right, that everything would work out.

Instead he slowly backed up the car so he could swing out of the parking lot. They were both younger siblings after all.

“This is so fucked up,” she said looking down at the floor when they turned at the bank.

“I know,” he said.

“Normal people don’t get murdered, do they? Huh? Stuff like that doesn’t happen.”

The sun was hitting her in the eyes, but she couldn’t be bothered to reach for the sun visor again. She squinted at the sun. She had traveled home reluctantly to see her father, mainly so as not to disappoint her mother. An obligatory dinner and hopefully a few nice hours with Ricky, that was what she had expected. Two wasted days of her life, but nothing she couldn’t live with. And all of a sudden she was in hell.

17.

Eva Karlén saw them at once when she examined the window above the flower bed. Two strands of hair that had gotten caught between the outdoor thermometer mounting and the window frame. They must have been plucked from the head of the person who had been standing there in the flower bed looking in.

She removed the strands of hair with a pair of tweezers—two long, black strands of hair—and put them carefully in an evidence bag. She was just writing a note on the outside of the bag when she heard someone approaching and turned around.

“How’s it going with the shoe prints?”

Fredrik Broman. Couldn’t he just stay away? Didn’t he understand that it was better that way? She certainly tried to keep her distance as much as possible. He must have noticed that.

It bothered her, having him that close to her. She lost her concentration. Something was disturbed. It wasn’t that she was still in love with him, not at all. She wasn’t even sure if she had ever even been. Rather than love, it had been a wonderful intoxication that she had needed right there and then. But now it was just a memory. And yet. Her pulse quickened, and, when she had it bad, images could start flipping through her head: naked bodies, tender words. Isolated highlights that were easily cherished, but best forgotten.