The Viper (12 page)

Perhaps she wanted to become intoxicated again? Just for one day.

“These shoe prints weren’t left by the same person as over there in that flower bed,” she said and pointed over at the trampled red dahlias. “These are a size forty-two and those over there are forty-sevens.”

“Arvid Traneus trudged right through the flower bed?”

“Presumably,” said Eva.

“But someone else was standing over here snooping then?” he asked.

“Yes, and left behind two long, black strands of hair. Because I guess we can assume, given the shoe size, that it’s a he,” said Eva, “even if we can’t rule out a large woman.”

Fredrik nodded, stood there silently thinking.

Okay, you’ve got the forensic details. Now go!
thought Eva Karlén.

*   *   *

WHEN ELIN STEPPED
out of the car she didn’t quite get a proper grip on the bag with the box wine. It tumbled out of the car and landed in the grass. She reached down for it, but fumbled and dropped it again and, without really understanding why, began stamping furiously on the pathetic little Bag-in-Box that she had schlepped with her all the way from Stockholm.

“Fuck,” she gasped and jammed her heel into the box several times without anything happening. “Goddamn,” she whimpered and wrenched the box out of the bag and pressed the spigot and spun around slowly as the wine gushed out onto the grass.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Ricky and reached out to her with both arms, but she twisted free from his grasp and continued spreading the dark-red liquid across the ground.

“Stop it Elin, stop it,” he said.

“What the hell’s wrong with you, are you some kind of wino or what?” she cawed in a voice that was broken and didn’t sound like her at all.

Ricky took two long steps forward and caught hold of her, forced her arms down to her sides. He put his arms around her, finally he put his arms around her.

The Bag-in-Box fell to the ground with a dull thud, just a third of the wine left inside.

“She’s dead. Dead!”

She screamed out, and then her whole body started to shake as she broke down sobbing and went completely limp in his arms. Ricky had to hold her up to keep her from falling.

“It’s him. It’s gotta be him,” she wailed through her bawling.

Ricky shook his head.

“Try to stand up now,” he said. “Try. It’ll be all right. Somehow things are going to turn out all right.”

“But he’s the one who did it. You’ve gotta admit it had to have been him.”

The words bubbled through her sobs and gasps for air.

“Elin,” whispered Ricky.

“It’s gotta be him. It’s gotta be Father. Father killed her. How could it be anyone else?”

“No, no, no. Stop it now, Elin. That’s not true. Come on, try to stand up.”

“It was him.”

“No, Elin.”

But that was the only thing she could think about. He had done it. That fucking son-of-a-bitch bastard had killed her beloved mother. Her beloved mother whom she’d turned her back on and left behind on Gotland.

“Come on. Stand up!” said Ricky, more firmly this time.

Her body was still shaking with sobs, but she was really trying.

“Let’s go now.”

He helped her step by step to the door. The Bag-in-Box and her black Prada bag would have to lie there for now in the wine-soaked grass.

*   *   *

THERE WAS A
low, comforting rumble coming from the shiny, dark green tile stove. Elin sat curled up on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket, with an untouched cup of tea in front of her on the table. Outside the window a cold blue October twilight fell.

Ricky entered from the kitchen and sank down next to her without saying anything. She was surprised that he could be so thoughtful and caring. It didn’t feel out of place exactly, but it was a side of him that she hadn’t seen very often.

He actually didn’t have to do all that—the fire, the blanket, the tea—but it felt good anyway. Something to hold onto. She could sit there forever, cocooned in her blanket, silently listening to the hiss and crackle of the fire while her thoughts went spinning around in her head. She didn’t want to move, didn’t want to speak, just wanted to sit there huddled up, sleep, wave, watch the light change.

“The police want to speak to you later. At some point. They left a phone number.”

She closed her eyes.

If this had been one of her usual trips home, they first would have swung past the farm, she would have dropped off her things in her old room, maybe had coffee with Mother, then they would have gone over to Ricky’s place for a drink or a glass of wine or two, and DWI-ed the short way back when it was time for dinner. If it wasn’t too late she would have gone out and met up with an old friend. But not Ricky. He wasn’t much of a party guy anymore. He’d become a homebody.

Now none of that would happen. Maybe she wouldn’t even set foot on the farm.

“Do you know where she is? Is she still at the house or have they…?” she asked.

He turned his head toward her and she could tell from his expression that he had been wondering the same thing. Mother. Where was she now?

“I don’t know,” he said.

She reached out for the cup of tea, but didn’t have the energy to rise up far enough from her curled-up position to reach it. Ricky had to lean forward and give it to her. She took a few gulps because her mouth was dry, not because she wanted tea.

“It’s strange to think of her.”

“Yes,” he mumbled.

“Lying somewhere.”

She wanted to talk about this, but she was forced to do so with long pauses between sentences.

“On the floor at home inside one of those chalk outlines.”

“I don’t think they…”

“Or in a refrigerator in Visby. Or maybe she’s on her way somewhere right now. Riding in an ambulance…”

“Elin.”

Soon he would tell her to stop it again, but she wouldn’t have any more outbursts, not right now anyway.

“Can they move her around as they please without consulting us? Don’t they need to have some kind of permission?”

As if wanting to give her an immediate answer to her question, the cordless phone quivered with an indistinct ringtone.

18.

Wow, it’s Saint Nicholas himself,
thought Sara when she caught sight of the slouched figure with the long, white beard.
Or Saint Nicotine rather,
she corrected herself as the light hit the yellowed patch beneath his mouth.

Emrik Jansson’s house smelled strongly of saturated smoke. Heavy, gloomy, pungent. Possibly you could pick up a slight whiff of fried food through the miasma of smoke. Everything was a yellowish brown: the walls, the ceiling, the woodwork, the hall ceiling lamp’s pilled fabric shade that had been hanging there since at least the sixties.

“I was watching TV,” said Emrik Jansson, “they’re showing reruns of
Hem till byn
. You know it?”

Sara nodded. She knew the series, but she didn’t follow it.

“I’ve heard about … well, all that up at the Traneus spread,” said Emrik Jansson and pointed with his thumb over his shoulder toward the farm.

“Then you know why I’m here,” said Sara.

Emrik Jansson’s house was more a nest than a home. The jaundiced walls had something of a beeswax quality about them she thought, and decided to question him out in the hall. He’d have to come up with something really sensational for her to even consider sitting down anywhere in there. If it looked like a beehive already out there in the entrance, what must it look like in the living room, say, where he probably sat and did his smoking?

“Who is it?” asked the hunched chain-smoker in front of her. “Is it Kristina and Anders?”

Sara tried to hide her surprise. It wasn’t all that surprising, in and of itself, for the news to have spread so quickly through the area. It would have been obvious to anyone who saw the steady stream of police cars and other vehicles heading back and forth to the farm that something serious had happened, but how he could be so informed about the details? After all, they had only just managed to establish the identity of the murdered man themselves.

“Has somebody suggested that?” she asked.

“No, not exactly. I just sort of assumed it,” he said.

His voice was calm and pleasant and his gaze alert. He may have been living in a smoke-infused nest, but he was no insect. He wasn’t even much of a freak. Maybe just too old to care.

“And why do you think that? Which Anders do you mean, by the way?” she hurried to say before Emrik Jansson had a chance to answer.

“Anders Traneus. The cousin.”

He ran his fingers along the outer edge of his beard and she saw that the tips of his fingers were just as yellow as everything else in the house.

“And why?” she repeated.

He bowed his head forward and released a rattly cough into his clenched right hand. It never seemed to end and the coughs seemed to echo inside the old man.
He’s going to keel over any minute,
she thought.

It ended abruptly and he continued as if nothing had happened, probably all too used to the convulsions to reflect upon the possibility that someone else might find them disturbing, if not downright disgusting. Sara was ready to sign up to the latter group.

“Well, I’ve seen him, haven’t I. Many times. I suppose they’ve tried to be discreet about it, but … well, you know, you see what you see.”

Emrik Jansson was the closest neighbor. That didn’t mean that he lived close by, it was a long way from the Traneus’s farm to the other houses in the area, but apparently it was close enough.

“I’ve also got plenty of time to observe my surroundings. I don’t snoop around, definitely not, but I’ve got a lot of spare time and still a pretty good head,” he said and put a finger to his right temple.

“So Anders Traneus has been a regular visitor to Kristina?” asked Sara.

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

Emrik Jansson wobbled suddenly and put a hand up to the wall for support.

“Gosh, are you all right?” she asked.

“It’s just the way it is,” said Emrik and kept his hand against the drab brown wallpaper.

“We can go sit down,” she said.

“I’m all right,” he said and waved with his free hand.

“If you say so … Can you explain a little more in detail why you think that it was Anders Traneus who was killed up there?”

“Well, Arvid came home the other day, didn’t he. Somehow I thought that maybe he caught them and, well…”

“Killed them?”

He paused before answering, as if he’d suddenly realized that his quick assumption amounted to a very serious accusation.

“Well, I can’t possibly know anything about that, of course, but yes, I guess that’s what I thought.”

He smiled meekly and did a little gesture with his hand.

“A crime of passion.”

“Is he the type who’d be able to kill over something like that, Arvid Traneus?”

“Sure he’s the type. I think I could go so far as to say that.”

“How would you describe him?”

“Adventurous, always in a hurry to get things done, hot tempered. I had him in school,” said Emrik.

“That hot temper of his … did he used to get into fights? Do you remember?”

“Fights? Well, not fights exactly. I mean, you know what boys are like, some of them anyway. He threw the occasional punch I guess, but he wasn’t the only one.”

“But there must have been more to it than that to make you think that he killed his cousin out of jealously.”

Emrik Jansson started to finger the edge of his beard again, a deeply ingrained habit.

“I’m starting to feel a little silly now,” he said and coughed a dry, social cough this time, “but one reason of course is that there’s a dead man lying up in that house together with Kristina, at least that’s what I heard, and the fact that I’ve seen Anders coming and going. That I made the assumption that they’d had some kind of relationship. But then there are also the rumors about Arvid being abusive. Well, toward Kristina that is.”

“Is that something that you’ve witnessed yourself at any point?” asked Sara.

“No, I can’t say that I have. It could, of course, just be idle gossip.”

“Well, if you haven’t seen or heard anything concrete then…” Sara agreed, but thought at the same time how gossip could sometimes be a criminal investigator’s best friend. If you were lucky.

She rounded off with a question about whether Emrik Jansson had seen Arvid Traneus since he got home. He had. He had seen him in the car together with Kristina on Monday evening, presumably on their way home from the airport. But not since.

*   *   *

EMRIK JANSSON FELT
unsettled when he shut the door behind the young woman from the Visby Police Department. His observations and assumptions about what was going on in the houses around him, conclusions that had seemed logical and sensible, appeared to fall apart when they came under the scrutiny of something as serious as justice. Were they, when it came down to it, nothing more than an old man’s excessive preoccupation with gossip and meaningless details?

He shuffled back to the TV and sat down slowly in his sunken armchair with threadbare armrests. The show he had been watching was almost over. Normally he would have been peeved at having missed half an episode, but all of a sudden he saw it as just a hollow attempt to make time pass.

Arvid had been good at school, and yet wild somehow, not one of the ones who sat at the front and raised his hand to each question. He used to throw himself into any task with uncommon drive and energy, as if he wanted to get it over and done with quickly so he could move on. He devoured school assignments as if someone had promised him a big delicious piece of cake if he’d just eat up that disgusting plate of food first.

The other kids looked up to him, but were a little afraid of him at the same time. And now he was out there somewhere. Maybe a murderer.

19.

“I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch father of yours. And do you know why? Well, I’ll tell you, because he’s not a human being. He’s an animal. A sick fucking animal who should be culled.”