The Viper (22 page)

The bottle he was holding was a Château Pétrus from 1990. He wasn’t altogether sure whether wines like that were drunk at all, or if they were just sold and bought at auctions. In any case, actually tasting one was a pleasure afforded very few. A sixteen-year-old Pétrus from a good year was worth quite a few thousand.

He stuck the bottle back into its clay pipe and realized that he ought to have a flashlight to do a proper job down here. He was just about to go upstairs and fetch one from the car when he caught sight of something sticking out from among the wine catalogues and loose sheets of paper on a little stained oak shelf to the left of the door. He pulled out the shiny metal baton, which, just as he had guessed, turned out to be a flashlight. With working batteries no less, he could confirm after having tested it.

He began the monotonous task of removing the bottles one by one and shining the flashlight into each of the clay pipes. Over half the cellar contained expensive Bordeauxs, although not all were of the same breathtaking price class as the first one he had taken out. He also found Bourgognes, Chablis, Meursaults, a few red Beaune wines, and then Champagne of course, but nothing other than bottles stuck inside the pipes.

He examined the shelf where he had found the flashlight, quickly flipped through the pile of catalogues and loose sheets of paper. In among them he found a bound black A4 notebook, a cellar book. All purchases were carefully entered in black ink on light-blue lines, as well as when bottles had been taken upstairs to be drunk. He flipped through it from the back. The last time something had been brought into the cellar was two years ago.

Fredrik flipped forward, wanted to see if Arvid Traneus may have taken out a bottle of Champagne or something else to celebrate coming home. He couldn’t find any such entry, at least not after skimming it so quickly. But another entry caught his eye. On the tenth of April, 2001, he had taken up two Winston Churchill 1985s. “Rickard 20” was written next to it.

He heard footsteps in the corridor outside and stopped flipping the pages. The door to the larder opened.

“Hello?” someone called out. “Fredrik, are you there?”

It was Eva.

“In here!” he shouted and tried to hide his surprise.

He thought she had sent him down to the basement so she wouldn’t have to see him.

Eva entered the wine cellar and pulled the door closed behind her.

“Hi, how’s it going?” she asked and swept her eyes quickly across the bottle necks projecting from the clay pipes.

“Not bad … very nice wine collection, but nothing of interest, if that’s what you mean?”

She took a few short steps toward him. Fredrik closed the cellar book and held it in his left hand.

“I see … well, I just wanted to see if you’d found anything.”

What he had at first perceived as a capacious wine cellar, had suddenly turned into a very small room where two people ended up very close to each other, whether they liked it or not. He got the feeling that Eva had been struck by a similar thought. She seemed to have become distracted from whatever her original reason for coming down had been.

“I was just thinking…”

She fell silent, lowered her gaze, and sighed heavily.

“What?” he asked, just to puncture the silence.

“I don’t really know what I was thinking,” she said.

It looked like she was going to back out of the room any second, but now he didn’t want to let her go.

“No, go ahead, say it.”

When she still hesitated, he took a cautious step forward.

“Haven’t we been silent long enough?”

That made her smile.

“I know that I’ve been a little … that I keep my distance. But I think it’s better that way. Right?”

He suddenly became uncertain. Was that a
right
that demanded his agreement, or was it really asking him what he thought? There wasn’t a lot of distance between them right now.

“I guess so,” he said.

Eva looked at him, her gaze dark and solemn in the gloom of the cellar.

“It doesn’t mean that there’s nothing else there,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“But that’s just how it is.”

Fredrik walked slowly up to her. It wasn’t more than two short steps.

She continued looking at him. What did she want with that look? Unyielding, insistent, and yet expressing some kind of desire? Or not?

He wasn’t sure which of them touched the other first, but … No, that was a lie. It was he who touched her. He couldn’t help it. But it was a completely innocent, virtually imperceptible touch. He raised his free hand and gently stroked the sleeve of her overall. She couldn’t even have felt it through the fabric, but she continued to work him with that gaze, silent and unflinching.

Then suddenly they kissed, passionately and full of desire. Her smell was exactly as he had remembered it, her lips like coming home.

This is wrong. This is so fucking wrong,
echoed in his head. But he couldn’t help himself.

He let go of the black notebook, tore off the latex glove from his right hand, and dug his fingers into her cool, thick hair.

Then she broke away. Abruptly.

“Damn it,” she whispered. “That was not good, that was not good at all. A bad idea, that’s what it was.”

Eva looked around furtively.

“Take it easy,” he said. “I don’t want to cause any trouble. If it was a bad idea then … well, then it was a bad idea.”

He sought eye contact with her, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze. Her chest was heaving in sync with her rapid breathing.

“Just take it easy,” he said again.

She gave him a quick look, then she turned around and disappeared out through the door.

Fredrik looked after her stupidly, then bent down and picked up the cellar book from the floor while he tried to still the hurricane that was raging inside him.

“No, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea,” he whispered to himself.

34.

Elin felt how everything became easier once Ricky came back. Her fear disappeared from one moment to the next. It even became easier to breathe.

But she was angry at him, angry because he had accused her, angry because he had just run off without saying anything. But she didn’t know how she was going to say that to him, if she even had any right to say it. And she was far too grateful to have him back in the house to risk starting another argument.

He had said, “Hi,” looked at her with a glazed-over look, and then disappeared into his room.

Elin sank down into the sofa in the living room. She should go home. What was the point in her being there anymore? It would take weeks, maybe more, before they could bury mother. School was waiting, or rather wasn’t waiting. The courses continued relentlessly without her and it would be hard for her to catch up once she had fallen behind.

It was like a nightmare. Had her father really killed her mother? That’s what she thought, but she didn’t want to believe it. Ricky couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understand the difference.

She leaned her head back and thought about dying. It was distant and incomprehensible and wasn’t connected with any emotions. She couldn’t picture the life that lay ahead of her or it coming to an end. But then all at once something sunk through her chest and everything around her became black and ice cold. She was completely alone and the world was neither good nor evil, and there was no point to anything. She jumped up from the couch to stave off the panic, walked over to the window, pressed her forehead and nose against the glass. A beautiful autumn sun shone above the lambs out in the pasture. She had to smile at the sight.

Once a long time ago, her father had spoken to her about the meaning of life. She didn’t remember why, whether it had come out of nowhere or if she had asked him some naïve existential question. “There is no meaning to life,” he had said, “no meaning other than the one you give it yourself.” If that was true, her life right now was meaningless.

Then the doorbell rang. It was the police who had come back.

*   *   *

THERE WAS A
large bouquet of white and red roses in a red glass vase on the black tabletop. There was a card attached to one of the stalks. Condolences from a relative, Fredrik guessed.

“What was it he was doing in Japan?” he asked Rickard, who was sitting opposite him at the big table.

“He’s a consultant. He … helps companies make more money, you might say. In a nutshell.”
Helps companies make more money,
thought Fredrik,
that sounds like something a father might say to his child.

“Did he have a lot of clients?”

“He only had one in Japan, but he’s got others in Sweden and Germany.”

“Was it always the same one in Japan?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Because that was quite an extended period if I’ve understood correctly?” said Fredrik.

“Ten years, if you count from the very beginning. But it’s only the past two or three years that he’s more or less been living there. It’s become more and more intensive you might say.”

Rickard Traneus looked tired. That was understandable. He had a jaundiced pallor beneath his eyes, and the eyes themselves seemed veiled.

“What sort of work do you do, or maybe you’re studying?” asked Fredrik.

“No, not right now. I work part-time at an accounting firm.”

“I see, where?”

“In Visby,” Rickard Traneus answered and put his right hand on the chair’s black backrest in what looked like a pretty uncomfortable position.

“What is it you do there, more precisely?” asked Fredrik.

“Accounting, ordinary bookkeeping. Not the greatest job in the world, stray hours here and there whenever they need me, but it usually ends up at around seventy percent for the most part. I studied economics up in Stockholm for a while, but I took a leave of absence after three semesters.”

“Was that at Stockholm University?” asked Fredrik.

“That’s right. My father went to the Stockholm School of Economics.”

Fredrik nodded. He didn’t want to plague Rickard with a follow-up question about why he had chosen Stockholm University instead. He was pretty sure of the answer.

Rickard Traneus sat with his back to the kitchen counter. It was thoroughly wiped off, spotlessly clean. On the left stood a shiny metal espresso machine and partially hidden behind Rickard a battery of olive oil, rapeseed oil, balsamic vinegar, oyster sauce, sherry, and other handy ingredients for the mildly ambitious home cook.

A part-time accounting assistant could hardly earn enough money for designer furniture, expensive kitchen appliances, and clothes that … well, Fredrik didn’t know for sure, but they certainly didn’t
look
cheap. He probably got help from his father, or in some other way. Either with cash, or else the chair and table were something that the parents had tired of and the son had taken over. But the kitchen and what he had caught a glimpse of in the other rooms, looked far too thought through to be the result of hand-me-down furniture.

“You have no idea where your father might be?” Fredrik asked.

Rickard Traneus let go of the backrest and laid his hand in his lap together with the other one. He didn’t answer.

“If you were to guess,” Fredrik proposed. “He has to have gone somewhere. Where do you think he’d go?”

Rickard’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.

“Are you taking Karl-Johan’s angle now?” he asked.

“We’re just trying to make progress. It’s important that we get in touch with your father. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Rickard looked down at his lap, then at Fredrik.

“I know that Elin has said a few things about our father. Things that she’ll have to answer for herself. They’re her interpretations.”

“How do you mean?” said Fredrik, even though he knew very well what Rickard Traneus meant.

He could feel how Rickard held back a grimace.

“I have never seen my father hit my mother,” he said.

After a short pause he added:

“And nor has Elin. She’s just gotten it into her head that he did. My father isn’t like that. He didn’t hit her. Much less murder her.”

The last bit came with added emphasis and it sounded like he believed what he said.

“The answers aren’t self-evident, of course, but it’s very hard for us to find out exactly what happened unless we get hold of your father,” said Fredrik.

Rickard looked at him without batting an eyelid.

“I can’t help you. I would if I could, but I have no idea where he is.”

“But if your father had nothing to do with the murders, why do you think he’s run off?”

To that, Rickard Traneus had no answer.

35.

Fredrik entered the café and immediately spotted Ove, who was sitting alone at a table right next to the glass wall with a crumpled up ice-cream wrapper in front of him. He sat down opposite him with a plain cup of coffee. Ove, who had been sitting hunched over the table with his head drilled down between his shoulders, straightened up slightly.

“I went down and questioned Rickard Traneus,” said Fredrik.

“M-hm,” said Ove.

“If it wasn’t Arvid Traneus who killed his wife and cousin, how come he’s disappeared?”

Ove stared at him.

“What?”

“Well, I mean if Arvid Traneus isn’t the one who…”

“I heard what you said, but it’s just doesn’t compute. There’s no answer to that question. It just doesn’t make sense any other way. Arvid Traneus killed them and then made a run for it. How else can you explain it?”

When Fredrik couldn’t answer Ove continued:

“But I have actually come up with another alternative. He may have committed suicide.”

The light from the afternoon sky lit up the left half of Ove’s face where the stubble that had been shaven in the morning had started to creep out again.

Fredrik rested his chin against his fist.

“Well, I agree that’s not a totally unheard-of scenario, but in this particular case … I have a hard time seeing Arvid Traneus as the type to take his own life. Besides which, if he has, wouldn’t we have found him somewhere in the house or nearby?”