The Viper (24 page)

She couldn’t even confide her deepest thoughts in her own diary. It just became a kind of account of the day’s events. A memory aid that could be used to call other things to mind, things that she had to keep inside herself.

It was a kind of prison, he thought, being shut up inside yourself. In the end she had found someone she could talk to, someone she could confide in. The consequence had been death.

He searched on through the notes from three years ago, the last of the years that were included in the two volumes that he had taken with him. On the thirteenth of August he found the entry: “Laid flowers on Stefania’s grave. Seven years old today.” Nothing more.

Friday, November 3

Karolinska University Hospital, Solna

Everything was clear now. Fredrik was there, he saw the room. Saw Sara in that ugly, ergonomically designed armchair. He heard everything she said. He knew who she was, recognized her, just as he recognized Ninni and the kids and a few friends who had been to see him with embarrassed smiles and nervous gazes they didn’t know where to fix.

What Sara recounted, however, the investigation they were supposed to have worked on together, was completely new to him. It could just as well have been some old yarn, or one detective telling another about a case she was working on, which of course it was, but it should have been a lot more than that. It should have been something they had experienced together … but Fredrik could remember nothing.

Fredrik wanted her to hurry it up, wanted to ask her to focus on those bits that dealt with him specifically and hop over everything else. Somehow he sensed that somewhere in this account lay the explanation for why he was lying here in this hospital bed. He assumed that she wouldn’t be sitting here rehashing the entire investigation if it didn’t eventually lead up to whatever it was that erased his memory.

He wanted to ask her, but he couldn’t. He had realized that the words he was capable of uttering were unintelligible. He was there, but only for himself, not for anyone else.

“They must have held an inquest into the accident with the horse, but we never managed to find any report,” she said. “A thirty-three-year-old workplace injury … It had simply been weeded out. Or misplaced, for all I know, but there was no sign of it in our records.”

Sara crossed her legs and sank down deeper in the armchair.

“But we did find a witness in the end. Ragnar Jonsson. He had been working on the farm when it happened. He hadn’t seen the accident itself, but heard the commotion and the screaming and rushed into the stable. He hadn’t wanted to believe that it was as bad as it sounded. He couldn’t believe that Traneus had sent them to
that
horse. Arvid might conceivably have been able to handle Valdemar, he said, but not his cousin. Never. He was a complete stranger to that horse.”

Fredrik was captivated by the scene that Sara depicted for him, and for a moment he forgot that more than anything he just wanted to fast-forward to whatever was about him. He was gripped by the sight that had met Ragnar Jonsson when he came charging into the stables so fast that he nearly slipped and fell on the concrete floor. The horse in the open box, glaring furiously yet stock still. The boy lying on the floor of the box, lifeless, stretched out along the wall, and next to him Arvid, in shock and unable to move, staring at his immobile cousin. Ragnar Jonsson had for a brief moment seen something in Arvid that he’d never seen before. Arvid, who otherwise never showed the slightest hesitation, was never at a loss, and never backed down from a challenge, peered for a few seconds into an abyss that he was completely unequipped to deal with. And the abyss stared back into him.

37.

Ricky couldn’t remember what he had been doing down in the cellar, nor whether he was eleven or thirteen. Maybe it wasn’t just on one occasion, but several. But he remembered Stefania.

He could see her in front of him, her long, blonde hair that had become brittle and rose up from her head like a flower when it was freshly washed. Like a dandelion ball when the sun shines through it. He remembered that image. Stefania hated it. She sprayed it and had all sorts of gels she used to make it lie flat.

He remembered her tall, frail frame hunched over the toilet. He could see her in front of him.

But had he really seen her?

The visual memory was so clear in his mind, but now eleven, twelve, maybe thirteen years later, he couldn’t explain
how
he had seen her. What had he been doing down in the basement? Had he been spying on her? Snuck after her when she had silently disappeared down the steps?

He could have created the image in his own mind. It was quite possible. But not out of nothing. He had heard her. The reverberating echo of the porcelain from the toilet by the sauna. He had thought that she was sick, had a bad stomach, thought about how disgusting it was to throw up. How you wanted to avoid it at all costs at the same time that you were in a cold sweat and the feeling of nausea surged through your body in waves. He had thought about how it must feel like that for Stefania, that she couldn’t hold it back any longer. In the end she had to sneak down into the cellar and give into it, let the stomach cramps take over, all that gross stuff that sort of assaulted you from within. Assaulted you and broke out at the same time. It was an odd force, that committed violence against you in order to escape from you. Did that mean that you fought against it? Yes, you did; he did anyway. It was wrong, it was awful, a waking nightmare, and not something you would ever voluntarily submit to. Once something was eaten, it wasn’t supposed to leave the same way.

He had heard her, he was definitely sure about that. Once, maybe more. Probably more. Why would it otherwise have become etched in his memory like that, so powerfully that it had formed a visual image of something that he may have only heard? He had thought that she was sick. That was also quite possible. He was often sick to his stomach when he was little. It felt like as soon as he got sick he’d start vomiting. But, why did she need to sneak down into the basement then, like a sick animal seeking out a place to die? Why didn’t she want to be looked after like he was when he was sick? Mother’s hand on his forehead, a cool, damp washcloth that wiped away the sweat and vomit, a glass of water raised to your mouth so you could rinse away that disgusting, sour taste. But Stefania threw up alone in the basement. When he listened to the sounds from inside the sauna, he couldn’t think of anything more terrible than throwing up alone.

*   *   *

SOMETHING CLATTERED, HACKED
and rumbled its way into Fredrik’s dreams. He tried to ignore the noise for as long as possible, pretend that nothing could bother him, right up until he couldn’t sleep at all anymore, but lay there wide awake with his eyes closed. He rolled over onto his left side with a groan and peeked at the red lacquered alarm clock from Ikea. It said twenty-five minutes to eight. Göran had told him to sleep in for a few hours this morning, they all needed a bit of extra energy after almost two weeks of constant grind. He had even gone so far as to order Fredrik not to come in before eleven. And then this happens.

The straining lawn-mower engine raced somewhere close by, caused the panes in the old window frames to rattle, reminding Fredrik that they needed to be re-puttied. Only once he had wriggled into his robe, did he realize that it must be Jocke who was out with the mower, and that it was he himself who had been after him about cutting the grass, even promised him fifty crowns to do it.

The money had obviously got Joakim moving, but getting woken up by the lawn mower at 7:30 in the morning wasn’t really what he had envisioned when he made the offer.

He tied the belt on his robe and walked down the steps, could hear Ninni hurrying Simon off to school in the kitchen. Suddenly the mower started scraping and screeching so loudly that it almost hurt your teeth. And then it cut out abruptly.

“Fucking piece of shit,” Jocke cursed out in the garden, loud enough that their one neighbor definitely must have heard it.

Fredrik opened the front door and looked outside, but couldn’t see Jocke anywhere. He must be around the corner of the house, toward the vegetable garden. Fredrik pulled the door closed and stepped into the room opposite the kitchen, the room that after a few years of dithering had become their joint workroom, even if it was mostly Ninni who used it.

He could see Jocke through the gable window, hunched over the lawn mower, which was tipped over on its side, his long body half kneeling and nearly doubled over. Fredrik managed to release the hasps on the window and pushed it open.

“How’s it look?”

Joakim pointed at the blade underneath the tipped-over mower.

“Not too good.”

He must have cut past the rock at the corner of the vegetable garden a bit too sharply. The long, black blade had been bent into a warped and scratched Z-shape.

“Make sure you disconnect the wire to the spark plug, before you start fiddling around with it,” he said and felt a little glum about always having to be the one to chide him. But what were you supposed to do when your child’s about to stick his fingers into a lawn mower that could chop them off in the blink of an eye?

“I’ve already done that,” said Jocke, “
and
turned it over with the carburetor facing up.”

Fredrik nodded and smiled, the latter more to himself than anything else.

“Okay, that’s good,” he said. “Looks like we’ll have to junk it.”

His gaze became fixed on the buckled blade that was still as sharp as a freshly honed knife where it hadn’t touched the rock. A lawn mower blade. Why not? If you held it with a glove, otherwise you’d probably cut yourself. Or were they actually in fact looking for a murderer with injuries to his hand?

“You can just leave it there. I’ll take care of it later,” he said and shut the window.

His cell phone was still lying upstairs. He always slept with his mobile on the bedside table when he was in the middle of a murder investigation. He hurried up the stairs, but stopped short halfway up. He didn’t want to call Eva from home.

*   *   *

“THAT’S TOTALLY FUCKING
crazy. I mean, I just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Ricky peered at Elin with a cold look in his eye, more distancing himself than aggressive. It frightened her, made her feel so terribly alone. She was on the verge of taking it all back, apologizing, anything to erase that coldness from his eyes. But she couldn’t do it. When she opened her mouth to lie, or at least contradict her firm conviction, then she couldn’t.

She hadn’t been able to keep quiet, that was the whole thing. It was her own fault. They had been drinking, that had undoubtedly played a hand in it. Once she had tired of rummaging among Ricky’s liquor leftovers, she had gone off to the state liquor store and bought a box wine.

She felt stupid. After three glasses of wine, the thoughts that had seemed so clear in her mind, hadn’t come out that way.

“I don’t understand how you can’t see that,” she said. “It’s like you’ve turned the whole thing into some kind of dream world.”

“You’re the one who’s dreaming here,” said Ricky.

They were standing up, they had been sitting at the black table in the kitchen and had been having a really nice time, right up until Elin started to say the wrong things and they couldn’t remain seated anymore. Ricky had gotten up first. She had thought that he was going to walk off and leave her there. But he had turned back to her after two steps, stood there and glared.

“Here’s the thing, okay,” said Elin. “Stefania was always there, always with the two of us whenever we were the whole family, always around you and me, at least as long as she still had the energy.”

“Sure, she was…” he started and lost track of what he was going to say. He started again:

“She was always there. Stefania was always there. Sure. She took care of us, she did. We were good together.”

He swallowed and fell silent, then he looked at Elin.

“Don’t ruin it.”

“I’m not trying to ruin it. Stefania was the best. And we were good together. That’s great. The three of us. But have you ever thought about why she was always there, why she always kept us together, made sure we were together? A teenage girl who hangs out with her little brother and sister? Think about it. And why she was always prancing around so much in front of Father when he was along, why she was always so damn eager to keep him in a good mood, as if she wanted to get all his attention, make sure he was completely preoccupied with her?”

“Now see that right there is…”

Ricky reached his arms straight into the air as if he wanted to stop a huge weight from tumbling on top of him, then bent them back down and ruffled his hair.

“Didn’t you see that? Didn’t you understand?” she said.

She stood there bent forward slightly, gesticulating while she spoke.

“Understand? What did you understand?” he said and forced out a laugh. “How old could you have been? Eight, nine? What did you understand? Can’t you see that these are just rationalizations you’ve come up with later on, things that you’ve dreamed up because you’ve been reading a bunch of psychology books?”

Ricky poked his forefinger against his temple and stared at her.

“It’s all up here, what you’re talking about. Inside your head and in those books.”

“Take it easy,” she said and felt how a drop of saliva hit her on the cheek when Ricky raised his voice.

He let his hands drop to his side.

“You’re wrong,” he said and then he walked off.

He turned his back on her and walked out of the kitchen, slowly and controlled to make it clear that he wasn’t upset, but that this had gone far enough. They were done talking about it.

Elin went after him.

Why couldn’t she just leave well enough alone, keep quiet? What difference did it make? But she couldn’t. She couldn’t stand the fact that he was trying to change the history, change what was true. She had to speak up, for Stefania’s sake, for Mother’s sake, and for her own sake.