The Viper (31 page)

They heard the front door to the station slam shut. The closed door to the interview room gave a jolt from the backdraft.

“When was Leo Ringvall last at the apartment?”

“Yesterday,” said Hallman.

“What time yesterday?” asked Fredrik.

“Around two o’clock.”

“So he didn’t sleep in the apartment last night?”

“No.”

“So where is he now?”

“No idea,” said Hallman.

Fredrik went silent and looked at Beppo Hallman with a slightly less patient expression. He let out a barely perceptible sigh and leaned forward across the table.

“A moment ago, it seemed as though you understood the seriousness of this situation, but now I’m starting to doubt it,” he said.

“I really don’t know,” said Hallman quickly. “He went out yesterday afternoon, I haven’t seen him since.”

“You mean to say that he comes and stays with you for three weeks, and then just ups and leaves without telling you where he’s going?”

Beppo Hallman nodded eagerly.

“Yeah.”

“And he hasn’t been in touch, either?”

“No.”

“And you have no idea where he may have gone?”

“No.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“Well, I mean, you can’t help wondering. If something’s happened to him, or whatnot.”

Sure,
thought Fredrik.

“We’ll take a break,” he said and gave Gustav a quick glance. “I’ll wait here with Hallman. If you go, ask Sara to come in.”

Gustav got up to go out and find Sara. The room where they were conducting the interview wasn’t actually a proper interview room. You couldn’t leave criminals like Hallman alone in here.

“I think Ringvall’s gone. Hallman hasn’t seen him since yesterday afternoon. Assuming he’s telling the truth,” said Fredrik when Sara took over from him.

Gunilla Borg looked up from behind her paper-laden desk, her blonde pigtails pinned up for the day at the nape of her neck.

“I don’t think he’s lying,” she said and laid one arm on her desk, “Beppo is more the type to just keep silent.”

“He’s talking all right, but he’s taking his time about it,” said Fredrik. “Chances are Ringvall has already taken a boat out of here.”

“He’s gotta know something,” said Gustav, “we might as well just keep at it.”

Gunilla Borg leaned forward over the desk with her head cocked slightly to one side.

“I don’t want to butt in,” she said, “but I know Beppo pretty good. If you tell me what it is you want to know, I could give it a try.”

Gustav and Fredrik looked at each other.

“Sure, why not,” said Gustav. “Sounds like a sensible idea.”

“Yeah,” said Fredrik and made a gesture to Gustav, “you want to go with her, or you want me to?”

Gunilla Borg hemmed thoughtfully.

“Beppo usually works best with women during questioning, I should have said that from the start I guess, but the whole thing happened so quickly, and like I said, I didn’t want to butt in, so really…”

Gunilla Borg’s perky and slightly chirpy voice broke off in a smug pause for effect.

“… it would probably be best if Sara sat in with me.”

They fell silent for as long as it took Fredrik to realize that there was only one possible answer to that question.

“All right then, you two go ahead.”

Gunilla Borg quickly got up and disappeared into the interview room containing Sara and Beppo Hallman. Gustav looked in astonishment at Fredrik who threw out his arms in response.

47.

Sara sat down on a chair over by the wall so as not to cause Hallman unnecessary stress. Gunilla Borg sat opposite him and looked at him for a long moment without saying anything. Those blue eyes above her freckled cheeks were steadfast and piercing, but not without empathy.

“Receipt of stolen property,” she said at last.

Beppo looked away.

“Well, you know how it is, some old buddies show up and want you to do them a solid, and I tell them no can do, I don’t do that kind of thing anymore, but then there’s always somebody who, how can I put it, dumps shit on you anyway and…”

“Per-Arne,” she interjected softly. “If your pal Leo has murdered these three people in Levide then we’re talking, in all likelihood, lifetime imprisonment.”

“He can’t have done it. It’s not him,” said Hallman.

“There are a few things that suggest otherwise,” said Gunilla Borg. “It’s important that you tell us what you know, for his sake, for our sake, and especially for your own sake. Do you understand?”

“Sure, I don’t know anything, but I’ll answer all your questions, I swear.”

“You’re not just going to answer my questions. You’re going to tell me everything you know, even if it seems totally unrelated and irrelevant. Okay?”

Beppo Hallman nodded and swallowed.

“Good,” said Gunilla Borg without taking her eyes off him. “When Leo got in touch with you and wanted to come stay with you, what did he say?”

“He told me that he’d just been let out. He said that straight off, but of course I knew that, too, that it was coming up, so to speak. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really that thrilled about it. I mean, a guy who’s just got out, you kind of don’t really know what might happen, does he just want to take it easy for a while, sort of collect himself, or is there something else going down?”

“If we stick to what Leo said,” Gunilla Borg interrupted Beppo’s sudden rambling, “what was he doing here?”

“He never said,” Beppo answered.

Gunilla Borg waited before asking her next question. She leaned her head back a little and her expression became what can best be described as concerned. Her eyes narrowed and a little furrow appeared between her eyebrows.

“Never?”

Beppo’s mouth opened and closed indecisively.

“Okay, I believe you. So, Leo has just gotten out, you’re old buddies, it’s not so strange for him to get in touch, nor for you to let him stay with you. He may not have needed any other reason to come here. But … once he actually made it over here, maybe you guys started talking about the future, that would be a pretty natural thing to do after all, if you’d just been released from prison. Plans, maybe he had some ideas. Might not sound like anything he’s really going to follow through with, mostly talk, as it often is. But I’d really like to hear it.”

Beppo Hallman shifted nervously in his chair, scratched his upper arm.

“It was … he said it, but he only said it, you know, just like you’re saying.”

“And what was it that Leo said?” asked Gunilla Borg.

“That he was gonna go up there.”

“Where?”

“He was going to go up to the farm. The Traneus farm in Levide.”

Beppo Hallman looked dismayed.

“You can’t say anything to Leo about my telling you this. If you’re gonna tell him, then I’m not gonna say any more.”

“He doesn’t have to know anything,” Gunilla Borg assured him.

What a pro, Sara Oskarsson thought as she sat there off to the side and watched her colleague, severe and impressive in that blue uniform shirt, free of any hint of insecurity. She reminded Sara of a teacher she had had in junior high who had possessed the unique ability to push the cockiest and most rowdy troublemakers up against a wall and stare them down, despite being a whole head shorter than most of them. She wished that she could understand the secret.

“He was going to head up to the farm and stand face-to-face with Arvid Traneus. He was going to stand there and look that bastard in the eye, that’s what he said.”

“And while he was standing there, what was going to happen?”

“He didn’t know. He was going to stand there and then he was gonna see.”

Gunilla Borg tried once again to wait Beppo out, but this time it didn’t work.

“That was it. I swear. I asked him, even said that I thought he oughta just forget about it because it seemed, well, sort of pointless. Chances were Traneus would just call the cops on him and he’d only make trouble for himself. But Leo never did it. He never went.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Not Leo. I know Leo.”

“Your friend Leo just got out after three years in prison. He was in there for beating someone up so bad that they’re disabled for life. You know about that right?”

“Yeah, but…”

“Yeah, but?” said Gunilla Borg and for the first time she didn’t sound completely composed.

Hallman sat there quietly for a moment, absolutely still.

“I still don’t think he did it.”

“Well that’s something else,” said Gunilla Borg sounding more understanding.

Sara looked down at her lap in an effort to hide her smile.

“So you don’t know, in other words, whether Leo went to see Traneus in Levide or not,” said Gunilla Borg.

“No,” said Hallman.

“Would it have been
possible
for him to have done it? Were you separated from each other for long enough that he could have made it over to Levide and back during that time?”

“I guess so. Yeah, we were,” said Hallman with a deep sigh.

“Any particular occasion?” said Gunilla Borg.

“Well, I mean, he was out for a while every day. I have no idea where he went, other than that he’d been to the liquor store and did some shopping and whatnot.”

“How about right after the weekend, when he’d just arrived?”

“Yeah, then, too. I don’t remember the days exactly, but there were several occasions when he could have made it out to Levide if he’d wanted to.”

“Did he have a car or any kind of vehicle?”

Beppo Hallman laughed.

“He’d just spent three years in the can. Where would he have gotten a car from? It’s not like there was someone waiting for him outside the gates.”

“He could have borrowed a car, stolen one, what do I know? But so he had no access to a car, moped, or even a bicycle maybe?”

“Not that I know of,” said Hallman.

*   *   *

IT WAS ALMOST
evening by the time they left Hemse. The onset of darkness was spurred on by the thickening cloud cover. The drizzle had given way to pouring rain that caused large puddles to form on the road through Hemse. The cars were tightly packed in the supermarket parking lot. People were hurrying out to their cars with their shopping carts filled with bags stuffed with chips, sodas, and Friday steaks, maybe the odd consciously chosen low-GI meal. And shoved down between the cartons of milk and clusters of bananas were latest issues of the tabloid newspapers filled with fresh details about the murders beneath bold black
EXTRA
headlines, that became wet from the rain and would be difficult to flip through. They sent a smell of wet paper and printer’s ink wafting through the cars that were on their way home to celebrate the weekend.

Sara, Fredrik, and Gustav didn’t have a free weekend to look forward to, they all understood that. Klint had decided to arrest Hallman on suspicion of receiving stolen goods. That was the safest bet. It was doubtful whether it would ever make it to court, but that was less important. The reason for keeping Hallman locked up, was so that he couldn’t warn Leo Ringvall.

Gustav was driving, Sara was sitting next to him, and Fredrik was sitting in the back speaking to Ove on his cell phone. Per-Arne Hallman had been sent off to Visby in a patrol car. They were happy not to have to drive him themselves. When Hallman had realized that he was being taken to Visby, he had launched into a relentless whining about having been tricked. As he saw it, they’d had an agreement that he’d be released if he told them what he knew about Ringvall. But nobody had promised him any such thing. Though they may perhaps have hinted at something that could have been misconstrued to that effect.

Fredrik snapped his cell phone shut.

“Doesn’t look too good for Ringvall,” he said. “The DNA test isn’t ready, but the strand of hair’s a match. Plus the guy’s got small feet.”

“Looks like this is going to turn out to be a short stint of freedom for Leo Ringvall,” said Sara.

They drove through a pool of water at high speed that sent up a great cascade of dirty water against the right side of the car.

“Let’s hope so, so that we can put all this behind us,” said Gustav.

PART THREE

He forgot you long ago

Screw God!

—EBBA GRÖN

Friday, November 3

Karolinska University Hospital, Solna

“I’m leaving on the eleven o’clock ferry tomorrow. I’m starting work again on Monday,” she said.

“Really?” said Ninni and looked up at her.

Ninni paused before continuing. Sara recognized her hesitation. The hospital room made everything so charged.

“Thanks for coming here, for spending time with Fredrik. It’s been very helpful,” said Ninni and looked at her husband.

Sara nodded quietly. She thought about all the visits she had made, the hours and days spent there in the room. She could hear herself speaking. She had revealed things that she would never have considered telling Fredrik if it hadn’t been for the special circumstances. Things that he maybe wouldn’t have wanted to hear, either. She felt how her cheeks heated up.

“Well, I’ll leave you two in peace now,” she said.

Ninni didn’t seem to have any objections.

“See you,” said Ninni when Sara slipped out through the door.

Fredrik had gotten a little better with every passing day, more words, more intelligible words, more eye contact. Better, but not good. Good still seemed a long way off. Sara didn’t know what it was reasonable to hope for. The doctors still spoke about it being fully possible for him to make a complete recovery or very close to it. That sounded promising, of course, and she tried to stop thinking about what might be included in
or very close to it.

She walked briskly down the corridor, but stopped short when she had passed the nurses’ station. She thought for a moment and then walked back and stuck her head through the open door. A curly gray-haired nurse was busy at a medicine cabinet.

“Hello, my name is Sara Oskarsson,” said Sara, “I’m a colleague of Fredrik Broman’s.”

The nurse put on a pair of purple-rimmed glasses that were hanging from a band around her neck.