The Viper (7 page)

10.

Gustav drove while Fredrik sat in the backseat next to the previously raving man whom they had by now managed to identify as Rune Traneus. They were on their way over to see one of Rune’s grandchildren, Sofia Traneus-Helin. She lived in town, Visby that is, in an apartment in Gråbo.

Rune Traneus sat silently next to Fredrik in the backseat hanging his head and staring at his hands that lay cupped in each other in his lap. He was as glum and inert now as he had been out of control just a short time ago.

Fredrik felt a sense of panic rising within him as he thought about what he would say to Sofia Traneus. Almost worse than having to notify someone of the death of a loved one, was having to inform someone that their father might be dead, but that they didn’t know for sure.

Of course he couldn’t do that. He would have to proceed on the basis of Rune’s reaction. They had found a dead man that her grandfather for some reason suspected was his son, Sofia’s father. No, that was no good, either. And then there was the car, of course. They had run a check on the plates and it was true, it belonged to Anders Traneus.

“What was it that made you go out there?” Fredrik tried asking him.

Rune Traneus didn’t respond.

“I mean, how could you be so sure that you would find your son there?”

Silence. Had he even heard the question? He seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

They reached Visby, turned off toward Gråbo between the ICA supermarket and the Sibylla hamburger grill and stopped outside one of the pastel-checkered fifties row houses on Allégatan. Across the street stood a long string of redbrick houses, all identical.

Fredrik had heard Visby residents say that “once you end up in Gråbo, you never get out” and then complain about how far away it was from the center. It was true that it was a neighborhood you never went to unless you had a reason to go there, but it wasn’t more than a few extra minutes’ walk into town compared to Öster, for example, and as far as Fredrik could tell it looked pretty nice.

But presumably it wasn’t the charming houses from the fifties, but rather the ones from the seventies in the center of Gråbo that had given rise to the neighborhood’s unfavorable reputation, thought Fredrik when he rang Traneus-Helin’s doorbell.

The woman who opened the door looked to be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years of age, and could have been a model for the essence of Swedishness, or at least the perception of it. Tall, slender—yet sturdy—flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, steadfast lips that stood guard in front of two even rows of white teeth. She had a two-month-old baby on her arm, naked except for a diaper. A girl of about three peeked out from a doorway a ways inside the apartment.

“Gramps,” the little girl cried out and came running toward them, but slowed down and faltered about halfway, frightened either by the strange men or by the fact that her great-grandfather didn’t seem to take any notice of her.

Rune Traneus stared vacantly at his filial granddaughter.

“Grandpa, what’s wrong?” asked Sofia Traneus and then turned to Fredrik questioningly, when she noticed that she wasn’t getting an answer.

Fredrik and Gustav already had their badges out and introduced themselves.

“I can’t help thinking that something terrible must have happened, seeing you show up like this. Something I don’t want to hear,” said Sofia.

She hoisted her baby a little higher and pulled it closer to her.

“There
has
been a very serious incident, but whether it has any connection to you, we don’t yet know. But with a little help we should be able to sort it out,” said Fredrik. “Could we come in for a moment?”

“Sure, come in,” said Sofia.

Fredrik saw how her expression changed from an initial look of confusion to one of apprehension of impending calamity. It turned in on itself and became completely exposed all at the same time. He had seen that transformation many times before.

They all went into the sunny kitchen, the girl with a firm grip at the knee of her mother’s jeans. After having sat Rune Traneus down on one of the chairs at the kitchen table, Fredrik gave Sofia a quick rundown of events, in a manner that was both as sensitive as possible while at the same time being as unintelligible as possible for the three-year-old.

“Your grandfather seems to think that one of the victims could be your father. We haven’t quite been able to work out why that is, nor have we found anything specific to suggest that to be the case.”

Rune Traneus shook his head slowly. Apparently he had absorbed something of what they had said. Sofia looked at him with glistening eyes and sank down on the chair opposite him.

“Grandpa?” she whispered.

Fredrik hadn’t said anything about Anders Traneus’s car having been parked outside the house. There was absolutely no reason to bring that up just then. Sofia Traneus was worried enough as it was.

“Do you have any idea why your grandfather might think that?”

Sofia looked up at Fredrik and it was clear that she didn’t have the slightest idea.

The girl crawled up into her lap without it occurring to Sofia to help her, and soon she was sitting there burdened with both children. The three-year-old leaned her head against her mother’s chest, hugged her mother’s arm and peered timidly at her great-grandfather.

“Mommy? Mommy?”

“Yes, sweetie, it’s all right. Mommy just has to speak to these gentlemen here a little bit.”

Fredrik looked at the three generations sitting around the table and gave up any ambitions he had of questioning the woman properly. This wasn’t the right moment.

“Do you have a photograph of your father? A fairly recent one. That would be very helpful,” he said and wondered at the same time if they would have much use of a photograph given the condition of the face.

Sofia nodded and stood up. The girl slid down from her lap and grabbed hold of her right leg with both arms.

“I should have something, I guess.”

She shuffled out of the room with her daughter clinging to her leg like a monkey.

“Please, Emma,” she said helplessly and shuffled on.

Fredrik and Gustav looked at each other, and just then came a loud crash from the kitchen table as Rune Traneus slammed his fists down full force onto the table.

“That bastard. He’s a bastard. Him and that goddamn father of his. Murderers.”

“Mommy!” Emma cried out in fright from the next room and then started sobbing loudly.

Rune Traneus had stood up and was glaring at Fredrik and Gustav, while he shouted out his words, only they didn’t quite come out as real shouts. It was as if they had run into some kind of resistance, smothered by a deep and powerful anguish.

Gustav had already moved next to Rune in order to, if necessary, restrain an outbreak like the one they had witnessed earlier outside the house. But it was already over. Rune Traneus stood there rooted to the spot, his gaze confused, his blue lower lip trembling. An old, frail man. Gustav gently took hold of his extended left arm and helped him sit back down again.

“I’ll go in there,” said Fredrik softly.

When he entered the living room, Sofia Traneus was squatting on the floor, trying to comfort her clinging, sniveling daughter. The girl’s cheeks were flushed from crying.

Sofia looked up at him with anxious, wide-open eyes.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said, “for the moment anyway … But Rune was very upset when he came to the house. Do you think you can manage this? Is there anyone who could come here and help you? Or else … maybe we should take him with us. To a doctor, I mean.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said after thinking for a moment. “I’ll call my husband. He can be here in five minutes.”

“And Rune?”

“It’s better if he stays here.”

She fell silent.

“The photograph,” Fredrik reminded her after a moment. “If it’s not too much trouble?” he said glancing at the child. “We can always get a copy of his passport.”

“Oh, no, I know where I’ve got one.”

She managed to free herself from Emma and sat her down on the couch together with the baby. The girl stayed there while Sofia quickly walked over and unlocked the bottom cabinet of the bookcase.

“Here,” said Sofia and returned with an open photo album in dark-red imitation leather.

It was a group photo with five people neatly lined up in front of the camera. Fredrik immediately recognized Sofia and Rune. In his eyes the woman next to him was little more than a girl in the picture, eighteen or nineteen maybe.

“It’s five years old, but it’s still a good likeness. Then there’s my brother and my mother. It was taken at my father’s birthday. Two months later they got divorced.”

She worked one of her clear-coated nails in underneath the edge of the photograph.

“The only question is whether I can get it off.”

Fredrik was about to suggest that they just borrow the whole album, so she didn’t have to ruin it, when the photo ripped free from the black construction paper.

She handed over the picture. He took it and tried to avoid touching the glossy surface, more out of respect for Sofia than concern for the photograph.

“Does your father have any distinguishing marks that you know of? By that I mean scars, tattoos, that kind of thing?”

She let out a laugh.

“Tattoos?”

“For example,” said Fredrik.

She shook her head and looked at him with a slightly dubious expression, as if he had asked her something inappropriate.

“It’s better if you ask my mother about that.”

Tuesday, October 31

Gotland

Ninni was in the car, on her way from Havdhem to Hablingbo in the dirty gray twilight. The drizzle had made the road wet. The tires spattered loudly and the wipers swept across the windshield at the longest interval setting.

She was driving fast along the winding road, too fast she felt and lightened the pressure on the gas pedal. She didn’t want anything to happen to her, too. She had to look after herself. Be strong. But where would she get the strength from?

She had left Simon and Joakim at Anneli’s on Karlbergsvägen and taken the ferry back to Gotland to take care of a few things at work. Maybe also just to get a chance to breathe a little. Not to have to be strong for a moment. Maybe so she could have a breakdown. She wasn’t sure. There was so much to think about, to take responsibility for. How long could they stay in Stockholm? What was best for the kids? How long could they be away from school? How long would it take before Fredrik was well enough to be moved to Visby? Would he even be able to receive the care that he needed there? Should she and the kids be moving up there instead?

She had climbed into the car at the Högby school parking lot. She had planned on driving home, but continued south and now she was on her way to Hablingbo. On her way? No, she wasn’t on her way anywhere. She was just driving. She was
on the road
between Havdhem and Hablingbo, but that was all you could say with any certainty.

She had pinned her hair up behind her neck so that it wouldn’t be so obvious how matted and dirty it was. It had been several days since she last put on any makeup, but there were faint shadows of smeared mascara on her eyelids. She wished that she had a cigarette. She had quit smoking eighteen years ago, but now she wished that she had a full pack of wonderful cigarettes to light up and inhale to put a fog between herself and reality.

The car rolled the last few feet up to the stop sign next to the electrical goods store in Hablingbo. If it had still been a supermarket she could have stopped and bought cigarettes. But it seemed as if everything closed down on this godforsaken island. Everyone shut up shop, moved away.

Ninni turned left out onto the coast road without really knowing why, guided by a vague yet persistent feeling.

And how about that whole thing with Mother?!
Ninni had asked her for help.
How fucking stupid was that?
She should have known better and spared herself the disappointment. Mother was playing a key role at some conference or other, and then she would be flying off to Helsinki for two days, and then her best friend was coming to visit her all the way from Umeå—and that had already been booked a long time ago—for about a week or so, at least over the weekend.

Ninni shuddered inside and nearly burst into tears, but she pulled herself together, didn’t let it get beyond a short sniveling.

Mother had made no attempt to hide her disappointment when Ninni told her that she was moving to Gotland. She would have so far to travel to see her and the kids. And Ninni had felt guilty, that she was robbing her mother of something that meant a lot to her. It was only after they had moved that she realized that her mother almost never had time for them. On those rare occasions when she did have time, it was always on her terms, when a little opening had appeared in her chockablock schedule.

The wiper motor squeaked, the tires spattered. Where was she going? She didn’t know.

She had a goal, she felt it, but she couldn’t see it in front of her and after nearly an hour of driving around aimlessly, she pulled up in front of her own house. Pitch dark and deserted.

She unlocked the door, wriggled out of her coat, tossed it onto a chair in the kitchen, and sat down on another one. She stared vacantly at the dirty dishes in the sink.

The big question was whether the bleeding between his skull and brain had cut off the supply of oxygen before they had managed to reduce the pressure. The CAT scan looked good, but it didn’t show everything the little woman doctor with the peppercorn eyes had explained. The more she had explained, the more Ninni sensed that the brain was unknown territory even for doctors. Wait and see, was the order of the day. There was nothing to suggest that Fredrik couldn’t make a complete recovery, but at the same time they couldn’t promise anything. In any case, she had to prepare herself for a long convalescence, at least six months, maybe even a year or more.

Maybe she just wanted to step out of her own life.

Easier said than done.