* * *
All the herring was doled out, and that felt good. If she got hungry there was filet. She plopped down in the hammock with a notepad of the type she’d used as a police officer. Blank pages. A sudden gust of wind passed through the garden and brought with it a scent of the sweetness of spring. “It’ll go fast now,” she said, repeating Gösta’s words.
“I want someone,” she mumbled, but expertly suppressed the thought. “Two witnesses,” she wrote. She tried to remember how Bertil had put it. Didn’t he say that the two didn’t know each other, or else that they didn’t even know about each other? What did that mean? Two who didn’t know each other and who were in the school, or outside the school, on New Year’s Eve. An outsider, in other words. There were actually only two alternatives. Either it was one of the refugees, or else it was a temporary visitor, maybe one of the young people who’d been at the party on the other side of the road. How many were there? Ann had no idea, but she’d heard that the party started early and went on until the school was in flames. She got the impulse to give Sammy a call, but decided to wait. It was still Saturday. He ought to be able to produce a list of the partygoers. But how could Bertil know about the person and what he had possibly seen? There was only one answer: They had run into each other in the crowd of people that gathered on the road outside the school, and perhaps intoxicated, perhaps confused and in shock, he had told Bertil what he’d seen. Was it a “he”? Probably. A young guy who then, when he sobered up and realized the consequences if he snitched, did not want to tell the police anything.
Okay, I’ll call Sammy on Monday, she continued her inner dialogue. The other one then? Was it Bertil himself? No, she decided. Was it Gösta? He lived next door to the school and was the person with the best view of the back of the schoolyard. But the carpenter had maintained that he was asleep and that as usual he woke up at five o’clock in the morning, and by then the whole thing was over. His bedroom faced south, the school north, so it wasn’t impossible, but how likely? There must have been a lot of commotion. She herself had been at a party in Uppsala, but thought that she would have woken up when the fire department showed up much later, if not before. They had driven with their sirens on, Astrid had told her that, how she sat up terrified in bed, thought she’d woken up from a bad dream, but then realized that the bellowing of the sirens was reality. Shouldn’t Gösta have woken up too? In principle it was then too late to witness how the fire started, but this stubborn assertion that he slept heavily the whole night, which Sammy had revealed that Gösta had testified, did not give a good impression.
But if he really was telling the truth and slept through the night, who was the witness that Bertil talked about? Yet another question mark. There wasn’t much to write down on the notepad. “Sammy Monday,” she wrote a bit superfluously.
* * *
Now it was time to confirm what she believed. She looked for his name on the internet. There were two of them, one of whom was on Molngatan in the Gränby area, where she seemed to recall that he lived. Could she call on a Saturday? She realized how silly the thought was, but perhaps it was a way to try to postpone the whole thing.
She entered the number. He answered on the third ring.
“Hi, this is Ann Lindell.”
There was a rattling sound as if he’d stumbled on something, and a swear word was heard.
“Have you been looking for me?”
It took a few seconds before he answered. “It may be too late.” It was obvious that he was drunk.
“What’s too late?” That old tiredness, the police tiredness, suddenly came over her. Why must it always be so tough? she thought.
A drawn-out sigh came in response, and then nothing. She waited.
“Ann, it’s been a long time.”
“How are you doing?”
“I think about Dad sometimes. You know Dad.”
“Me too,” said Ann, and let the whole thing go as it would. She was no longer a police officer, nothing was documented, she couldn’t be criticized after the fact for anything, and she was aware that sometimes it was good to lure the other one out onto thin ice. Sometimes then everything could burst. Berglund had worked that way, borderline sensitive, but with a different form of address. But then he also had a different weight. Maybe he was the one who inspired her, not hesitating for what was low or elevated, where moods were allowed free play.
“And about you too,” she added.
That boy, she thought, Justus, that little guy. She remembered his despair, his incredible sorrow and longing for his murdered father, Little John. The two of them had nurtured a dream about opening a store for aquarium fish, his father’s great interest. He was an expert on cichlids, one of the foremost she’d understood later, but he had supported himself as a welder.
It had been a difficult investigation, where she learned an incredible amount about Uppsala. The tragedy seemed fated. Berglund thought that there were doomed families, who slowly but mercilessly were broken, ground down by the state of things. Justus’s family had been like that.
“How is Berit doing?”
He sobbed and let out a hiccoughing sound. Was he too drunk to talk? Maybe it wasn’t a good idea after all to call on a Saturday.
“Mom’s not doing good,” he said in a sharp voice, as if he wanted to accuse someone of having inflicted illness on her. Ann didn’t want to hear. Not now.
“You called,” she reminded him. “It was Sammy Nilsson you spoke with. You don’t remember him.”
“No.”
“He’s good, you could have talked with him.”
“Listen! What do you think about all this?”
He moaned as if he was stuck in a vise.
“What do you mean?”
He did not reply.
“Shall we meet on Monday? I’m going into town.”
“Where the hell do you live?” Ann was not in any publicly accessible register, could not be searched for on the internet with information about date of birth, telephone number, or address.
“In the country. Shall we meet at five o’clock?”
“But, I can’t … we can’t…”
“You don’t want to be seen with a cop, even if it’s a former one, is that what you mean?”
“Something like that.”
“Come to the Linnaeus Garden at five o’clock, I’ll be sitting there on a bench. I don’t think any of your buddies go there.”
“A garden? Where the hell is it?”
“Svartbäcksgatan. You’ll have to look it up. Shall we do that?”
She got him to repeat the time and place, clicked off the call, and got up from the hammock.
* * *
It was an at once familiar and strange smell that struck Ann when she went back into the house. The herring trimmings, it struck her first, but hadn’t she wrapped those in newspaper and then put them in a garbage bag? It was still in the kitchen, but the strange thing was that in the kitchen the odor was considerably fainter than in the hall. She took the bag, looked around, went into the living room, returned to the kitchen, sniffed, looked around again. An indefinable feeling of discomfort came over her. If there was anything she disliked it was unpleasant odors. That was one of the things she had a hard time with in police work, the smell of unaired, stinking apartments and houses, with ashtrays filled to the brim, rotting food scraps, even a corpse in more or less decomposed condition. In that respect Sammy, but Berglund too, had been better, and many times they’d taken over and sent her out in the fresh air.