“Nothing? You have no idea?” Sammy Nilsson’s voice sounded doubtful. Maybe he’d seen hesitation in her face. She was bad at lying and Sammy was skilled at seeing through liars.
They sat in the kitchen. Sammy had praised the cottage, which he had only visited a few times previously, how nicely she had furnished everything. And it was nice, both inside and out. Against the south wall the first lilacs had started to bud, the summer flowers were planted even though the risk of frost was not over. But every time she got praise the thoughts of loneliness came, also when Sammy made a quick house inspection.
She thought she was doomed to live alone in the nice cottage with its fireplace and its lovely ceramic stoves, scrubbed wood floor and frosted windows in a neat porch, and a garden with flowers, fruit trees, and a potato patch and everything else that was simply there or that she had constructed and planted. A villager, Gösta Friberg, had helped her a lot. He was a retired carpenter and also handy when it came to cultivation.
Erik lived in town, and that was probably the right thing. He was in his first year of high school and had protested about having to change schools, and friends along with it. Now he was living at the home of an old colleague of Lindell’s, with a five-minute walk to school. On weekends he could be convinced to come out to the cottage. Gösta had helped her to renovate and furnish an old shed as a guesthouse. He stayed there, and seemed content. Sometimes he brought friends along from Uppsala. They looked at her and treated her with respect, which she liked.
* * *
“I’ll put coffee on!” She stood up and started filling the coffee maker. She felt his eyes on her back. Her cheeks got warm.
“Have you heard anything about the fire?”
“No,” said Sammy. “You’re the one who’s more likely to hear anything exciting, I mean, since you live in the village.”
“Do you think it’s a local arsonist?”
“We got that feeling early on. We did bring in a gang from the unemployed, young guys, and none of them seemed squeaky clean. It was New Year’s Eve and many of them had been drinking.”
She was grateful that Sammy accepted that she changed tack just like that.
“Things can easily start burning, you mean?”
She turned around.
“It’s an acquaintance, isn’t it?” he said, mercilessly.
“What do you mean?”
“The caller.”
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“Can this have something to do with the fire? Was it someone from the village who called?”
“How should I know that?”
“I think I’ll skip the coffee.”
He stood up and Ann knew that there was no possibility to get him to stay if she didn’t get involved in a discussion, one of those that once upon a time they used to have with complicated occurrences where the questions were piling up.
“Okay,” she said, turning around and turning off the coffee maker.
“Maybe it was someone from that mold factory where you work.”
“If that were so, why would he call?”
“Yes, that’s true, but maybe he’s not at work, maybe on sick leave.”
“Jesus,” said Ann.
“Yes, that was a long shot.” Sammy reached over and pressed the button and the coffee maker responded by immediately coughing to life again.
“Go out and sit on the porch, I’ll be right there,” she said. He obeyed, naturally.
* * *
“No, I don’t know who it is, not sure at all, but the voice reminds me of someone, something.” She made that admission solely for tactical reasons. The question was whether he would let himself be fooled.
“Many years ago?” Sammy Nilsson asked.
Lindell nodded and raised the coffee cup in a toast. She had to watch out, she understood that, they knew each other well and he was an experienced investigator.
“Far too many years ago,” she said.
“An investigation, but which one? A witness? A crime victim? But that…”
“You thought it had something to do with the fire. Is that just because I live here? It may very possibly be so, everyone knows of course that I’m a police officer, was one. You saw that Upsala Nya even published a picture when I was standing by the school making small talk with Wikman, only to get attention and speculate that I was on my way back.”
Despite everything she was glad that they hadn’t mentioned that she lived in the village.
He observed her thoughtfully. “Think about it, listen to the voice. You can keep the USB stick with the call.”
“I’ll listen,” she said and knew that it was both true and false. The conversation was very brief, and there was not really much to brood about, but perhaps there was something hidden to pick up on. Something that wasn’t obvious at first.
“But what old investigation would it be? If the voice belongs to a relatively young man, thirty at most.”
“I don’t know,” said Lindell, cursing her passive tone of voice.
“Someone who trusted you.”
“There are probably a few,” said Lindell.
“A young person.”
“I’ll listen, I promise. If I think of anything, I’ll call you right away. Okay?”
“How’s Edvard doing? Does he still live out there on the island?”
“It wasn’t one of his boys who called, if that’s what you’re thinking!”
“Which one of his boys? One of them has had a few interactions with us, perhaps you know that?”
She did not reply. What was there to say?
“He’s involved in one of those acronyms, NRM, or was it the Swedes Party? They change names all the time. He was involved in beating up a guy in the middle of town.”
“An investigation that wasn’t one.”
Sammy Nilsson smiled. “Fortunately the local press got involved, so we had to pick it up again.”
She knew that they shared an understanding here, that the whole thing had been mishandled from the first moment. It was an obvious case, there were willing witnesses, it happened in public and even cops were filmed. It was only after Upsala Nya wrote about it all that things started happening and the investigation was opened.
“He wasn’t one of those who were convicted, but he was involved in the group, you can say.”
“Bad enough,” said Ann. She knew that Edvard was ashamed as a dog at his son’s involvement in various racist and Nazi groups. He himself was raised in a Social Democratic farmworker home, and like his father and grandfather was active in the union. His sons’ mother blamed their political wandering in the desert on Edvard, that he abandoned the marriage and home and thereby left Jens and Jerker adrift. There was a grain of truth in the criticism, he hadn’t been a good father, or rather: He had been a fairly good father, until Ann Lindell showed up and unraveled his life.
He’d been seduced, they had been seduced, and it was probably not so strange, but the force with which the collision happened was baffling to those around them. He broke off from everything, left the work that he’d inherited, his family and house, and rented a room on the top floor of an old estate on Gräsö outside Öregrund. Viola lived on the ground floor, an old archipelago woman of a rare caliber. When she died he inherited the property and a little land, mostly stony hills, meadows, and overgrown ditches, a number of small islands and rocks and fishing rights.