“Who said she’s confused?”
“She can’t be that old, but lives in a home.”
“Around seventy, if I remember right.”
“You see.”
“You mean that-”
“The mom wants to protect her son, Andreas is keeping a straight face, and the old lady is confused and confirms what her daughter tells her to confirm. She is questioned by a colleague who is sympathetically inclined, because he happened to work with her husband. Just like that the boy has an alibi.”
Lindell sat quietly a while.
“You really stir things up,” she said at last.
“That’s my job,” said Sammy Nilsson.
It can’t be wrong, was a sentence that came back in her head again and again, after Sammy had left her.
Now there was quite a lot that was wrong. Klara Lovisa was missing and probably dead. That was just so very wrong. Her own theory, about a young man with a driver’s license, rested on shifting sand and would easily collapse. How wrong can you be! If Sammy Nilsson was right after all, that Andreas’s alibi was constructed within the family, then that was wrong too. Sinking her teeth in the poor boy again simply felt rotten.
And Anders Brant was wrong! She checked her e-mail repeatedly; not a word from him. Just a lot of drivel that didn’t mean a thing, either personally or professionally. Within the corps there seemed to be a whole cadre of salaried bullshitters who did nothing other than produce completely meaningless messages.
The latest however was from her mother, who with the help of the neighbor lady Olofsson’s computer and willing assistance for a while now had been sending e-mails almost every day.
This time it was about her father and his “depression.” He was asking about her! Lindell did not believe that for a moment. Vacation was approaching and Mom wanted Ann to come to Ödeshög. “Dad wants you to.” So wrong! Feeling that way about your parents created a bad conscience, that was a given, but Lindell had learned to live with it. Nowadays she accepted that she found no joy in returning to her childhood Ödeshög. Am I a worse person for that, she would ask herself. On one level she obviously liked her parents, they had given birth to her and raised her, gave her a secure upbringing, she had never wanted for anything, the ties to the person she had been and had become were with them.
Gratitude, that was how she might summarize the feeling she had, but there was no affection any longer. When they met there was a brief period of the joy of recognition, exchange of the mandatory gossip, but then only silence and embarrassment. Having arrived at that stage her mother became sharp and impudent, made comments and demands that Ann perceived as pinpricks and intrusions on her own life, a life far from Ödeshög and the stuffiness of her girl’s room.
Her father looked at her with an expression of doubt and admiration, as if he was asking himself: Is this Ann, my daughter? Then indifference took over and he showed no real interest in her life and doings, and the two slowly glided into a kind of anonymity with each other, a mood that suited her better than her mother’s meddling.
For many years she had tried to mobilize some form of enthusiasm, convince herself that love for your parents is something you feel automatically, anything else is unnatural and a sign of baseness. But Ödeshög and even the briefest coexistence with her parents seemed like pure exile, a feeling that was reinforced leading up to this summer.
In her mind she had planned to spend the major part of her vacation with Brant. Then he and Erik could also start getting to know each other. How that would turn out no one could predict.
But Ödeshög, sitting with a cup of coffee on the increasingly neglected terrace, staring at the hedge of bridal wreath and plastic flowerpots planted with dispirited marigolds and bright violet petunias and listening to her mother’s increasingly macabre rigmarole about the neighbors’ lives and supposed ill will-never!
Sports Club The Best’s coach for the women’s team was named Håkan Malmberg, Lindell figured out after speaking with one of Klara Lovisa’s soccer buddies, Elina Strindberg. He was single, but had “a really cute son,” according to Elina. She thought the coach was on vacation. He often rode his motorcycle through Sweden and sometimes down on the continent. So too this summer. Elina Strindberg could also tell that for a short period Malmberg had an assistant coach, “Freddy something,” who was “like, twenty-two” years old.
Lindell had cautiously inquired about Freddy under the pretext that perhaps he knew where Malmberg was to be found on his motorcycle odyssey.
Elina did not think so at all; the reason that Freddy’s sojourn on the team was only a couple of months was that Malmberg did not like the “snob,” as he called his coaching assistant.
Lindell asked Elina to think about whether she could ferret out Freddy’s surname, perhaps she could look in some old papers or call around to her friends, and then possibly also check whether anyone had Malmberg’s cell phone number. Of course she could. Lindell sensed a certain excitement in the girl’s voice; it was not every day you were asked to help out in a police investigation, and Lindell poured it on by saying something to the effect that the general public was the police department’s best friend, a cliché she hoped did not sound like one in Elina’s ears. Lindell gave the girl her cell phone number and encouraged her to call whenever she wanted, even in the evening.
Elina called after only half an hour. Freddy’s last name was Johansson and coach Malmberg was quite rightly on a motorcycle vacation. Lindell got cell numbers for both of them.
“Think if everyone worked that efficiently,” said Lindell, and praised Elina for her quickness.
The girl sounded charmed when she explained that she was happy to help find Klara Lovisa, but then asked carefully whether Freddy and Håkan were “suspects.”
“No, not at all,” Lindell reassured her. “We’re just trying to map out everything and everyone around Klara Lovisa.”
Elina, who to that point sounded eager, seemed to hesitate a moment.
“Freddy’s a little untethered,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, a little strange, like that.”
“That he’s a snob, you mean?”
Lindell understood that that was not what made Elina want to talk about the assistant coach, but wanted to get her started. No doubt she and her friends had aired Freddy’s “strangeness.”
“He doesn’t say much,” Elina said at last.
“Maybe he’s shy?”
“No,” said Elina hesitantly. “Well, maybe,” she quickly changed her mind, “but he looked so strangely at… he seemed…”
“He looked strangely at the girls on the team?”
“Uh-huh.”
“At you?”
“Yes. He is cute and that, and-”
“So in the beginning you were a little interested?”
“Not exactly. Maybe.”
“Was he interested in more than one? Klara Lovisa or another?”
“Klovisa thought he was really super.”
“You call her Klovisa?”
“Yeah, didn’t you know that?”
“No,” said Lindell, writing down the nickname on the pad in front of her.
She thought it was strange she hadn’t heard that nickname before, but there was a lot that was strange with this investigation. That some dumbass had lost track of Yngve Sandman’s call was unforgivable, and that Klara Lovisa played soccer had escaped them. She had missed that!
“Was that why he had to quit as coach? I mean that he was taking liberties.”
“No, no, he never did anything. It was just Håkan who got mad at him, a few times.”
“Did he have different ideas about coaching?”
“No, it was something else, I think. Håkan just didn’t like him.”