“In principle, I agree,” said Lindell. “But during those seventy-five minutes he and Klara Lovisa have to walk the last stretch up to the shed too. I timed it from the place where Yngve Andersson saw them. It took thirteen minutes at a pretty good pace. His attorney is going to pulverize the timetable.”
“You think someone else dug her grave?”
Lindell nodded.
“And the court is going to believe that, if the defense plays its cards right.”
“How did he come up with the idea of taking her there?”
“He’d been near there picking mushrooms with his mom. The shed looks like it’s been there a long time. From what I understand it was not the first time he’d taken a girl there either.”
“So you don’t think he’s guilty of the murder?”
“Guilty of having dragged her there, but perhaps not of homicide.”
“Who?”
“Don’t you suppose I’ve racked my brain about that?” said Lindell.
“Three alternatives,” said Sammy. “One,” he said, holding up his index finger. “Freddy returned later. Two”-another finger in the air-“some local talent runs into Klara Lovisa and strangles her. And three, a third person comes to the shed after Fredrik left, ends her life, and digs the grave in peace and quiet.”
“I’ve been thinking along those lines too,” said Lindell, studying Sammy’s way of holding up three fingers, thumb, middle finger, and index finger, making it look like an obscene gesture.
“The third man,” said Sammy with a smile, and started whistling, but fell silent when he saw Lindell’s tormented expression.
Sammy Nilsson raised the bundle of papers in a knowing gesture, making an effort to get up, but sat back down on the chair at once.
“Are there any houses in the vicinity, where Fredrik or someone else could have retrieved a spade?”
“Five houses within three hundred meters, including Yngve Andersson’s,” Lindell replied. “I’ve asked Nyman to collect all the shovels and spades from those places. He’s a farm boy so that suits him well.”
“I heard he was there when you questioned Fredrik,” said Sammy Nilsson.
“So someone spilled the beans,” Lindell noted with a tired smile. “Well, shock tactics in a broad country dialect can frighten even the toughest guy.”
“So now Ryde gets fifty spades to look at?”
Lindell nodded absentmindedly. Sammy Nilsson got up; he realized that in her thoughts she was already on her way somewhere else. She had that thoughtful, clairvoyant expression that had marked her the past week, and he wondered whether there was anything to Morgansson’s speculations about an affair between her and Haver. The rumor that Haver was getting a divorce was already going around the building. He had evidently talked with Beatrice, apologized to her, and then asked Ottosson for a few days off to bring some order on the home front.
Haver had not said a word about divorce, but everyone assumed that was the reason for his accelerating dissatisfaction recently. He could “work from home,” was Ottosson’s extremely generous proposal, and they agreed that Haver would continue to investigate where Anders Brant had gone, whether he was in Spain or had traveled on from there.
Contacts were made with Interpol and the police at the Madrid airport, but producing passenger lists from all the various airlines proved more difficult than Haver could have imagined. But the Spanish machinery was in motion, as Ottosson put it at a meeting.
Sammy Nilsson observed Lindell. Had she lost weight? In any event she looked pale and tired, and Sammy did not believe that Klara Lovisa’s death was the sole reason. He considered asking what was up with her, but Lindell anticipated him.
“Sammy, will you stay a moment,” she said, gesturing toward the chair he had just got up from.
Something in her voice, but above all the worried expression, her entire posture, made him immediately close the door and sit down again.
She looked inquisitively at him; Sammy Nilsson got the impression that she was assessing him. Was he a suitable audience for what she obviously now had to get off her chest? She lowered her eyes, moving her hands mechanically over the papers in front of her, as if she was trying to put order into the mess, before she braced herself.
“I’ve not been completely honest,” she began, and Sammy Nilsson feared the worst. The last thing he wanted was a soap opera at the unit, with all that would entail. Then she spoke uninterruptedly for ten minutes, gave the background and told how the story between her and Brant had developed, that on Tuesday, the morning after the murder of Gränsberg, he disappeared without saying where he was going and how she then tried in vain to locate him, to get some sign of life, before finally receiving the peculiar-to say the least-message on the cell phone.
“Witness to a murder?” Sammy Nilsson exclaimed. “And he just takes off?”
“Yes, it’s completely improbable! And the man I’ve had with me at my home each and every night, having sex!”
He looked at her with surprise.
“‘May be problems,’ that flipping idiot wrote. Yes, it’s clear there’s a problem!”
“Take it easy,” said Sammy Nilsson, who had never seen Lindell so off balance. “There must be a reasonable explanation.”
“I thought so too,” said Lindell. “But why didn’t he tell me, instead of taking off as if he were guilty?”
“Maybe he is guilty,” said Sammy Nilsson calmly.
Lindell stared at him.
“He knew Gränsberg over twenty years ago, they played bandy together, they have demonstrably had contact-the notebook in the shed, Brant’s prints on the window, and Gränsberg’s prints in the Toyota.”
Lindell closed her eyes.
“What should I do?” she mumbled desperately.
Sammy Nilsson realized that it was not worth saying that she should have put her cards on the table from the start.
“Talk with Otto,” he said.
“He’ll never trust me again!”
“There’s no other way. If you drag it out even longer, it will be ten times worse.”
Lindell nodded, as if she already understood the simple fact that a lie creates new lies, until the abscess one day mercilessly bursts.
“I’ve texted him again,” said Lindell, and now there was only resigned fatigue in her voice. “I wrote that he’s in a bad way, that he must make contact, preferably come home. I don’t get what he’s thinking, he knows I’m a police officer. Can you understand?”
“Talk with Otto,” Sammy Nilsson repeated, who did not want Lindell to keep speculating about what had happened.
“I’ll give him another twenty-four hours,” said Lindell.
He looked at her with an expression as if she were an alcoholic who for the fifty-eleventh time pronounced a solemn vow of total abstinence.
“Don’t doubt me! Support me instead. There’s a lot at stake, don’t you get that?”
“Sure,” said Sammy Nilsson, “I get it. This is about the murder of Bosse Gränsberg, among other things.”
“I know! You don’t need to point that out!” said Lindell with an aggressiveness that surprised herself.
“You had a good thing going,” Sammy Nilsson observed more than asked, and he was thinking about Brant’s apartment and what they found in his bed and the open package of condoms. Lindell’s hair color was light, while the strands of hair they found were really dark. He was happy that Lindell was not directly involved in the case and hoped she would never need to read the report from the technicians. But there was an obvious risk that she would find out about it.
Lindell nodded. She was reluctant to say how many hopes she had already associated with this man.
Ann Lindell was not one to talk about her private life at work, which also led to recurring speculations about what was really going on, but Sammy Nilsson was close to her. Behind his roguish image there was seriousness and wisdom, she knew that.