He had, for his generation, unusually beautiful handwriting, and the introduction also turned out, according to what he spontaneously thought, if not beautiful, then promising anyway.
For an hour he sat hunched over the table, writing, virtually uninterrupted, before he took a short break to peel and cut up a mango, mixing the beautiful yellow fruit with the insides of a passion fruit and a couple of strands of flowing honey, his usual snack. This too was a routine.
He ate with good appetite and a newfound sense of well-being, while he skimmed what he had come up with, careful not to soil the blindingly white sheet with the red text in the strangely exquisite handwriting, and continued.
Sometimes he looked up. The sun that shone in through the open window moved gradually and bit by bit mercilessly revealed the untidy kitchen-the soiled counter, with an unwashed cutting board, stains on the floor, piles of dishes that threatened to overflow the sink, the drain covered with grains of rice, fruit peels and coffee grounds-and that created a rising discomfort, this messiness and dirt. He was also less focused, his handwriting deteriorated and likewise his prose.
When the sun reached the refrigerator, a snorting contraption that had been there all these years, and which worked more like a freezer, even though the control was turned down to a minimum, he chose to stop.
He carefully screwed the cap on the pen, childishly satisfied that he had chosen this very one, got up, went out into the living room, and up to the window, now better equipped to meet the sight of the wall where the drama, which had such a disastrous finale, had taken place.
The scene was calm; not a person was to be seen. A few garments on a line were all that indicated that there were people in this ruin.
The main street was also relatively quiet, an occasional bus came careening at full speed, braked abruptly at the stop, and then puffed away again. The fruit seller with his small business, squeezed up against a wall on the sidewalk, stood peering down the street; it looked like he was waiting for a particular customer.
The alley below was deserted. The white flecks of paint on the stone pavement had changed hue, but Brant did not want to believe that it was blood from the murdered man that made the paint darken.
A woman came walking up from the buildings at the top of the alley. He followed her with his eyes. The next woman who goes by, he thought, if the next woman who passes by has a white garment on, I’ll go back to Itaberaba and Vanessa. That’s how it will be, chance will have to decide, all the wisdom from his writing at the kitchen table fell away, and he was unexpectedly captivated by this idiotic thought experiment.
Now the chance, or risk, was great that the next person would be wearing a white garment. He glanced down toward the main street and could see that white overwhelmingly predominated.
Should I pick a different color, he wondered, but realized that he could not change colors. That was a whim, playing with the irrational, but once the thought had been formulated the whole thing suddenly became serious. Here and now my future will be decided, he thought, captured by the contingencies and excitement of chance.
Suddenly he thought he glimpsed a movement in the alley, but it was only a dog poking its nose in a pile of trash.
He waited; two, then three minutes passed. No one came by. It started more and more to resemble a drawn-out torture, he recalled all the contradictory thoughts that had darted through his brain the past few days. If he did return to Itaberaba, would Vanessa really take him in after having been so humiliated? Did he love Ann? What was it about her really that captivated him so? Could he ever live together with a police detective?
He leaned his forehead against the frame that surrounded the window, closed his eyes, and inhaled deeply.
He started sweating, more and more tormented. Why, why did I get this stupid idea? He hardly dared look down at the alley anymore. With each second his game stood out as a threat.
At last he gathered his courage and looked out at the whole extent of the alley in a single sweeping motion, then yielded, and took a few steps away from the window.
“Now I’ll never know,” he murmured, filled with a strange mixture of relief and self-contempt.
Twenty-six
Four digging tools of various types, snow shovels included, were the average holdings of the five properties that Fredriksson and Nyman visited.
The first question they asked was whether any of the property owners thought they were missing any tools. Everyone understood the seriousness of the question. The news had quickly spread that the young girl who had been written about so much in the papers during the spring had been found in the area.
Sheds and outbuildings were inspected, all unlocked, the police noted, but no one thought they were missing anything.
While Nyman labeled and packed the tools in garbage bags they had brought along, a task that he performed with great zeal and with an enthusiasm that only a trainee can demonstrate, Fredriksson questioned the residents.
They reminded him of the three monkeys, Fredriksson said later, none of them had seen or heard anything, and none of them was particularly communicative. All of them were obviously sorry about the young girl’s tragic fate, but it was as though they thought it was a bad thing that the murder took place within their own domain.
“Did it really have to happen right here?” was an opinion that one of the villa owners expressed.
Another thought that now property prices would surely go down.
“Who wants to live where there’s been a murder?”
“The rate isn’t all that high,” Fredriksson objected, but the woman he was speaking with maintained with emphasis that “one thing leads to another.”
Nyman, who overheard the conversation, snorted and got a sharp look from the woman.
“You don’t know anything about the real world,” she said, turning her back to the two policemen.
The forensic investigation of the tools produced nothing. True, there was organic material on several of the spades, but nothing that could be directly linked to the discovery site. A concrete shovel had dark stains on the blade, but that turned out to be paint.
“If the murderer were so ice cold that he stole a spade and then returned it, he was certainly careful to remove all traces,” Nyman said sententiously, when together with Fredriksson he visited the tech squad. Eskil Ryde reported on the lack of anything substantial, and Nyman added something about waste of work time.
Fredriksson recalled a different tune when they were collecting the tools, but chose not to comment, aware that the old technician would surely take care of that.
“You don’t know squat, not about police work anyway,” said Ryde with such sharpness in his voice that Nyman thought better about making a reply.
Instead, his face turning beet red, he turned and left.
“Which fucking quota did he come in on?” Ryde asked.
Fredriksson shrugged his shoulders.
“We had a Nyman before, and he didn’t last long, do you remember?”
Fredriksson remembered. Through his work on the vice squad, Nyman the First had come in contact with an escort service that supplied young women as dinner companions as well as for more physical activities. That Nyman chose to close his eyes, and for his silence was offered services that he eagerly took advantage of. This went on for a few years before the whole thing was uncovered. Nyman was encouraged to resign, but the case was kept quiet, even though a young journalist at Upsala Nya Tidning was on the trail of the “prostitution affair.”
There was whispering that the whole thing was too sensitive, as several bigwigs within the academic administration also made use of the services, not personally, but by supplying suitable telephone numbers to foreign guest lecturers, among others, in one case to a Nobel Prize winner unusually active for his age.