The first one was from July 19, 1945. A poem was quoted as a superscription above the greeting. Following the poem, the letter read:
Dearest Anna!
My vacation weeks are the last week of July and the first week of August. I will arrive at Stockholm Central Station on July 26. We can head straight to Ingarö as far as I’m concerned. It sounds absolutely wonderful that you’ve managed to rent a house on the island! I feel that I need to rest up. This year has been filled with work, and it’s much harder to be the house mother and head nurse than I thought it would be! But now I have a nice, comfortable apartment. What a difference from the tiny room I had before, where I had to share kitchen and bathroom.…
Irene quickly read the rest of the letter. Not one word about Hilding or Lovisa Löwander. She sped through the other letters as well. Same negative result. Not one word about love—or any other emotions, for that matter—just small stuff about happenings at work and in daily life.
The last letter was entirely different. It also began with a poem, but there were only a few lines below the quote. Irene felt strong emotion at the date: March 21, 1947. It must have been written a day or two before Tekla hanged herself.
Irene leaned back in her chair and tried to think. Why had Anna kept these letters of all letters? Did they contain some important information somehow? Tekla and Anna had grown up as sisters. Did they have a secret code?
She felt her brain slow to a stop. No use continuing. Time to go to the coffee machine and get another cup.
She’d just dropped the required two crowns into the machine when she heard a familiar voice.
“There you are. Any scoops for me today?”
Kurt Höök didn’t sound angry, just sarcastic. Extremely sarcastic, actually. Perhaps he was entitled, Irene told herself.
She turned around with an innocent smile on her lips. “Well, hello. Can I offer you a cup of coffee? Not as good as yours over at GT, but this will have to do.”
Höök shrugged and mumbled something that Irene took as a yes. She stuffed two more crowns into the machine and handed him a steaming-hot cup. She hadn’t thought of any strategy, just walked ahead as Höök followed her to her office. He stopped with raised eyebrows as he reached her door.
“Are you moving in or moving out?”
Irene laughed, but she could understand his quizzical expression. Files, folders, and paper were strewn everywhere. The paper bags containing Tekla’s and Hilding’s books and clothes stood on the floor.
“You won’t believe me. These things belonged to the ghost nurse. They fill two whole bags.”
“Somebody is putting you on. People here didn’t have paper bags back then. Especially not ones with a grocery-store logo on them.”
Amazing how this guy spotted things. He was right, of course. Irene hoped he wouldn’t ask about the suitcases.
“Where did you find all this stuff?” Kurt Höök asked. “And is this everything?”
Irene could almost sense his professional antennae go up. She was just about to give him a noncommittal answer when something occurred to her. Someone had broken into the suitcases recently. What had been taken from them?
She was jolted from her musings as Höök added, “And why are you wasting time sorting through it?”
Irene waved his questions away and pointed him to a chair. Her brain went into overdrive as it tried to churn out a story not too far from the truth. She made a tentative effort.
“As you know, we found Linda Svensson hanged in the hospital attic at almost the same place where the ghost nurse Tekla had hanged herself way back when.”
Irene took a large sip of coffee as she decided where to go next.
“In one corner of the attic, we found three old suitcases. They’d been recently broken into. One of them belonged to Tekla Olsson, and the other two belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Löwander—that is, Sverker’s parents. Now I’m sorting through them to see if anything here is important, especially since someone had broken the locks to get into them. Whoever it was must have been looking for something, but what?”
“If they found it, it would be long gone, Höök pointed out.
“True. Still, we have to sort through everything just in case there’s something we missed. Probably not, but you never know.…”
She let her sentence trail off for a reason. She took another long sip of coffee. Höök bent his long body over the desk and picked up the pile of faxes before she had a chance to stop him.
“What are these?”
“Old letters Tekla wrote to her foster sister in Stockholm.”
“Why in the world would you read these?”
Irene didn’t like his inquisitive stare and sharp questions. Why did she ever invite the most inquisitive journalist in all of Göteborg into her office? But here he was!
“We were tracking down Tekla’s sister, but, unfortunately, she’s deceased. We did find her son, and he was the one who faxed these to us.”
“Why would these letters be of interest?”
“Don’t know.”
Irene could tell how dumb she sounded but decided to maintain her tack. She watched Kurt Höök flip through the letters. Then he started to arrange them by date. Thoughtfully, he read through them and hummed to himself. Finally Irene couldn’t restrain herself and burst out, “Do you think they might be in a secret code?”
Höök gave her a sharp look. “What do you expect to find?”
She decided to tell the truth without revealing everything. “Details about an affair. We know that an unhappy love affair was behind Tekla’s suicide.”
Höök looked at the pile of papers with renewed interest. Still reading the letters, he said, as if it were just a passing thought, “And why would the reason behind an old suicide be of interest?”
“Honestly, we don’t know. However, we believe you found the truth in your article. The murderer was wearing an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform so that he would be taken for Nurse Tekla. We believe that Mama Bird saw him that night. We believe that’s why she was killed. Once your article was published, the murderer knew that Gunnela Hägg had seen him. We believe that the killer knew of her existence prior to the nurses’ murders, since he knew immediately she was the ‘anonymous neighborhood woman.’ ”
Höök’s face darkened, but his voice had a bit of belligerent guilt. “You can’t say that my article was the reason she was killed.”
“No, we’ll never know that for sure. These are our hypotheses.”
Silently, Höök read through the letters a second time. At length he shook his head and said, “No, there’s nothing in the text. It must be in the poems.”
“The poems?”
“Every one of her letters starts with a poetry quotation. Maybe this was a trick they used to convey something to each other they didn’t want to write down.”
“Maybe. But Anna didn’t use poetry in her letters.”
“But Tekla did in the letters that Anna saved,” Kurt Höök replied.
That thought hadn’t crossed Irene’s mind as she’d read. She’d only glanced at the poems.
Now she read them again, and with the recent revelations the poems seemed to fit into what Irene knew of Tekla’s life history.
The poem in the first letter, dated July 19, 1945, was a happy summer poem and contained no hidden message as far as Irene could tell. On the other hand, the second letter, dated August 25, appeared more somber:
As friendly evening stars burn
And send their rays down to the valley,
He looked at his servant,
See! He saw as the loved one sees.
WAS TEKLA TRYING to say that Hilding had declared his love for her? “His servant” seemed fairly belittling, but maybe that’s how Tekla saw her relationship to the much older head doctor.