He reminded her too much of her father, bent before his time, his life juice dried up, casting a frightened glance at death.
In a way she did not accept Berglund’s sadness and doubt. He had made it through brain surgery and should be praising the God he had worshipped. Instead he was drawing the completely opposite conclusion: His God no longer existed. Lindell was not a believer, had never been, but found it sloppy and unfair to treat one’s faith in this way. If it could not stand up to an illness, it was not worth much.
It occurred to her that she should perhaps contact the hospital minister and ask him to pay a visit to Berglund. Clearly he needed someone to talk to. But maybe the best medicine would be to dig into an investigation.
She could not claim that the missing politician intrigued her. The naked foot in the boot was far more compelling, but Ola Haver was leading that investigation and that was fine by her. Driving the ninety to one hundred kilometres out to Öregrund was difficult for Lindell, since she had to drop off and pick up Erik at day care. The town was so small that it would have been a high-risk project. She could bump into Edvard on any corner. It still hurt to think of him even though she had learnt to handle the feelings and thoughts that could so suddenly flare up. Just a couple of years ago the ground trembled at the very mention of his name or when her memories took a stranglehold. All too often it was wine that would deaden her unease, but since a couple of months back she had decided not to drink a single drop for a while. She convinced herself she was living a good life. She had finally produced order out of all the threads that went this way and that.
In the parking lot she had trouble remembering where she had parked, and at the same moment she spotted the car the mobile phone rang. She saw from the display that it was Ottosson, head of Violent Crimes. She considered ignoring the call but finally answered.
‘How is the old man?’
‘Fine,’ Lindell said. ‘He’s a little dazed but up and about.’
Ottosson talked on but Lindell picked up something in his tone of voice that put her on edge. Finally he reached the real reason for his call.
‘Ola isn’t feeling well.’
Ann Lindell realised immediately what this meant.
‘I won’t take it.’
‘He’s throwing up like a pig.’
‘Fredriksson will have to go to Öregrund.’
‘That’s not a good solution and you know it. It’ll be quick. Our colleagues out there just need a little attention and encouragement, and then you can go back home.’
Lindell sighed. She knew exactly how it would be. She would not be able to turn him down; her working relationship with Ottosson depended on cooperation. Even though he was a fantastic boss who had always supported her, she could not say no to him. Both of them knew how things looked in the division. Everyone was weighed down with work. Fredriksson had his battery cases, Riis was on disability, Sammy Nilsson was attending a course, and Beatrice Andersson was investigating a rape in Tunabackar.
She also knew that this was not simply a matter of driving out to Öregrund, chatting a little, and heading back home.
‘It’s a woman’s foot,’ Ottosson said.
She cast out her last card.
‘Erik has been a little under the weather this week.’
‘You know my wife likes to look after him,’ he said.
Asta Ottosson had jumped in as babysitter many times before, and even picked up Erik from day care. Ottosson’s statement was the nail in the coffin to her objections.
Ottosson may have realised the unfairness of his dealings, as he hurried to add that Sammy Nilsson would immediately take over once he returned from his course.
NINE
Once upon a time, Uncle Ante had been part of a mission to blow up a bridge over a river. Sven-Arne Persson could not remember what the river was called, but he could remember his excitement as Ante narrated – slowly at first, and then with increasing engagement – how they crawled between the boulders, how they approached the start of the bridge. Sven-Arne could feel the sharp stones cutting through his trousers, his breathing grew quick and yet controlled, and he scrutinised his uncle’s face in order not to miss a single detail.
It was cold and it was night-time. The decimated troop took advantage of the fact that there was a new moon. Above them there was an outpost, an old stone house with a tile roof. It was most likely just Moroccans, and they stayed inside. The smoke from the chimney blew down over Ante and his three comrades. They had been forced to leave the fifth man, a German, when he sprained his ankle and could not continue up and down the steep slopes.
‘We never saw him again,’ Ante said. ‘His name was Ernst.’
His uncle went silent for a while, and Sven-Arne knew he was thinking about the German. A thing like that, to have to leave someone behind, a trifling matter in a war that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives, brought Ante to silence, sometimes for days and weeks. He would refuse to continue his story, became grumpy and got something in his eyes that made Sven-Arne avoid him. The war inside Ante was thundering, a battle noise that seldom quietened. ‘The Africans were the worst,’ he said finally, ‘they fought like animals. They terrified us, as if they did not know what death was.’
The bridge operation, the in part failed mission to cut the supply chain to the Fascist armies gathered just outside Teruel, was something that returned again and again in Sven-Arne’s mind. It symbolised something more than the targeting of a poorly constructed wooden bridge.
‘The timber was popping in the cold, kind of whiny. It was around minus fifteen degrees Celsius. One of my companions, who was from southern Italy, was also whining. He kept talking about Sicily and the heat. He was a farmhand and used to hard labour. But he hated the cold.’
Sven-Arne never figured out what the bridge stood for. It was just one of the stories he had grown up with.
He rolled over onto his back. It was almost ten o’clock. The voices in the corridor had died down. The hotel had suddenly grown unbelievably quiet.
Sven-Arne stared up at the ceiling where Ante crawled on toward the bridge. The Italian was right after him, thereafter the two Bulgarians. One of them was a miner, he was the one who was going to set the explosives. He was big, almost too big, well over six feet tall and ‘wide as a barn door’ and Communist like most Bulgarians. He had been a body guard for Dimitrov and spoke both Russian and German fluently.
‘I felt safe when “the Brush” was around,’ Ante said. ‘That was what we called him; the hair stuck straight out of his ears like a brush. He did everything right. He was a good buddy.’
That was the highest praise one could get. Once he had called Sven-Arne ‘my little pal.’
But did the Bulgarian actually do what was right?
‘It was war,’ Ante said. ‘Not everything goes like you think it will. You die. No one thought they were going to die. At least not when we landed or came hiking through the Pyrenees; there we were invincible. The Brush did what he could, and more. He was a piece of fly shit, like the rest of us. A speck of dust.’
A good buddy was suddenly a piece of fly shit who didn’t mean anything. Sven-Arne wanted everyone to be a hero. Surely the Bulgarian miner did not blow himself up for nothing.
‘No, maybe not,’ Ante said, and Sven-Arne noticed that his uncle was close to the big silence.
It was as if there was always a fight going on inside him, a battle flowing back and forth. All of the battles had a place inside his head, nothing was forgotten. Not a single speck of dust.
That afternoon on Rosberg’s rooftop, when Ante stood up and screamed something in Spanish, was the only time Sven-Arne had seen him really worked up, off-kilter in a way he had never seen him either before or after, but he calmed down almost immediately. Rosberg waved. Perhaps he thought Ante was yelling something to him?