‘Yes, maybe that would be a good idea,’ Ann said, and scraped the last bit of food from the plate. ‘Did you eat any salad?’
Erik sighed and took a piece of cucumber from the bowl.
After dinner, Erik turned on the television, inserted a video, and sat down. Ann had made a cup of coffee and stood in the doorway to the living room. She observed her son, who was engrossed in Monsters, Inc.
He would start school next autumn. He was looking forward to it, often bringing up the exciting subject of starting school. Maybe he was hoping to find the answers to all of his questions there. His mother unfortunately did not know everything.
Where do you get all of your energy and unflagging curiosity, she wondered. Maybe your father was a little rascal too. ‘The Engineer,’ as Ann secretly referred to Erik’s father. She had no name and barely any memory of how he looked. Erik was the result of a couple too many glasses of wine, a desire for skin and a sweaty night.
Ann Lindell had been a shy and quiet child. She only came to life in her teens, as far as that was possible in a place like Ödeshög.
She returned to the kitchen, worried that she did not know what she should do with Östhammar. If she became engaged in it, the trips back and forth would pose a complication. Not that Erik would suffer, she would drop him off and pick him up at day care the same time as she had been doing all autumn.
But long drives were tiring, as was a murder – as she and everyone else assumed – investigation. It devoured energy, she had noticed that after only one day. She could say no, she knew Ottosson would give in. But how fair was it to dump the foot on someone else? Haver had his hands full, on the job and at home. Sammy Nilsson was overladen with work and the bandy season was in full swing. He trained kids and youths two nights a week. Fredriksson had grown too tired. Lindell could not imagine him driving back and forth to the coast, and he would not get along so well with Marksson. They would not function well together. Berglund was laid up for a while and Beatrice, no, that wouldn’t work.
She got out the pad of paper that she kept on her bedside table, flipped to a clean sheet, and started to write down questions.
SEVENTEEN
After leaving his workplace, Sven-Arne Persson immediately went home. He had a mist before his eyes that only let up once he was lying on his bed. He did not speak, he did not think. All his energy was focused on staying in motion.
Slowly but surely the impact of what Jan Svensk had told him started to seep into his consciousness. He accepted the fact that Elsa had been run over, without much surprise. He tried to imagine her under a thundering lorry but could hardly recollect her face anymore.
The fact that Uncle Ante was writing his memoirs, however, and that in these he would ‘tell everything,’ terrified him, since he knew what Ante was capable of. When his uncle decided on something he was almost impossible to divert from his cause. The fighter from the Teruel front took no orders.
Sven-Arne tossed and turned on the bed, thumping his fist into the wall and cursing all damned Swedes and above all the one with the very name of the Swedes, Svensk. He went through the events of the past few days, and above all he returned to the visit to Koshy’s. Why had he gone there when he had received so many signs along the way that something was up? He should have better interpreted the signals. Instead, he had walked straight into the establishment in a foolhardy manner, to his doom.
What had Ante told Elsa that had made her so upset? What was there to tell, except one thing? Elsa had heard, seen, and understood everything that had to do with him, perhaps even better than Ante. She was the one who had seen through him both in public life as well as in the bedroom. He was for her the impotent rhetorician, the personification of hypocrisy. When he had claimed that it was her coldness and clumsy manner that had made him impotent, she was not hurt – as he had intended – she laughed. She had laughed straight in his face, and in order to humiliate him further, had taken out the dildo she had bought many years ago.
‘This is my county commissioner.’ She had grinned and moved the mechanical member up and down.
She, who had shown no genuine happiness for years, had laughed.
Now she had become bewildered to the point that she had stepped out in front of a lorry. Not intentionally – Sven-Arne was convinced of that. Elsa would never willingly take her own life, that much he knew. Not the Elsa he knew, not with her calculating logic.
And yet now she had been thrown off her stride. Unconscious. He came upon himself wishing she would die. No, he recalled those thoughts. It was too low. The one whose turn it was to die was Ante. He was old. Why should he start to blabber? The last time they talked, half a year ago, he had seemed spry, at least not confused and demented. Quite the opposite: He had analysed the Swedish political situation of the day more clear-sightedly than in a long while. He had taunted the prime minister, who, like a nobleman, was renovating a manor house in his castle-rich home district.
‘He probably also has tenant farmers,’ Ante had declared cheerily, as he always did when he wanted to take aim at some elevated social democrat.
No, it was not very likely that he was confused. He would probably die with a cutting phrase ready on his lips.
Sven-Arne decided that Ante must have upset Elsa by saying that it came as no surprise to him to hear that Sven-Arne was in India. It must have hit hard, the discovery that his uncle – a man that Elsa had always disliked – had known these past twelve years what had happened to her husband. It must have been a blow to her pride. She had been doubly betrayed. Thus her bewilderment, and the anger that had come after the initial shock.
He decided that this was what had transpired. Everything else was unthinkable. The mention of memoirs was just idle talk. But on the other hand, if they were published posthumously he would be victorious even in death. For who would seriously be able to criticise the old man, and what would be the point? It was Sven-Arne who would become the target, he would be publicly flogged, hung out to dry. His sentence would be another matter altogether.
He stood up from the bed so quickly that he grew dizzy.
‘What’s the point?’ he screamed.
He already knew the answer. He would have been able to live with the consternation and the general hullabaloo, the critique, the outrage, yes all this he would have been able to take, but he would never again find peace. Not one second of peace. He would be pursued wherever he steered his course. Public interest would never wane, everyone would want to know. To know! All of these damned Swede-bastards who devoured all the shit, hair and all, wallowing in the mass media’s rubbish. They consumed the rotting headlines with a ravenous appetite, as if they were delicacies, and slurped up the offerings of retarded hoaxers as if they came from the king himself.
Ante’s triumphant voice would ring in his ears, whether or not the old man was dead. He had nourished himself with bitter fruit ever since he had returned from Spain, now some seventy years ago. The old man had become broken down, but his ideology had turned to stone and remained unchanged by the tooth of time. He was going to rub his poisonous balms into Sven-Arne’s open wounds.
As a fourteen-year-old on the roof of Rosberg’s barn he had sensed something of Ante’s dream, it was as if he could touch it, and since then he had never been able to cut that feeling out of his chest. When Ante said ‘someone has to do it, it’s just that simple,’ Sven-Arne had interpreted it literally. That time it had been about Rosberg’s roof. Twenty years before it had been about the Spanish Republic.
But Sven-Arne had also seen something deeply tragic in his uncle. The adults had quarrelled about Budapest in Grandmother Agnes’s kitchen. The fact was that the people of Hungary were being trampled.