After a couple of minutes of conversation, Mr No took him by the arm – a gesture he only bestowed upon Westerners – and showed him into a corridor, stopping at a door and opening it.
The room was bare and empty, with the exception of a wooden table and a couple of chairs. A man and a woman were sitting at the table. They immediately rose to their feet. The first thing Stolt noticed was the fear in their eyes. Thereafter he felt astonishment. The woman before him was identical to the woman in the photograph.
Mr No introduced him. Stolt nodded, smiled, and greeted the woman. She immediately began speaking in an intense torrent of words, and Mr No waited for her to finish. When she was done she stared at Sune Stolt as Mr No translated.
The photograph was of herself. It had been taken two years ago outside the restaurant where she still worked. The person who had snapped the picture was her sister, who shortly thereafter travelled to Sweden.
‘Why did she go to Sweden?’
Mr No shot him a look that expressed as much irritation as sorrow. The woman answered with another long explanation. Again Mr No waited patiently for her to finish.
‘She was going to pick berries in the big forests,’ he summarised. ‘She was going to make a lot of money. You have big forests, isn’t that right?’
‘Yes, we do,’ Stolt said. ‘What is her sister’s name?’
He used the present tense as the woman did not know her sister’s fate.
‘Pranee Kaew Patima,’ said Mr No.
It was an hour later, when Sune Stolt had checked in to the hotel, that the grief washed over him. As long as he was at the police station he could retain his composure, but outstretched on the bed in his room, prey to the vertigo no physician could find a reason for, he gave way to the bottomless black void that had recently grown deeper and wider. He felt ashamed, both as a Swede and as a man. Bosse Marksson had given him enough information so that he gathered how it had gone. The same old story, this time with a deadly outcome.
Thailand let its young women go to humiliation and death. Sune Stolt hated the Scandinavians, British, and Germans, the old men, the gangs of rowdy twenty-year-old men, the pudgy pale middle-aged men, and the well-established ones with gold clubs in their luggage. All came for the sake of flesh.
Most of them were content to screw their way around massage parlours and in dim rooms behind bars, others moved down for a few winter months in order to live like kings, and still others imported the reed-thin girls to a cold and loveless life in Europe. Of course there were exceptions, of course there were instances of real love and concern, but most of the time it was purely a matter of commerce with bodies.
Now yet another name could be laid alongside the earlier ones, Pranee Kaew Patima.
How long would he be able to stand looking up close at this misery? He knew this hatred threatened to make him a poor policeman. He glanced at the clock. He knew he ought to get up from the bed, turn on the computer, and email Marksson what he had discovered.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Ann Lindell could not help feeling a smidgeon of triumph as she thought of Beatrice’s haughty face and the rest of her colleagues’ resistance to her suggestion about advertising in Thailand.
‘Fucking brilliant!’ she exclaimed.
Bosse Marksson, who had read Sune Stolt’s entire email, was more restrained.
‘It’s a relief to have a name,’ he said. ‘But how is it pronounced?’
‘Let’s just call her Patima,’ Lindell said. ‘The identification of the woman in the photograph is one hundred per cent? No doubt?’
‘No, Sune is completely convinced that the picture is of the woman he met in Krabi. He even went to the restaurant where she worked. And the police there were going to get a photo of sister Patima and send back that-’
‘-we can test at the campsite,’ Lindell completed.
Marksson grunted.
‘The timing fits,’ he said. ‘She left Thailand at the beginning of August last year.’
‘Okay, then we are a step closer.’
But Lindell also realised that the investigation had ground to a halt. They had a name for the woman and a connection to Tobias Frisk, they had a DNA match between the hair they had found in Frisk’s house and the foot, they had the chainsaw, but there it ended. They could conclude that there was a great probability that Frisk had murdered and thereafter dismembered Patima. How, why, and when they would never know. Most likely they would also never recover a body to go with the foot they had found. She had probably been buried or dumped into the sea.
The case was solved but left a bitter taste. The usual sense of satisfaction wasn’t there, something Marksson also commented on.
‘I wish the bastard hadn’t been such a bastard and blown his head off.’
‘Should we keep going?’
‘Can we keep going?’ Marksson countered. ‘We have questioned everyone we can think of, neighbours, his former girlfriend, and co-workers.’
‘And what do their contributions have in common?’
‘That Tobias Frisk was an unusual fellow but no one who would have taken his own life or that of another person.’
‘What do you make of that?’
‘That life is full of surprises,’ Marksson said.
‘Okay,’ Lindell said. ‘We’ll drop the whole thing. I can check with the campsite. It would be good to get a positive ID on the woman, but then we’ll close the file.’
‘What should we do with the foot?’
‘Save it for now,’ Lindell said, after a moment’s reflection. ‘I don’t think we’ll send it to Thailand. That would feel rotten.’
‘A foot may be better than nothing. What do we know, perhaps there may be some kind of religious point to it, I mean in Thailand.’
After having called Sorsele Campsite and agreeing with Gösta Ohlman that she would shortly be emailing a picture of the woman, Lindell left the police building. She needed to walk, to get a little air, even if the weather wasn’t the best. The whole city was wreathed in a damp fog.
She walked west along the Luthagsled. Her goal was the Café Savoy. During the quick walk she came to think of the old man, the county commissioner’s uncle, who lived only a couple of blocks away, and from there her thoughts wandered to Berglund. He would be discharged from the hospital soon and after that there would be some weeks of convalescing. She wondered how it would be. Her image of her colleague was altered in its very foundation and Lindell didn’t like it. She wanted her old, secure colleague back, not some shaky, troubled, and pessimistic old man.
The tables at Savoy were filled. That was more and more the case. Lindell looked over half a dozen mothers who occupied two tables with their offspring in high chairs and on their laps. They looked to have been there quite a while. All of the coffee cups were empty and the tables covered in rubbish. Lindell thought it was out of line to occupy a café for their mum gatherings. Three baby carriages were wedged between tables and chairs. A little one was crawling around on the floor with a bun in his hand, another was screeching in his high chair.
She stood there for a few minutes but none of the customers showed any signs of imminent departure – definitely not the mothers. Lindell sighed and left.
She slowly walked past the flower shop and the kiosk on the corner and then walked east on Ringgatan, with a vague feeling that things were not as they should be. It wasn’t just Berglund who was out of sorts, that much was clear. Beatrice was unusually cranky and Sammy Nilsson was unrecognisable. Even Ottosson was unusually listless. Perhaps it was the approaching Christmas holiday that was making people so down.
She came to a sudden stop outside Konsum. There had been something that hadn’t felt right to her during the whole investigation of the severed foot. She had perceived her uncertainty like an irritating static in the background and Marksson had expressed similar thoughts. The way the whole thing had unfolded appeared obvious, even if a frustrating number of threads hung loose. What was it that rubbed?