She paused with her hand on the refrigerator handle, saw herself at Svenssons or Flustret. How would she behave? She couldn’t go there alone. I don’t have anything to wear, was her next thought. Mentally she scoured her wardrobe.
‘I’ll buy myself a dildo instead,’ she muttered.
She had heard someone on the radio talk about a multifunctional magically vibrating thing called ‘the butterfly.’ Apparently it provided miraculous pleasure.
She had to force herself to open the refrigerator and get out the yogurt. Being horny slowed her down.
When Erik ran off to the Hedgehog room and had steered his course straight to a teepee in the middle of the room, Ann talked for a while with a newly hired preschool teacher, Lotten, who told her that they were currently working with the theme of housing. Right now they were doing tents, then they would move on to yurts, and after Christmas hopefully igloos.
Ann praised their creativity and hard work, perhaps a bit too forcefully, because the woman looked almost embarrassed and dismissed the approbation.
‘I’m envious,’ Ann went on, but aware that she was not being completely honest, ‘when I see how you work. It seems so… inspiring. My job is just about misery.’
Lotten looked closely at her.
‘You’re a cop, aren’t you?’
Ann nodded and saw Erik come crawling out of the tent, turn his head, and flash her a quick smile before he ducked back in again.
‘I read about the county commissioner this morning. What a strange story.’
‘Do you have the paper here?’
‘Yes, I think it’s lying around here somewhere.’
They went to the staff room. The newspaper was on the table and Lindell immediately saw the headline: Missing Politician a Killer?
Lotten left her and Lindell quickly read through the story, which filled a whole page. One article went through the backstory, how Sven-Arne Persson had disappeared from Uppsala in the autumn of 1993 and what speculations it had triggered.
Now he had returned and freely given himself up to the police and confessed to the killing of Nils Dufva, the so-called wheelchair murder of the same year.
Lindell left the preschool, jumped in her car, and called Ottosson.
‘Who’s been talking?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ottosson said mournfully.
‘We agreed not to let this out and the next thing we know we get wartime headlines. What is this?’
‘Fredriksson and Sammy haven’t said squat to any reporter, I’m sure of that. They’re just as mad.’
‘I’ll put money on the fact that it’s that bitch at the front desk,’ Lindell said. ‘Or Riis.’
‘We don’t know,’ Ottosson repeated.
Lindell made a violent manoeuvre with the car and nipped in front of the queue at the red light on Vaksalagatan. She wished she had strobe lights on the car.
‘And we are not likely to find out,’ he added. ‘Are you on your way out to the coast?’
‘I’m going to meet Marksson at half past eight. I’m already late.’
‘How are you doing?’
With Ottosson you could never be certain what he meant by a particular question but she assumed he was referring to the case.
‘I think there’s something we’ve overlooked,’ she said, but did not attempt to elaborate this further, mostly because she herself did not understand it.
They agreed to meet in the afternoon. Lindell turned off the telephone and thereby Ottosson and the whole unit. She thought about her conversation with Lotten. Was she envious? Was the nursery school – or something equally undramatic – a realistic alternative to police work?
She chuckled.
‘Fuck,’ she said out loud.
She was on her way to a man on the coast. But it was the wrong man.
FORTY-ONE
The interrogation of Sven-Arne Persson was resumed at half past eight in the morning. Sammy Nilsson thought he looked decidedly more alert than the day before. Persson praised the breakfast but complained that his stomach was acting up.
When the coffee was on the table, Sammy Nilsson turned on the tape recorder, recorded the session details, and thereafter looked at Persson as if he expected him to automatically resume his narration.
‘Have you thought about-’
‘Yes, I have been thinking,’ Persson immediately interrupted, ‘I have been thinking as hard as I can. There’s nothing for me to add. Now I just want peace and quiet, that is the only thing I want.’
Peace and quiet, Sammy Nilsson thought, and felt a sudden spurt of irritation toward the man on the other side of the table. He kills a defenceless old man and then demands peace and quiet.
‘How were you feeling that autumn twelve years ago?’ Allan Fredriksson asked.
‘Fine,’ Persson said quietly, but corrected himself at once. ‘No, that is, I was intensely uncomfortable. I had it up to here with politics. All the bitches.’
‘Bitches?’
‘Yes, haven’t you noticed that the old biddies have taken over? All these well-spoken ladies in their trouser suits but without substance, without sense, only air. And there are men who are old biddies too. It may in fact be the case that there are more men than women in this category.’
Allan Fredriksson could not help smiling. Sven-Arne Persson was showing a human side for the first time. Up to this point he had appeared almost completely unfeeling, despite his politeness. Now a little humour was emerging. Fredriksson knew it was good and continued along this path.
‘You’re talking about your political opponents?’
‘And my friends,’ Persson said. ‘The talkers are distributed everywhere. That is no party-specific characteristic.’
‘And would you call yourself an old biddy?’
Persson looked up, bewildered.
‘You were a man in the midst of a career. How did you reach your position? Through empty chatter, as you call it, or were you unique?’
‘Not unique, perhaps unusual, but I was on my way to becoming a biddy. But we can forget all that now. This isn’t a political seminar. I went to India to get away from all this loose talk.’
‘So you didn’t leave because you had committed a murder?’
‘For both those reasons.’
‘Were you afraid of being found out?’
‘No, not really. You didn’t seem to be getting anywhere in the investigation. I had some contacts and kept myself abreast of your progress. Don’t take it personally. It was a difficult case, I know.’
‘Your flight must have been painstakingly planned. You had arranged for a false passport, put away large sums of money, and even prepared a disguise so that you could leave City Hall without being recognised.’
‘It amused me.’
‘To plan this?’
Persson nodded.
‘Do you know how you seem to me?’ Sammy Nilsson broke in. He had been listening to this dialogue without speaking. ‘You seem like a cold, calculating guy, who wants to pose as a defender of the weak, the only honest politician, but in reality he is a remorseless killer who disappears after his deed for his own amusement, not only fleeing from justice and civic responsibilities, but even from his own family.’
‘I had a wife, not a family.’
‘In short,’ Sammy Nilsson said, ignoring Persson’s comment, ‘you’re a bastard who hides behind pseudo-arguments about “old biddies”. You leave your wife and your friends to their worries and complete ignorance and you even seem to like it.’
‘That is probably an accurate description,’ Persson answered. ‘I’m not going to argue against your image of me.’