Larsson put his cell phone back in his jacket pocket and started walking to Molin’s house. Lindman stayed where he was. It was several hours since he’d last thought about his illness, felt the creeping terror about when the severe pains might return. As he watched Larsson walking away, he felt as if he’d been abandoned.
Once when he was very young he’d been taken by his father to a football match at Ryavallen in Borås. It was a Swedish Premier League match, very important in one way or another, maybe crucial for the championship. He remembered that the opposition was IFK Göteborg. His father had said, “We’ve got to win this one,” and as they drove from Kinna to Borås he kept repeating the mantra, “We’ve got to win this one.” When they parked outside the ground, his father bought him a yellow-and-black scarf. It sometimes seemed to Stefan that his interest in football had been awoken by that yellow-and-black scarf rather than by the match itself. The teeming mass of people had frightened him, and he’d clung onto his father’s hand as they walked towards the turnstiles. In the middle of that seething crowd, he’d concentrated on just one thing: holding his father’s hand tightly. That was the difference between life and death. If he let go, he’d be hopelessly lost among all these expectant would-be spectators lining up to get in. And then, just before they came to the turnstiles, he’d glanced up at his father and seen a face he didn’t recognize. He didn’t recognize the hand either, now that he looked closely. Without realizing, he’d let go of his father’s hand for a couple of seconds and taken hold of the wrong one. He was panic-stricken, and burst into tears. People looked around to see what had happened. The stranger didn’t seem to have noticed that a boy in a yellow-and-black scarf had taken hold of his hand, and now snatched it away, as if the boy were about to pick his pocket. At the same moment, his father appeared again. The panic subsided, and they passed through the turnstile. They had seats at the top of the stand on one of the long sides, giving an overall view of the playing field, and they watched the yellow-and-blacks battling with the blue-and-whites over the light brown ball. He couldn’t remember the result. IFK Göteborg had probably won, in view of his father’s silence all the way home to Kinna. But Stefan had never forgotten that brief moment when he’d let go of his father’s hand and felt utterly lost.
He remembered that incident as he watched Larsson walk off through the trees.
Larsson turned. “Aren’t you coming?”
Lindman drew his jacket tighter around him, and hurried after him.
“I thought you might prefer me not to be there. What with Rundström.”
“Forget Rundström. As long as you’re here, you’re my personal assistant.”
They left Rätmyren behind. Larsson was driving fast. When they arrived at Dunkärret, Larsson immediately started shouting at one of the police officers there. He was a man in his fifties, small and very thin, by the name of Näsblom. Lindman gathered that he was stationed at Hede. Larsson was furious when he couldn’t get a straight answer to his question about precisely when the dog had disappeared. Nobody seemed to be sure.
“We gave it some food last night,” Näsblom said. “I keep dogs myself, so I brought some dog food from home.”
“Obviously you can get a refund for that if you submit an invoice,” Larsson said. “But when did the dog disappear?”
“It must have been after then.”
“Even I can work that out. When did you realize it was no longer there?”
“Just before I called you.”
Larsson looked at his watch. “Okay, you gave the dog some food last night. When?”
“About 7.”
“It’s now 1:30 in the afternoon. Don’t you feed dogs in the morning as well?”
“I wasn’t here then. I went home this morning, and didn’t come back until this afternoon.”
“But you must have seen if the dog was still there when you left?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t.”
“But you keep dogs yourself...”
Näsblom looked at the empty running line. “Obviously, I should have noticed. But I didn’t. I suppose I thought it must have been in its kennel.”
Larsson shook his head in resignation.
“What’s easier to notice?” he said. “A dog that’s disappeared, or one that hasn’t?”
He turned to Lindman. “What do you think?”
“If a dog is there, maybe you don’t think about it, but if it isn’t there, I suppose you should notice.”
“I’ll go along with that. What do you think?”
The last question was directed at Näsblom.
“I don’t know, but I think the dog was gone by this morning.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“No.”
“You’ve talked to your colleagues, no doubt. None of them saw it disappear, or heard anything?”
“Nobody noticed anything at all.”
They walked over to the running line, with no dog attached.
“How can you be certain that it didn’t just break loose?”
“I looked at the leash and the way it was attached to the running line when I fed it. It was a very sophisticated system. It couldn’t possibly have broken loose.”
Larsson studied the running line.
“It was dark by 7 last night,” he said. “How come you could see anything at all?”
“There was enough light from the kitchen window,” Näsblom said. “I could see.”
Larsson turned his back firmly on Näsblom.
“What do you have to say about this?” he said to Lindman.
“Somebody came here during the night and took the dog away.”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t know a lot about dogs, but if it didn’t start barking, it must have been somebody it recognized. Assuming it was a guard dog, that is.”
Larsson nodded, absentmindedly. He was studying the forest that surrounded the house.
“It must have been important,” he said after a while. “Somebody comes here in the dark and fetches the dog. A murder has been committed here, the place is sealed off. Even so, somebody takes the dog away. Two questions occur to me right away.”
“Who and why?”
Larsson agreed.
“I don’t like this,” he said. “Who apart from the killer could have taken the dog away? Andersson’s family lives in Helsingborg. His wife is in a state of shock and has said she isn’t going to come here. Have any of Andersson’s children been here? We’d have known if they had, surely. If it wasn’t a lunatic or a crazy animal rights supporter or somebody who makes a living from selling dogs, it must have been the murderer. That means he’s still here somewhere. He stayed around after murdering Molin, and didn’t leave after killing Andersson. You could draw several conclusions from that.”
“He might have come back, of course,” Lindman said
Larsson looked at him in surprise. “Why should he come back? Because he’d forgotten there was somebody else he needed to kill? Or because he’d forgotten the dog? It doesn’t add up. The man we’re dealing with — always assuming it is a man and that he’s operating on his own — plans what he does, detail by detail.”
Lindman could see that Larsson was thinking along the right lines. Even so, there was something nagging away at him.
“What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know.”
“You always know what you’re thinking. It’s just that you’re sometimes too lazy to spell it out.”
“I suppose the bottom line is that we don’t know for sure that the same person murdered Molin and Andersson,” Lindman said. “We think it was, but we don’t know.”
“It goes against common sense and all my experience to think that two incidents like this would take place at almost the same time and in the same place without there being a common murderer and a common motive.”