Chapter 10
Kjell ?stholm was the first one to spot the car, and it was really all thanks to Bill.
Bill was almost two, but he hadn’t been with Kjell for more than a few months, so the German shepherd hadn’t completely adjusted to life on the farm. Sometimes Bill woke up hours before dawn.
It was a different story in the past, of course; Kjell remembered the years when his wife was still alive, and he kept a dairy herd, as the happiest of his life. Back then, the alarm clock rang at quarter past three and Greta would pat Kjell gently on the chest to get him up.
These days, Bill woke Kjell. This morning, he’d slunk into the bedroom just before five, placed his front paws on the edge of the bed, and grunted.
Kjell took his time getting up. As he got on in age, his thighs and back gave him trouble and his balance was temperamental. It was past five by the time they were wandering across the property in the cold.
When Bill began to act strange, Kjell wondered what was going on but let him be. They went across the field, toward the fence on the other side.
Down on the road was a car, an old gray Volvo 240 with its back gate open. Kjell stopped.
“So I said to Bill, I said,” he explained in the police interview, “we’ll have to check that out.
So we climbed over the fence and approached the car.
And I looked into the back, of course, because the dog was leaping around something awful and I had to see what it was.
Then I screamed and ran home as fast as my legs would carry me and called it in. ”
—
Gerd Pettersson was leaning against the wall outside an apartment on Odengatan in Oskarstrom, fervently wishing that the new colleague from the city she’d been promised had been scheduled to start their first shift at midnight.
This kind of call was so exhausting and took forever to get through alone.
“Well, help me!” she heard from inside the apartment. “Don’t just stand there.”
The order was followed by thuds and bangs.
“Hasse, I want you to unlock the door and take a few steps back into the hall. Can you do that?”
Gerd’s words became round and tinny in the cramped stairwell.
“I can’t,” Hasse bellowed.
“You’re upsetting the neighbors, you know.”
“I don’t give a damn! Go get the machine.”
“What machine?”
“The computer machine.”
“What would we do with one of those?”
“On New Year’s Eve all the machines are going to explode in midair. They know all about it. If you put out a computer machine they won’t dare to radiate you anymore.”
It was almost five thirty in the morning. One of the neighbors had called to complain about old Hasse Ek, who lived on the top floor. He’d been on a roll since midnight, the caller reported, shouting and ranting, banging on walls and doors and keeping the whole building up.
“Can’t you help me?” Hasse howled.
It’s so odd, Gerd thought. The tinfoil-hatters always manage to sound both enraged and pitiful.
You’d never know it now, but Hasse had once been one of the most promising harness-racing drivers in the county of Halland.
Gerd herself had cheered him on at the Halmstad racetrack one summer when he took the Sprinterm?stare title.
Everyone was there, even Isidor Enoksson, the village priest. Everyone placed bets, the priest included, and after a beer or two up in the stands they got him to confess what he really believed in: Hasse Ek.
And God. Two entities which were, at that particular moment—according to Isidor—one and the same.
Maybe the priest should have believed in liquor as well, because it was stronger than Hasse and as the years went by, it slowly conquered him.
After a few stints at the rehab clinic, the old man sobered up, but the hard life had taken its toll and he began to rant about electromagnetic rays.
He did have children, two of them, but they’d flown the nest long ago.
They didn’t have the energy to deal with him.
His ex-wife lived with a banker in Halmstad.
“Hasse,” Gerd pleaded.
The microphone on her uniform crackled to life and the call echoed off the walls.
“What was that you said? Skavboke? Now?”