Chapter 12
The light over the fields and meadows was pale and chilly as quicksilver that morning. It gradually gathered strength and people woke with a strange feeling in their bodies, something kymig—uneasy, eerie. As though the whole village had dreamed the same uncanny dream during the night.
Blue-and-white police tape fluttered around the Volvo.
A large van had pulled up there, and people in uniforms and dark-blue coveralls went back and forth from its open back doors.
Hands covered in lavender vinyl gloves held cameras, notepads, pens.
The activity proceeded solemnly, quietly; any discoveries were disclosed with great discretion.
Kjell stood outside the tape with Bill, who was visible, and recognizable, from a distance thanks to his pale coat.
Many people noticed the dog first. Next, presumably, they noticed the stranger.
That was how she was described, Gerd Pettersson’s new colleague, who had the bad luck of starting her new position at the Oskarstrom police station on that particular morning.
Siri Bengtsson had arrived early and seemed unbothered by the fierce cold. According to her contract, she wasn’t due to start until Monday, but she had personally contacted Gerd at the Oskarstrom office to suggest she come by over the weekend to become familiar with her new workplace.
If she regretted that choice, she didn’t show it.
She was skinny as a young birch tree, everyone thought, not least Gerd.
She barely filled out her uniform, and she wasn’t much older than such a tree either, with aloof features and intense brown eyes that seemed bottomless.
Most people assumed she had roots in China or maybe Thailand.
—
Gerd tried to make up her mind about what she was seeing. It looked like an accident, yet something was off. The Grenbergs’ Volvo had crashed into a tree down on the road that ran between the ?stholm and Soderstrom properties. The back gate of the car was open.
There were visible tire tracks in the slush behind the car, as though the Volvo had skidded and yawed before the driver lost control and sailed right into one of the big old trees that lined the road.
If you walked around and stood by the driver’s-side door, you could see blood on the steering wheel, and there were more dark-red stains, alongside some footprints left by large, rugged shoes.
And there, in the cargo area, a boy. Two blows to the head, it looked like.
One at his temple and one on the back of his neck.
Blows from what? Gerd and Siri leaned over the body of Mikael Soderstrom.
No smell yet. That was because of the cold, according to the medical examiner on duty, who had been summoned to Skavboke.
He was of the sullen, cautious sort and didn’t say much more.
The fatal blows to the head, though—anyone could see those.
“And,” the medical examiner said after a great deal of observing, “last night, sometime.”
“What’s that?”
“The time of death.”
“Right, we knew that. Could you be a little more specific?”
“Not really. Not yet.”
Gerd glanced wearily at Siri. “Okay. But if you had to guess?”
“I don’t like guessing.”
“For Christ’s sake. One o’clock? Three o’clock?”
He shrugged and looked at the body. “Sometime between one and two.”
“So, one thirty?”
The medical examiner pursed his lips. “Maybe.”
—
When Gerd leaned down once more, she noticed flakes of rust in the boy’s hair.
“A hammer?” she suggested.
“Or a shovel,” Siri said. “Something like that.”
It really was kymig. Not just that Mikael was the one lying there—it was the car, too, the fact that it belonged to Madeleine Grenberg. She had bought it for herself and her daughter, Felicia, after Goran died and they could no longer make payments on their big Ford.
Madeleine herself had called the police this morning when she woke up and made her way, on her crutches, to the kitchen to brew coffee. She had looked out the kitchen window and wondered where on earth her car had gone.
Madeleine’s injury was also a well-known fact, even though no one in the village had witnessed her fall from the roof yesterday.
Several people had heard her calls for help as she lay on the ground, though; among them was Frans Ljunggren, a mechanic, who came to her rescue and drove her to the hospital.
Her left leg was X-rayed, examined, and placed in a cast up to her knee.
Now she needed crutches to get around, and Felicia was sticking around their house to help her out.
At the moment, Madeleine was near the scene, tippy and unsteady on the crutches; apparently she hadn’t gotten used to them yet. The two officers made their way over to her. Madeleine looked fragile and shaken; her handshake was chilly and slack.
“Hi,” Siri said. “My name is Siri. I’m new.”
“I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “Is it really Mikael?”
“Yes,” Gerd said. “I’m afraid it is. How did your car end up here?”
“No idea. I have no idea.” She repeated the words mechanically, tonelessly. “It was in its usual spot at our place when we went to bed last night.”
“And when was that?”
“Oh, a little before eleven, maybe.” She nodded at her cast. “They prescribed pills to help me sleep. Once those kicked in, I slept like the dead. Felicia went to bed at the same time. The car was gone when I got up this morning, but I was still all groggy from the pills, so it took a while for me to realize something was wrong.”
It wasn’t uncommon for people to borrow the car, especially young people in the village who didn’t have cars of their own yet, but they always asked first. After checking with her daughter, Madeleine felt she had no choice but to call the police and report it stolen.
“Your daughter thought you should call,” Siri said, more as a statement than a question. “What time did she go to bed, again?”
“At the same time as me.”
“And did you see her during the night?”
“No, it, I…The pills, like I mentioned. Why?”
“We have to ask, Madeleine,” said Gerd, as though she were speaking to a friend, nodding toward the car. “Given that it’s your car, and the keys are in the ignition, that means whoever took it had access to the keys. And there’s the fact of Mikael. Felicia knows him, obviously.”
“Yeah. Of course.” She nodded, her gaze vacant, and wobbled on her crutches. “I’m happy to help. You know, sometimes I just leave the keys in the car, because who’s going to steal it out here? And on occasion I forget to take them out of the ignition.”
A moment later, Madeleine hopped stiffly away on her crutches.
“Listen, Gerd,” Siri said. “What she said about leaving the keys in the car. Can that really be true?”
“Welcome to the boonies,” Gerd said.
She crossed her arms and studied the vehicles that had begun to gather outside the cordoned area. Old Kjell was still there with his dog. He was giving a loud and dramatic account of his morning walk and the discovery of the car to anyone who would listen.
Gerd clicked on her radio and called the station.
“Where are we at with the dogs?”
“The closest team is in Gothenburg. It’s going to take all day to get them here.”
Gerd shook her head. “Thanks, I guess,” she said, and clicked off.
It was good to have Siri, at least, although it was a disadvantage that she didn’t know the area.
Another disadvantage was her miniature size, and the fact that she probably had to hold tight to a sturdy object if a breeze kicked up, and her lack of experience in general was a third.
But even so, Gerd found it was nice to have someone at her side on a morning like this, at the very start of an investigation that already didn’t bode well.
Siri approached the police tape and addressed Kjell.
“I don’t suppose he’s a hunting dog, is he?”
Kjell lit up. “Why, yes he is. Smart as a whip.”
“Do you think he can track blood?”
Well, look at that, Gerd thought. Never judge a book by its cover. Maybe there was a real police officer in that tiny body after all. A small one, at least anatomically speaking, but even so.