Chapter 64
As the evening and night wore on, the picture began to take shape. A certain Sten Persson had been buried earlier that day, Vidar learned. Killian Persson’s father.
Filip had attended both the service in the chapel and a portion of the reception at the village hall.
Then he left to go to work. But he never turned up there.
Instead, it seemed, he had stopped his company van along the road where his childhood home used to be, stepped into the young, green foliage, and was beaten to death.
Vidar clicked his pen, crossing out names of witnesses and tipsters. Some had nothing of value to share, while others he hadn’t been able to reach yet because it had gotten too late.
He yawned as he sat in the car. He bought new washer fluid and a to-go cup of coffee from the twenty-four-hour gas station in S?nnarp.
The digital clock in his car said it was seven minutes past one in the morning.
Eighteen degrees Celsius outside. He watched cars pull into and out of the station.
Men and women climbed out, filled up, purchased midnight snacks.
He leaned against the headrest and drank his coffee, closed his eyes.
He’d been thirty years old back then, in 1999, still in uniform as a patrol officer.
He remembered the landslide—he’d been there as a small cog in the great relief effort over the following days.
It looked as if a bomb had gone off, he recalled.
All that was left of the area was a crater.
Now the main suspect, Sten Persson, was deceased.
He thought about Filip Soderstrom and the rap sheet he’d read through this evening: assault and intimidation, possession and larceny, often all at once; the most recent was from five years ago.
Filip was kicked out of Billiards there was nothing about that in his interviews or the database.
No signs in his home, either, according to the initial report from the officers on scene there.
They should be getting in touch again soon, incidentally. Unless they decided to wait until morning.
Vidar opened his eyes, bolted down the rest of the piping-hot coffee, and brought his phone to his ear.
“I’m calling about an old case,” he said when someone picked up. “A homicide in Skavboke, 1999.”
The detective on duty yawned and hit some keys. “Okay, here it is.”
“Can you give me the names of the investigators?”
The man on the other end muttered and clicked at his computer. “There were quite a few, both out in Oskarstrom and here in town.”
“Who was it in Oskarstrom?”
“Gerd Pettersson, she died a few years ago. And Siri Bengtsson.”
Vidar jotted down the names. “No perpetrator apprehended,” he said, “if I recall correctly.”
“Suspect deceased, it says here.” He clicked again. “Killian Persson. But it seems to be an open case, still.”
“Can you check if it’s been digitized?”
A pause. An old American car rumbled into the station. The driver, a young man, got out to adjust the tire pressure. A couple was entwined in the back seat; Vidar could see their silhouettes in the glow of the station lights.
“No, it hasn’t. It’s still in the boxes.”
Boxes, Vidar thought. Dusty old boxes, yet again. “Can you have them sent up?”
“Consider it done.”
Vidar’s phone beeped as a call came in. For a moment he considered ignoring it and simply going home to see Patricia instead. They were supposed to split a bottle of wine on the patio eight hours ago.
He accepted the call.
“Oh, hello,” came a familiar voice that was much less frenzied than last time. “This is Adrian al-Hadid from patrol. We’re still out here, my shift is almost over, but I wanted to stick around until you arrived.”
“Go home and get some sleep. I won’t be there until tomorrow anyway.”
“No,” Adrian said with an unexpected air of authority, as though he had grown ten feet taller out there in Skavboke. “I really think you’d better come now.”