Chapter 66
Bizarre, Vidar thought later, as he stood on the street and watched the slim man vanish slowly into what was left of the Halland summer night. Light had long since begun to return, and the birds were up and bursting with song.
Bizarre. Was that ever the right word.
—
It had still been stuffy, the air stale, in the lobby where Sander Eriksson was waiting for him.
“Can we sit outside?” Sander wondered. “It’s cooled off now. Somewhere nearby?”
They left the building in silence and settled on a bench in Norre Katts Park.
The rotunda up on the hill was closed, but faintly illuminated.
Colorful garlands hung from the trees. A group of young people were still hanging around on the small stage, holding cans and bottles.
Some sort of banner had fallen to the ground.
“I’m not quite sure what was going on up there,” Vidar remarked, mostly just to have something to say.
“I read in the paper that it was supposed to be an evening of poetry.”
“Nice,” Vidar said, as though he didn’t understand what that entailed.
“Not a poetry fan?” Sander said.
“Oh, I am.” Vidar smiled. “I’m just not so sure poetry likes me back.”
“Same here. My wife is the one who got me to appreciate it. It took a while.”
“I had actually been planning to get in touch with you tomorrow. But this is fine, too, of course. I heard from my colleague that you wanted to talk to us.”
Sander looked at his hands like something might be written there, some instructions.
“My family’s in Kivik on vacation, and I was supposed to head back there right after the funeral service. I only came here for the day. But then I ended up stuck in the house for a bit. And then Jakob Lindell dropped by. You guys had talked to him.”
“He came to see you in Skavboke?”
“No, in Snostorp. That’s where I live. And I…I don’t know, he brought this shirt with him. Did he give it to you?”
“Why would he give us a shirt?”
“Because I told him he should.”
“No, he didn’t. What about it?”
Vidar posed the question as though it were no big deal, but Sander’s face was pale and when he opened his mouth to speak, he didn’t seem to know what words might come out.
“I thought maybe you knew.”
As best he could, Sander recounted what Jakob had told him about the night of Christmas Eve in 1999: the wood in the stove, the figure running by, and the shirt he’d found in the dark.
According to Jakob it had belonged to Filip, and a scrap of it had been recovered from a dead dog’s mouth.
This last detail rang a bell for Vidar. He remembered that.
He remembered the rubble, and standing down there with two officers from Oskarstrom, helping them pry open the dog’s jaws. The cracking sound as they gave way.
Beyond that, Sander’s story jumped back and forth in fragments, and Vidar had a hard time piecing them into a whole.
By now Sander had his elbows propped on his knees, like he was trying to control an increasing wave of nausea.
That’s when Vidar realized what was plaguing Sander. He should have waited for Sander to say it himself, but the long workday and its many conversations had worn down his patience. He slipped:
“You don’t believe it’s entirely true. What Jakob Lindell claims.”
“No, I think he’s lying.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know how much you know about what happened that Christmas.”
“Not much, so far,” Vidar admitted. “I know people say Sten Persson caused the landslide, but the police never had the evidence. He’d been at odds with Karl-Henrik Soderstrom.”
“There were rumors about Filip too,” Sander said.
“Right, some sort of threatening letter?”
“He was sixteen and he had just lost his brother. He was in crisis. It wasn’t a threatening letter, not really, and teenagers write all sorts of shit anyway.
I should know—I’m a teacher. For one thing, Filip was at a party on the other side of our community when it happened.
The only reason to think Jakob saw Filip is that Jakob himself is so sure it was him.
No one else saw Filip at all that night.
For another thing, Jakob said he found the shirt when he tripped over it.
But how the hell do you trip over a shirt?
It just falls to the ground. You don’t trip over a shirt, you step on it.
Besides, why didn’t he hand the shirt over to the police?
He must have known it was significant. And another thing—I knew Filip back then.
He never wore a flannel like that, only T-shirts and hoodies.
I don’t even know if he owned that kind of shirt.
Jakob, on the other hand,” he continued, “wore flannels a lot.”
Vidar began to ask some gently probing questions: So Jakob had brought the shirt with him to Sander’s house? How was he storing it? What did it look like? What did he do with it after showing it to Sander?
The kids up by the rotunda were starting to trickle back home.
One of them seemed to have fallen asleep, to the others’ annoyance.
They tried to wake him up by aiming the stage lights in his face, but it didn’t work.
They ended up throwing the banner over him like a blanket, until he began to squirm and bat his hands in irritation.
“So,” Vidar said, having finally arrived at the simplest yet perhaps most important question of all, “what do you think? Why did Jakob tell you this, if it was all lies? And why now?”
Sander didn’t say anything for a long time.
“People always said it was one of my close friends who killed Mikael.”
“Killian,” Vidar supplied.
As though he were putting his thumb on a nasty bruise and pressing down.
“I never wanted to believe it was him. Or maybe it’s more like I had trouble believing it was him. I think it was someone else.”
“No one wants to think their friend could do a thing like that. Wasn’t it true that they had a fight at that party, Mikael and your friend?”
Sander shook his head.
“Mikael and Jakob had a fight. And there was a burglary too,” Sander went on, “that same night. Fifty thousand kronor went missing from Jakob’s family’s house.
After the landslide, the money was found at Killian’s place.
But if it was Killian, why didn’t he take it with him when he left? He could have used it.”
“You mean someone might have put the money there after the fact?”
“It’s just never made any sense to me. What if it wasn’t Killian, but…
well, what if it was Jakob who killed Mikael, what if he’s the one who set off the dynamite at the Soderstroms’ and caused the landslide?
What if the dog took a bite out of his shirt?
He might have realized it would get out eventually, so he held on to the shirt to frame someone else—someone who can no longer defend themselves. ”
“Sounds pretty convoluted,” Vidar said. “Why would he do that?”
“For the money? I don’t know. For Felicia, maybe?”
“Felicia?”
But Sander didn’t say more; instead he gazed at the park, toward the Nissan and its still, cool waters, past the bike trail.
“Is that the sun coming up?”
“Yes,” Vidar said. “It is.”
They got up and walked back toward the station.
“By the way,” Vidar said, before they parted ways. “What did you wear?”
Sander stared at him, puzzled. “What?”
“Did you used to wear flannels back then?”
Sander regarded him for a long time. “Yes, on occasion.”
“On occasion,” Vidar repeated, like he was testing the truth content in his mouth.
“But never one like that.”
“Good to know.”