Chapter 81
“Nothing,” Jakob said. “We were just at home. Trying to make sense of what had happened. The kids wondered, too, they knew something was up.”
“Did you talk about it?”
“Not in detail. The fourteen-year-old got it all anyway, of course, just like us when we were that age.”
“So you didn’t make any calls or anything?”
“We talked to Alice’s parents. Or, you know, Alice did.”
“And you stayed in Skavboke all that evening and night?”
“Yes.”
Vidar clicked his pen and jotted something down before placing it aside again.
“Thank you, Jakob. That’s good.”
Jakob exhaled and leaned back. Vidar had placed a binder on the floor earlier. Now he put it on the table and paged through to the right sheet protector, turned it around to face Jakob.
“You recognize this,” Vidar said, “don’t you?”
It was the scrap of fabric, dark green with lighter stripes, the one Siri and Gerd had once extracted from the jaws of a dead dog.
“I’ve been given to understand,” Vidar continued, when Jakob didn’t answer, “that you know where the rest of this is. Is that true?”
Jakob stared at Vidar. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
Instead, Vidar spoke: “How come you didn’t tell the truth from the start?”
“I…just didn’t know.”
“But you talked to someone about the shirt.”
Jakob nodded again, but this time he looked grim, as if Vidar’s question confirmed that a betrayal had taken place.
“Who?”
“Sander.”
“And what did he recommend you do?”
“Go to you. To the police.”
“But you didn’t.”
Vidar’s questions were becoming statements.
“No,” Jakob said, his voice as flimsy as a whisper. “I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
“What were you doing on Christmas Day in 1999? In the evening?”
“I was at home.”
“You spent quite a bit of time outside, didn’t you? Stacking firewood and so on.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Alone that time too, is that right?”
“I think so. But everyone else was right inside.”
“But you were alone outside. No one saw you.”
“No, yes, I guess I was alone.”
Jakob was starting to sweat.
“I know how it is with firewood. It takes a long time. You must have been out for half an hour, at least?”
Jakob shifted in his chair. “I don’t remember. But something like that, sure.”
“So you see, Jakob, how this looks and why I’m being so persistent.
You don’t tell the truth the first time we speak to you after Filip Soderstrom’s murder.
You don’t tell your wife the truth about where you are or what you do that afternoon.
By your own account, you don’t see anyone or speak to anyone.
In other words, you have no alibi. Nor do you have your cell phone with you, which can be read as premeditation: you don’t want anyone to see where you are or have gone during that time period.
And now it turns out that you have also lied to me during this conversation. ”
Vidar watched for a reaction on Jakob’s face before he went on, but Jakob’s gaze was blank.
“Not to mention all the uncertainty concerning your actions surrounding the burglary and the theft of your family’s money after Pierre’s party.
You have been hiding things from us for a long, long time, things with a direct connection to what happened in Skavboke in 1999.
You can’t quite account for your whereabouts at the time of the landslide, and there’s even a motive to explain why you might have been so upset with the Soderstrom family. The fight with Mikael, and the money.”
Vidar placed a gentle finger against the scrap of fabric behind its plastic sheet.
“It appears you won’t reveal anything until you are confronted with information that renders your story impossible. Then you revise it. This is a strategy of sorts, conscious or not, that we often see in interviews like this one, and it’s never a good sign.”
Jakob sat very still. Dark circles were appearing under his arms.
“What’s more,” Vidar said, turning the page of the binder, “we’ve got this.” He pointed at a photograph of the spade they’d found in Filip’s garage. “You recognize it, I believe.”
Jakob stared at the picture without saying anything.
“Do you recognize this, Jakob?”
He shook his head. Vidar turned the page again. Another photograph, this time the one from Lillemor Soderstrom’s photo album.
“Here it is, just two months before Mikael was murdered, at your house. That’s the same spade, isn’t it? It was used in not one but two homicides. So I have to ask, Jakob. Did you kill Filip Soderstrom?”
“No.”
“Did you kill his brother, Mikael Soderstrom?”
“No.”
“Did you cause the landslide on Christmas Day of 1999?”
“Christ! No!” Jakob was breathing hard. “No,” he said again, his voice fainter this time.
“So what is going on here? If you want to go home,” he added, more as a statement of fact than part of any particular strategy, “you need to help me out first.”
Jakob looked helpless.
“It wasn’t me. None of that was me. I haven’t seen that spade in, I don’t know, ages. I didn’t even recognize it at first, that it used to belong to us. And as for the shirt,” he continued, “I just didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Why didn’t you hand it over to us?”
“Because I didn’t know what to say. That I found it?
And what would have happened if you didn’t believe me?
Everyone knows Killian killed Mikael. The landslide, that was Sten.
I thought that was all pretty well settled.
So what did the shirt matter? It was all so chaotic afterwards, it took a long time before I even thought about it again. ”
“What?”
Jakob looked confused. “What, which part?”
“It took a long time before you thought about what again?”
“The shirt. It was like everything else blocked it out.”
“But you still had it?”
“I found it in the basement. So, yeah, I still had it.”
“I’ve been told that Filip didn’t wear flannels very often,” Vidar said slowly. “Isn’t that true?”
“I don’t remember.”
“But if it is true, then isn’t it unlikely for the shirt to be his?”
Jakob shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he borrowed it from someone.”
“But you wore flannels like this one. Right?”
Jakob sat up straighter.
“Sometimes,” he said, and then, each word growing heavier, as if he wanted to make them mean more than they did: “And so did tons of other people.”
“But this one’s not yours?”
Jakob’s eyes bored into him. “No. It’s not mine.”
Vidar observed him for a long moment.
“I’m going to ask a colleague to go home with you and pick up the shirt.”
For the first time, Vidar’s voice was cold as ice.