Chapter 109
“Is this all of it?”
Vidar weighed the binder in his hand.
“All but the medications list,” said Adrian, who was in the passenger seat next to him. “But it doesn’t really matter now. The shirt’s in the bag, there. It’s like you thought.” Adrian nodded at the house, which was teeming with intense activity around Killian Persson’s body. “It’s his.”
Vidar paged through the binder. Intake paperwork, attachments from social services, notes for the medical record, a visitor log, some sort of diary describing his progress, a calendar of activities.
“Good, Adrian. Thanks. But no. It doesn’t matter now.”
The emergency lights had attracted a small flock of onlookers from the village, those who lived nearby and had come out in the rain to see what had happened. Vidar saw Jakob Lindell among them.
“Interesting that he’s here,” Adrian commented.
“Very,” Vidar muttered, his focus on the binder.
The diary entries weren’t comprehensive, just undated pages from a plain old notebook, covered in Filip’s scrawling, uneven handwriting. They were about the staff at Rasmusg?rden, his medication, how he felt. Vidar paged on and soon stopped at the visitor log.
Most were friends of Filip’s, it seemed, but the visits were increasingly infrequent. His father had come once, his mother, too, along with two personal-care assistants. A couple of social workers, the occasional police officer. And then a name that showed up over and over, many times, every week.
“Hey, what was that you said before about Filip Soderstrom’s planner?”
“What part?”
“Something about the number one?”
“Oh yeah, that he seemed to have had a relapse and marked his first day sober again. They do that a lot.”
“Do you remember what it looked like? The way he wrote the number one.”
“Sure, I guess.”
Vidar tapped the page.
The name that appeared in the visitor log over and over. The person who’d visited Siri the day after Filip was murdered.
“Could it have been a letter I rather than a number one?”
Adrian looked at the page. I as in Isidor.
I didn’t know who I could talk to.
That’s what Siri had said.
Suddenly it all clicked in Vidar’s mind.
“That must be how he knew,” Vidar said slowly as the pieces fell into place.
“What?”
“Siri talked to Isidor Enoksson, who told Filip. That Killian Persson was alive.”
“He’s over there in my car right now,” Adrian said.
Vidar turned to look at Adrian.
“What?”
“He was wandering around on the road, in the rain, drunk as hell, so I stuck him in my car.” He looked uncertain. “Was that a bad idea?”
For the first time in what felt like ages, Vidar smiled.