Former Swedish police inspector Ann Lindell returns in internationally bestselling and award-winning Kjell Eriksson's newest mystery, The Deathwatch Beetle…
Release date:
November 16, 2021
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
288
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“This is hers.” The woman lingered in the doorway before she stepped to one side. She was “stylish,” that was the word that came to Ann, but with an almost girlish way of moving. The bare shoulders testified to self-confidence and strength.
Her husband remained standing on the stairs with one hand on the railing, stopped in midstep, as if he had to catch his breath. Ann stepped into the room, which was surprisingly large, perhaps thirty square meters, and sparsely furnished. Along one wall was a bookcase, filled with a mixture of old works in half-bound leather, book club editions from the 1970s, and paperbacks. It was not a collection, but it struck her instead as a random hodgepodge from several sources. The opposite side was dominated by a large bed in the same massive style as the bookcase. A tidy desk, the only modern feature, was in front of the window.
“She’s orderly, always has been,” the mother said, and Ann understood that she was addressing Edvard. The two had immediately made a connection, perhaps because Edvard was a Gräsö resident. They’d run into each before; he had visited the farm together with Victor several times.
Ann went up to the window and from there she could see a little patch of the sea. An aggraded bay, and a boathouse, unusable for its original function, testified to the land uplift.
“She loves the view,” explained her father, who had unobtrusively made his way into the room and was standing right behind Ann. “But let’s go downstairs now, Gunilla. I understand that as a former police officer she’ll want to be left in peace. To think.”
Without further ado he left the room and took his wife with him to the ground floor. She no doubt would have liked to stay behind and tell about their daughter, her life and possessions. She was that type, someone who happily accounted for things; Ann had perceived that immediately. Edvard sat down on a stick-back chair.
“He’s watched too many TV series,” he said, but Ann was grateful that they’d left. The father had understood correctly, she really did want to be left in peace, look around without preconceived notions, without anyone telling her what to think.
* * *
Ever since she and Edvard met Folke Åhr in Lisbon she had thought about Cecilia Karlsson now and then, what had become of her. Missing for four years, as if swallowed up by the earth, as one of Edvard’s neighbors had expressed it. Her disappearance had naturally aroused a great deal of attention on Gräsö. Her parents were well-known, Rune Karlsson had been a successful middle-distance runner and Cecilia’s mother was a multiple champion in archery with international records.
Folke Åhr had a summer house on the island and after retirement from National Homicide became interested in Cecilia’s fate. His engagement had not decreased since an old schoolmate of Cecilia maintained that on two occasions he had seen her in Lisbon. The first time he’d thought it was a doppelgänger he’d glimpsed in Estrela Park, but when he caught sight of the same woman again a few days later he was convinced that it was Cecilia. She had boarded a trolley, while he was sitting on a park bench. He immediately leaped up and tried to follow, but that was hopeless. The trolley left the square and disappeared.
“It was her, quite certain,” he’d firmly maintained when Ann called him. He had obviously not been sober but tried to pull himself together, Ann recognized the signs well. It was a problem, Åhr had also pointed out, Nils “Blixten” Lindberg was often intoxicated. Was he that way in Lisbon too?
“How can you be so sure?” Ann Lindell asked.
“Her ass,” Lindberg said without hesitation, and she was forced to smile. “She has an amazing ass, always has had. The shapes.” It could be taken as sexist, but he’d said it with such warmth in his voice that she understood there was a lot of love in what he said.
“She was the first girl in the class who had to wear a bra,” he added, as if to make Ann truly understand Cecilia Karlsson’s physical advantages.
“Why did she run away?” she’d asked, and the answer came after some hesitation. “That Casper.” After that he was silent, didn’t want to say one more word.
* * *
Ann recalled the conversation with “Blixten,” as the witness was called on the island, as she studied some framed photos on the bookcase. She took them down one by one. They were traditional pictures from holidays and parties, and Ann could see that he was right. She was curvy, in a way that surely drew men’s gazes to her. Was she beautiful? Both yes and no. Her face had pleasant proportions, the close-sitting eyebrows reinforced the impression of a strong will. She resembled a Mexican female artist whose name Ann Lindell could not recall.
The shelf with the photos and some nondescript decorative objects was dust-free. It occurred to Ann that she did not have a similar arrangement of photos of herself, her parents, or her son, Erik. Was that good or bad? A little of both, she thought. She remained standing in the middle of the room.
“Check behind the books,” Edvard said.
Ann had a memory from the past. Then it was her old colleague Sammy Nilsson who would make similar comments and directions. She obeyed, reached a hesitant hand over the books arranged by height, and in that way searched through shelf after shelf. On the last one, behind volumes of yearbooks from the Swedish Tourist Association, her hand encountered something. She immediately suspected what it was.
“Letters,” she said, coaxing out a thin collection, bound together with a red cord with a rosette, which gave a teenage impression. Edvard got up from the chair. “Shall I?” she asked, even though she knew the answer, and carefully pulled on a length of twine.
“No,” said Edvard.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s hers.”
“But…”
“Leave it to the police,” said Edvard, “or to her parents.”
There was something to his objection. If Cecilia Karlsson were alive, or had died by her own hand, in principle it was an illegal act to open her mail. If she had been killed then it was a case for the police.
“The address is a post office box in Uppsala,” said Ann. “Strange, didn’t she live on the island, here in the house?” She turned up a tab of the topmost envelope and checked the rest; all were addressed to the same P.O. box. “There are four letters.”
Their eyes met. Ann felt his resistance. “I have to check,” she said.
He left the room and clumped down the stairs. She quickly undid the rosette, carefully opened one of the envelopes, and took out the letter, which in reality was a postcard in a somewhat thicker quality of paper, with crimped edges, handwritten in an open style with even, careful lines. She held it by one corner and read:
Dear!
Thanks for last time! It was pleasant as usual, and I only wish we’d had a little more time.
There was just one thing that puzzled me: what you said about the incident at Hasselbacken.
I don’t think Rune really meant what he said, he’d probably had quite a bit to drink. Don’t pay any attention to that misadventure. Can we meet next week? I’m going to Sundsvall. We can stay at Knaust, you know the hotel with the stairs. Don’t you have some relative up there in the Lapp country that you can pretend to visit?
Hugs!
No signature, no date. She inspected the envelope; no legible postmark. Rune, her father, what had he said? “Misadventure,” what kind of word was that?
From the ground floor came the clatter of porcelain. Cecilia’s mother had insisted that they should have coffee. Ann hurriedly took out the remaining postcards, lined them up on the desk, and photographed them with her cell phone. Just as she replaced everything and tied the letters together again, steps sounded on the stairs. Ann dropped the letters behind the STA books.
“Shall we have a cup?”
“Let’s do that,” said Ann.
“Have you thought of anything?” The woman spoke quietly. There was a confidence in her voice that had not been there previously. “Rune gets depressed sometimes,” she continued unprompted. “He rarely goes in here, I was surprised that he came along upstairs.”
“Depressed because of Cecilia?”
“Yes, it’s probably that, that she doesn’t want to or isn’t able to make herself known. We would really like to have her here.”
“You believe that she’s alive?”
Cecilia’s mother looked at her, and without saying anything gave her an answer. Her otherwise soft facial features bore a sharpness that left no room for reservation. She was convinced that her daughter was alive.
“But now let’s go down, otherwise Rune will start to wonder.”
She hooked her arm under Ann’s. “He wants to keep track of everything, like with the lap times when he competed, or like now when he stares at all those galas on TV.” Ann recalled that the man had been a runner.
“No, I haven’t thought of anything.”
“Why are you here?”
“Perhaps out of curiosity,” said Ann.
“That was an honest answer,” said Gunilla Karlsson, who stopped for a moment on the stairs.
“I don’t like mysteries,” Ann continued.
* * *
The table was set in the kitchen. Rune sat half turned away by the window with his hands resting on either side of the coffee cup. His thin lips, almost nonexistent, were tightly compressed. He had a sturdy crease over the bridge of his nose and his gaze was far away, looking out over what had once been a bay. He gave an elderly impression, even though he couldn’t be that old. A patriarch. Sixty-five? He still looked good, and when he was young on the running track he’d no doubt been an attractive sight. The most prominent feature was the sturdy nose.
His wife was considerably younger, she must be over fifty anyway considering Cecilia’s age. Archery. Ann associated that with Olympic games. How successful had she been? That could be searched on the internet. A well-filled trophy case stood in the living room. Gunilla Karlsson had a peculiar way of pushing out her one hip. Perhaps it was a carryover from her days as an archer?
Edvard sat across from Rune. Soon he too would be there, in old age. She as well. It was hard to imagine. Would they grow old together? A feeling of discomfort gave her the impulse to say thank you, leave the house as well as the questions around Cecilia’s disappearance. She actually had no business there! She didn’t have time for other people’s mysteries.
“I was born here,” Rune Karlsson suddenly said. “My siblings and I. There were five brothers, one is gone.”
“Martin?”
“I see, you knew him?”
“Yes, we were on the same job in Forsmark one time,” said Edvard. “He was a skilled painter.”
“The best,” Rune said with a smile that at once made him fifteen years younger.
Edvard hummed a little, the way he did when without words he agreed or did not have anything to add.
“Then we could set out nets and in a flash fill the boat with herring. Now the trawlers vacuum up everything, they pick up a hundred times more herring than the local fishermen do. It all goes to hog feed in Denmark. Hog feed. And to hogs that live in hell, enclosed in cages.”
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