The Fire Dance (29 page)

“Sure. I can meet you there at one
P
.
M
. Right now I have a showing.”

“After one is fine. Thank you very much for calling.”

Tommy was giving Irene a questioning look. She smiled back, suddenly full of energy. “Get more coffee. This is going to take a while. Then let’s go over to Sven, so I don’t have to say everything twice.”

N
URSE
U
LLA UNLOCKED
the door to Ingrid Hagberg’s apartment. The smell of an old, sick person hit Irene as they entered, just like the previous time she had been there. When Irene stuck her head briefly into the bedroom, she smelled ammonia. She couldn’t explain why. Maybe it was her imagination.

An open box sat in the middle of the kitchen table. It was empty. They could see the square niches for the missing
nougat. The cover showed a couple dancing a Viennese waltz—Viennese nougat, of course. The sweetest candy ever made. And easiest to eat, too, as far as the wrappers strewn about the table revealed. Only one piece was left. Ingrid had eaten each and every piece except this last one. Hardly a healthy thing to do for a diabetic, especially if she’d gobbled them all at once.

“I can’t understand who would give her candy,” Nurse Ulla said indignantly.

Irene thought that the nurse was giving her a distrustful look, but perhaps she was just imagining it.

“Did anyone visit her yesterday?” asked Irene.

“Not that I know of. Ingrid is fairly solitary. She almost never has visitors. Just that young man who comes around sometimes.” Nurse Ulla pointed to Frej’s graduation picture.

Svante Malm placed the empty nougat box and all the wrappers into a plastic bag. He had already put on full protective covering so he would not contaminate anything as he searched for evidence. Irene and Nurse Ulla wore only paper shoe covers and paper head coverings. They had strict orders from Svante not to touch anything and to move as little as possible while in the apartment.

“No indication the candy came through the mail,” Svante said. His voice was muffled as he was on his knees with his head under the countertop. “There’s no mailing envelope in the garbage. But there is this.”

He held a plastic bag from a convenience store with a pair of tweezers. There was no Pressbyrå anywhere near Happy River, which showed that Ingrid Hagberg
did
have a visitor yesterday.

O
PERATION
K
NOCK-ON
-D
OORS DID
not yield any results. None of Ingrid’s neighbors had seen or heard anyone visit Ingrid. Irene figured out that her neighbors did not have much contact with Ingrid.

The neighbor next door was a tiny woman who boasted that she was about to turn ninety-four next month. She kept telling Irene this. She seemed very glad to have a visitor—a person who, most importantly, listened to everything she had to say. After twenty minutes, Irene was exhausted. Nevertheless, she was able to confirm that the talkative old lady had neither seen nor heard anyone come to Ingrid’s apartment yesterday. Of course, as she put it herself, her hearing and sight were not what they’d been, but since she was just about to turn ninety-four, that could be overlooked.

The woman reminded Irene of a porcelain doll, but she had tough opinions about her neighbor. Ingrid had been “antisocial” and “unpleasant,” and she never wanted to participate in any activities the assisted living center arranged for the residents.

All the other residents Irene talked to confirmed this description of Ingrid as “antisocial.” She was not exactly well-liked.

Irene and Svante decided that Sven Andersson would have to decide if there would be a larger-scale Operation Knock-on-Doors at all three buildings in the apartment complex. Even if it had been rainy and dark yesterday afternoon, someone might have seen something suspicious.

I
RENE AND
S
VANTE
managed to wolf down a pizza at Torslanda Square before they drove to the farm in Björkil. Erik Johansson’s sports car was already parked in the farm driveway. He was opening the barn door and waving to them as they got out of the car.

“Over here!” he called. His smile was wide and inviting.

“Are you sure he’s a real estate agent and not an entertainer?” Svante muttered to Irene as they walked toward him.

Irene introduced Svante to Erik as they went into the
barn. It was a large building with a large space between the ground and the ceiling. The ceiling was lower over the horse stalls, with the hayloft above them. Erik led them right through the barn to a heavy wooden door, which looked rather new.

“This is the changing room,” he said. He held the door open for them.

It was a long, narrow room with orange metal lockers along the walls. There were also massive hooks on which the students probably kept various pieces of horse equipment. There were a few small windows over the lockers.

“Why did the riding school leave the lockers behind?” asked Irene.

“All the interior fixtures belonged to the aunt,” Erik said.

Next to the door was a small toilet.

The young agent walked over to a smooth oak door on the other side of the changing room. He unlocked it. He used a common ASSA key, but Irene saw that there was also a seven-lever tumbler lock.

“Here’s the office,” he said.

The room had no windows. It was hardly more than ten square meters and was completely empty of furnishings, except for one poster on the wall showing the anatomy of a horse. Erik Johansson strode across the floor and opened another door. “There’s a toilet here, too.”

“I’d prefer it if you wouldn’t touch the door handles too much,” Svante said and smiled. “Fingerprints and the like, you know.”

“Oh, jeez! I hadn’t thought of that!” Erik said with a guilt-stricken face. He let go of the door handle as if it were red hot. “But I do have to tell you,” he added. “A number of people have come through here—potential buyers.”

“Don’t worry, but it would be nice if we didn’t add any more traces,” Svante said. He pulled out protective gloves
and hats, and gave Irene a meaningful look. “Why don’t you and our friend Erik here take a look at the stalls?”

Irene read his mind and told the young man, “Here’s the deal. We’ll just be in his way here. We’ll be more useful looking around somewhere else.”

Erik Johansson nodded, appearing relieved to turn the office room over to Svante. He looked curiously into Svante’s toolbox.
He’s observant and curious
, Irene thought.
He’d make a good police officer
.

The stalls still had a slight smell of horse and hay, although two years had passed since the animals were taken away. There was a rusty bridle hanging on one of the pegs, and some pitchforks and shovels were propped in a corner. Otherwise, the place was empty. It was neat and tidy, but nowhere near as sparkling clean as the office room had been. Erik was right. Someone had recently cleaned that area thoroughly.

“Not so much to see here,” Erik said, gesturing as if to include the entire barn.

He went toward an old wooden door hanging crookedly on its hinges. He could walk through upright, but Irene had to bow her head.

“This was a large storage space or maybe even a garage. An old tractor and a few pieces of ancient machinery. Old stuff.” Erik seemed to have little understanding of farm machinery.

The light was dim in the storage space. The tiny windows were covered with spider webs and layers of dust. In the dark, Irene could see the tractor and something that looked like a harvester.

“Are there any lights here?” Irene asked.

“Sure, just a moment,” Erik said.

A few tired fluorescent light strips began to sputter. Even though the windows were as dim as ever, Irene was now able to see much more clearly what was in the storage area.

“Why don’t you start over by the door and I’ll start from this end,” Irene said. “If you see anything interesting, don’t touch it!”

“Aye-aye, Chief Inspector,” Erik replied and gave a perfect military salute.

Irene couldn’t help thinking that the influence of American television shows was getting much too strong.

Obviously, this area had been used to store all kinds of broken down machinery during the past decades. Irene felt a sting of nostalgia as she spied her father’s old light blue moped. Well, of course, it wasn’t her father’s, but one exactly like it, just missing tires. He’d ridden his moped to work for years, no matter what the weather, until her parents bought their first car in 1962. Irene had been much too young to remember the time before her parents had the car. Still, she remembered the moped very well. Her father, Börje, had kept it and fixed it up to give to her on her fifteenth birthday. It ran like clockwork. Some of her friends had made fun of her old moped, but she didn’t care. She loved her light blue Puch and rode around on it for many years.

She was pulled out of memory lane by Erik’s voice on the other side of the storage area.

“Ahoy! A bed!”

Irene made her way over. He was pointing to an area where stairs went to the hayloft. Underneath it, between two slabs of Masonite, a wooden cot was folded up and stashed. Irene remembered sleeping in a bed like that when she spent her summer vacations at her paternal grandparent’s place in Falkenberg. The edges of the bed were heavy wood, and there was a metal hinge in the middle. It had links on the bottom that rattled whenever the bed was unfolded or folded back up.

“It’s not as filthy as the other stuff,” Erik pointed out.

He couldn’t hide his excitement. Police work often had
that effect on people, as long as they were not feeling threatened themselves.

“You’re right. Let it be for now, and let’s see if there’s anything else, like clothes or sheets,” Irene said.

Erik quickly rushed up the stairs and into the hayloft. He didn’t seem to mind that his light blue pants and his mocha jacket were not suited to mucking around in a filthy old barn. Irene heard his footsteps above her head.
I hope he doesn’t fall through the floor
, she thought. She hoped that his real estate insurance would cover any accidents in the course of a workday.
But is he actually doing real estate work now? They’d have to say he was if anything happened to him
.

Irene poked around the junk without finding anything else of interest.
Yet the bed is a good find
, she thought.

Erik came back down from the hayloft and reported that up there were just rotten hay and an impressive number of rats. Without thinking, he wiped his hands on his light blue pants, which was unfortunate. Palm prints now ran down both sides. He looked even worse when he rubbed his hand on his forehead. It looked like he was putting on camouflage.

“You’ll have to go home and wash up before you meet your clients this afternoon,” Irene said, laughing.

“Oh, it’s not so bad. I’ll have time to change. My next showing is at four thirty,” he said happily.

S
VANTE
M
ALM THOUGHT
the bed was an interesting item. Irene also put on protective gear, and together they managed to wrap the heavy bed in plastic.

“No bedclothes?” asked Svante.

“No, but she was on a mattress when she died in the fire. And fragments of the fabric used to set the fire indicated a cotton like the kind used in sheets. And there was a woolen blanket,” Irene reminded him.

At her words, Erik turned a little pale. It had dawned on him that this was no game. They had gone on a scavenger hunt to find anything relevant to Sophie’s murder, and she had not been much older than Erik.

F
REDRIK
S
TRIDH NEEDED
help investigating the pedophile sports trainer. As they went through the man’s computers, both his home computer and the one he used at the office of the sports club, they found thousands of pictures of child pornography. Many of them were hardcore, showing rapes of boys not much older than three or four.

“He’s been passing them around. We’ve found a whole new damned porn ring,” Fredrik said with a sigh.

Simultaneous with this investigation was the need for a great deal of work on the gang killings. Irene decided to suspend her investigation over the weekend. Svante had promised to get back to her with some concrete results by Monday or Tuesday.

When Irene went home Friday evening, she felt drained. She needed to take it easy the entire weekend and rest up.

S
AMMIE CAME RUSHING
to greet her as soon as she stepped into the house, but no one else was around. The twins must have been home at some point, because they’d picked Sammie up from his dog-sitter. There was also a note on the kitchen table:

So only Irene and Krister would be home that evening. That would be nice and relaxing—just what she needed in her exhausted state. Still, she felt a twinge of missing her girls. Of course, the twins were much more independent at their age and had their own activities and friends. Irene missed her Friday night family time, tubs of hot popcorn and good movies on television. But most importantly she missed the sense of security as the four of them cuddled on the sofa. Other evenings they’d play games, although things could get hot when one of the girls lost her temper. Both girls hated to lose; for the sake of peace in the home, the girls often would play on the same team and were often allowed to win.

Irene went into the kitchen to prepare Sammie’s food. Sammie was now lying in the hallway, watching to make sure the process was done correctly. He could hear the sound of dry food dropping into the bowl. Then there were leftover bits of Värmland sausage from Wednesday’s dinner. Warm water was spread over all of it.

When Irene put the bowl on the floor, Sammie flung himself at it with enthusiasm. He began to chew loudly, content. At least one being on this planet appreciated Irene’s food preparation abilities.