The Intruder (47 page)

“We have everything under control. You don’t need to worry any longer. We’ll take care of Katja. You can put down the gun.”

A brief glance in Fredrik’s direction showed that Henrik was listening. But nothing happened. He sat there as if paralyzed.

“You know that you cannot fire that gun. If you do, you won’t be let out until your daughter is grown. Ellen will have to grow up in a foster family.”

Henrik breathed heavily, his head lowered a few inches.

“Henrik,” said Fredrik. “For Ellen’s sake if nothing else.”

He could hear Henrik’s breathing, then how he swallowed.

“You’ll get the gun,” he said hoarsely.

“Good,” said Fredrik. “That’s the right decision. Do as I say now. Set the gun down on the ground beside you.”

Henrik took a deep breath.

“Calmly and carefully,” said Fredrik. “With the butt in my direction.”

Henrik changed his hold on the gun and leaned slowly to the side, setting it down on the ground.

“And then scoot it backward in my direction as far as you can.”

Henrik did as Fredrik told him.

“And now?” he said tonelessly.

“Just sit there,” said Fredrik.

When Henrik was settled again, Fredrik went over and set one heavy foot down on the butt of the gun. Not until then did he lean down to pick it up.

He backed away with the shotgun, holstered his own weapon, opened the shotgun, and took out the cartridges; at the same time, he kept a worried eye on Henrik.

“Henrik,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I want you to get up and go over and sit on the steps.”

“Okay,” said Henrik.

Henrik got up and went toward the steps. When he was there he turned around toward Fredrik.

“Can I go in to Ellen?” he asked.

“Is she in the house?”

“Yes, in her room.”

“Very soon,” said Fredrik. “First we’re going to take Katja to the car. During that time I want you to sit down on the steps, nothing else. Okay?”

Henrik sank down on the steps without saying anything else.

“Thanks,” said Fredrik.

He didn’t want to take any risks, did not want to give Henrik the chance to change his mind and come rushing out with a knife or some other weapon.

Fredrik went over to Katja and set the unloaded gun down in the grass.

He told her to stand up with her hands still on her head, then he took out the handcuffs and shackled her arms behind her back.

“Ready?” asked Sara.

“Yes.”

He saw how she relaxed and holstered her gun. They took Katja Nyberg by either arm and led her out of the bower.

“We’re going to take her up to the car, then I’ll come back down,” he said to Henrik.

Henrik nodded silently, and they passed him with Katja between them. No one said anything else. When they were on their way up the rise, Katja twisted her head and looked over her shoulder toward Henrik. Fredrik turned around, too. Henrik had stood up from the steps and was staring after them. The strong lamp above the door glistened in his dark eyes. Fredrik had never seen anyone look so incredibly alone.

93.

It was Monday afternoon, calm and quiet in the police station. And warm. The summer heat had come back with full force the day before. Fredrik was off all day Sunday. He had spent the day with Joakim, or to be more exact, from when he woke up at noon until Fredrik dropped him off outside the ferry terminal at three thirty.

He had asked him what type of work he would prefer if he became a photographer. Joakim grinned and said he didn’t know. Fredrik told about the visit with Janna Drake and the two worlds on the wall in the entry, the children in the slums and the photo model. He could see that Joakim did not really understand what the problem was. Maybe it was only in the head of a middle-aged man born in the sixties that those two pictures were poles apart.

Fredrik let the water run from the tap in the kitchenette until it got really cold. He filled two glasses and carried them up to the interview room.

“Are you okay?” he said, looking at Henrik Kjellander, who was already waiting in the room.

Henrik met Fredrik’s look with tired eyes.

“Yes, of course,” he said hoarsely.

Fredrik set the glasses down on the table. Henrik thanked him, picked up his glass, and took a couple of deep gulps.

“I hardly slept last night,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve slept at all.”

His voice was clearer now, maybe thanks to the water. Henrik set down the glass.

“I can’t understand this. So it’s really her?”

“Yes.”

“You mean it was her the whole time?”

“She denies everything, but I’m certain. She is going to be convicted.”

“This is damned incomprehensible.”

Henrik rubbed his neck and looked down at the table.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything about Katja Nyberg?”

“I couldn’t imagine that … I never thought of her.”

“You never thought of her, despite everything we talked about?”

The tone had gotten harder. He could not help it.

“Yes, yes, of course. That’s not what I meant. Of course I thought of her. But I never believed—”

He fell silent, turned away from Fredrik, and took hold of the back of the chair.

“That it might be her?” Fredrik filled in.

“I know,” said Henrik. “I was supposed to tell about everything, but I didn’t. I didn’t tell about Maria, and not about Katja Nyberg.”

And perhaps there were others he didn’t tell about, thought Fredrik.

“Is that hard to understand?” Henrik turned back toward Fredrik. “Is it completely incomprehensible?”

“No,” said Fredrik.

Fredrik let it go. He had not been asked to torment him, just to get the pieces to fit together.

“Tell me about Katja,” he asked.

Henrik cleared his throat a couple of times, settled himself on the chair, and then hesitantly started.

He had met Katja Nyberg at Hotel St. Petri on the fourth of October. That was already known. She had been in Copenhagen during the day to interview a Danish politician. When she was done with the interview she went to St. Petri’s bar to have a drink. Henrik arrived later along with Marte Astrup and Agnes Lind. Someone exchanged a few words with Katja, Henrik could not remember who. They started talking and later when they moved over to a table, Katja came with them. They remained sitting for several hours, then the editor and Henrik’s assistant left in turn. Katja went with Henrik up to his room and spent the night. Henrik left the hotel early in the morning while Katja was still asleep, but left a note on one of the hotel’s note cards—the note that was pinned up on Katja’s wall at home in Malmö.

When Henrik came back to the hotel on the evening of the fifth Katja was sitting in the bar waiting. They spent that night together, too, as well as Henrik’s third and last night at the hotel.

When Henrik was going to fly to Copenhagen again a few weeks later, he called Katja and asked if she had time to take the train over.

“It was an impulse. I never really thought I would see her again, but then … Well, now it turned out that way.”

“And it was on your initiative?” said Fredrik.

“Yes. She came to the hotel, we … Yes, she stayed over, but … I guess I knew it wasn’t a great idea. I told her that I was married and had children, I mean, I said that right from the start, but that I couldn’t continue with a relationship on the side.”

“How did she take that?”

“Fine, it seemed like. Or, maybe she got a little annoyed that first I asked her to come and then … But she said she understood.”

“And it was on the morning of the twenty-seventh you said that?”

“Yes.”

“So on that occasion you were only together for one night?”

“Yes.”

“But you met again in Copenhagen?”

“No.”

Fredrik tried to conceal his surprise. Who besides Katja could have written the comment on Malin’s blog?

“Wasn’t she at the hotel on November sixteenth?”

“Yes. She was there. But we hadn’t been in touch or anything. She just showed up.”

“But she must have known that you would be there?”

“Yes, of course. I must have said something about that time, too.”

“So what happened?”

“I had to ask her to leave. It got a little tiresome.”

“In what way?”

“She took it okay, but it was a little painful to send her away. She was disappointed, it was noticeable, but there was no big drama or anything.”

“Did she try to make contact with you again after that?”

“She sent a couple of e-mails and asked if I would be going to Copenhagen anymore, or to Stockholm. She also called at some point and left a message on my cell phone. But I never answered that.”

“But she never came to St. Petri again?”

“No.”

“And there was nothing in what she said or wrote that was threatening? Or that you perceived as strange in any other way?”

“No,” said Henrik. “Not at all.”

The phone in the room rang. Fredrik excused himself.

“Yes?”

It was Sara.

“I think Ellen wants her dad now.”

“Okay,” said Fredrik. “Then I’ll finish up here.”

Henrik took the words as a sign that the last question had already been asked and got up before Fredrik had even hung up. He seemed eager to get out of there. Fredrik extended his hand.

“Thanks for coming in.”

“You’re welcome.”

Fredrik followed Henrik and Ellen through the building and let them out on the front side. He had solved his first case since he came back into service for real. What ought to have been a simple one-person job on Fårö had turned out quite differently. He had a definite feeling that he would remember them a long time. Both the dead and those who remained.

94.

The day was mild, cloudy, and windy. The sea neither threatening nor beautiful, just gray and a little sad. Malin had often talked about nature on Fårö, how it had two sides. Today, Friday the sixteenth of October, it didn’t seem to have any side at all.

Axel, was the first thing Henrik thought when he came into the light, open church sanctuary along with Ellen.

Axel.

The two caskets were at the front by the chancel. The larger casket with Malin to the left and the smaller one with Axel to the right. Henrik knew that they would be there, he knew what they would look like. He was the one who had chosen them. Two simple white caskets with two simple wreaths of spruce. No pictures. He had said no when the woman at the funeral home asked if he wanted to have portraits on the caskets. In this context, he preferred his own internal image, a living image, rather than a frozen moment. And he wanted all the others who came to the funeral to have their own images, undisturbed.

He went down the center aisle holding Ellen by the hand, felt her small fingers moving against his, and without exerting himself, without even thinking about it, he felt Axel’s even smaller fingers against his free hand. Hundreds of times Axel’s little hand had slipped into his, hundreds of times, perhaps thousands, to get support, strength, consolation, or simply in search of an obvious intimacy.

With every step he took it was as though the grief stabbed a sword deeper and deeper into his chest, with every step death came ever closer and could finally whisper right into him. A cold voice that reached to the very depths of his soul. This is you. This is everyone you love. Malin, Axel, Ellen. You.

Candles were lit on the altar and alongside the caskets. Above the altar no soothing Jesus, simply God’s all-seeing eye in the form of a simple sun. Without being able to take his gaze from the two caskets, he took the final steps up and sat down trembling in the front row with Ellen beside him. Maria came right after and sat down next to Ellen.

The newspapers had not missed any details. Everything would be out in the light, wide open. Names, pictures, and places. The hotel. “Here he met the murderer.” They had ferreted out Agnes and Thomas. They declined to be interviewed, for which he was grateful. Not because it made any great difference. Everything was there, every miserable detail. But it meant a lot to him that they had still done what they could to protect him.

But not a single line about Maria. That had escaped them. Or possibly had not been defensible to publish. Maria remained a secret.

Ewy and Staffan sat in the pew behind Henrik. They spoke as little as possible with him. He could not blame them. In their eyes everything was his fault and maybe they were right. If he had not betrayed Malin the way he did, she and Axel would still be alive now. Betrayed. What a pleasant paraphrase for his having slept with a complete stranger in a hotel in Copenhagen. A stranger who then killed his wife and his child.

The bells started ringing, and he looked cautiously around the sanctuary. Right across the aisle, on the second pew from the chancel, sat three friends of Malin who had come down from Stockholm. Tyra had worked at Kakan, the other two, Viktoria and Måns, were old friends from high school. Behind them sat Janna, Thomas, and Agnes, and then the neighbors from Kalbjerga, Bengt and Ann-Katrin.

Two vacant pews behind them he noticed Alma. His sister.

He had not noticed her when he came in. He tried to catch her eye, but it was directed forward toward the caskets and the chancel.

The funeral would take place in Fårö church and the burial in Stockholm. Thankfully that had been easy to agree on despite the icy chill between him and Ewy and Staffan. Because they had such a hard time talking with one another they decided that Henrik would decide on the funeral arrangements and Ewy, Staffan, and Maria the burial. In the background lurked an unspoken tug-of-war about which family Malin really belonged to. The first one she had been born into, or the second one that she had formed together with him? Henrik could only hope that the struggle would remain hidden. He did not want to start a war over Malin’s dead body.

Maria still talked with him. Perhaps she had a harder time judging. Between the two of them the obstacles were of a different kind. But she sat beside him. No, she sat next to Ellen. Maybe it was only for Ellen’s sake.