The Viper (17 page)

The first day was always the best. And the island. On second thought it was probably the island that was the best, rather than the fact that it came first. It was another world. It was a big island, and there was nothing else there except for a few lambs, a couple of old ruins, and a lighthouse next to a little jetty. They used to anchor the
Adventure
with the bow facing the jetty. Elin and Ricky were the first to jump ashore, went dashing straight up to the lighthouse and pulled at the rusty iron door. Always the same ritual, always with the same result. Then they’d spend fifteen seconds looking for a key in the seams of the limestone wall next to the base of the lighthouse before setting off toward the opposite end of the island. They ran almost the whole way and mother came after them and cried out telling them to wait, sometimes Stefania, too. “I said wait, didn’t you hear me?!” They stumbled and jumped forward in flip-flops toward the scorching hot, chalk-white stone beaches and the big, dark limestone cave that you could only enter by swimming.

As they moved toward the interior, the island became quieter. The dry, tall grass rustled beneath their flip-flops, insects buzzed around them, and from a distance they could hear the lambs bleating from within the ruins of the old lighthouse keeper’s quarters. That was the only place where there was any shade when the sun was at its zenith. There and in the cave. But the lambs couldn’t make it in there, of course.

The sun beat down. It was hot. They marched past the overgrown cluster of wind-battered junipers and dwarf birches where there were fire ants, continued up the bluff as fast as they could and tried their best to avoid stepping on the chalk-white bird skeletons that shone in the low-cropped grass along with white flowers that were no bigger than pinheads.

“I’m dying, water, water, I’m dying,” they groaned one after the other like two parched desert explorers, always at the same spot, where they struggled up onto the ridge above the pebble beach. There they collapsed onto the grass, lay there with their legs splayed and caught their breath. But not for long, never long enough that Stefania caught up to them. She was never as quick as they were. She came trudging along at the same pace as Mother and Father. At least that was how he remembered her, as being slightly in the background. But she was also five years older than he was. Probably didn’t want to have too much to do with her romping little siblings.

They got back on their feet, saw the three figures slowly drawing closer, almost camouflaged by the sun-bleached grass in their light summer clothes. From down there, he and Elin must have stood out like two steadfast little silhouettes up on the ridge. They started climbing down the steep, craggy bluff, heard a faint “be careful” behind them.

They reached the hot, blinding beach cauldron, teetered on chalk-white stones, and looked out across the endless sea. Then, they ripped off their clothes and threw themselves into the sometimes cold water, but they still threw themselves screaming into it and swam out toward the cave, into the dark, cool cave where the clucking of the waves echoed enchantingly against the rock walls, and reflections from the sun danced off the ceilings. Elin’s hair lay pasted against her head and the water was like a wet film over her face. His heart pounded in his chest, the lurching surface of the water tickled his throat and Ricky felt warm all over his body, no matter how cold the water was.

There they were eternal. Time ceased. They were all immortal. He, Elin, Mother, Father, and Stefania.

26.

This day is turning out to be like walking backward in your own footprints,
thought Fredrik as they pulled up in front of the row houses with the checkered pastel facades.

As soon as they’d climbed out of the car, the door at number 14 opened and Sofia Traneus pulled out a baby carriage where her youngest child lay fast asleep in a footmuff in the same dark-blue color as the carriage. The elder girl followed right behind and immediately took her mother’s hand when she caught sight of Fredrik and Gustav.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Fredrik. “I wish we could have brought you better news yesterday.”

But someone had to get that news,
he thought to himself. If it hadn’t been Anders Traneus lying dead in the house, it would have been someone else. There was no getting around that.

Sofia Traneus nodded and rolled the baby carriage slowly back and forth.

“I was just going to take the kids out for a little walk,” she said and glanced at the dozing infant. “Will it take long?”

“No, no, you go ahead. It’s Rune we want to talk to. He is still here, isn’t he?” Fredrik asked.

“Yes, Grandpa’s inside.”

“Then we’ll do it here,” said Gustav and looked at Fredrik.

“Yes, I think he’d feel better if he could stay here,” said Sofia Traneus.

She headed off with the carriage and only once she’d disappeared around the corner did it strike Fredrik that she had been dressed in black from head to toe. Did people do that these days, or was it just a coincidence?

*   *   *

THE RUNE TRANEUS
who was sitting across from them at the kitchen table was very different from the one they’d met the day before. He seemed calm, not the least bit confused and definitely responsive, but also subdued.

“We have to ask you a few things about Anders’s background,” Gustav began. “In a case like this, it is of the utmost importance to get as detailed a picture as possible of the relationships within the family, even going back in time, and you’re perhaps the best person of all to tell us about it.”

“That’s possible. Yeah, that could be,” Rune Traneus muttered.

Gustav’s plan was to steer the conversation as little as possible and draw upon Rune Traneus’s rage. Even if he wasn’t shouting and screaming and wildly throwing his arms around anymore, the anger and hatred toward Arvid Traneus still had to be in there somewhere. That was the wellspring he wanted to tap into, there was a wealth of information that could be extracted from it.

“When you came to your nephew’s farm yesterday morning, you seemed so certain that it was Anders lying in there. Something tells me you were pretty sure even before you spotted his car parked outside the house?”

Gustav saw how something flared up in the old man’s eyes as his thoughts were brought back to the scene of the murder.
Just don’t start howling about how Arvid is the devil again,
he thought to himself. But it was as if Rune Traneus just couldn’t help himself.

“I realize that I went overboard yesterday,” he said, “but I meant what I said. That man is the devil. Arvid Traneus is Satan himself.”

Those last words came out with added emphasis and you could detect something of yesterday’s fire in them, but he was far from uncontrolled. He said it more to himself than to Gustav and Fredrik, more like an incantation.

So far so good,
thought Gustav,
but it would be great if you could be a little more specific.

“I barely know where to start where that man’s concerned,” said Rune and twirled one of his bushy eyebrows.

“If you focus on Anders. How was Anders’s relationship to his cousin and Kristina?”

“I understand that that’s what you want to hear about, but it’s still difficult to know where to begin. I sensed that something was amiss, and that made me … Well, it’s impossible to describe.”

Rune Traneus drew his hand across his mouth and shook his head. He had raisin-sized liver spots on his face and his eyes were pale somehow, diluted. He was an old man and his old age had all of a sudden become very hard to bear.

“What could I do? Anders was a grown man, and then some,” said Rune and threw out the hand that he had just been holding over his mouth. “You can’t … It becomes difficult to interfere.”

“What was it that you sensed was amiss, as you put it?” asked Gustav.

“He was so busy all of a sudden, always had things to do, didn’t answer the phone, and when you asked him where he was going or where he’d been, you never got a straight answer. It was like when he was a little boy and had gone and done something stupid. I recognized it. At first I just thought that he’d met someone new, you know, after Inger, and that he just didn’t want to talk about it. You can understand that, if you’re getting involved with someone new, and you’re not sure yet where it’s going.”

Rune paused and breathed almost like he was a little short of breath, as if it had been physically strenuous to talk about.

“Then there was one day when he was over at my house; there was something in his eyes, an anxious look that I hadn’t seen in a long time and the thought suddenly struck me like a bolt from the blue:
What if it’s Kristina?
And the words just slipped out, before I had a chance to stop myself. ‘You’re not seeing Kristina are you?’ He sat there silently for a long moment without looking at me. ‘No,’ he said then. That’s it, just ‘no.’ I couldn’t be more certain, short of him coming right out and admitting it.”

“But he never did?” asked Gustav.

“No. If he’d done that, I probably would’ve told him what I thought, I don’t care how grown up and middle aged he was, but I had asked him and he’d answered no. So what could I do?”

He panted softly again.

“I realized that it would end badly, one way or the other, but that it would end up like this…”

He looked at Gustav and Fredrik with big, lost eyes. Gustav met his gaze and felt how he went completely cold. There was a pleading look in those eyes that he couldn’t face. He could only do his best to solve the case, but he understood that it wouldn’t make a lot of difference. Not to Rune Traneus.

“You probably can’t really understand this. But you see, Anders had a brother who died exactly thirty years ago. He died out there on the farm. He used to work for my brother sometimes in the afternoons. They said it was an accident. A horse accident. But it was my brother who had the answer. You don’t let an inexperienced sixteen-year-old get onto a horse that’s … It was said that my brother had a way with horses, but that wasn’t true. Our father was a good horse breeder. He had a way with animals, with horses especially, but not my brother. His animals were tense and skittish. My son had to pay for my brother’s mistreatment of animals with his life.”

Rune Traneus clenched his right fist at the same time as his left hand pressed against his stomach.

“My brother and his offspring have taken away everything from us. It wasn’t enough with Johan and Kristina, they had to take Anders, too. And now he’s gone, Arvid. The question is whether you’ll ever catch him? He’s a devil, but he’s a damn smart devil.”

“Kristina? How do you mean that they took Kristina away from you?” asked Gustav without revealing that they had recently touched upon the same topic with Inger Traneus.

“Kristina,” snorted Rune. “It was as if Arvid just had to do it. He saw how much she meant to Anders. But I’ll tell you this much…”

He pointed a crooked forefinger at Gustav.

“If Arvid hadn’t have married her, Anders would’ve been able to put the whole thing behind him in a completely different way, that I’m sure of. But he just had to do that, too. You might well ask why? I mean, why he even wanted to get married at all. He treated women just like his father treated horses. What does a man like that get married for?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He looked at Gustav as if he expected an answer. It hung there in the air.

“Can you tell us what happened?” asked Gustav.

Rune Traneus looked pained. He’d had enough.

“Yeah, I reckon I can, more or less,” he said.

27.

“Be gentle,” she whispered through the hair that had fallen in front of her face and meant it in two ways, literally, but also hinting that there was another power at play, an alternative to being gentle that was both tempting and frightening and it was that power she was playing with when she gave her whisper a slightly syncopated quality akin to a gasp.

Arvid wasn’t gentle. He turned her around and bent her over the couch that lay overturned on its side, with the back facing upward. It smelled of basement and mildew and the fabric felt damp through the sheer dress that she still had on, even if it was unbuttoned and hiked up around her hips.

He penetrated her from behind, purposefully and with surprising suddenness. He took a firm grip around her hair, not enough to make it hurt, but so that it drew taut, leaving no doubt about who was in charge. He got her to bend her spine backward, cupped an ample warm hand over her right breast, let go of her hair with the other, and let it slide in between her legs. He continued to fuck her from behind with long, hard thrusts. Hot waves shot through her body. Her skin was like an electrical field and no matter where he touched her, she was on the verge of coming. She had never experienced anything like it. It was as if Arvid was taking her virginity all over again down in that basement, there in the very back, in the room full of furniture and old junk.

It smelled of dampness, earth, and dank basement air and her body rocked and slammed against the rough fabric of the couch. She felt the dust and tiny pebbles beneath her bare feet, felt his cock sliding into her, and how his body smacked against her buttocks underneath the hiked-up dress. She squeezed the backrest with her right hand, actually wanted to grab hold of him, but had to content herself with the couch, felt that she had to hold on, tight.

Arvid was rampant, dangerous in that sense like nobody else she knew. He was strong. He didn’t care. He was brazen. You could tell as soon as you saw him what he wanted, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. He dared to fuck her in the basement while the party was in full swing out in the garden and someone could come looking for them at any moment, or come down there to fetch some cold beer or whatever.

The hairs on her arms stood up. She had goose bumps all over her body. Her nipples stood straight out in his cupped, squeezing hand. It was so powerful that it scared her. Were these feelings normal, or was something wrong? Was something happening inside her body that was completely twisted? Was she dying perhaps? It was as if she was being immersed into a scalding hot bath at the same time that she was floating, no, soaring, in the cool refreshing night air, way above the treetops, high up above, out among the stars.