The Viper (19 page)

“It’s what
you
think, isn’t it?”

Göran didn’t answer.

“What do
you
think?” he asked.

“I’m surprised that it took him this long.”

She abruptly cupped her hand over her mouth.

“I’m sorry, Christ that was harsh,” she mumbled through her fingers, “but it’s true.”

She lowered her hand and swallowed before continuing.

“I just started a very demanding, five-and-a-half-year degree program in Stockholm so I could stay away from here for as much as possible. Well, that wasn’t the only reason, but it was a very welcome perk.”

She fell silent without looking away. Göran said nothing. He had trouble finding a good way of responding to her. He thought that the best was perhaps to just let it show.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said after a moment. “It feels very strange talking about this.”

“How were things between your parents?”

“They were…” she said and paused to think for a long moment. “He used to beat her,” she said finally. “But I guess I already said that, in a way. He beat her, and if you ask me, I think he was the one who did it … the one who killed her. It’s difficult to say it. I didn’t think it would be, because I’ve really turned my back on him, I think he’s a total fucking bastard, and yet it’s still not easy for me to say it…”

She went quiet and bit down hard to keep back the tears. The white, cramped interview room was completely silent around them. It wasn’t all that hard to understand that she must have found the whole situation very unreal.

“And Anders Traneus and your mother? How did they know each other?”

“That’s what I just can’t get my head around. Anyone but him, or any other relation for that matter. I hardly know who these people are. Anders Traneus and, what was his name now again … Karl-Johan. We’ve been like an island in our family, especially where relatives are concerned, but otherwise, too. I can’t understand what he was doing here.”

Göran Eide couldn’t make heads or tails of this interview. It steered back and forth, produced information, but nothing concrete. Elin was virtually convinced that it was her father who had killed her mother, but it was a conviction that was based more on a feeling than anything else. She hadn’t spent a lot of time with her family over the past few years, but neither had Arvid Traneus for that matter. How much did she really know about how things were between her parents?

“You say that your father beat your mother. I realize that it’s difficult for you, but could you talk a bit more about that? How did you become aware of it?”

“I’ve never seen him do it. He never did it in front of us. But I understood it early on. And Stefania was older, smarter, she could handle him in a way that we couldn’t. She could divert his attention. But she couldn’t always be there.”

“How did you come to understand that this was happening? Can you remember?”

“You just knew. We heard Mother crying, we saw the aftereffects, bruises sometimes, but mostly that Mother was just totally broken. She moved differently, became someone else.”

“How often could you see those kinds of signs?” asked Göran.

“Often enough. But not so often that you understood it. Sometimes you could predict it, but mostly it was just something that exploded. You could sometimes convince yourself that we were a normal family, at least when I was little, but then when you got older and smarter, like Stefania, you realized that we’d never be a normal family. It always came back, things would never be hunky-dory.”

30.

It was as if the entire community was holding its breath. Not out of shock, but for fear of missing something if they breathed too loudly. The evil that had taken place radiated, reeked, and resonated from the farm in Levide and if you just listened closely enough you soon knew everything. Anything that didn’t appear in the newspaper or wasn’t reported on the radio or on the TV news, you could soon pick up through the stealthy use of your own nose, eyes, and ears.

Kristina Traneus. Found dead next to her husband’s cousin. And there were those who knew how everything had begun once upon a time. It was like a saga.

Arvid Traneus had come home and he had also used his nose, eyes, and ears to find out what was going on. But it was claimed that he didn’t even have to do that. He had a sort of sixth sense; it was enough for him to just walk into a room. The way it worked was that people were afraid of him and when they became afraid they gave themselves away, whether they wanted to or not.

Oh, sure. There were a lot of people who knew all about it.

The day was gray, but mild. Two old ladies, still wearing light summer coats, were standing in front of the gray facade of Svahn’s hardware shop in the middle of Hemse. Their hair was crimped, but hidden beneath a cherry-red beret and a white-knitted hat. They hugged their shopping bags and were engaged in lively conversation.

“What a way to end your days.”

“And how, you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.”

“And she who was such a refined woman. I remember her from when she was a young girl. It wasn’t that long ago after all.”

“She was willful, too, though.”

They fell silent and looked at each other while they thought about what they had just said. Then the woman in the cherry beret sighed.

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

The other woman nodded slowly.

“One today, and tomorrow another.”

*   *   *

ELIN PULLED UP
in front of the house, turned off the engine, and pulled the hand break. Just as she opened the door, two people came rushing toward the car. She had been keeping an eye out for the red TV4 van, but hadn’t noticed the white rental Volvo that had been parked fifty-five yards farther down the road, in the shade of a big chestnut tree.

Her first instinct was to pull the door closed, lock it, and just remain sitting there, but that impulse only made it as far as a nervous twitch in her leg.

She climbed out and slammed the car door, activated the central locking system, and held the bags from H&M and the sporting goods shop in a tight grip.

They came up to her, two women of around thirty, close to each other in appearance, medium-length hair in a ponytail, one light, the other dark, both wearing trench coats, this year’s fashion rage. The dark-haired one held up a camera that she trained on Elin, while the blonde one introduced herself and held out her hand. Elin said, “Hi,” but didn’t take her hand. She didn’t want to appear rude, but she had decided to keep her distance, and continued walking resolutely toward the house.

“I’m really sorry for your loss,” the blonde continued. “I lost my mother, too, recently, and I understand what a difficult time this must be for you right now. And I can really appreciate the fact that more than anything right now you’d probably just like to be left alone, but…”

Elin tried not to listen. She kept her gaze fixed on the door and hoped that Ricky was standing on the other side of it, ready to help her in. The two journalists walked on either side of her, the light-haired one babbling on and on, and Elin felt how she gave her a squeeze just above the elbow. And just at the moment when the woman touched her, something softened inside her, something opened up and she longed for the chance to just sit down and babble incoherently about what had happened with someone who didn’t want to interview her, and someone who wasn’t Ricky, no matter how great he was. Her chest and knees became weak, and she felt so goddamn alone.

But it didn’t cross her mind her for a second that the blonde woman hurrying along next to her could be that person. She had only ignited that longing. The woman journalist was there to do a job, to get her to say useful things, not to listen.

When Elin was almost ten feet from the door, she suddenly rushed forward and at the exact right moment the door opened. She had no idea what happened behind her; just heard the door close and the lock turn.

“What timing,” she gasped and dropped the bags onto the floor.

She thanked God for Ricky. Not just because he had guarded the door so well, but because she had him, because she wasn’t alone there. Otherwise she would never have managed it. Otherwise she would have been standing out there now, would have felt forced to talk about her feelings to those strangers.

There she was again, carrying on about God.

The journalist pleaded in a loud and friendly voice so that it could be heard clearly through the door.

*   *   *

THEY HAD FLED
upstairs to the study and pulled the door closed. Ricky had wanted to turn on the radio to drown out the sound of the doorbell and the journalist’s calls through the seam of the door, but Elin had stopped him. If she couldn’t hear them she might start to imagine that they were breaking into the house. Not because she really thought they would try something like that, but you couldn’t stop your imagination.

“The police were here again,” said Ricky swaying slowly back and forth in the rockable office chair.

Elin stood in the middle of the room and looked out through the window, out over the meadow across the road. A pitch-black bull stared in her direction with bright-yellow tags dangling from its ears.

“But it was only the woman detective. The bald guy wasn’t with her.”

“The one named Eide, you mean. No, he was in Visby speaking to me,” said Elin.

“What did he want?” asked Ricky.

He stopped rocking, looked down at his foot, and started to spin the chair around very slowly.

“He asked if I knew Karl-Johan Traneus.”

Ricky looked up.

“He was the one who called yesterday. Anders’s son.”

Ricky looked away, stood up from the chair, and just then there was a knock on one of the windows downstairs.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake! I’m going down there and—”

“There’s no point.”

Elin blocked his way to the study door

“It won’t do any good. The more we communicate, the longer it’ll take to get rid of them.”

It didn’t take much to get him to change his mind. Ricky turned around abruptly and dropped down on the bed.

“Is that what they teach you in psychology?” he said with a deep sigh.

“That particular trick I think I learned from working behind the bar.”

Ricky gave her a quick smile.

“So, and what did she want with you?” she asked and took his seat in the office chair. He thought about it for a moment before he answered.

“She asked me about Mom and Dad. You know, how things were between them, that kind of thing,” he said.

“And what did you say?”

They fell silent again. A different kind of silence this time. A silence between them.

“Well, I mean, what do you say to something like that? They had their share of ups and downs, but who doesn’t? At least over such a long period of time. Besides which, Dad’s barely even been home in the last three years.”

“So that’s what you said, ‘They had their share of ups and downs, but who doesn’t?’” asked Elin.

“Something like that.”

“And that was it?” she persisted.

She looked at him intently, tried to hold back the anger, but noticed how her voice had already started to quaver.

“No, she asked me about what I’d done last Monday, what time I came home and—”

“About Mom and Dad,” Elin interjected.

“No, that wasn’t it,” he sighed, “She harped on about that for a while.”

“But you didn’t say anything?”

“Like what?”

He looked at her vacantly and Elin felt how she wanted to rush up and scream at him, but faltered just as she was about to get up from her chair. There was something about his hunched figure on the bed and his confused, feigned confused, expression that made her anger so desperately sad. Ricky wasn’t stupid. She knew that she had an intelligent brother, that he was really capable of so much more. And she wasn’t talking about that boring accounting job that Father had set him up with. She meant more in every possible sense. But it was as if he couldn’t get a hold of himself. He lived some kind of pretend life steered if not by lies, then at least a stubborn refusal to look life right in the eyes. It was easily done, it was comfortable and human, she knew that, but if you make a habit out of always directing your gaze a little off to the side, life starts to become a little fuzzy around the edges. And she didn’t want to see him like that, meekly carving out a shapeless life.

She had to steel herself.

“He beat her, Ricky.”

This time the answer came quickly.

“Did you say that to the guy in Visby?”

“Yes. Of course I did.”

“Of course you did?” bounced right back at her.

He almost sounded hurt, as if he’d been one she informed on.

“Why wouldn’t I tell them that? Mom’s dead, why wouldn’t I tell them what I know?”

Her voice barely held out till the end of the sentence.

“Did you ever see it? Did you ever see him hit Mother?”

“I saw the aftereffects, and so did you!”

She couldn’t hold back any longer. She sobbed and whimpered her way through her words.

“You saw the
aftereffects
and that means he hit her. Give me a fucking break, Elin.”

He sounded so damn cold, so unreasonable. So fucking … stupid.

“I said exactly what I’m saying to you now. That I’ve never seen him do it, but that I’ve seen the aftereffects and that’s sure as hell good enough for me.”

“I think it’s pretty fucked up to talk about stuff you haven’t even seen. Pretty damn fucked up,” he said.

He had sat up in bed with his arms crossed, stubborn, sullen.

“She was murdered. Murdered, Ricky. We have to tell them what we know. What we’ve seen.”

She sobbed, cried, and shouted out the words, and was surprised that he could even understand what she said.

“Then go downstairs and tell that to those journalists why don’t you, if you think it’s so important.”

She flew up out of her chair, couldn’t remain sitting down anymore, sent it skittering off on its wheels until it hit against the desktop with a dull thud. Elin stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind her. She heard how Ricky got to his feet.