The Viper (30 page)

“But you’re saying that it ended anyway?”

“There were a number people who said that Stefania’s father had scared Leo away somehow. Though I can’t say how you’d go about scaring off Leo. He was pretty wild as I remember.”

“But still just a teenager,” said Fredrik.

“Yeah, of course.”

Marie smiled vaguely, as if she saw Leo in front of her as the boy he once was. Had Arvid Traneus gone after him, physically? Or had he gone after Stefania?

“Do you remember who Leo Ringvall hung out with back then?” he asked.

“Oh, sure, I probably remember pretty much everyone,” said Marie Barsk without having to think about it.

“We can start with those closest to him,” said Fredrik and smiled, and heard just then how someone called out for Marie from the stockroom.

“Then you can go,” he added and started writing down the names that she gave him.

45.

Elin sat in the couch with the receiver pressed to her ear and listened to Molly’s hoarse voice, hoarse because she had been speaking in such a low tone that her voice was on the verge of disappearing completely.

“I wish that I could be there,” whispered Molly.

“I wish you could be here, too,” said Elin and there was a long silence.

She felt clearer in the head, the painkiller had started to work. She had also gratefully taken the sleeping pills she had received from the district doctor that the police had sent for. They had allowed her to sleep straight through the night, but she had woken up with a heavy head and fuzzy thoughts. The painkiller helped, the way it helped with most things. She ran her left hand through her hair, felt that she needed to wash it. Her pale face was reflected in the empty TV screen.

“I don’t know what to say,” Molly hissed from receiver.

“You don’t have to say anything,” said Elin.

That was true and yet not. She needed someone who said something, who said a lot, but she didn’t need any pity or someone to work through everything that had happened. She needed someone who called and talked about Freud’s interpretation of dreams, about the pitfalls of CBT, about how drunk she had gotten at the last college pub crawl, about an incredible bargain they’d found at Tjallamalla, anything; even somebody calling up to complain about their pain-in-the-ass boyfriend.

Since she had told Molly that her mother had been murdered, Molly had called her once. One single time in two weeks. It made her angry. It made her even more angry since she realized that she had nobody on the island. There was nobody that she really cared about and who cared about her. Not anymore. Well, Ricky of course, but she hadn’t seen him since yesterday night. And he wasn’t calling, either.

“I’m gonna come home tomorrow,” she said.

“Will they let you?” said Molly.

“You don’t have to whisper,” said Elin.

“Okay,” said Molly after clearing her throat.

“They can hardly stop me,” said Elin. “I can’t wait to get home. I’ve been living at Ricky’s place for two-and-a-half weeks now. It … I’ve just got to get home. It’s too much over here.”

“It must be awful,” said Molly.

She started with a whisper, but caught herself and raised her voice on “awful.”

“Try bizarre,” said Elin.

She thought more about Mother than about Father. It was as if the news from yesterday had thrown her back in time, back to that moment at Redners when Ricky had told her that Mother was dead. She didn’t remember it in detail, strangely enough, but she remembered the feeling, she was caught up in it. It was completely unbearable, and yet at the same time it enveloped her in a palliating silence. A great, white sea of mute stillness that helped her survive.

Her father. She didn’t know what she felt about that. She wasn’t there yet. The horrific circumstances of his death overshadowed the death itself. Elin couldn’t understand that he was gone. Whatever that meant. She was caught up in the horror, the unreality of it all. Someone had murdered her parents. And she had believed that it was her father who had … She couldn’t absorb it. It was too much.

“I’ll be getting in at around nine. Do you have time to meet up?” she asked.

*   *   *

IT HAD BEEN
raining for half an hour, a light resounding rain, the kind where every drop sounds like a soft but distinct tapping against the roofs and windows. They had gathered in Göran’s office, Ove with some papers in his hand, the others restless, eager to finally be getting somewhere. After more than two weeks they were finally going to be able bring in a suspect for questioning.

“I’ve put together a profile of Leo Ringvall,” said Ove. “It’s true what the witness Marie Barsk said, that he moved to Stockholm with his parents in 1994. The assault charge in 2003 marks the first time he actually got convicted of anything, but if you ask around a little it seems that he’s been involved in a whole bunch of other stuff. We’re talking smuggling, selling illegal alcohol, receiving stolen goods, but he’s always sort of on the sidelines, it’s impossible to tie him conclusively to anything, not enough to arrest him.”

“And probably no one has put much effort into finding anything, either, as long as he’s careful and sticks to that kind of small-time stuff,” said Sara and squirmed impatiently.

“Probably not,” said Ove, “but then,
bang,
he gets put away for this assault. A nasty case. The victim was left severely disabled from a skull injury.”

“Three years seems pretty light,” said Gustav who was standing over by the door.

“Probably came down to the fact that it was his first offense and that the victim was a nasty piece of work himself, who started the whole thing by smashing Ringvall in the head with a beer bottle,” Ove explained.

A resigned silence settled for a moment over the room.

“Some days you just want to give up and become a hermit,” said Fredrik.

“Well, you moved here, that’s a step in the right direction,” said Sara.

They fell silent again. This time for a completely different reason.

“It was a joke,” said Sara and looked unhappy.

Ove gently folded his papers together and clasped them between his thumb and forefinger. “Those who aren’t planning on becoming hermits or stand-up comedians today, can head down to Hemse and bring in Ringvall. One of the guys that Marie Barsk said was an old buddy of Ringvall’s is in our files. Per-Arne Hallman, better known as Beppo. And Hallman is registered as living on Ängsgatan in Hemse. I suggest that we start there.”

Göran lifted the receiver, momentarily silenced the dial tone with his thumb against the cradle, and pointed at his detectives with the receiver in his fist.

“We’ll go in as soon as we get the order, but you stay back. The SWAT team will go in first. If we’re right about Ringvall then anything could happen and I don’t want any detectives getting knifed. Lumbago is bad enough.”

He removed his thumb from the cradle and dialed the number to the district police commissioner as the room quickly emptied. It took three seconds to break down Per-Arne Hallman’s front door, another three for four men from the SWAT team to secure the little apartment on Ängsgatan in Hemse, with a view out across the parking lot outside the Konsum supermarket and municipal library.

A bleary-eyed Per-Arne Hallman, better known as Beppo, looked up from the couch where he’d been sitting before nodding off in front of a black-and-white matinee movie. Before he’d even woken up properly he was pushed down onto his stomach on the couch and was quickly frisked by a couple of rough gloved hands. There was no one else in the apartment.

The four officers dressed in protective gear, holstered their sidearms, which had been deemed adequate armament for the purposes of this takedown, and waved in the detectives from CID.

“He’s all yours,” said the SWAT team commander.

Gustav went in first, Fredrik and Sara entered behind him. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke, which concealed a mixed odor of grime, garbage, dirty sheets, and sweaty socks. Piled next to the unmade bed was a stack of unopened boxes of amplifiers, DVD players, and similar electronic devices.

“So, you haven’t called it quits yet, huh?” said Sara and nudged the boxes with her foot.

Beppo had been cuffed and lifted back up to the couch where he was now sitting leaning forward because of the handcuffs behind his back.

“Watch it!” Beppo whined. “What, I’m not allowed to buy a new stereo?”

“Where’s Leo Ringvall?” asked Gustav who’d pulled up a white steel-tube chair with a dirty red seat cushion and sat down in front of Beppo.

“What?” said Beppo.

Fredrik held up a green-and-yellow sleeping bag that he had found on the floor among the dirty laundry and empty beer cans.

“Looks like you’ve had company. Or are you going camping?”

“Where’s Leo Ringvall?” Gustav asked again.

“I don’t know.”

Gustav looked up at Fredrik who had tossed aside the sleeping bag.

“Let’s take him down to the station for starters.”

“Yeah,” said Fredrik and suddenly came to think of something else.

He took a pair of latex gloves out of his jacket pocket, pulled them on and squatted down next to the sleeping bag. He carefully folded it open and examined the lining, pinched his fingers together purposefully like a set of tweezers, and held up something that none of the others could see.

“One strand of hair, long and black,” he said.

“I think Eva better take a look at this,” said Gustav.

46.

Sara was standing outside the police station in Hemse looking at the ram and the banner on the shaft of the cross hewn in limestone above the entrance. She understood that all three of them couldn’t question Hallman, but why did she have to be the one to step aside? Did it have to do with her hermit comment? She didn’t understand how it could have caused such offense. It was completely harmless, not overly funny perhaps, that she could accept, but apart from that …

She pulled her gaze from the provincial coat of arms and took a few desultory steps along the whitewashed facade. The rain hadn’t completely ceased. A light drizzle was drifting through the air. What was the deal with Ove anyway? She had always seen him as the most thoroughly good-natured person in the whole station; calm, dependable, knowledgeable, and nice. But as head of the investigation he had suddenly displayed a rather grumpy and uptight side that she hadn’t seen before. Couldn’t he handle the pressure? Wasn’t he cut out to be a supervisor?

The drizzle had laid itself over her face like a thin layer of sweat. She rubbed away the moisture from her forehead and cheeks and went back inside the station. On Tuesday at 3 p.m., she had an appointment at Stockholm South General Hospital. It had taken a whole lot of persistence and sustained badgering over the phone to get them to allow the procedure to be done in Stockholm rather than in Visby, but in the end she had gotten her way. For a while she had thought she was being silly, that it was just this fixed idea that she had gotten into her head, but after the uncomfortable silence that had followed her failed joke, she was happy that she hadn’t given up.

As it happened, she had been given a time the same day that Arvid Traneus’s remains had been uncovered in a field in Hejde. It was upsetting that it was going to clash with a new murder investigation, but she had no choice anymore. The clock was ticking. She had been forced to tell Göran. She hadn’t said it straight out, but her prevarications had been transparent enough. She couldn’t help noticing the shadow that had moved across Göran’s face when it was clear that she would be away for at least three days. He had done his best to conceal his disappointment, but without success.

*   *   *

“YOU ARE UNDER
arrest on suspicion of aiding and abetting a felon, and complicity to murder. You are also under suspicion for receiving stolen goods,” said Gustav and looked at Per-Arne Hallman with his friendly gaze.

“What?” said Hallman and grasped the sides of the polished top of the old desk with both hands.

His face was harrowed from drugs and alcohol and his spiky hairdo hung down the back of his neck in a manner better suited to a rock star than a petty thief from Hemse. Fredrik wondered who had cut his hair. He had a hard time picturing Hallman paying someone to do it, but even a loser of his caliber could of course show some degree of vanity.

“You have the right to a lawyer. Do you want a lawyer now, or would you consider continuing this interview without one present?” Gustav asked.

“If you’re going to talk about murder, then I want a lawyer, you can be sure of that, because I sure as hell haven’t been involved in any murders,” said Hallman and fingered the hair at the back of his neck with his left hand.

“So you deny any crime?” said Gustav.

“I don’t know nothing about no murders. You got the wrong guy,” said Hallman who sat straight as an arrow in his chair and stared at Gustav with eyes wide open.

“Primarily, we’re interested in talking about Leo Ringvall. Could we do that right here and now, or would you prefer to have a lawyer present?”

Beppo Hallman was about to open his mouth, but Gustav interrupted him.

“If it’s the latter, then we’d have to take you into Visby and put you in a detention cell there while we find you a lawyer.”

Hallman sat there stiffly as before and thought for about five seconds, then he slumped down and waved his right hand in resignedly.

“Sure, all right, ask away.”

Fredrik took over after he had been read his rights, as they’d agreed ahead of time.

“Have you known Leo Ringvall for very long?”

“Yeah, since school.”

“And now he’s been staying with you for a while?”

“Yeah.”

“For how long?”

“A couple of weeks, three maybe.”

“Could you be more precise?” asked Fredrik.

Hallman looked up at the ceiling at the oversized fluorescent light fitting that cast a harsh, almost shadowless glare over the room, then back at Fredrik again.

“It was a Saturday,” he said.

“Three weeks ago?”

“Yeah. You can work the date out yourselves.”