The Viper (8 page)

She sat in still silence as the minutes ticked by. Alone there in that empty house it was almost as if she was removed from her life. At least she could pretend that she was for a brief moment.

Then she suddenly understood where she had been on her way to. That vague persistent feeling in the pit of her stomach had been urging her to seek out a place of her own. Now she saw it: the low rocks beyond the pier where her parents had their summerhouse in the Stockholm archipelago. Bedrock that she had sat on every summer from when she was seven years old right up until they moved to Gotland. Or maybe the rocky outcrops at Hellas in Nacka, that she had swum from and set off on skating excursions with Jocke when he was little. She wanted to sit on solid, familiar bedrock and look out across the water, not on some brittle goddamn limestone that fell apart as soon as you looked at it.

She got up with a jolt and grabbed the first things she could get her hands on, a pepper mill of brushed steel that she had been given as a fortieth birthday present by distant relatives, and threw it with all her might at the kitchen cupboards.

“Goddamn you!” she screamed.

The pepper mill smashed a nasty hole in one of the cupboard doors and the little plastic container that kept the peppercorns in such a viewing-friendly manner, broke into pieces that went skittering across the floor with a rustling sound. Not unlike what you hear when a gust of wind shakes the water from a tree top after it’s rained.

“Goddamn you!” she shouted again and threw a hot dish holder and the pile of newspapers immediately after it. “Don’t you dare die on me now! And don’t you dare become some fucking vegetable that I have to spoon-feed for the rest of my life! You hear me?”

She remained standing there with her hands clenched, fixing for a fight, as if she were ready to have it out with life itself.

It just couldn’t end up that way. She had been dragged to this goddamn island half against her will. She had just started to feel a little bit at home—despite the drawbacks—thanks very much to her job and colleagues at the school. As a teacher you quickly worked your way into a community, made contacts, and gained stature. But it was also because of her job that they had ended up so far out in the countryside, over thirty miles from town.

What the hell was she doing here?

Was it her destiny to rot away in a limestone house in the middle of nowhere with a husband who couldn’t wipe his own ass? It just couldn’t end up that way.

11.

The October sun had risen up higher into the sky. The day had become mild and clear.

“Wonderful day,” said Gustav as they sat in the car. “First, two people cut to shreds, then a grandpa with a screw loose.”

“Let’s see how much fun we have at the ex-wife’s house,” said Fredrik and steered the car toward Södercentrum.

He was hungry, had eaten too little breakfast as usual.

“We’ll have enough time to grab a quick lunch after Inger Traneus, right?” he asked and Gustav nodded.

“So what do you think?” Gustav then asked. “You think Rune Traneus is right?”

“Unless the guy’s completely nuts, then I guess he must have a good reason for reacting the way he did. But we didn’t get anything useful out of him.

“His son’s car was parked outside, there’s no escaping that. But it could just as well be Arvid Traneus lying hacked to pieces inside the house.”

“More likely even,” said Gustav.

“In which case Anders Traneus’s car points in a different direction altogether.”

*   *   *

INGER TRANEUS LOOKED
like her daughter. Tall and slim with the same long hair, more gray than blonde, in a tight ponytail. A beautiful woman just over fifty.

Once again, Fredrik explained the reason for their visit, the sensitive version, but was spared the trouble of having to try and make it incomprehensible to a three-year-old.

They were sitting crammed into an office at the Department of Childcare and Education at Söderport. Fredrik had seen that office innumerable times before, both at public agencies as well as in the private sector: about seventy square feet, a desk in birch veneer, a glass wall hung with thin cotton curtains looking out on the corridor. It could have been his own office at the police station.

“Rune Traneus seems convinced that Anders is the dead man in the house. Do you have any idea why he might think that?”

Inger Traneus lowered her head and looked down at her lap. Fredrik thought he glimpsed a vague smile. She shook her head, then looked up at them with a gaze that was somewhere else, tired, guarded.

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“We already have,” said Fredrik, “but now we’re asking what you think?”

His natural impulse was to be more open and forthright, show more empathy, but if things were as Gustav had suggested, that the answers were to be found within the family, it was better not to reveal more than was necessary.

“I was together with Anders for twenty-two years. We were married and lived under the same roof for twenty of those. But I never got to know him especially well. I thought I knew him, but then I discovered that I didn’t know him at all.”

There was that smile again, only it wasn’t so much a smile as a strained grimace.

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Fredrik honestly.

“Well, what is there to understand?” said Inger Traneus inwardly and stretched her neck. “I don’t understand myself.”

Fredrik decided to wait her out. The hard drive under the table started whirring. The sound was drowned out a moment later by a loud laugh out in the corridor, Inger’s colleagues on their way out to lunch.

“If it is Anders lying … If it is him, then it’s only logical that Kristina became the death of him. And he of her. Romantic, huh?” she said and moved her gaze back and forth between Fredrik and Gustav.

That didn’t make things any clearer for Fredrik, and he was just about to ask what there was between Kristina Traneus and Anders when Inger’s head fell forward again, and she started weeping.

She held her thumb and forefinger above her eyebrows as if she wanted to press back her tears. The long ponytail slid slowly down the front of her shoulder, strands of hair getting caught in her woolen sweater along the way.

“We don’t know for certain,” said Fredrik. “It’s very possible that we’ve upset you completely unnecessarily.”

They could just as well do this later, just concentrate on what was most important: finding out who it was lying sliced to pieces on the living room floor at Kristina and Arvid Traneus’s house.

“We’re heading back south. If you’d like we can give you a ride home?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not Anders I’m crying about. It’s all those wasted years. How you can waste your life so single-mindedly on someone who doesn’t want you?”

They fell silent. What can you say? Fredrik wished that he could say something. Instead it was Gustav who broke through the gloom.

“It’s better at least than single-mindedly staying together with someone you don’t want.”

Fredrik glanced at his colleague out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes he could surprise you. Inger Traneus also looked at Gustav and gave a little smile, a real one this time. Then she got up, turned her back to them, and wiped her tears.

“God how pathetic,” she mumbled. “Me, that is,” she added over her shoulder, in Gustav’s direction.

“Our main reason for coming here was actually to ask you whether Anders has any distinguishing marks or scars, that could help us to identify him. If it is him.”

She needed to think about it for a moment.

“He’s got a brownish-red birthmark just above his right knee, about the size of a fifty-öre piece.”

12.

Elin Traneus dropped a Treo Comp effervescent analgesic tablet into a glass of water on the bedside table. She didn’t have a headache, yet, but could feel how it was lurking there ready to pounce. For the moment her entire world was wrapped up in a gray haze, but just the sound of the tablets dissolving made her feel perkier.

She looked out across the room in the ridiculously small apartment that she had been subletting since New Year’s. The room where she would sleep, study, socialize, and look at TV was about fifty square feet. Beyond that there was a corridor of a kitchen, an intestine-like hallway, and a miniscule bathroom. The apartment was on the third floor of a building on Atterbomsvägen in Fredhäll. And Fredhäll was on the island of Kungsholmen, right in the center of Stockholm, although she had soon learned that it was the part of Kungsholmen that anyone living in the center of the capital didn’t recognize as being part of Kungsholmen.

“Oh, I see, in Fred
häll,
” they had corrected her with polite smiles when she had explained where exactly on Kungsholmen she was living. What inevitably followed was the obligatory, “It’s a really neat area, Atterbomsvägen.” That she had also learned. The inner suburbs were always “really neat.” Totally unhip, but really neat. The outer suburbs weren’t even really neat; “pretty nice” possibly, and when you got as far out as suburbs like Alby and Tensta they had nothing to say at all.

Her building was actually wonderfully situated on top of a high cliff with a view out over Riddarfjärden, even if the only thing Elin ever saw from her apartment was the light yellow facade of the building next door.

She was happy with her apartment, loved it in fact, even though she had grown up with closets that were as big. She couldn’t care less what the inner-city crowd thought. It was her life, not theirs.

The Treo tablet had finished fizzing. Elin downed the contents of the glass and reached for her cell phone. She dialed her mother’s number, but waited in vain for her to pick up.

“Damn it,” she said out loud and threw off the blanket that she’d wrapped herself up in.

She had been trying to get hold of her mother since yesterday afternoon with no luck. It was as if her mother could sense that she was going to wriggle out of it and refused to answer. Elin checked the time on her cell phone. There was no way she was going to make it over there in time by ferry. She considered calling Ricky and letting him deal with it, but then decided to head out to Bromma airport and try to fly standby. That usually worked.

She slid out of her pajamas and stood naked in front of the hall mirror. Her hair was dyed black, but was actually a dull mousy blonde underneath. Her brother and sister had gotten real blond hair, while she’d ended up with her drab color. Otherwise, she looked pretty okay, she thought, even if her breasts were maybe a bit on the small side, and her stomach wasn’t quite flat. And then she was short, of course. She could feel very unremarkable next to five-eight girls in four-inch fashion heels. But there were a lot of guys who liked small girls. It made them feel more manly.

Not that she’d had a lot of boyfriends. Her relationships were few and short-lived, and she was usually the one who broke them off. So she couldn’t exactly complain. She wanted to be seduced. Always. Every time. Why did the guys she met always think they had free access to her body just because she had given in once? That she would want to make love to someone who wasn’t ready to conquer her again each time he stepped through the door? Was that asking too much? Anyway, those were her conditions.

She felt the impulse to crawl back into bed and touch herself, but decided that she didn’t have time. She climbed into the shower instead.

Mother had called and told her that Father was coming home. That was a week ago. More or less. Of course she had wanted Elin to come down. Elin had been noncommittal. Said that it depended on how her studies were going, and Mother had of course pointed out that she could bring her books with her and study down there. Because it would so nice if …

As if she could find enough peace and quiet in that house to read so much as two lines. But she didn’t say that. They were going to speak later. And Mother called and pressured her and Elin had given in and promised to come, but then she had called to say that she couldn’t come after all, but hadn’t been able to get hold of her and couldn’t get herself to just leave a message on the answering machine.

“It would be so nice to sit down at the same table all together. We haven’t done that in so long.”

How could she say something like that? Did she mean one single word of what she said?

Elin turned up the cold water and raised her face into the shower stream, felt how her skin got covered in goosebumps. The shampoo smelled of apple.

All together. Yes, it had been a long time since they had all sat down together at the same table. It was true. Maybe the only thing that was true. Ten years ago. And they would never be all together again. Did she realize what she was saying? Didn’t she hear her own words? Never again would they ever be able to sit down, all together, at the same table. Elin pulled her fingers through her hair and down over her face as if she wanted to claw away the thoughts, then let the cool water run over her.

It felt good to have water that wet you right down to the skin, enveloped you, didn’t just bounce off you like the hard water on Gotland.

Was it Mother’s eternal duty to always try to make things better? Whatever the cost? Sure her intentions may have been good, but when your good intentions made you blind, what was the point?

Elin had been shocked when she heard that her father was coming home. Actually on his way. She wondered what her mother was thinking. She had wanted to ask, but hadn’t had the courage, had tried to be as sensitive as possible, listen to every pause, every breath, but hadn’t been able to detect anything that revealed what Mother was really feeling.

When Father first began spending more and more time away in Tokyo, Elin had taken the opportunity to get a room in Visby, like so many other kids her age who commuted to the high school there. Father hadn’t said anything. She wasn’t sure that he’d even been told.

Then, once she’d turned eighteen, there was nothing to stop her. She moved to Stockholm. Worked for a year in a café in the center of town, an awful place to work with a constant turnover of stressed customers you never saw twice, an obnoxious and sometimes downright mean boss who scared away his employees. When Elin quit after a year, none of the people working with her had been there for as long as she had. She went to Thailand on vacation, took a bus to Cambodia and saw Angkor Vat, had sex on a beach and got blisters, came home and enrolled at Stockholm University. She studied French for two semesters. She couldn’t say that she regretted it, she spoke French fluently now, but it had still sort of been a waste of time and definitely a result of cowardice. She hadn’t dared to make a serious start and now that she had finally chosen a five-year degree program it meant that she was no longer eligible for financial aid covering the full five years. She had heard that you could get a special dispensation, but she wasn’t sure. People said so many things. Oh, well … She was just six weeks into her psychology degree and her financial aid wouldn’t run out for another five years almost. She could survive one semester without financial aid one way or the other. There was no reason to get worked up about it.