The Cruel Stars of the Night Read online

  “A creature of habit.”

  “A man of order,” Haver said.

  “Who couldn’t get his life in order,” Lindell said and walked over to the window. “How old is the tree?”

  “At least a hundred years,” Haver said, a bit impatient with Lindell’s reflective mood, but well aware of the fact that there was no sense in hurrying her. It wouldn’t make any difference to Blomgren anyway.

  “Do you think it’s a robbery-homicide?” Lindell asked suddenly. “Was he one of those old men with his dresser drawer full of cash?”

  “In that case the thief knew where to look,” Haver said. “The technicians say that nothing appears to be disturbed.”

  “Did he know that Blomgren was on his way to the barn? That’s a barn, isn’t it?”

  Haver nodded.

  “Or was he hiding in there and taken by surprise when the old man walked in with a rope in his hand?”

  “We’ll have to check with the neighbor,” Haver said. “She seems to be the kind who keeps tabs.”

  They both knew that Beatrice Andersson was the most suited to handle the questioning of the neighbor. If there was anything Bea excelled at, it was talking to older women.

  “Who stands to inherit?”

  Sammy Nilsson’s question broke the silence that had settled in the kitchen. He had come creeping in without either Haver or Lindell noticing.

  Haver didn’t say anything but gave him a look that was difficult to interpret.

  “Am I interrupting?” Sammy asked.

  “Not at all,” Lindell said.

  “Let’s hope for a dead broke, desperate nephew,” Sammy continued. Lindell tried to smile.

  “Look over by the bread box,” she said.

  Sammy walked over to the kitchen counter and read the good-bye letter in a low mumble.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  A gust of wind underscored his words. Their gazes turned to the window. Outside a rain of leaves whirled from the tree to the ground. Lindell had the impression that the maple tree had decided to shake off all its leaves on this day.

  “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Sammy Nilsson said.

  “I wonder how his thought process went last night,” Haver said.

  “We’ll never know,” Sammy said and read the letter one more time.

  Lindell slipped away, entering the small room off the kitchen. If she had been forced to guess what it would look like she would have scored a nine out of ten. There was an old sleeper couch with dingy red upholstery, most likely from the thirties, and an armchair of the same color, a TV on a table with a marble top, a couple of chairs surrounding a small pillar table, and a bookcase. On the small sofa in front of the TV there was nothing except the remote control.

  It was a very personal room in spite of its predictability. It gave Lindell the feeling of intimacy, perhaps because she sensed that Petrus Blomgren spent his evenings here alone. He must have favored the armchair; it was extremely worn and had threads coming out of the armrests.

  She walked over to the bookcase, which was filled mainly with older books. She recognized a few of the titles from her parents’ house. They had a coating of dust. No one had touched these books in a long time.

  The left part of the bookshelf had a small cabinet. The key was in the keyhole. She pulled the door open with a pen and on the two shelves inside she saw what she thought was a photo album and a book entitled The Uppland Horse Breeder’s Association.

  Everything looked untouched. If this was a burglary-assault the perpetrator had been exceedingly careful.

  “Allan will have to take a look at this,” she said, and turned in the direction of the kitchen. She got up and looked around but could not spot anything out of the ordinary.

  “He’ll be here soon,” Sammy Nilsson said.

  Haver had left the kitchen. Nilsson was staring out of the window. Lin-dell looked at him from her position diagonally behind him and discovered that he was starting to go bald on the back of the head. He looked unusually thoughtful. Half of his face was illuminated by the soft morning light and Lindell wished she had had a camera. She was gripped by a sudden feeling of tenderness for her colleague.

  “What do you think about the new guy, Morgansson?”

  “He seems all right,” Lindell said.

  Charles Morgansson had been working in Forensics for a couple of weeks. He had joined them from Umeå, where he had been for the past few years. Eskil Ryde, the head of the Forensics Department, had installed Morgansson in the empty cubicle in their division and the northener had made a comment about it being like a row of boxes in the stables and had said little else since then. His reticence had irritated some, aroused the curiosity of others, but all in all the new recruit had acclimated well. This was his first homicide case in Uppsala.

  “Have you heard anything of Ryde’s plans?”

  “No,” Lindell said, who as recently as the other day had talked to Ryde about his plans of quitting the force and taking early retirement, but this was nothing she wanted to discuss with Sammy Nilsson.

  “Anita thought his buns were cute,” Nilsson said.

  “Whose buns?”

  “Morgansson’s”

  “Forget about his buns a while,” Lindell said flatly, “we have an investigation under way.”

  “I was just trying to . . .”

  “Forget it. Can you take the upstairs? I want to take a look around out there. Tell Allan to go over the TV room.”

  The technicians Jönsson and Mårtensson had spent almost two hours going through the home. Now it was the detectives’ turn but Lin-dell was finding it hard to remain in Petrus Blomgren’s house. She couldn’t exactly put her finger on it but it was something more than the usual oppressiveness she felt in the homes of those who had fallen victim to deadly violence. Perhaps a little fresh air will help, she thought and walked out into the yard again.

  The mercury strip had indicated negative five degrees Celsius this morning but now there was milder weather approaching. The period of unusual cold would be followed by a warm front and the end of October would be marked by more normal temperatures.

  She turned the corner and came out of the wind. A couple of black currant bushes, with withered leaves and the occasional, dangling dried berry, reminded her of a time gone by. It was always this way when she came out to the countryside. All the little cabins, woodsheds, and woodpiles with bunched-up twigs and grass took her thoughts back to Gräsö Island. This was her punishment, or so she felt. She had to live with it; she knew that. Everyone carried some painful memories. This was hers.

  She sighed heavily, plucked a berry that she popped in her mouth, and looked around. There was nothing of note to see: a handful of old apple trees, a bed of wilted flowers, and a rusty ladder hanging on the wall. She took a closer look at it and the mounting hardware. The ladder did not look as if it had been moved in years.

  Behind the house there was a pile of rocks that stirred the imagination. Large stone blocks pushed up against each other as if engaged in a wrestling match. From having been enemies once upon a time they had now made their peace and—weighed down with age, covered with moss and lichen—had stiffened, exhausted in their struggle, leaning heavily against each other.

  Petrus Blomgren had planted a tree near this rock pile. Lindell rubbed its smooth, striated trunk. A single chair had been left out under its thin crown. Lindell pictured him sitting there in the coolness of the rocks, pondering the decisions he had to make on his own. Wasn’t that what he had written, that he had to make all his decisions alone?

  Where was the motive for killing an old man? Lindell stopped, took a deep breath, and drew out her newly acquired notebook. She was a little embarrassed about it. She had read a mystery novel over the summer, the first she had read in a number of years, and in it the protagonist had a notebook where he wrote down everything of interest. At first Lindell had thought it seemed silly, but after she finished reading she kept thinking about that
notebook and so when it happened that she passed by a bookstore she had slunk in and bought a pad for thirty-two kronor. She always carried it with her now and she thought it had sharpened her thought processes, ennobled her as a police officer. Perhaps she was simply going with her gut here, but then, wasn’t that a part of police work? At any rate, the notebook had not made things go any worse.

  She had mentioned her new routine to Ottosson. He had laughed heartily, perhaps mostly because of the expression on her face, but had said something about how if she turned in the receipt for her expenditure he would gladly accept it.

  Now she wrote down “motive” and smiled to herself. Thereafter she listed the various financial motives she could think of, skipped jealousy but wrote “conflict with neighbors,” “a failed robbery,” and finally “accident.”

  What the latter would be Lindell could not imagine, but she had enough experience to know that many crimes—even if they involved violence—were the result of unplanned circumstances.

  She heard a car pull over on the main road and sensed that Allan Fredriksson had just arrived. This investigation is probably to his taste, she thought; he likes the country air. The Violent Crimes Division’s own country boy.

  Who was Petrus Blomgren? How did he live? She rounded the next corner of the house. The place suggested peacefulness, but loneliness even more, especially like this in the final days of October. May probably looked different, more optimistic. Now nature was switching off, dropping leaves, closing in around piles of rock and underbrush. She stopped and looked right into the vegetation surrounding the house. Static. The wind had died down. She imagined funeral wreaths. Fir branches. Bells that rang out in a doomsdayish way on a bare autumn day over a cowering congregation that tried to minimize its movements.

  Don’t let it get to you, she thought. There’s no time to be depressed.

  She had to create an idea of Petrus Blomgren’s life in order to understand how he died. The good-bye letter was a fall greeting from a person who had given up hope. The irony of fate meant he had not been granted the time to take his own life.

  Lindell crossed the yard at the same time as Fredriksson walked in through the gate.

  “Male, around seventy, not in our database, lived alone, killed in the barn, no signs of robbery.” Lindell summed up the situation for her colleague.

  “Nice hill,” Fredriksson said. “Have you seen the maple?”

  “No, I must have missed that,” Lindell said, and smiled.

  “A lot of leaves. When I was a boy we weren’t supposed to jump in the leaf piles because you could get polio.”

  Two

  Dorotea Svahn suddenly got to her feet, walked over to the window, and looked out for a second before once again sinking down at the table.

  “I thought . . . ,” she said, but did not complete her sentence.

  “Yes?”

  “I thought I saw someone I know.”

  The woman spoke in short sentences, forcing the words out, audibly gasping for breath and it looked like such an effort that Beatrice Anders-son inadvertently leaned forward across the table as if to help when Dorotea got ready for another attempt.

  “Petrus and I, we got along. I’m a widow.”

  She looked down at her folded hands. Behind her, on the wall, a clock was ticking.

  “Have been for many years now,” she added and looked at Beatrice. “Are you married?”

  Beatrice nodded.

  “That’s good.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “I was born in this house.”

  Beatrice could discern a streak of defiance, as if it were a strike against her to have been born in Vilsne village, in Jumkil county, and not ever to have gotten around to leaving.

  “This is a beautiful area,” Beatrice said.

  “I’m the only one left.” Dorotea sighed.

  “Could you tell me a little more about Petrus?”

  “He was”—Dorotea Svahn searched for the right word—“strict with himself. He didn’t indulge himself in very much. He kept going as usual. For a while he worked in carpentry, in town as well. He got a lot of work. And that helped. But all that was long ago. The last couple of years he didn’t come over as often. But I could see him sitting in that chair by the corner of the house. He sat there, philosophizing.”

  “About what?”

  Dorotea smiled for the first time.

  “It was mainly small things,” she said, “things like, well, you know . . . small things. No big thoughts. It could be about that squirrel that disappeared or the firewood he had to get to. He picked mushrooms too. And berries. Could come back with buckets of it. I had to make jam and juice. My legs aren’t so good anymore. For going in the forest, I mean.”

  Beatrice nodded. The clock struck a few peals.

  “Was he worried about anything?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Did he mention anything? Did he have any conflicts? People he didn’t get along with?”

  “Then he would have . . . He didn’t say anything like that.”

  “Did he have any children?”

  Dorotea shook her head. “No,” she said flatly.

  “Did he have many acquaintances?” Beatrice Andersson asked, although she knew the answer.

  “No, maybe in the past. He belonged to the road committee and sometimes he might have gone hunting. But not very often.”

  Dorotea paused, glanced out the window. The begonias on the windowsill were still in full bloom.

  “A long time ago the library bus used to come by,” she continued. “He borrowed a lot. I did, too, for that matter. As long as the Kindblom’s children were still at home it was more lively.”

  She made a movement inside her mouth, produced a smacking sound. She must have repositioned her false teeth.

  “Do you remember him receiving any visitors out of the ordinary the past while?”

  “Like in the ads, you mean, a tanker running aground in his garden?”

  Beatrice laughed at the unexpected comment and could sense a younger woman’s mischievous presence in Dorotea’s eyes.

  “No, he didn’t get many visitors. The postman sometimes stops by. And then Arne, but that got less often.”

  “Who is Arne?”

  “Arne Wiikman. He’s an old friend. Their fathers worked at the mill together. One day Arne simply disappeared.”

  “Really? When was this?”

  “Well that’s a story in itself. He had inherited his father’s temper. A real troublemaker who picked fights with everyone.”

  Dorotea smiled at some recollection and seemed to have collected herself somewhat. Her breathing was calmer.

  “He was a communist. Everyone knew that, of course. But he was good anyway. A hard worker.”

  “Are you talking about Arne’s father?”

  “His name was Nils. Petrus’s father’s name was Karl-Erik, but they called him Blackie. They were always together. He was an edger working the saw. Nils was a lumber hauler. Of course, Petrus also worked at the mill when he was young. And so did Arne. Then he disappeared.”

  “When was this?”

  “I guess it was the midfifties.”

  “But he came back?”

  “Yes, that was about ten years ago. He bought Lindvall’s old house and renovated it.”

  “And Arne and Petrus spent time together?”

  “Yes, that’s how it went. But so different. Petrus was calm, Arne fiery.”

  “Does he still live here?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Can you think of anyone who would want to take Petrus’s life?”

  “No, no one. He didn’t harm a fly. He had no trouble with anyone.”

  “What was his financial situation?”

  “He managed. He had a pension, of course. He lived frugally.”

  “Did he have any cash in the house?”

  “You mean that someone would have wanted? I don’t think so.”

  “Are y
ou afraid now?”

  Dorotea Svahn sighed.

  “I’m afraid of getting old,” she said. “What will happen if my legs don’t carry me? I’m afraid of the silence. It will be . . .”

  She looked down at the table.

  “What a pity for such a fine man, to end like this.”

  Dorotea wept silently. Beatrice held out her hand and placed it on top of the older woman’s. She looked up.

  “It’s strange that something so terrible is needed to stir things up,” she said.

  “Your son, where is he?”

  “In town, but he travels a lot. Sometimes internationally.”

  “When was he here last?”

  “It was a while ago.”

  “What kind of work does he do?”

  “To be quite honest I don’t really know what it is. Something with medical technology. Or that’s what it was before.”

  “Is he married?”

  “Divorced. Mona-Lisa, his wife, was . . . well, she got tired of him.”

  “Grandchildren?”

  Dorotea shook her head.

  “She had a child later. Afterward, I mean, long after. I think she is doing well.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “I have nothing against Mona-Lisa,” Dorotea said.

  “If we might return to Petrus. When did he usually go to bed?”

  “After the nine o’clock news, sometimes he sat up later if there was a good movie on. He liked movies.”

  “Did you see him yesterday?”

  “We didn’t chat or anything, but I saw him as usual. He usually brought in wood in the evenings. Before, when he had a cat then . . . well,you know. He really loved the cat. A little black one with white paws. She disappeared.”

  “So you saw him fetch firewood last night?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I must have sat here,” Dorotea said thoughtfully, “with the crossword puzzle. And then I wrote the grocery list. Petrus was going to look in on me today. He did some shopping for me. There’s always something you need.”

  Beatrice nodded and scrutinized Dorotea.

  “You are the first Dorotea I’ve met.”

  “Is that so? Beautiful it’s not, but you get used to it. The worst was when they called me Dorran, but that was a long time ago.”