Stone Coffin Read online

  And in that case, where was he? Lindell thought of the dog. A pointer. Was that a spotted kind?

  She stood there with the folder in her hands. The front door opened, and she assumed that it was the technicians returning after a quick meal.

  There were two other rooms on the second floor. A guest room with Spartan furnishings; a sewing room with a sewing machine, a dressmaker’s dummy, and a table draped in black cloth. Lindell pulled out the uppermost drawer in a dresser that looked out of place with its baroque style, marble top, and curved legs, and carefully looked through the bits of fabric. The next drawer was filled with paper—sketches, from what Lindell could tell. At the back of the drawer, under some patterns, there was a blue book with a linen cover. Lindell opened the book to the first page and immediately realized that she had found something that would help her understand Josefin Cederén, because it was her book. She deduced this both from the fact that it was hidden in her room and also from the handwriting.

  It was a diary beginning at the end of May 1998. The first entry read: “After a year of uncertainty I now know everything. I can’t say that I am surprised, but it hurts so much. Perhaps I am the one to blame.”

  The handwriting was clear and easy to read. Lindell turned the page. A person’s innermost thoughts, recorded over a period of two years. The last entry was dated the fourth of June.

  There was sadness in the blue book. Josefin wrote in it instead of cleaning.

  Lindell kept searching the drawers for other notebooks but didn’t find anything else. Either this was the only one or Josefin had stored her earlier diaries somewhere else.

  She brought the journal with her and went downstairs.

  “I’ve got some reading to do tonight,” she said and showed her find to Fredriksson, who was still sitting at the table.

  He looked up. “I wish that I could find some personal notes, but these are simply documents from his work. I need a medical researcher to translate.”

  Allan Fredriksson looked fresh and alert despite his recent illness.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” Lindell said.

  There was a time when he had not met her gaze. Now he looked at her with a smile and nodded.

  One of the technicians came out of the kitchen. Lindell had taken a second look at him earlier. He was in his thirties and had that appealing blend of strength and softness that Lindell liked. “He’s married. Happily married,” Sammy Nilsson had said when he noticed her look.

  “We’re sorting through the trash and the only item of note is the remains of an airplane ticket. All of the rest is an ordinary collection of refuse. Would you like to see the ticket?”

  They went out into the kitchen. Lindell could not help sniffing the scent of his aftershave or whatever it was.

  He held up a piece of paper with a tweezer.

  “I think it’s the back of an airplane ticket,” he said. “There’s a handwritten note that says eight twenty-five. Other than that there is only the name of the company. British Airways.”

  Lindell looked at it without expression.

  “Keep it,” she said and left the kitchen.

  * * *

  “Think I can take one?”

  There was a bowl of candy in the living room. Lindell was extremely hungry, and the sight of the candy made her mouth water.

  “Maybe they’re laced with poison,” Fredriksson said.

  Lindell twisted off the wrapper of a Marianne. Normally she didn’t eat candy, but right now the treats were irresistible. She took one and then another.

  Fredriksson looked up. “You should eat some food instead.”

  “I’m hungry, but not at the same time. Candy is exactly what I needed.”

  “I don’t think people need to eat more than bananas,” Fredriksson said.

  “Bananer.” Lindell chuckled.

  She held the journal in her hand. She knew that there were threads she could start unraveling. What had pushed Josefin to start to write? The inner pressure had become too great and she had been forced to write down her anxiety and despair. What had she sensed and then become convinced of? She would find out tonight.

  * * *

  As Lindell left the house, she bumped into Berglund and Haver. They were going to assist Fredriksson.

  “At least until ten o’clock,” Haver said.

  “Go home to your girls instead,” Lindell said.

  He had become the father of a little girl in May. But Haver simply smiled. They briefly discussed the outcome of the morning meeting.

  Lindell called Ottosson and let him know that she would not be coming by. She was going to read the journal.

  The neighbors were gone, the road empty. A couple of ducks flew in a wide arc over the house, and there was a scent of summer.

  But something didn’t add up. Lindell thought of Josefin’s well-groomed nails, painted and polished. She seemed attractive and clean, even in death. The house stood in stark contrast to that impression, more than a little dirty and unkempt, almost disgusting. She had to have been a woman who placed a great deal of weight on appearance; her closet and shelves were filled with clothes, beautiful and most likely expensive. She sewed a great deal, taking her inspiration from fashion magazines, and her makeup table was covered with all kinds of jars and products.

  Why didn’t she keep the house clean? The Cederéns would never have been able to invite people over. What was their social life like? Lindell had an impulse to pay a visit to Josefin’s father again but decided to wait until the next day.

  * * *

  Her nausea had increased on the trip back to town and she stopped at a McDonald’s and had a hamburger.

  She managed to get home and into the bathroom right before it came over her again. She crouched over the toilet and cursed herself for not taking care of herself. She drank a little water from the tap, rinsed her mouth, and rested her brow against the cool porcelain. What a day. Yesterday all routine office work and a meeting about the new organizational structure. Today a decimated family.

  Holger Johansson’s lacerated scalp appeared in her mind. Did he have eczema or had he scratched it during the day?

  She threw the journal on the floor in the entryway. She stepped over it and walked into the kitchen. The light on the answering machine was blinking, so she pressed the play button. The first message was from Ödeshög. Ann had started to realize that her parents were no longer in the prime of life and that she could get a phone call about sickness, or even death, at any time. But this time it was only the usual words from her mother—“How are you? Everything is fine here”—and then some details about which flowers were blooming in the garden.

  The other message brought her to her knees. Edvard’s voice sounded as if it came from another age, another world. She knew it so well and yet it sounded so foreign. “Oh, god,” she breathed, and sank onto the chair.

  He sounded happy, and this made her heart beat faster. She stared vacantly as he talked of Gräsö, passed along greetings from Viola, and talked about work. At the end of the message, his voice grew lower, his tone more hesitant, as if he was unsure of how to sign off. There was a quick good-bye and then it ended.

  Give up, she thought. Leave me in peace. She replayed the tape and listened to it again. His voice. She could imagine him standing in front of the window overlooking the bay, a sunny Roslagen landscape. Or else he was sitting in the wicker chair.

  He had talked about his work, mostly about his work. Repairing a barn. Where did all this work come from? He built things, spending his days breaking and bending, lifting and heaving, cutting and fitting, living with others, laughing and having cups of coffee, leaning up against a red-painted wall. His hands. Lacerated, scarred, and sometimes so rough that they made a sandpapery noise when he rubbed them against her back, sometimes with fingertips worn so smooth that you wouldn’t have been able to get a good set of prints.

  She could hear his heavy steps on the stairs. His exchanges with Viola. She could feel his breat
h.

  Ann pulled over the telephone and selected number one on speed dial. Ödeshög. Mom and Dad.

  “Yes, I’m fine. There’s a lot of work right now.”

  She did not want to talk about the Cederén case. Her mother chattered on.

  “Yes, maybe, but there’s just a lot going on right now.”

  The closest neighbors, Nisse and Ingegerd, had had a grandchild. A boy. Four kilos. As her mother talked on, Ann opened the refrigerator and peered inside.

  “In July and half of August,” she said and took out the margarine and caviar spread. “Of course. I’ll come then. I promise.”

  No bread in the house.

  “I miss you too. Give my love to Dad.”

  * * *

  At the very back of the cupboard there was half a packet of hardtack. “Fiber,” she muttered and made herself four pieces spread with caviar, picked up the milk, and went out into the living room, returning to the entryway to pick up the journal.

  Now she was adequately supplied. Her belly screamed for food and her head ached. She took a couple of bites, poured the milk—it was Edvard who had taught her to drink milk—and leaned back in the armchair.

  The blue journal was resting on the table. She was curious but still felt some resistance. Josefin’s journal had not been written for public consumption. Now her notes would be pored over. Her clothes, photos, medications, and trash would be systematically sorted, examined, and evaluated.

  Ann crunched on the crackers, looked around the room, and decided she should clean more often.

  She herself didn’t have any diaries. Not even from her teen years. The only piece of writing she had saved that could be considered private was a letter. It was from Edvard, written in January. At the end of the Christmas holidays, she had left the island and also him. She had been too much of a coward to tell it to his face, but the way she disappeared had clearly indicated that it was for good.

  A couple of weeks later, he had sent her a letter. Hands trembling, Ann had read it. She had not imagined that Edvard could write so passionately. It was as if all of the words that he gathered in his self-imposed isolation had welled forth and spread across the pages in front of her. Even the fact that he owned stationery was astonishing. But he must have borrowed it from Viola.

  He wrote that he loved her, but that it was too complicated to live so far apart. Now he did not want to see her anymore—as if she had not been the one who had left. He was going to focus on his work and his two sons. This was certainly news to her. Jens and Jerker had hardly been out to the island during the past two years, and contact with their father had been sporadic at best.

  * * *

  She couldn’t eat the last piece of bread, but licked some of the roe topping. Now for the journal.

  She read it for half an hour before she put it down. There were twenty-five pages to go, but she already had a possible motive for Josefin’s death. Why Emily had been killed was still unclear.

  Josefin had written that the only thing she was sure of was that Sven-Erik loved his daughter above all else.

  * * *

  Thoughts of Edvard kept returning for the rest of the evening. For long periods of time, things had been wonderful. They had made love with an intensity far beyond what she had experienced before.

  He had taught her a great deal. That serious gaze. Thoughts roamed like lost dogs through her landscape of thieves, murderers, and other violent perpetrators. He had made her a better police officer. Perhaps it was his language that most fascinated her, the words borne by a life so close to the earth and green, growing things. He gave name to that which she many times did not see or reflect on. He reawakened her own background and language in her. The dialects were different, but she could hear her own and her parents’ language in his.

  They had met once—her parents and Edvard—and after their initial nervousness, a certain feeling of kinship had emerged. Her father had taken Edvard out onto the plains and driven with him down the narrow lanes. God only knew what they talked of, but when they returned, it was as if they were old friends.

  They had lingered by the car, looking out over the land. She and her mother had stood in the window, watching them.

  In the car on the way home, Edvard had said that her father carried a rift within him, and Ann had wondered what he meant. Edvard had been quiet for a long time—she had learned to wait out his silences—but shortly before Södertälje he had embarked on a rambling account of life on the plains of Östergötland and all the villages and settlements that he and Ann’s father had driven through. Her father had pointed out the long-shuttered shops where he had delivered pork and beer for twenty-five years. By now most of them had been turned into private residences but were still easily identifiable by their storefront entrances and large windows. Occasionally a sign—Arne’s groceries—could still be made out.

  “You were spies, in other words,” Ann inserted.

  “Exactly. We spied and your father told stories. It was there, in his stories, that the rift was.”

  “No one cares about his old delivery routes. Do you know I often accompanied him in the summer?”

  “You told me that the first time we met … no, the second, don’t you remember? When we walked down that old road. You told me how he used to sing in the car. That’s why I fell in love with you.”

  Then he fell silent. Was it the memory of that old road, of his earlier life, that overcame him? She assumed so, and they did not speak until they reached the roundabout at the southern entrance to Uppsala. The visit to Ödeshög and the car ride back home became one of her most beautiful memories of their time together.

  Nothing more was said of the rift, but she had a feeling she knew what he meant. That was Edvard. He read the landscape and people like nobody else.

  Her father’s delight in seeing his old delivery locations, the obligatory honk as he drove up to the entrance or loading dock, the faces of the country grocers in the doorway, the talking, the jokes, the clinking of the fully loaded beer crates and the clatter of the empty ones—everything that gave the trips meaning was relived during those Sunday hours.

  Edvard had observed all this, but also something more. A rift. How her father walked around in his old memories. Edvard understood these things. She missed this, missed his intensity, his gaze.

  * * *

  She got up out of the armchair. Should she pour herself a glass of red wine? She smiled to herself and decided instead to have more milk.

  * * *

  The blue journal was still open on the table and she would read more. About the rifts in Josefin’s life.

  Six

  “Day two,” Ann Lindell wrote in her notepad. Then nothing else for a long while. And then the number one.

  “Can you live with this, Sven-Erik Cederén?” she said out loud and wrote his name on the page.

  Security had been increased in the nation’s airports and harbors. A national alarm had gone out yesterday morning, but had not yielded anything. Everyone knew how easy it was to leave the country. Perhaps he had gone to Kapellskär, taken the boat to Finland?

  “Lover” was the next word. She stared at it. “Love.” After reading Josefin’s diary, Lindell knew that there was another woman in her husband’s life. Who she was and where she was, it didn’t say. Either Josefin herself did not know or else she did not want to write down her name. She hated the woman, that much was clear, and perhaps she did not want to give her a name, a shape.

  She was only mentioned in passing. Josefin and Sven-Erik’s relationship had circled around this woman, although he did not know that she knew. Or did he? Had they quarreled about her? Lindell did not think so. There was nothing in the journal about this. She was simply present, a boulder rolled through the dirty, elegant house in Uppsala-Näs, carried up the stairs, the stone that Josefin stumbled over. She compared herself to the other woman, scrutinizing her husband and his reactions.

  Josefin had tortured herself over it. The knowledge that
there was another had worn her down. At the same time, she had been pregnant. The journal said as much and the autopsy confirmed it. Sammy Nilsson had come back with the report that stated that Josefin had been in her second month.

  Was it another man’s child? The diary did not say, but the whole text led to the same conclusion: that Sven-Erik was the father. Lindell remembered one of the sentences quite clearly: “How could he go from her to me?” Lindell wondered how she could receive her husband in bed, make love to him knowing full well that he had a mistress, but sensed that it had been a desperate attempt to win him back. Perhaps a child would save the marriage?

  Lindell took out the list of MedForsk employees. Nine names in all, of which three were women. All in their thirties. The whole workforce was young. No one over fifty, most of them between thirty and forty.

  Lindell decided to question the women. The preliminary work that had been done yesterday had yielded nothing out of the ordinary: “He seemed fine” and “I didn’t notice anything unusual.” Lindell noted that Wendell had conducted the interviews and had also had time to type up the reports. There were photographs of all of the employees. That was impressive. He must have worked into the night.

  She wrote down the women’s names as she studied their pictures. All three were attractive. Two blondes and one with henna-colored hair. Weren’t most affairs job-related? Lindell picked one of the blondes.

  * * *

  MedForsk was located on the outskirts of town, in an area where Lindell had almost never had reason to go. Even the street name was new to her. Here they were, the start-ups in IT and medical research. All housed in nondescript buildings, like a parade of boxes in yellow brick. These were supposed to be the city’s future, with company names and logos discreetly placed on the side and above the entrance. There was no way to guess what lay inside.

  Lindell cheered up when she saw a company name for a business that she could place: Lasse’s Auto—Everything for Your Car. She wished that was where she was headed. A car lift and walls hung with tools, the sound of an angle grinder and the sparks from a blowtorch—this was familiar to her.