Marked for Life (16 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

Saturday, April 21

THE CHILDREN USUALLY
woke up as early as six, as they did this Saturday morning too.

Henrik Levin stretched and yawned widely. He looked at Emma who was still asleep. The children were making quite a noise upstairs and Henrik decided to get up. He checked his mobile but no new messages had come during the night.

His pajamas were comfortably warm as he went up the stairs to the children's room. Felix had tipped the whole box of Legos over the floor and smiled happily when he saw his dad in the door. Vilma was sitting on her bed and rubbing the sleep out of one eye.

“Well now, what do you think? Breakfast?”

With whoops of joy Felix and Vilma ran down the stairs and into the kitchen. Henrik followed after them. He closed the door to keep the sound down and laid the table with bread, butter, ham slices, juice, milk and yogurt. Vilma opened the pantry cupboard and reached out for the box of cereal.

Out of the ordinary, Henrik boiled two eggs for himself and during the time that took he buttered bread for the children, adding spread or ham to each slice according to their wishes. Felix managed to turn the cereal box upside down and transformed the kitchen table into a buffet with the colorful fruity rings.

Henrik sighed. There was no point getting out the vacuum cleaner. That would wake Emma and she deserved to sleep in for a change. But he couldn't let the kitchen look like a battlefield.

Henrik poured out the boiling water from the pan and let the eggs cool under the cold water tap. Then he bent down and tried to pick up all the cereal. He managed to tread on some of them under the table and the crumbs fell into the gaps in the rush matting. He hated crumbs. He considered it a cardinal sin to leave a table with crumbs on it. It must be left clean. Wiped down, and preferably sparkling clean.

He looked out through the window. Today he would try to find time for a run. If he got the children ready with breakfast, getting dressed and brushing their teeth, then Emma would surely let him take half an hour to get some proper exercise. Besides, he had let her sleep in. So he should be on her good side.

Felix pushed some cereal off the edge of the table. Vilma's joyful laughter encouraged him to do it again. He pushed off a green ring, then an orange one. With his index finger he flicked one that landed in the flower pot. Vilma laughed out loud and Felix flicked off yet another, and one more after that.

“Stop it. That's enough,” Henrik said.

“All right then,” said Vilma.

“All right then,” said Felix.

“Stop copying me,” said Vilma.

“Stop copying,” said Felix.

“You're stupid.”

“Stupid is stupid.”

“Stop that now,” said Henrik.

“It was him,” said Vilma.

“It was her,” said Felix.

“Now stop that.”

“Stop it yourself.”

“All right, now we're finished.”

Henrik was just about to pick up the eggs from the cold water when he heard his cell ringing.

“Good morning! Sorry to call so early,” said Gunnar Öhrn in a clear voice.

“That's all right,” Henrik lied.

“We've had a call from a witness who saw Hans Juhlén a few days before his death. We ought to check that. Can you come?”

“Can't Mia take it?”

“I can't get hold of her. She's not answering.”

Henrik looked at Felix and Vilma.

He sighed.

“I'll come.”

* * *

The loaf of bread had gone moldy. Mia looked at the green fungus that was growing threadlike on the slice of bread. She threw the whole bag into the waste bin and thought of an alternative for breakfast. She had heard her cell ring, but didn't bother to look it up. She didn't want to talk to anybody. She wanted to eat. The fridge didn't have much to offer her, nor the freezer compartment. The pantry cupboard had long since been emptied of everything edible except for a packet of fusilli. She pulled out a saucepan, measured a liter of water and threw in a couple of handfuls of the twisted pasta. Boil for twelve minutes, it said on the packet. Far too long, Mia thought, and turned the timer to ten minutes.

She went into the living room and flopped down on the sofa. With the remote in her hand she surfed between the channels, trying to choose between various repeats from the previous week.
Garden Wednesday, Wilderness Year, Spin City
and
Border Guards
.

Boring shows.

Mia sighed and threw the remote aside. What she needed now was a good film channel. But then she'd need a new TV too. With a really good picture. Plasma. Or LCD. With 3D. Henrik had bought one, a 50-inch model and Mia had been green with envy. A friend of hers had also bought a huge flat thing. Everybody had one. Except her.

The gray weather outside the window meant you could hardly tell it was daylight, even though the dawn was several hours ago. She hadn't come home until four in the morning and she had fallen asleep with her clothes on. When she woke up she had her phone in her hand and the battery was dead.

It had been a good evening out in other words, one of the better ones for a long time, and Mia had got talking to a guy who was nice as well as generous. But she nevertheless declined his invitation to go home with him. Now she regretted it. If she'd been at his place, she would certainly have been given a decent breakfast with freshly squeezed juice. Then they would have been able to lie closely entwined in front of his big-screen TV. She assumed he had one. It would all have been better than sitting alone staring at her old TV.

She considered going off to the Ingelsta shopping mall and checking the price of a new one.

She had two kronor left in her account. At least she was in the black. And she didn't actually have to buy one today. She could just go and look at what was available.

The timer buzzed in the kitchen. Mia went in and took the pasta off the hotplate. I'll just go looking, she thought.

Just looking.

Not buying.

* * *

Jana Berzelius took an extra long shower and let the hot water loosen up the last of her tension from the night before. She had hardly slept, but had gotten up at dawn and run fifteen kilometers. Too far, too fast. It was as if she was trying to run away from what had happened. But she couldn't. The image of the dead man came back to her. For the last kilometer she had run so fast that her nose started bleeding. But even though the blood was dripping onto her windcheater she had sprinted the last hundred meters. Back in her flat, she had in some strange way felt strong and she managed to do twenty-three chin-ups on her bar. She had never managed that before.

Now she stood in the shower and thought about Thomas Rydberg. What was it about those combinations that had made him so desperate? Something had obviously caused him to panic.

Her thoughts moved on to the sudden attack that she made on him. She had reacted so coldly and instinctively, and that perplexed her. The way she had hit out had come just at the right moment. From inside her. Almost practiced. And besides, her blows had struck home perfectly, and even more remarkable was that the violence had made her feel good.

Who am I?
she wondered.

* * *

Karl Berzelius stood by the window in his study, the telephone in his hand. The display had long since turned itself off. The voice at the other end was silent. His white shirt was buttoned up to his neck and tucked into the neatly pressed trousers. His hair was gray, thick and combed back.

Outside, the rays of the sun had pierced the heavy clouds. Like spotlights on a stage, all the light fell on a single point, a tree with buds.

But Karl didn't see the sun. He didn't see the tree. He had his eyes closed. When he slowly opened them, the light was gone. Only grayness was left.

He wanted to move, but was unable to do so. It was as if the parquet floor was ice and his feet had frozen in it, and he was a prisoner of his own thoughts. He thought about the conversation he had just had with Chief Public Prosecutor Torsten Granath.

“It's a difficult investigation,” Torsten had said with the sound of his car engine in the background.

“I understand,” Karl had answered.

“She'll manage it.”

“Why shouldn't she?”

“It's taken a turn.”

“Yes?”

“The boy...”

“I've read about him, yes. Go on.”

“Has Jana told you about him?”

“She never tells me anything, you know that.”

“I know.”

Torsten had then told him in detail where the boy had been found dead. He had described an arm at a strange angle, a gun and all the rest of what was in the police report. After a thirty-second pause, his voice sounded troubled. The background noise got worse and Karl had to concentrate to hear what he said.

“The strange thing is that everything points to him.”

Karl had scratched his forehead and pressed the phone even harder against his ear.

“It seems as if he is the perpetrator. And that it was he who killed Hans Juhlén.”

“What do you think?”

“I don't think anything. But what is even more remarkable about this boy is that he has something carved on his neck. It's a name, a name of some god, a god of death.”

Karl's heart started to race. He found it hard to breathe. The floor rocked. Torsten's words echoed like a shout from a deserted tunnel.

A name.

On his neck.

He opened his mouth but couldn't recognize his own voice. It was alien, distant and cold.

“On his neck...”

Then he fell silent. Before Torsten could say anything else, he ended the call. He had never before hung up in the middle of a conversation. But nor had he ever before had such a suffocating feeling.

I must get some air
, he thought now, and pulled open the top button on his shirt. The cloth seemed to cling to him as he struggled with the next button. He tugged so hard that it came loose and fell to the floor. He inhaled deeply as if he had been holding his breath.

The thoughts whirled around inside his head. He saw the picture of a neck, with light skin and black hairs in vertices. He saw letters, pinkish-red deformed letters. But he didn't see the picture of a boy.

He saw the picture of a girl.

The picture of his daughter.

The child had been nine years old and completely bothersome. She hadn't slept at night and at breakfast had talked about dreams which could only have been pure lies and the product of a sick imagination. He quite simply didn't want anything to do with her flights of fancy, and one morning he had had enough. He got hold of her thin arms and demanded that she should be quiet. She did become quiet. Even so, he had taken a firm grip of her neck to force her into her room. That was when he had felt the uneven skin. He pushed her hair aside to see what it was, and the sight of those three letters was something he would never forget. He had swallowed. He felt sick.

Just as suddenly as now.

Karl shut his eyes.

He had insisted that she should get the scars removed. He had visited dermatologists and even tattoo parlors and been told that it would be difficult to remove them. They couldn't say in advance how many treatments would be necessary. And all of them wanted to see the scars first. Karl hadn't dared say that it was a name carved into the skin. Let alone dare show his daughter's neck to anybody. What would people think?

He opened his eyes.

He had decided that the carved letters would have to stay. With harsh words he had told her never to show them to anybody, and he ordered Margaretha to buy Band-Aids and polo sweaters. Her hair was to be worn long, and not be put up. After that they never spoke about it again. It was over. It had been dealt with. And that was that.

Now there was a boy with a name carved on his neck.

Should he say anything to Jana? And what would he say? They had already dealt with this issue between them years ago. Filed it away. There was no more to add. It was her own private business now. Not his.

Karl's heart beat fast.

The telephone vibrated in his hand and Torsten's name appeared again in the display. He didn't answer.

Just squeezed the telephone and let it go on ringing.

* * *

Nils Storhed stood on the port bridge walkway holding his little dog in his arms. To Henrik Levin, who was walking toward him, he looked like a Scot with his tartan beret, lace-up shoes and dark green overcoat.

“He looks like he comes from Scotland,” said Gunnar, who was walking next to Henrik.

“My thought exactly,” said Henrik and smiled.

The port bridge was a heavy concrete construction which linked Jungfrugatan to Östra Promenaden across the water. There was always a lot of traffic on the major road across the bridge, and this day there were lines of Saturday motorists. The noise from the traffic and the shrieking of the seagulls could be heard together.

Nils Storhed leaned against the railing and with a view of the rowing club and the bustle of the city behind him. In front of him lay the docks and on his left side the district heating power station towered up against the gray sky.

The little dog in his arms panted heavily and its winter coat was shedding. It left lots of white hairs on Nils's coat.

“Is your dog tired?” said Gunnar after they had introduced themselves with their full names.

“No, she's freezing. Her paws don't like the cold,” said Nils.

Neither Henrik nor Gunnar had time to say anything before Nils went on.“Yes, well, I'm sorry. I know I ought to have called you sooner.”

“Yes, right...” said Gunnar.

“I didn't think it was so important but now I realize it is, and yes, my wife's been nagging me all week saying I should phone, but I've had lodge meetings here and dinners there, so it wasn't until this morning I pulled myself together. One doesn't want to hear any more nagging either, if you know what I mean,” said Nils and gave them a wink.