The Hand that Trembles (30 page)

After fifteen minutes’ worth of surfing on the Net she had located Sorsele on the map and familiarised herself with rivers and fishing camps in the area, and even turned up the name of a fishing consultant.

She called Torsten Stenberg and explained what she was after.

‘I see,’ the consultant replied hesitantly, ‘there are many who come to Sorsele to fish. And it is over a year ago. Was it trout or something else?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lindell replied. ‘I only know he went up to fish.’

‘Is he a fly fisherman?’

Lindell didn’t have an answer.

‘If it was trout or charr then it had to be before the middle of September.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the season ends,’ Torsten Stenberg said. ‘But it was probably grayling.’ He sounded surer now, as if simply the names of the various species of fish had given him a shot in the arm, or as if Lindell’s lack of fishing knowledge made him chatty.

‘It’s a nice fish,’ he continued, ‘but it needs immediate consumption because it loses its taste almost immediately. Do you know it tastes a little of thyme?’

He told her about the various offerings that a visiting fisherman had to choose between. Lindell made a written note of the Laisa and the Vindel rivers, as well as a number of different options for guest accommodations. There were fishing campsites, hotels, private cottages, and youth hostels. She had her hands full making the notes as he spoke and realised that it would probably take a while to establish where Tobias Frisk had stayed.

‘Maybe at the campsite,’ Stenberg said calmly. ‘I would call them first. Who did you say you worked for?’

‘I’m with the police,’ Lindell said, astonished.

‘I got that, but what kind? You’re probably not solving bicycle thefts.’

‘I work at the unit for violent crimes.’

‘That’s what I thought, that it would be something big. What has he done, your fisherman?’

‘We don’t know,’ Lindell said, and could not repress a deep sigh. ‘We are only the beginning of the investigation. I think I’ll come up to you for a while and fish. It sounds relaxing.’

Stenberg chuckled. ‘You should be happy that you …’

He stopped himself and Lindell waited a few seconds for a continuation.

‘I mean about the work,’ he said. ‘It’s worse up here. I would welcome a little stress sometimes. And we need the police. Now there are only two of them and soon they’ll be down to one.’

‘In Sorsele?’

‘Yes. Do you know how large the county is? At least two hundred kilometres long and fifty or sixty kilometres wide. And we have two policemen, Hallin and Lindgren, and neither of them is young anymore. It’s probably fifty years since we had a murder and soon there will be no one around to kill. But go on and call the campsite. And if you want to fish, all you have to do is come on up.’

Lindell ended up sitting for a while after the phone call. She studied her scrawls in the notepad and thought about what the fishing consultant had said. She tried to imagine him, a telephone voice, an unfamiliar person in the same country, speaking the same language – even if he did so with another dialect. Nonetheless Sorsele seemed foreign. She tried out the word ‘charr’ and smiled to herself. The unfamiliar word echoed in the room. She said it again, louder this time. It sounded like a promise.

He had told her about his county, where the police had seventy kilometres to the nearest colleague – was that Arjeplog? – and two hundred and sixty kilometres to backup, the day such was needed. I will never again complain about distance, she thought. Östhammar and Bultudden are right around the corner.

The conversation with Torsten Stenberg had affected her mood in two ways. The feeling that there was another life, in a foreign landscape, with a different sound, but still so recognisable and near. If she stretched out her hand, her life with charr would be there.

‘Damn Bultudden,’ she mumbled, but it was the bay at Gräsö she saw before her.

At the same time this initial contact with Sorsele meant a small break. Something that was immediately confirmed with her next call. Sorsele Campsite was first on the list of likely accommodations for a visiting sport fisherman. Ten or so signals rang out. Lindell was about to hang up when someone picked up.

Lindell said what she was looking for.

‘That’s easy enough to take care of,’ said the man who had answered the phone, and introduced himself as Gösta Ohlman. ‘I’ll look him up in the book. What was it you said he was called?’

‘I didn’t mention it yet, but the name is Tobias Frisk.’

‘Has he gone missing?’

‘Not really,’ Lindell said. ‘I just wanted to check if he—’

‘Fishermen are good people,’ Ohlman said.

Lindell heard the receiver put down and thereafter the sound of footsteps. Several voices in the background, perhaps a radio. How did a campsite in Västerbotten in northern Sweden look at the end of December? She had never been so far north.

‘They don’t cause any trouble.’

His voice reappeared quite unexpectedly in her ear and it took a second for her to realise that he was continuing his argumentation about fishermen.

‘He was definitely here,’ Gösta Ohlman went on. ‘He arrived at the end of August and left a week later. I think I remember him. He’s from the coast, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, from Roslagen. Why do you remember him?’

‘He caught a grayling that was almost three kilos.’

‘And is that a lot?’

‘I should think so.’

‘Do you remember anything else?’

The silence at the other end spoke vividly and Lindell could almost see how Ohlman hesitated.

‘You don’t have to feel that you …’

‘He met a girl up here,’ he said abruptly. ‘We weren’t too excited about that.’

‘A girl from Sorsele?’

‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact.’

A pigeon was sitting on the left fence post and when Sven-Arne Persson approached it slowly turned its head. The perfectly round eyes regarded him without any apparent anxiety.

He took this as a good sign but then became uncertain. Perhaps it was injured and unable to lift into the air?

The street was completely empty and Sven-Arne had not seen a single person on the short walk from Norbyvägen where he had asked the taxi driver to let him out, except for a couple of schoolchildren in the distance. He had asked himself where this reluctance to be driven all the way up came from but had not found a good reason. Perhaps he had wanted space between himself and the destination in case he changed his mind at the last minute?

He stopped a couple of metres from the gate. The pigeon was motionless. Sven-Arne pulled his coat tighter around his body.

‘What do you want?’ he muttered.

The pigeon took some careful steps along the rail. Sven-Arne looked around. The small houses in a row with low fences or hedges toward the street looked like they had always done. The street had looked like this for approximately fifty years.

Most of the original owners were likely gone by this point but maybe a few of them had hung on past their time. Sven-Arne believed the area was inhabited by younger families, the houses a typical starter home – in the career as house owner – before the children came.

His father had had several acquaintances who had built homes in the area in the forties. These construction projects could take several years to complete at a time when decent industry and construction workers with fairly secure positions could take advantage of each other’s skills and helpfulness. One year basements could be dug out and the foundation laid. Thereafter they raised the frame, walls, and roof, and during the third season the house would be ready for occupancy.

The work was done on evenings and weekends. There was a great deal of barter – the only possibility for workers and tradesmen to scrape together the material. It was possible to buy refabricated framing and lumber cheaply, or even get it free in return for hauling; it could be stripped of nails and scraped clean, to be reused again and again. Bricks could take the most remarkable journey through town, to finally end up in a self-built house. Wood from sugar crates was painstakingly freed from brackets and nails and lined walls in storage areas.

It took years but finally these projects turned into homes that then represented the highest attainment of happiness for a factory worker at Ekeby or a heavy construction worker at Diös. A feeling of harmony characterised the neighbourhood, a sense of proportion between house and lot, something missing from the terraced houses in Eriksdal that Sven-Arne had just left behind.

The pigeon broke into a sudden flapping and, alarmed, Sven-Arne backed up a step. The bird took flight in a wide arc over the tops of the apple trees, who with their abundance of thin upward-turned shoots mostly resembled clumps of reeds. Sven-Arne followed the bird’s flight with his gaze and saw it disappear between the houses.

He was awakened out of these thoughts by a passing car. It slowed down a couple of houses away and turned in to the gravel area in front of the very small garage. A man got out of the car and as he took out a couple of grocery bags he subjected Sven-Arne to curious examination. Sven-Arne smiled and nodded at him. The man closed the car door with a bang and went into the house.

The streetlamps flickered and turned on. Yet another car drove past. Sven-Arne walked in through the fence posts and walked up the path, just like twelve years ago, and set his sights on the front door. Everything was going much easier than he had thought.

NIKLAS ÖHMAN – JENNY HOLGERSSON
said the enamelled nameplate. He chose to use the clapper instead of the doorbell and in a way he wished that no one would open.

The door was opened with a quick movement and a man stared at Sven-Arne with astonishment.

‘What do you want?’

The directness of the question surprised Sven-Arne.

‘I … it’s a little hard to explain … but I am acquainted with the man who lived here before.’

The man looked closely at him.

‘With Dufva?’

Sven-Arne nodded.

‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. He didn’t have any friends.’

‘I didn’t say friend. And to be precise he was not really my acquaintance.’

‘Are you a policeman?’

‘No, I just wanted to—’

‘Come on inside, there’s too much cold air blowing in.’

Sven-Arne hesitated. He could still extricate himself, but he was more or less physically dragged inside the house.

‘There’s something wrong with the furnace, that’s why it’s so cold. Let’s sit down in the kitchen. It’s warmer there.’

The man disappeared into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Sven-Arne followed him but ended up standing in the doorway, looking around. He could smell fish. Fresh vegetables were spread out on a countertop.

‘Sit down.’

Sven-Arne obeyed. The man, who looked to be between thirty-five and forty, grimaced, pressing his lips together as if experiencing a sudden pain.

‘I must be intruding, I see you are in the middle of preparing dinner,’ Sven-Arne said. But the man waved this away. ‘I don’t know how to express this, but Nils Dufva meant a great deal to my family. What do you know about him?’

‘Not much,’ the man said. ‘But who are you?’

‘I am Sven-Arne, but the past couple of years I have gone by the name of John for the sake of expediency. I have been away for many years and now I am trying to get some order in my life again.’

The man nodded and appeared genuinely interested. Sven-Arne was slowly starting to warm to him, considering how he had let him into his kitchen without reservations.

‘Nils Dufva was in Spain during the thirties.’

‘That’s nothing new,’ Niklas Öhman said. ‘He was always going on about Spain.’

‘So you met him?’

‘Of course. Jenny and I have been together almost twenty years. We met in school and she cleaned for the old man, bought his groceries, that kind of thing. Sometimes I helped around the house, things that Dufva couldn’t manage. Two or three times a year he would invite us to dinner, either here or at the pub. They were crazy events. The old man went on about all kinds of historical shit.’

‘What did he tell you about Spain?’

‘That he was down there fighting in the war, but it mostly came out in episodes. I’m not so sure about the facts other than that they had a civil war, and to be totally honest I didn’t listen particularly carefully.’

‘You didn’t think that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he was there and—’

‘Nothing could be out of the ordinary with that old man,’ Niklas Öhman interrupted. ‘He was odd, to say the least. You know that he was in Germany later during the war?’

Sven-Arne nodded.

‘A real Hitler lover. He hated Russians and Communists. That was his thing.’

‘My uncle Ante was also in Spain.’

‘Damn. Did Dufva and your uncle know each other?’

‘Ante was a Communist.’

Niklas Öhman stared quizzically at Sven-Arne.

‘They fought on opposite sides?’

‘You’re quick on the uptake,’ Sven-Arne said. ‘Maybe they bumped into each other down there, I don’t know, but Nils Dufva was important in some way for my uncle. I came here to possibly get some clues. I knew that Jenny had moved in here after her relation died, and I thought that she might have had some information—’

‘Has your uncle died?’

‘No, he is still alive, I have just come from him at any rate, but he doesn’t tell me anything, not about Dufva at least.’

Niklas Öhman got up and walked over to the kitchen counter, took up a knife, and started to cut up what Sven-Arne believed was fennel, while he went on to talk about how they had renovated the whole house. Jenny Holgersson had developed an almost fanatical obsession with obliterating all the old traces of her relative.

‘Jenny doesn’t want to talk about him either.’

‘But she wanted to live here?’

‘The price was right. When he died Jenny had lived in rental flats for many years. To get a house was … you understand, I’m sure.’