Åke Edwardson - Sail of Stone

He lit a Corps, his first of the day. He was cutting back, but he could hardly cut back more than this. He refrained from smoking during work. If he was going to refrain after work, he would have to ask himself what the point of that time of day, or any time of day, was.

It was the screwed-up viewpoint of a nicotine addict.

But it made sense. He tried to live a different life after the life that had to do with crime and all its consequences.

No smoking then, but smoking afterward. It made sense.

He had tried to explain it to Angela.

“I might understand,” she had said. “While you transition. But later. Elsa might like to have you around when she is, oh, twenty-five. You were not twenty-five years young when we had Elsa. You were forty.”

“I was still the youngest chief inspector in the country,” Winter had said, lighting up. Angela had smiled.

“Have you ever looked that up? Really looked it up?”

“I trust my mother.”

“There are two jobs where it’s apparently possible to remain young and promising for any amount of time,” Angela had said. “Detective inspector and author.”

“I still feel young.”

“Keep smoking and we’ll see in a few short years.”

“They’re only cigarillos.”

“What can I say?” She made a motion to indicate that she was speaking to deaf ears. “What else can I say?”

“Okay, okay. It’s not good for me, and I’m smoking less and less.”

“It’s not for my sake, no, first and foremost it isn’t about me, as a matter of fact. We’re talking about your health-about Elsa’s dad.”

He let the thought go. He saw a soccer ball coming his way and he took the cigarillo out of his mouth and connected perfectly, and the ball flew in a beautiful curve back onto the gravel pitch. That’s how it’s done. First take the cigarillo out of your mouth and then connect with the ball with an extended ankle. That’s how it must have been done when soccer was a game for gentlemen in nineteenth-century England.

His cell phone rang as he crossed Södra Vägen. The walk light was still on, but a man in a black Mercedes honked at him when he was halfway across the crosswalk. Winter answered the phone with a “Yes?” and stared at the man, who was revving the motor. The city was not a safe place. All the frustrated desperadoes racing around in their Mercedeses. He should throw that bastard in jail.

He turned onto Vasagatan and listened:

“You haven’t heard anything else?” asked Johanna Osvald.

“If I find anything out, you’ll know right away,” he answered.

“I worry more and more each day,” she said. “Maybe I should go over there?”

Yet another generation of Osvalds takes off to look for the last one, thought Winter. Three generations drifting around in the Scottish Highlands.

“What would you do?” she asked.

I would go, he thought.

“Wait and see for a few days,” he said. “We have the missing-person bulletin out, after all. And I’ve spoken with my colleague.”

“What can he do?”

“He knows people.”

“You don’t think something serious has happened?” she asked. “A crime?”

“It’s possible he became ill,” said Winter.

“Then he would have called,” she said. “Or someone else would have called about him.”

“We can help you,” said Aneta Djanali.

“We don’t need any help,” said Signe Lindsten.

It was the answer that Aneta expected, but she still couldn’t understand it.

“We want everyone to leave us alone,” said Signe.

“Is Anette at home?”

Signe looked out through the window, as though that was where her daughter was, somewhere on the stony sea. Or in it, thought Aneta.

The sky had grown dark over the water, and everything had become the same color. Aneta could see the dock down there. She could see the boat. A lawn lay like a thin band that soon transformed into sand thirty yards from the edge of the water.

“Is Anette home, in Gothenburg?” asked Aneta.

The mother continued to look out at the shore and the sea, and Aneta did the same.

“Is that your boat?” she asked.

Signe gave a start.

She looked at Aneta.

“Anette is at home.”

“In Gothenburg? At the house in Fredriksdal?”

The mother nodded.

“She didn’t open the door when we were there.”

“Is that against the rules?”

Technically, it is, thought Aneta.

“Is she very scared of Hans Forsblad?”

Signe gave another start.

“What can you do about it if she is?”

“We can do a lot,” said Aneta. “I mean it.”

“Like what?”

“Put a restraining order on him,” she said, and she could tell how weak that sounded. “We can make a short-term decision on it and then hand it over to the prosecutor. We can bring him in for questioning. We’ve actually decided to do that.”

“Questioning? What does that involve?”

“That we can take him in and question him about his threats.”

“And then what? What happens then?”

“I don’t-”

“Then you let him go, don’t you? You talk to him and then that’s it.”

“He might not dare to-”

“Dare to visit Anette again? If you can call it that. Is that what you think? What the police think? That it’s enough to write up some papers that say he can’t see her, and that somehow you’ll scare him by talking to him? You don’t know him.”

She was expressing genuine frustration, there was no doubt about that.

But there was also something else.

In the background there was something else. It wasn’t just about the man, about Hans Forsblad. Aneta could feel that, see that.

“That’s exactly why,” she answered. “To see what he’s like.”

“I can tell you that here and now,” said Signe. “He is dangerous. He doesn’t give up. He is obsessed, or whatever you call it. He doesn’t want to accept that Anette doesn’t want to live with him. Doesn’t want to accept it. Do you understand? He can’t get it into his head!” She turned out toward the sea again, as though to gather her strength; she made a motion. “It’s like he’s completely crazy.”

“Why haven’t you contacted the police?” asked Aneta.

Signe didn’t seem to be listening, and Aneta repeated the question.

“I don’t know.”

She hasn’t mentioned that her husband called me, thought Aneta. Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe that’s not what this is about.

“Were you afraid to?”

“No.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Yes.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t want… it doesn’t matter… it could…”

Aneta tried to put together the pieces of what Signe Lindsten said. It was her job, a part of it, these broken sentences that people spoke out of fear, panic, sometimes with ulterior motives, sometimes out of sorrow, out of schadenfreude, in the effort to come up with the most believable lie. Splintered words that were barely coherent, and she had to unite those words, make them coherent so that she understood, so that someone understood.

Most of the time it was like this. Ragged words spoken by a frightened person.

It was so good at first,” said Signe Lindsten.

Something happened to her face when she said it. As though the memory lifted her features, as though happy memories could smooth out faces. First comes the sun and then comes the rain and all that crap. Every cloud has a silver lining. All of that. Aneta couldn’t see any of those clouds outside because everything was clouds over the bay and the cliffs and the sand and the shore; no silver linings anywhere, only a flash of light here and there in the middle of the mass of stone.