Åke Edwardson - Sail of Stone

“It’s as though there’s someone else here, too.”

“The dad? The Lindsten guy?”

“Maybe.”

“He’s definitely fucking shady.”

“I was thinking about that break-in, or whatever it was, the theft from the apartment out in Kortedala. Could Forsblad have known about it?”

“Yes, why not?”

“Or the dad. Sigge Lindsten.”

“Why not both?” said Halders.

“Would he steal from himself?” asked Aneta. “Lindsten?”

“He didn’t steal from himself,” said Halders. “He stole from his daughter.”

Aneta thought of Halders’s words. She watched him drink. Drink coffee and survive.

“What are we really trying to figure out, Fredrik?” she said after a little while.

“Well, not the theft, anyway. Not in my case.”

“You don’t think it has to do with this?”

“If by ‘this’ you mean the assault, then I don’t think so.”

“And what is ‘this’ for you?”

Halders pushed his paper cup away with yet another grimace.

He scratched his chin, which had nearly a day’s stubble.

He was blue under the eyes. The unforgiving light in the break room shone through his crew cut and revealed his scalp. He had called home once to make sure that the babysitter had everything she needed to stay overnight tonight. He scratched his chin again.

“I’ve almost gotten to be like you were about this, Aneta.” He looked at her with tired eyes. “But I’m not sure that Forsblad is really a wife beater. Or that we’re protecting his wife by clamping down on him.” Halders grew quiet. He looked as though he were listening intensively to the hissing air up by the intake behind them. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. He ran his hand over the back of his close-cropped head. “There’s something damn suspicious about all of this. About all of them. Everyone involved.”

Aneta nodded.

“Something more than we know,” said Halders. “Much more.”

“Forsblad?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Lindsten?”

“The dad? Yes, it’s possible.”

“Anette?”

Halders didn’t answer; he seemed to be listening to the rush of the ventilation system again, the tittle-tattle in the corner. He looked at Aneta again.

“We don’t know anything about Anette, do we?”

Forsblad looked like he’d been sleeping when their colleague from the jail brought him into the room again. He still had his jacket on, and his tie, the white shirt, the odd pants, which weren’t particularly wrinkly, the shoes, which were no longer shiny. Forsblad’s thick hair looked recently combed, but in a way that suggested he had just run his hand through his hair and it was done.

“Why were you sitting in your sister’s car outside the house in Kortedala?” asked Halders.

“That’s my right as a citizen,” said Forsblad.

“Why there in particular?”

“I recognized the place.”

Halders looked at the recorder to make sure it was turning. He looked like he wanted to reassure himself that it was working so he could listen to the answer later and analyze it.

“Why then, in particular?”

Forsblad shrugged.

“Was it because my colleague and I were in there?”

“How should I have known that you were there?”

“Where are you living now, Hans?”

“With my sister.”

“She says that you aren’t.”

“I see.”

“Do you have any permanent residence?”

“I’m working on it,” he said.

“Where?”

“It will work out.”

“You know that there’s a restraining order against you?” said Halders. It was a lie, but not for long. “Our short-term decision has been extended by the prosecutor.”

Forsblad looked like he wasn’t listening or didn’t care. As though all of that had happened a long time ago. He seemed to be listening for other voices inside his head, or to the air-conditioning that was hissing in there.

He looked up. He fixed his eyes on Aneta.

“Maybe I can live with you,” he said.

Aneta didn’t answer. She avoided his gaze. You should never make eye contact. In Africa there were crazy apes that had rabies, and they tried to make eye contact, and when they did it was dangerous; it was very, very dangerous.

“You’ve been clinging to me this whole time, after all,” said Forsblad. “I’m starting to wonder what it is you actually want.”

He was released after midnight. To go home, but in this case that was just an expression. Or else he had a home, or a bed, a sofa, an air mattress.

“In an hour we ought to break down the door in Kortedala and wake him from his beauty sleep,” said Halders.

They were on the way home to Aneta’s place. Halders was driving fast but avoiding the few boozers who stumbled out into the road, on their way home from that evening’s entertainment.

“If we hit someone we’ll pretend it’s a badger,” he said.

“If he’s sleeping in that apartment, then Anette’s dad is in on it,” said Aneta. “We can’t tromp in there again.”

“Of course we can,” said Halders. “But not tonight.”

Aneta looked around when they parked. She couldn’t see the glow of any cigarettes in any front seats, no silhouettes.

“Do you think he was serious?” she said.

“About sleeping at your place?”

“Did you think it was funny?”

“Oh, Aneta, it was just another way to provoke us.”

“You didn’t see his eyes.”

“I did, too.”

“He was trying to make eye contact with me,” she said.

Halders opened the front door.

“He wouldn’t dare come here,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I told him I’d kill him if he did. It was when you were inside and I was outside waving good-bye.”

The morning was light and warm. There were people smiling on Vasagatan. The sun was round and kind. The sky was blue. Birds were singing.

Winter was walking to the Palace. He saw the temperature on the gauge over Heden: sixty degrees. Already. No one was playing soccer on the fields at Heden. A mistake on a morning like this. The air was easy to breathe in and breathe out. He yearned to sacrifice an ankle.

The sun shone in. Ringmar stuck in his head after Winter had sat down and started to go over the cases: thefts, assault, homicide, robberies, threats, more thefts, criminal damage, another homicide, two more robberies. Reports, testimonies, statements. Papers, cassette tapes, videotapes. Many cases, all at once. A suspected murder. A confessed murderer. A drunk dispute in a neighborhood in Gamlestaden. Almost all homicides and almost all murders looked like that. Case open and closed within twenty-four hours.

“Do you have a minute?” said Ringmar.

“No, I have two,” said Winter, putting down a sheet of paper.

Ringmar sat down. His face was sharply lined. He was twelve years older than Winter, which meant that he had some hard years behind him that Winter had in front of him. Maybe the hardest. And Ringmar had twelve years more of duty as ombudsman and protector to the public in front of him. How would the lines in his face look then? And Winter had twenty-four years left, t-w-e-n-t-y-f-o-u-r years in front of him, in the same role. Dear God. A third of a life the same way as this. Lift me up, take me away.

At the same time, this was his life. He knew this life. He was good. He had knowledge and aggression, maybe not as much aggression as Halders, but more knowledge. He had patience. He could work hard. He could think. That was that. One could think here; it was still possible to take time for thoughts. And thinking could lead to results. A person who didn’t think well didn’t get results. Not the big results, the ones you got from thinking outside the routine. Thinking outside the beautiful melodies. Winter listened to Coltrane when Coltrane was in his most discordant period, and it was a similar atonal platform that he, Winter, started out from. It never worked to think in a straight line. It was possible to follow logic, but it was logic that couldn’t be followed by anyone else. It was his logic, the same way it was Coltrane’s logic, Pharoah Sanders’s logic, or Miles Davis’s logic. He had sent off for a book from Bokus.com and he’d received it yesterday: Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, by Ashley Kahn, and he was going to try to start reading it tonight if he had time to listen first, which he was starting to do now. The Panasonic was on the floor. He was playing Kind of Blue for the thousandth time.