Åke Edwardson - Sail of Stone

“So Lindsten rents to people who are then robbed of all they own.”

“Yes.”

“Why not,” said Aneta.

“That is what we were thinking when we brought him in just now, isn’t it?”

“And others are doing the same thing?”

“Yes, or they have good contacts among the landlords.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Then of course there’s the question of why, in that case, he stole his own daughter’s belongings.”

Aneta thought. She thought about her short encounter with Anette Lindsten, about Hans Forsblad, about his sister, who seemed as nuts as her brother. About Sigge Lindsten, about Mrs. Lindsten, about all those people, all of whom seemed extremely dangerous, no, not dangerous, peculiar, evasive, like shadows who got tangled in their lies. They disintegrated, became something else, someone else. She saw Anette’s face again. The broken cheekbone that had healed but didn’t look like it once had, and never would. Her eyes. A nervous hand up in her hair. A life that in some ways was over.

“A warning,” said Aneta.

“He wanted to warn his daughter?” said Halders.

“A warning,” said Aneta, nodding to herself. She looked up at Halders. “Or a punishment.”

“Punishment? Punishment for what?”

“I don’t know if I dare to think about it,” said Aneta. She closed her eyes and opened them again. “It has something to do with Forsblad. And his sister.” She grabbed the arm of Halders’s jacket. “It has to do with them. But not how we think.”

Halders had the sense to keep quiet.

“It’s not like we think,” she repeated. “They’re playing some game. Or keeping quiet about something they don’t want us to know. Or they’re just scared. One of them, or some of them, are scared.”

“Like I just said,” said Halders. “What is it that I’m not getting here?”

Maybe we shouldn’t know, she thought, suddenly and intensely. We shouldn’t know! Maybe we should let it go, like a hot coal. Maybe Fredrik was right when he said that a long time ago. Maybe it’s dangerous, really dangerous, for us, for me.

For me.

“So she’s done something to her father that he has to punish her for?” Halders scraped his hand across the back of his head. “He steals the furniture?” Halders looked at Aneta. “Of course, it could also be as simple as that the warehouse out on Hisingen is a perfect storage facility for her things for the time being. Lindsten had the manpower and the vehicle, and Anette wanted out of the apartment fast, so Dad sent his thieves there to get the whole lot and then they drove to the warehouse and stacked it up nice and neat. Think of how it’s arranged all by itself, behind screens. Most of the other stuff is all helter-skelter out there.”

“Does Anette know about it, do you think? The warehouse? And the stolen goods? The trafficking?”

“No idea,” said Halders. “But surely she wonders where her things are.”

“If she knows, maybe it’s yet another reason to keep quiet,” said Aneta. “She doesn’t dare to do anything else.”

That evening she ran a hot bath. The sound of the water rushed through the entire apartment. She walked to the bathroom and dropped her clothes behind her. She had always left her clothes everywhere, and her mother had picked them up after her.

Now Fredrik picked them up.

“Jesus Christ,” he sometimes said when pieces of clothing were lying from the door to the bathroom.

It was the first time he followed her the whole way.

She had dragged him down into the half-full bathtub before he had had time to take off a damn thing.

That had been good.

She threw her panties into the hamper next to the washing machine and climbed carefully into the hot water and turned off the faucet. She sank very slowly down into the water, one inch, two, three, and so forth.

She lay with her chin underwater. There was foam everywhere. The water started to cool, but she intended to keep lying there. It was quiet in the apartment. No steps up above that was rare. No banging from the elevator door out in the stairwell; that was rare too. No sounds of traffic; it wasn’t audible from here. She heard only the familiar sounds of her own home, the refrigerator in the kitchen, the freezer, some other hum; she’d never really figured out what it was but she’d accepted it long ago, the faucet that dripped slooowly behind her neck, some sigh that could have been from the electronics that were scattered here and there in modern homes.

She heard a sound.

She didn’t recognize it.

Macdonald led the way north on High Street. They passed many shops and cafés. Here there were neighborhood services for the locals; we crushed those long ago in Sweden, thought Winter. This place might be poorer, but not in that way.

Macdonald stopped at one of the dark stone houses. A sign hung above the door: The Forres Gazette -Forres, Elgin, Nairn.

They went in. They were expected.

“Awful long time, no see, Steve,” said the man who came up to them. He gave Macdonald a punch on the back.

Macdonald clipped him back and introduced Winter, who quickly extended his hand for safety’s sake.

“Duncan Mackay,” said the man, who looked older but was the same age as Macdonald, who had told Winter about his classmate in the car.

Mackay’s hair was coal black and shoulder length. He had matching circles under his eyes. He guided them in behind a wooden counter. They sat down on two chairs in front of Mackay’s desk, which contrasted almost comically with Chief Inspector Craig’s in Inverness. They could barely see the editor on the other side of the piles of paper. Even though he was standing.

“Coffee, beer, whisky?” asked Mackay. “Claret? Marijuana?”

Macdonald looked at Winter.

“No thanks,” Winter said, pointing at his pack of Corps, which he had taken out. “I have smokes.”

Mackay had a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Macdonald shook his head at Mackay.

“We just saw Lorraine,” he said when Mackay had sat down and rolled a bit to the side in his chair.

“Steve the Heartbreaker Macdonald,” said Mackay. “It took her some time.” He turned to Winter. “To get over it.”

“She told us about Robbie.”

“Yeah, shit.”

“No doubt he’s disappeared.”

“He’ll show up,” said Mackay. “Unfortunately.”

They sat in silence for a few seconds, as though to reflect upon the fate of humanity. The room lay half in shadow.

Mackay got up and searched through the top of the piles of paper. He held a paper up to the light from the window.

“I asked the local editors to look around, but no one has seen this Osvald guy,” said Mackay. “Axel Osvald, right? There was a bulletin that went out, too, and obviously we checked then too-a foreigner who dies in Moray-but nothing about the man.”

“Okay,” said Macdonald.

“Your colleagues over at the Ramnee haven’t seen or heard anything either,” said Mackay.

“I know. I called a few days ago.”

“Have you been there?”

“Not yet.”

Mackay read from his paper again.

“There’s just one thing…”

“Yes?”

“Billy in the editorial department in Elgin did a thing about the fish market’s new dismal numbers, and he interviewed people up in Buckie. That was before the bulletin.” Mackay looked up. “Billy’s a little slow, but he’s good. But slow. Okay, he was talking to some of the old forgotten guys at the shipyard and he had parked the car on one of the little streets right across from there, and when he came back and he was going to drive home he saw a Corolla parked on the same street. It had been there when he arrived, too. Metallic green.”

“Did he get the number?”