Bad apples, p.21
Bad Apples, page 21
The detective makes a note. The Chief looks at the note the detective made.
‘And?’
‘Ragnar’s daughter was killed in a hit-and-run incident in 1994.’
The Chief leans back in his chair. ‘That is correct.’
‘I have reason to believe Ragnar Falk was investigating the accident over the years, as would be understandable.’
‘I’d say,’ says the Chief.
‘Arne Persson was the individual Ragnar Falk suspected of driving the hit-and-run car that was never recovered.’
‘Falk told you this, did he?’
‘I gleaned it from the information available and from my extensive interviews of multiple Visberg residents.’
‘You gleaned it?’
I nod.
‘Gleaned it?’
I nod again.
The Chief says, ‘I’ve reports from the neighbourhood-watch coordinator…’ he takes a deep breath and then carries on… ‘Coordinator, Harry Hansson, tells me Ragnar Falk suspects someone was casing his building yesterday evening, sometime between eight and ten.’
‘Casing?’ I say.
‘Looking for possible entry points and exit points, with a view to a robbery or home invasion.’
‘Good job their neighbourhood watch is so watchful, isn’t it.’
The Chief looks down his nose at me.
I clear my throat. ‘All I’m saying is please don’t discount Ragnar Falk from your investigation just because he looks harmless and he’s got a limp and a Santa beard.’
‘That everything?’
‘No. I got sent this.’
I take the creepy Halloween poem from my coat and place it on the desk.
The Chief reads it.
‘Looks like you got yourself an admirer.’
The detective checks his phone, then writes a note on his pad and shows it to Chief Björn.
‘Okay, Moodyson. We’ll take all you said about Falk’s daughter into account. I got to go now, I’m sure you’ll understand.’ He points to the door and I leave.
Outside, there’s a guy walking around in double denim. He’s pushing a sheepskin-fur-lined buggy and his toddler’s wearing a full skeleton-sleepsuit. Black with white bones.
‘Happy Halloween,’ he says as I pass him.
His kid bursts into tears.
The bell tinkles above the door to Gavrik Posten.
Sebastian looks like a new penny. Fresh haircut, fresh complexion, freshly-ironed shirt. I haven’t pressed a shirt since Mum’s funeral.
‘Luka Kodro,’ says Cheekbones. ‘The Bosnian pizza maker. He doesn’t have any kind of gun officially registered, but I have it on good authority that he uses an old military gun in the woods for target shooting. Not hunting, just paper targets.’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘What else?’
‘What else?’
‘Statements from neighbours? Anything from the police? Is it the same kind of weapon used in the Arne Persson killing? Who is the registered owner, if anyone? Rifle or shotgun or handgun? Ammunition he uses? What gauge is the barrel?’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Shit. Right, I’m on it.’
He runs back to his desk and starts typing something.
‘You need help in Visberg tonight?’ he says. ‘Need back-up?’
Part of me wants to say yes, wants to say, just be there to watch my back. See what I don’t see. But if I’m going to be living and working here for a while, and I will be by the look of my new contract, then I need Visberg locals to trust me. They have to see me as their go-to person. For their middle-of-the-paper slow-news-day features on their Buick restoration and their longest-ponytail-in-central-Sweden story, but also so they can fill me in on gossip and secrets when a major event takes place. I need to be their primary contact.
‘I’m fine. You need to be here covering Gavrik Halloween. Has Lars talked you through how to use the DLSR camera in low light?’
Sebastian nods and looks disappointed.
I text Noora. About what you said. Can we talk later tonight when I’m done?
She texts back almost immediately. Sure xxx
And now I feel like a human again. Those three kisses. The ones I find awkward to write even though it’s stupid that I’m awkward and even though part of me loves receiving them. Mum never sent any. Not on a card. She never sent me a card after Dad died, or sat me down for a chat. There were no messages to end with kisses. I reply to Noora with a single x.
Lars walks in.
‘Mrs Björken from the haberdashery is livid.’
He removes his coat like a DVD on slow-motion setting. It gets tugged off his shoulders and each arm gets pulled through. He shakes the coat and straightens it then hangs it carefully on his hook.
‘Why?’ I ask.
He looks round to me, his bifocals misted from the October damp outside.
‘Why?’ he says.
Then he removes each boot and places it neatly on the shoe rack. One Velcro trainer on. Then the next. He pulls the first one off again and adjusts the strap.
‘Tooth,’ he says.
Sebastian looks confused.
‘What?’
Lars saunters over toward the kitchen and says, ‘Coffee in the pot, Seb?’
You could just check.
‘Yeah, fresh in the pot,’ says Sebastian. ‘What tooth?’
Lars stops and turns around, standing in the doorway of Nils’s office-slash-kitchen.
‘Mrs Björken went in to get a cap replaced.’ He puts his finger inside his mouth and checks on one of his own teeth and then looks surprised. ‘Sven Edlund started the procedure as per expected.’
Lars stops talking and just looks into the middle distance.
Jesus Christ, just get to the fucking point, man.
‘And…’ says Sebastian.
Lars takes a deep breath. ‘Apparently Sven Edlund left the room for a moment and when Mrs Björken looked up again it was Dr Eva Edlund wearing the face mask, holding the drill.’
‘What?’ says Sebastian.
‘Well, she is a qualified dentist,’ I say.
‘Not practicing though,’ says Lars. ‘Besides, it upset Mrs Björken, because you don’t expect a different face to appear looming over you when you’re down in the chair, do you? A strange face and a drill making that awful, squealing noise. Mrs Björken put her hand in front of her mouth and refused to cooperate with Eva Edlund.’
‘What happened?’ I say.
‘Sven came back and completed the procedure. He apologised and said he’d wanted his wife’s opinion on the tooth, and that he should have let Mrs Björken know what was going on.’
‘Doesn’t sound like a front-page story,’ says Sebastian.
‘I never suggested it was,’ says Lars. ‘But as I mentioned, Mrs Björken was quite put out. Said the look in Eva Edlund’s eyes would haunt her to the grave. Said Eva had an excited expression.’
I work on my outlines and type up interviews from my digital Dictaphone. Pot noodle at my desk followed by a Daim bar. Then off to Visberg.
I’m stuck behind a slow-moving mobile crane until I get to Svensson’s Saws & Axes, where the driver pulls over because she’s good enough to let me pass. The sky is white with dark-grey patches that move fast across the horizon. A deer lies dead on the side of the road, it’s neck bent round the wrong way.
The rain starts coming down heavy when I’m halfway up the hill. The white bike glistens. The cross bears up to the weather, just like it’s done for a thousand days before, except this afternoon it has a rainproof grave-candle flickering and spitting at the point where the cross meets Visberg mud.
The town hasn’t transformed the way it did on Pan Night. It’s still open to the outside world. No road blocks. The rain beats down and I park outside Konsum. A troupe of schoolkids wearing hooded raincoats carry their instrument cases over to the bandstand and shelter underneath it, their innocent faces lit by their phones.
In between me and them are dozens of bright-red toadstools. New arrivals in town. They’ve pushed up through the apple sludge and now they dot Visberg town square like it’s plagued by acne. Or plague.
People milling around. Excitement in the air. A chestnut seller sets up and the rain makes his charcoal fire smoke and hiss.
I look around at the pizzeria and think about Luka Kodro’s unregistered gun. Could it be a remnant from the terrible war? The gun he fired to scare away the bird that awful night? Could it be a weapon that has been used to end life back in the ’90s, or more recently? Above the fogged-up restaurant window is a smaller first-floor window.
Behind the glass is a woman with two girls looking out at the square.
All three have bright red hair.
39
I work away in my new office, aka my Hilux. The upstairs window above Visberg Grill is empty now. The Kodro family are most likely preparing for tonight’s trick-or treating.
I remember when Halloween first came to Stockholm in a big way. I was ten or so. It started with the cool kids – richer kids, who’d visited Disney World or New Orleans with their parents. Kids who travelled regularly to catch up with the relatives who moved to the US during the diaspora, when Sweden was one of the poorest countries in the Western world. Those kids started celebrating Halloween, and parents all over Sweden turned their noses up. American nonsense. Even though Halloween probably arrived in the US originally from Ireland and Scotland. Swedes said it wasn’t Christian and that we should keep All Hallows Day sacred, even though most traditional Swedish holidays are about as Christian as a sacrificed virgin on a mountain to appease some god of harvest. But my first Halloweens were not good experiences. Mum wouldn’t even consider it an occasion. Banned me from making so much as a homemade mask or a witch’s hat from a cardboard cone painted black. Easter is for witches, so she said. Another oddball Swedish tradition that my London flatmates never really figured out. Easter? Witches? About as relevant as bunnies or chocolate eggs, I guess. And then, when I was old enough to disobey Mum and go out, I didn’t really have any friends to trick-or-treat with. My deafness was an isolating factor but so was my individual situation. No dad. No mum able to pick me up or drop me off. No parent to sign release forms so I could go away on school trips. No guardian to pay for official school photographs or birthday gifts for schoolmates. I became quieter. Adept at living life in the corners and the shadows. Not making a scene. Just existing on the fringes and hoping for some better days in future years once I had full independence.
Well, here I am, motherfuckas.
I shoot off emails to Lena and Thord, and tidy up the timeline of events leading up to Arne Persson’s murder that I’d like to include in next week’s issue. It needs to be accurate but also sensitive. Local people don’t want too much hard information. Nothing gratuitous. I’m not in this for clicks, I’m in it for the long haul.
A bang on my windscreen.
I wipe the condensation and strain to see who thumped the glass.
Red hair.
I turn my key one notch in the ignition and wind down my window.
‘You need my garage again, Tuva?’ asks Julia.
I smile and shake my head.
‘No need tonight,’ I say. ‘Or is there?’
‘No, no,’ she says. ‘Halloween is for kids, at least it is in Visberg. You eating before things kick off.’
I look over at the half-squashed clingfilm-wrapped meatball-and-beetroot sub I bought earlier today from the newsagent in Gavrik.
‘That thing even edible?’ she says.
‘Not sure I can stomach another pizza,’ I say.
‘Sure you can.’
‘In an hour, then? I need to work some more.’
She agrees and walks away.
I see Emil and Margareta Eriksson right in front of me. They place heavy, oversize pumpkins outside the entrance to the Hive. Konsum still has a few uncarved ones left. There’s something outside the pop-up shop glowing in the shadows but it looks too small to be a pumpkin. Too pale.
I do my rounds.
In Konsum I ask the manager about whether he’s heard anything new about the murder. About the grave disturbance.
‘All behind us, now,’ he says.
‘But nobody’s been arrested or charged?’
‘Best thing this town can do is move forwards. We’ll be in the run up to Christmas after tonight. Busiest time of the year for us.’
I’m always stunned by this. How humans manage to view momentous events through the prism of their own daily needs and wants.
Sven Edlund walks out of his dental surgery carrying a bag of golf clubs, and then Tobias the hygienist walks behind him, carrying a slightly smaller bag. Is the Edlund’s club open on Halloween? Is this Visberg festivity really just for children?
The kids in the bandstand are eating steaming chestnuts from paper cones. A black girl with white facepaint is tuning her guitar and it sounds awful through my aids. Behind the musicians is a bank of amplifiers, and the cables run out and loop through puddles. They’re already half submerged in mud and rotten apples before the sun’s even gone down.
I check in with Thord about the grave robbery.
‘I still can’t tell you much more, Tuvs.’
‘You can but you won’t.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Was the head removed?’
A long pause. Sound of breathing.
‘It was, I knew it was.’
‘I didn’t confirm anything,’ says Thord. ‘Do not write that in your paper. You understand me?’
‘Elk skulls. A dead man’s head buried two decades ago.’
‘No comment.’
He puts down the phone and I notice the fog rolling in from the side streets. It’s not dense tonight, but it makes Visberg look older than it is. A grainy, sepia photograph of itself.
I head over to the grill and it already smells like wood smoke and roasting meats of various kinds.
The window’s steamed up and the huge plastic udders of ketchup and mustard and mayo are being refilled by Luka Kodro himself. He’s wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt as usual and he looks handsome. How the hell does he manage to never get ketchup stains on his pristine, white shirts?
Julia comes inside and we sit down.
‘My boss is off to play golf in all this, can you believe that?’
‘In the fog?’ I say.
‘In the fog. In the fine drizzle. On Halloween of all days.’ She shivers for effect. ‘No way I’d be out on an isolated windswept golf course today, even without a crazed killer on the loose.’
‘No Green Card, eh?’ I say.
She laughs out loud and I notice she has a gold filling at the back of her mouth. I rarely see them these days.
‘Playing with his young protégé, Tobias,’ says Julia. ‘Thick as thieves those two.’
‘Is Tobias a member of Edlund’s Club?’
‘He’s working on it,’ says Julia. ‘That’s the vibe I get, anyway. Doctor Eva likes him even more than my boss does.’
I make a mental note of all this. Like I’m building a delicate web of connections, trying to figure out how all the locals fit together. Who owes who what. Who needs something from who. Who’s raging. Who’s hurt. Who’s infatuated.
‘You out later to watch the kids get their candy?’ I ask.
Julia screws up her nose.
‘Join me if you like. We can walk around and you can tell me who’s behind all the masks. I need to cover it for the paper.’
She shrugs with a smile. ‘Sounds good. It’s a date.’
Our pizzas arrive and we devour them. Something about the cold and the damp and the way I sense the atmosphere in this town turning again. The mood. As much as everyone tells me tonight will be an innocent, child-friendly PG13-night compared to what happened last week, I can still feel the charge in the air. The hint of danger. People here seem to be drawn to it.
We split the bill.
‘No tip?’ I ask.
‘We don’t really tip in Visberg,’ she says.
‘What about the waitress, though. She was really nice.’
‘That’s her job, I guess,’ says Julia.
We walk out and I leave a 20 kronor note. You have to tip. You just have to.
The air outside is chill and it is infused with the scent of roasted chestnuts. The smell takes me back to London, to long winter walks along the south side of the Thames with my then boyfriend.
The band in the bandstand is playing ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash, or Nine Inch Nails, whatever, but the pacing is wrong and it sounds a little too slow. And it’s already a slow tune.
There’s a queue of teenagers outside Mind Games. None of them have bothered to dress up. The door says ‘Welcome to the Halloween Zombie Feast. Doors open 19:00’.
‘Nerds,’ says Julia, elbowing me and then pulling on her orange, bobble hat.
‘If I wasn’t working tonight I’d probably be in that queue with them,’ I say.
She looks at me. ‘You? Seriously?’
We walk toward the statue of Adolf-Fredrik Edlund. The anvil sparkles after its recent deep clean. There are pumpkins all around the base and Sheriff Hansson is there in full uniform, with his star badge and beige shirt and brown tie and striped trousers and radio attached to his shirt loop. Outside the Hive, there’s Noora talking to Hans Wimmer the Austrian clockmaker. Law enforcement are out in force. Or as much force as we ever have, all the way out here at the end of the world.
Noora looks over and narrows her eyes. Is she jealous of Julia?
The music changes to Girl…You’ll be a woman, soon, and the boy singing has an exceptionally smooth voice. The beat vibrates through me and reverberates round the square.
More and more kids arrive. Some in groups, and other, younger children holding the hands of their parents. A tall woman wearing a Scream mask carries a doll close to her chest. I smile and of course her mask doesn’t move so I don’t know if she smiles back or scowls but the doll isn’t a doll it’s a real baby. Its own extra-small Scream mask tipped back to the rear of its head, its fat, ruby-red lips clamped to its mother’s breast, its cheeks flushed from the cold air of hill town, or the warmth of its mother’s sweet milk.
