Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [58]
The large main house was on the right, with new cladding, but the window frames needed painting. A fairly new stained-wood veranda, a little white china lamp and four small African violets in the kitchen window. On the left an office and silo, stables and workshops, a heap of manure and some pieces of agricultural machinery that evidently hadn’t been used for some time.
A proper old farm, she thought, efficiently but not pedantically run, traditional but not sentimental.
She switched off the engine and caught a glimpse of the woman as a shadow in the kitchen. Taking her bag, she walked up to the house.
‘Come in,’ Gunnel Sandström said in a thin voice. Puffy eyes. Annika took her dry little hand.
She was about fifty, short and fairly plump, radiating that sort of vanity-free self-confidence. Short grey hair, a wine-red belted cardigan.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Annika said, thinking the phrase sounded clumsy and feeble, but the woman’s shoulders drooped slightly, so the words seemed to have hit their mark.
‘Please, take your coat off. Can I offer you some coffee?’
Annika could still taste the cold coffee from the machine in her mouth, but said yes anyway. She hung up her coat and pulled off her outdoor shoes. The woman was acting on reflex, following patterns of behaviour ingrained over decades. In this house visitors were offered coffee, no matter what. Gunnel went to the stove and turned on the fast plate, measured four cups of water into the pot, then four spoons of roasted ground coffee from the green and pink tin next to the spice-rack, then rested her right hand on the handle, ready to pull the pot off the heat when it came to the boil.
Annika sat down at the kitchen table, her bag beside her, and surreptitiously studied Gunnel Sandström’s mechanical movements, trying to work out the woman’s mental state. She could smell bread, coffee, manure, and something that might have been mould. She let her eyes wander across the room.
‘I don’t read the Evening Post very often,’ Gunnel Sandström said once the coffee had come to the boil and she was stirring it. ‘There’s so much nonsense in it these days. Nothing to do with anyone’s real life. Nothing that means anything to people who live like we do.’
She put the pot on a mat on the table, then sat down and seemed to collapse.
‘Thomas, my husband,’ Annika said, ‘told me that both you and Kurt were active in local politics.’
Gunnel Sandström was looking out of the window. Annika followed her gaze and saw a bird table surrounded by flapping wings and scattering birdseed.
‘Kurt was on the council,’ she said. ‘I’m chair of the women’s group, and a co-opted member.’
‘For which party?’ Annika asked.
‘The Centre, of course. We care about the countryside. Kurt has always been interested in politics, from when we first met.’
Annika smiled and nodded, then stood up.
‘Shall I get some cups?’ she asked, walking towards the draining-board.
Gunnel Sandström flew up.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, how silly of me, sit down, please.’
The woman fussed about a bit longer, with cups and saucers and spoons and sugar and milk and half-frozen cinnamon buns dusted with ground almonds.
‘How did you meet? In the Centre Party’s youth group?’ Annika asked when Gunnel Sandström had sat down again and was pouring the coffee.
‘No, oh no,’ the woman said. ‘Kurt was a radical in his youth, lots of our generation were in those days. He was part of the move to the countryside out here, he joined a collective in the early seventies. We met for the first time at a meeting of the road-owners’ association. Kurt thought the payment system should be fairer. It caused a huge fuss round here.’
Annika took out her pen and notepad from her bag, noting down the details.
‘So he’s not from round here?’
‘From Nyland. He studied biology in Uppsala, and after his finals he and a few friends moved out here to start a chemical-free farm. It wasn’t called organic in those days . . .’
The woman looked out at the