Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [59]
‘It didn’t go very well,’ she went on after a while. ‘The members of the collective fell out. Kurt wanted to invest in a silo and a tractor, the others wanted to buy a horse and learn to turn hay. We were already seeing each other by then, so Kurt came to work here on the farm instead.’
‘You must have been very young,’ Annika said.
The woman looked at her.
‘I grew up here,’ she said. ‘Kurt and I took over when we got married, in the autumn of seventy-five. My mother’s still alive, lives in a home in Östhammar.’
Annika nodded, suddenly aware of the monotonous ticking of the kitchen clock. She guessed that the same clock had made the same noise against the same wall for generation after generation, and for one giddy moment she could hear all those seconds ticking through the years.
‘Belonging,’ Annika heard herself say. ‘Imagine belonging somewhere like that.’
‘Kurt belonged here,’ Gunnel Sandström said. ‘He loved his life. There’s no way he would have contemplated suicide even for a second, I swear to that.’
She looked at Annika and her eyes were flashing. Annika could sense the woman’s utter conviction, knowing at once and without any doubt that she was right.
‘Where did he die?’
‘In the sitting room,’ she said, getting up and walking over to the double doors beside the fireplace.
Annika walked into the large room. It was cooler than the kitchen, with a damp, enclosed feeling, and a scratchy blue-green fitted carpet covered with rag rugs. There was an old tiled stove in one corner, a television in another, two sofas facing each other at the far end of the room, a swivelling brown leather armchair beneath a standard lamp, with a small table alongside.
Gunnel Sandström pointed, her finger trembling.
‘That’s where Kurt sits,’ she said. ‘Always. My chair is normally on the other side of that little table. After dinner we always sit here and read, council papers, the local newspaper, journals, paperwork from the farm, we do everything in our armchairs.’
‘Where’s your chair now?’ Annika asked, although she had a good idea.
The woman turned to her, her eyes full of tears.
‘They took it away,’ she said quietly. ‘The police, to examine it. He was sitting in it when he died, holding the rifle in his right hand.’
‘Did you find him?’
The woman stared into the space left by her armchair, images chasing through her head so vividly that Annika could almost see them. Then she nodded.
‘I was at the scouts’ autumn bazaar on Saturday afternoon,’ she said, still staring at the empty space on the carpet. ‘Our daughter runs the Cubs, so I stayed to help her tidy up afterwards. When I got home . . . he was sitting there . . . in my chair.’
She turned away, the tears overflowing, and stumbled, hunched over, back towards the kitchen table. Annika followed her, rejecting an impulse to put her arm round the woman’s shoulders.
‘Where was he shot?’ Annika asked softly, sitting down beside her.
‘In the eye,’ Gunnel Sandström whispered, her voice echoing faintly between the walls like a rattling wind, the clock ticked, salt tears ran down the woman’s face, no sobbing or any other movement. Suddenly something happened to the temperature in the kitchen, Annika could feel the dead man in the next room, like a cold breath, a faint note from the angelic choir in her mind.
The woman was sitting quite still, but she raised her eyes to look into Annika’s.
‘If you were going to shoot yourself,’ she breathed, ‘why would you aim for your eye? Why would you stare down the barrel when you pulled the trigger? What would you expect to see?’
She closed her eyes.
‘It doesn’t make sense.’ Her voice was louder now. ‘He would never have done that, and certainly not in my chair. He’s never sat in it, not once. He was sending me a signal that someone was forcing him to do it. It was something about that phone call.’
She opened her eyes, Annika saw her pupils suddenly widen, only to contract again.
‘We had a call on Friday evening,’ she said. ‘Late, after nine thirty.