The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [36]
“Are you from Skåne?”
The doctor did not reply, simply removed his coat, grabbed the tape recorder, and walked away from Haver.
“You’ll be receiving my report,” he said and disappeared out the door.
Haver was left with a corpse on a stainless steel counter. He looked at Petrus Blomgren again. In many ways he reminded Haver of his father, or what his father would have looked like if he had been allowed to live as long as Blomgren.
The investigation into the small-time farmer and carpenter Petrus Blomgren’s life had not yielded a single significant result, not even a detail that could stir up speculation or ideas.
Ola Haver walked once around the dead man. Seventy years of hard work, that’s how one could summarize his life. Raised in Jumkil, with “diligent” parents according to those in the area who remembered them, he had worked on the farm, at the mill, and in his final employed years as a carpenter and a kind of handyman on construction sites. The most recent employment could be traced to a couple of years at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties at a company called Nylander’s Construction and Cleaning, a modest operation whose owner had died about six years ago. Sigvard Nylander’s only child, a son about fifty years of age who lived in Uddevalla, couldn’t even remember Petrus Blomgren but in a phone conversation with Berglund he had said that there were usually three or four men hired on with his father’s firm at any one time and that in general they worked on renovations and other smaller projects.
After his years as a carpenter, Blomgren had jumped in as a seasonal worker during planting and harvesting, worked in the forest, thinning and felling trees, mostly on jobs close to home. Here it was even harder to get any details. Some of the forest owners—all farmers—had been vague. Some of them said they had used Blomgren’s help, others had denied it. Berglund thought they were afraid of the Tax Authorities. Blomgren had most likely been paid under the table.
The money he had received from the sale of his farmland, about thirty hectares, hardly an outlandish sum, had been deposited in the bank and been well-used. He had drawn on the capital at a slow but steady rate.
There were no unusual transactions on the account over the last few years, only a withdrawal for sixty thousand in connection with the purchase of a car five years ago.
Blomgren’s will was clearly drawn up without any gray areas, the donation to Doctors Without Borders the only question mark. No one could explain why that organization had been favored, but in itself there was nothing strange about that, nothing to keep a murder investigation going.
The murder victim would only leave an absence in one way. Haver thought about Dorotea Svahn’s words and sorrow. This woman was the one who grieved him, the one who would miss her neighbor and friend.
Blomgren was without contours but Ola Haver knew it was wrong to say that he had been or was insignificant. He had been a man who did not take up a great deal of space, no man to figure in the headlines, Haver thought and smiled to himself, catching himself about to place a hand on the forearm of the dead man in a gesture of respect, perhaps as an excuse for the fact that he in his thoughts had reduced Blomgren’s significance.
He was a normal person and therefore an unusual murder victim. If people like Blomgren died a violent death it was because of an accident, in the forest, with a tractor or on the job, by a falling tree, a malfunctioning PTO shaft, or falling from a scaffold. Men like Petrus were not bludgeoned to death. Well, sometimes, but then the motive was almost always financial. Several youths, searching for alcohol or cash, a car perhaps, who knocked down some old person, very often brutally, but seldom thought out in advance.
The weapon was often something to be found at hand, a frying pan, a tool, or a piece of firewood. This time they had not found anything like that. They had not even isolated a footprint in the soft yard, no car tracks,