The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [40]
He came back the next day with new packages and windows were flung open, dust was cleared away. He was given food, and he ate, chuckling a little, it seemed. She heard her mother say that the stranger ate like a real man.
A flurry of activity, and thundering noise. Laura had to eat alone at the dining room table. She set the table with her tiny china and cleared it away, invited imaginary friends to lunch and discussed things with them. She tried to laugh like the man did.
After fourteen days he disappeared, but her mother said he would be back in the spring. Laura waited. It would be a long winter.
Then one day at the beginning of April he returned. Now he spent most of his time in the garden, spreading a white powder on the lawn. Laura was allowed to help. He pruned bushes and piled the branches into large piles. The apple trees were trimmed. Laura picked up twigs and was praised.
The professor, who had recently moved in, would come over and talk across the hawthorn hedge. They discussed different kinds of apple. Laura stood nearby. She thought the man smelled like apple. His green pants, stuffed into red boots, had marks from paint and had holes that were roughly patched with black rubber.
The professor went on about the apples. The man rested a foot on a shovel. It looked so comfortable, as if they were close friends, him and the shovel.
The rain increased. She drew closer to the French window that faced the garden, but shut it with her foot and remained standing out on the crumbling flagstone, partly shielded from the rain.
She feared the approaching afternoon. Her body was completely limp and she didn’t see how she would be able to pull herself together and call Stig.
Twelve
Later on, when they laid the investigation about the murder in Jumkil next to the investigation concerning the murder of Jan-Elis Andersson in Norr-Ededy village in Alsike, they appeared almost identical.
Both of them were elderly men living alone in the countryside, who had been farmers in the past. Andersson, just as Blomgren before him, had suffered brutal blows to the head with a murder weapon that the police had not yet found.
In the search for a possible motive the results were the same: nothing. Both men had lived a retiring, peaceful life, they lacked the ready assets attractive to a murderer, and they appeared to be without enemies, at least of the order to lead to a murder.
There was one difference: Jan-Elis Andersson had resisted. To what extent this was so it was not possible to determine but the evidence in his kitchen spoke for itself: three chairs had been knocked over, and the tablecloth had been pulled to the floor, taking a bowl of oatmeal, a spoon, and a jar of lingonberry jam with it.
“There’s someone out there who doesn’t like old men who eat lingonberries,” Beatrice said, remembering Dorotea Svahn’s words about Blomgren being a champion berry picker.
Most likely the killer had crept up on Andersson from behind. The neighbor had said he had severely impaired hearing.
Lindell could guess how it had happened. Andersson had been struck hard on the back of the head, had been thrown forward, pulled the cloth with him down onto the floor but had managed to get up and grab a chair for protection. One of the chairs had two broken legs. Ryde, the forensics specialist who was not supposed to be working but who had jumped in, was firm on that point: the chair had been used in an attempt at self-defense.
But Jan-Elis Andersson had failed in his attempts and now he lay facedown in a mess of lingonberries and blood.
Ann Lindell stood with her head bent. The technicians had— grudgingly—cleared a thin corridor of floor space in the kitchen so that she and Beatrice could come in and take a look. Morgansson sat in a crouch next to the counter, trying to secure some fingerprints. He looked up at Ann.
“Same guy?” he asked.
Ryde muttered something. He hated speculation during the work process.
“It could be a coincidence,” she said and looked out the window.
Out in the yard, Sammy Nilsson