The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [43]
“Should we mosey along?”
“You’re the only one I know who says that,” Lindell said.
“It’s from my grandfather,” Berglund said. “He lived like this, exactly like Andersson, though he wasn’t really a farmer. He didn’t get around much but he was a devil with horses. Have you seen that movie about the guy who could talk to horses?”
“No, I missed that one. I rarely go to the movies.”
“Is that so?” Berglund said with a mocking smile. “In any case, we went to that one. I thought it was going to be something, but it was shit.”
“It’s often that way with films,” Lindell said.
“Granddad would have done it better.”
“How did you know I went to the movies last night?”
“Hultgren saw you,” Berglund said, “and you know how he is.”
Lindell went to pick up Erik. It still felt strange to leave her colleagues in the middle of a murder investigation. She knew that the others would stay down at the station in order to organize the material, look up databases, contact people, and do everything else that was part of the inner investigation.
She wanted to be there too, in the middle of the activity. Ottosson had brought it up as soon as she returned from maternity leave, that he didn’t want her turning up at the station at all hours, that he wanted her to focus properly on herself and Erik. Ann Lindell had tried to joke it away but Ottosson had been firm. She sensed, from the way he formulated it that he didn’t want her to repeat his own mistakes.
She played with the thought of letting Erik stay at his friend’s place for a few hours—after all, this was a murder and it was only the shame of calling and asking the parents that prevented her from going back to Salagatan.
When Erik had fallen asleep Ann Lindell turned off all the electric lights in the apartment and lit a couple of candles that she put out on the table in the living room. A glass of Portuguese wine was already out there, half empty.
A cozy evening at home, she thought, chuckled, and pulled her legs up under her. The silence was deafening. Sund, one of the few neighbors that Ann Lindell had a fairly regular contact with, had popped in with a construction set for Erik. He had bought it on sale, or so he claimed. Ann had the feeling it had not been inexpensive. It was an airplane. As usual, the neighbor had overestimated Erik’s abilities. He was simply too young for Sund’s gifts but Ann was touched by his thoughtfulness.
They sat at the kitchen table for a while and talked. Sund’s car, a more than forty-year-old Ford Anglia, was completely worn out. Sund was of two minds about what to do. Ann Lindell advised him to have the car repaired. The neighborhood would not be the same if the “Black Pearl” disappeared from the parking lot.
After about an hour, when it was Erik’s bedtime, Sund had reluctantly said good-bye and gone home. The faint smell of pomade lingered in the apartment. She had come to realize there was some talk in the building regarding Sund’s old-fashioned attentions toward Ann, an older man’s concern for the single woman some thirty years his junior, and some had taken to calling him Sick—a play on Sund, which means healthy—but for her it was a source of joy. She had never noticed anything unhealthy in her neighbor. Quite the opposite. He was just thoughtful and a little lonely.
She thought about Sund and from there it was not far to Petrus Blomgren and Jan-Elis Andersson. Men, lonely men around seventy. Those times she had visited her neighbor she had been struck by how the loneliness shone in the orderly home. Everything was clean and nice, everything in its place, perhaps a touch pedantic. The coffee cup always in the same place on the counter, placed on a small crocheted pad, ready to be used, carefully washed and returned to the cloth after the coffee break was over.
Well-ordered