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She had mentioned her new routine to Ottosson. He had laughed heartily, perhaps mostly because of the expression on her face, but had said something about how if she turned in the receipt for her expenditure he would gladly accept it.

Now she wrote down “motive” and smiled to herself. Thereafter she listed the various financial motives she could think of, skipped jealousy but wrote “conflict with neighbors,” “a failed robbery,” and finally “accident.”

What the latter would be Lindell could not imagine, but she had enough experience to know that many crimes—even if they involved violence—were the result of unplanned circumstances.

She heard a car pull over on the main road and sensed that Allan Fredriksson had just arrived. This investigation is probably to his taste, she thought; he likes the country air. The Violent Crimes Division’s own country boy.

Who was Petrus Blomgren? How did he live? She rounded the next corner of the house. The place suggested peacefulness, but loneliness even more, especially like this in the final days of October. May probably looked different, more optimistic. Now nature was switching off, dropping leaves, closing in around piles of rock and underbrush. She stopped and looked right into the vegetation surrounding the house. Static. The wind had died down. She imagined funeral wreaths. Fir branches. Bells that rang out in a doomsdayish way on a bare autumn day over a cowering congregation that tried to minimize its movements.

Don’t let it get to you, she thought. There’s no time to be depressed.

She had to create an idea of Petrus Blomgren’s life in order to understand how he died. The good-bye letter was a fall greeting from a person who had given up hope. The irony of fate meant he had not been granted the time to take his own life.

Lindell crossed the yard at the same time as Fredriksson walked in through the gate.

“Male, around seventy, not in our database, lived alone, killed in the barn, no signs of robbery.” Lindell summed up the situation for her colleague.

“Nice hill,” Fredriksson said. “Have you seen the maple?”

“No, I must have missed that,” Lindell said, and smiled.

“A lot of leaves. When I was a boy we weren’t supposed to jump in the leaf piles because you could get polio.”

Two

Dorotea Svahn suddenly got to her feet, walked over to the window, and looked out for a second before once again sinking down at the table.

“I thought . . . ,” she said, but did not complete her sentence.

“Yes?”

“I thought I saw someone I know.”

The woman spoke in short sentences, forcing the words out, audibly gasping for breath and it looked like such an effort that Beatrice Anders-son inadvertently leaned forward across the table as if to help when Dorotea got ready for another attempt.

“Petrus and I, we got along. I’m a widow.”

She looked down at her folded hands. Behind her, on the wall, a clock was ticking.

“Have been for many years now,” she added and looked at Beatrice. “Are you married?”

Beatrice nodded.

“That’s good.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“I was born in this house.”

Beatrice could discern a streak of defiance, as if it were a strike against her to have been born in Vilsne village, in Jumkil county, and not ever to have gotten around to leaving.

“This is a beautiful area,” Beatrice said.

“I’m the only one left.” Dorotea sighed.

“Could you tell me a little more about Petrus?”

“He was”—Dorotea Svahn searched for the right word—“strict with himself. He didn’t indulge himself in very much. He kept going as usual. For a while he worked in carpentry, in town as well. He got a lot of work. And that helped. But all that was long ago. The last couple of years he didn’t come over as often. But I could see him sitting in that chair by the corner of the house. He sat there, philosophizing.”

“About what?”

Dorotea smiled for the first time.

“It was mainly small things,” she said, “things like, well, you know . . . small things. No big thoughts. It could be about