The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [64]
“No, thanks. I’ve just come from my cousin who lives nearby, just two buildings down actually. Svante Henriksson is his name.”
“No, no one I know,” Ann said.
“He was actually the one who lured me down here, to Uppsala I mean. He talked so warmly about the city so when . . . We played basketball together earlier.”
Ann nodded. Why did he come here, she wondered, while she kicked some toys under an armchair.
“How are things at work?”
“You know that as well as I do,” he said and laughed.
“Yes, I guess,” she said sheepishly.
They sat down across from each other.
“Maybe you’d like a glass of wine? Or a beer?”
He shook his head. Make this easier for me, she thought, and got a little exasperated with her smiling colleague.
“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” he said as if he had read her mind. “Why do you kill yourself? Blomgren wanted to, though he didn’t have the opportunity Do you think he would have gone through with it?”
“I do. He was the type of person who followed through on his plans.”
“But why? Sick of life? I don’t think so. There was something that weighed on him. Had he hurt somebody?”
“Who would that be?” Ann asked.
Morgansson laughed suddenly.
“It’s silly to sit here and talk about work. You must think I’m totally crazy.”
He stopped and looked at her.
“Should we do it again? The movies, I mean.”
Ann nodded. Morgansson got up abruptly.
“It’s time for me to go,” he said and Ann barely had time to react before he was at the door, putting on his coat.
Then he left as quickly as he had arrived. Ann Lindell had the feeling that he was out on an inspection round to check out her place.
When she fetched her wineglass from behind the curtain she looked out the window and saw him walk swiftly across the courtyard. The unpredictable manner, the rapid changes, the short lines, and the flash of his smile that changed as quickly into serious reflection, confused her.
Morgansson reminded her of a thief, Malte Sebastian Kroon, whom Ann had come into contact with many years ago. “The Jewel” as he was called, was quick both in his thinking and with his hands. He stole with a restless energy, driven by a fire greater than that of most in his field. At a house search in Kroon’s home on Svartbäcksgatan they recovered over seven hundred items that could be classified as stolen, among these over eighty pairs of shoes. In the interrogation sessions he denied everything, but with such humor and quick wit that his replies were still repeated among the officers at the station.
Charles Morgansson did not appear as humorous, but the quickness and the disarming smile were things he had in common with Kroon.
Ann remained standing in the window long after he was out of sight and looked out at a rain-hazy Uppsala. She held her breath and tried to perceive the faint whistling sounds from Erik’s room and her own inner voice.
“I’m fine,” she muttered.
The following days nothing happened to help further the murder investigations. Of course, Ottosson claimed that they drew closer to solving the cases with each detail that they added to the case files, even if none of them could see it themselves. It was a worn cliché that afforded them little comfort.
Sammy Nilsson’s mapping of Jan-Elis Andersson’s life constructed the picture of a stingy, if not greedy, man. His own pedantic documentation bore witness to this. The oldest item was a receipt for a toaster bought in 1957.
A disagreeable man, Nilsson said in conclusion, who himself put all his important documents in a box, pushed into the bookcase with all the photos he was someday going to put into an album that he had not yet managed to buy.
It took him two working days to go through the folders but he had not found anything eye-catching, nothing that awakened interest or gave any clue to why the man had been clubbed to death in his own kitchen.
When Andersson’s financial assets were added up the final sum was around one million kronor. On top of this was the value of